Incense and Powdered Diamond - Lucifra - Parahumans Series (2024)

Chapter 1: Gazing Into the Well

Chapter Text

For most people, claiming to hate Mondays was just an expression of a minor distaste, since it ended the freedom of the weekend. As much as they griped and groaned, they welcomed the coming of Monday for the structure it brought, be it through work, school, or something else.

Not Taylor Hebert.

She truly detested Mondays with every fiber of her being, and for good reason. This reason was because of the presence of the Trio, a group that had formed around her ex-best friend that had devoted what seemed to be its level best effort to making her miserable, at her school. Since Emma was one of the most popular students, and Sophia one of the most intimidating, it wasn’t exactly surprising that Taylor had no friends at school, and given the rumors that they had spread had made the jump to even the teachers, she wasn’t going to take the risk and reach out for someone beyond the school.

She was mostly able to avoid them on weekends, since they didn’t have the gall to come to her home (yet, a small voice inside of her said), but Mondays indicated the beginning of five days of their torments, both petty and not.

So it was with a heavy heart that Taylor Hebert returned to Winslow High School on January 3, 2011, mourning the end of her desperately needed break from the Trio.

So preoccupied was she with this lament that she failed to notice the fact that the attention of what seemed like the entire school was upon her until she had already walked for two minutes towards her locker. At that point, she knew something was wrong, but she expected (incorrectly so) that it was just that the Trio were planning to confront her there.

As she approached, the stench emanating from her locker swiftly disabused her of that notion.

As if in a trance, she walked forward and opened the locker, allowing a gush of reddish-black things to fall out, revealing more red covering almost every single surface in the locker, including her schoolbooks, with squirming forms dotted here and there.

Well then, she thought, curiously detached, I’ll be needing new school books again.

Before she could do anything else, she felt strong hands on her head and back that then shoved her forward.

She screamed out, and the hand on her back vanished, which only intensified when one of the broken pencils (that wasn’t that way last month, said a quiet part of her mind) ended up embedded in her side, thankfully relatively clear of the red stuff in the locker before the dark-skinned hand clutching it rammed it into her and released it.

It was a small mercy that Taylor managed to close her eyes, that way she didn’t see the nail that her eye was smashed into to gruesome effect.

The last thing she heard before her consciousness faded completely was her locker door slamming.

"Taylor Hebert."

Her head snapped up. Had she finally broken, after so long?

"No, lass. Your mind stands strong yet," replied that same voice, a firm, fatherly tone balancing out what sounded like a Scots brogue coloring the words.

Taylor turned her head, looking for the source of the voice and the sudden warm light in the room.

"Who are you?" she asked hoarsely, voice weak from lack of use.

The man she saw, a gray-bearded man old enough to be her grandfather and with an eyepatch mirroring her lost eye, smiled kindly at her, radiating a warm golden glow. "I am a man of many names. I have gone by Bölverk, Fjölnir, Ganglari, Jörmunr, Vadderung, and many more besides, but the name you're most likely to know me by is Odin One-Eye."

Taylor's remaining eye widened. "What?"

The gray-bearded man chuckled. "Yes, the Odin of the Nords. Worry not, child. Now is not your time to die, for if it was you'd be seeing one of the Valkyrjur and not myself. No, this is... well. If you'll indulge an old man to tell you a story from his youth, I think that would help you understand the situation greatly."

"Uh... sure?" Taylor had no way to know what was happening, but indulging powerful parahumans was always a good thing to do.

"In that case, allow me to tell you the tale of how I learned the runes." The old man's eye went distant. "I was watching the Norns work their powers, one day, and I realized that, if I could use the runecraft that they could. I would be better able to serve my people. So, I asked what I would need to do in order to earn the runes, and they told me thusly:

"A price must all pay for the runes' wisdom

From Yggdrasil shall ye sway no others nearby

In blood are all runes forged and your own ye must provide,

Then will your mind have surged and the world ye shall ken."

Odin smiled. "Seven days it took me to puzzle out what they meant by that. Once I learned, I hanged myself from Yggdrasil, implaled upon Gungnir to pay the price of blood-" he gestured to her left eye, which was the one the nail had torn into, and her side, where she felt the pencil’s wound as a dull throb. "-and gazed into the depths of the Well of Urdr. Nine days and nine nights did I remain there, as long as you’ve been on the cusp of life and death," said the venerable warrior, "and as the tenth day dawned, the runes judged me worthy, and the spirit of the last Runekeeper appeared to me. Old Mimir gave me his knowledge, his powers, and I returned to Asgard a better king."

"So..." Taylor frowned. "Am I to be your successor?"

Odin nodded. "Aye, lass. You've paid your price, you've earned the runes, with the help of your Administrator friend. My time has passed, passed long before the Warrior from beyond the stars came. I, of all people, did not need to survive Ragnarök, and yet here I am. It's high time someone younger became the Runekeeper."

"So... what happens now?" asked Taylor, playing along.

"Oh, simple, lass. You awaken with the knowledge of the runes and the realms, and my spirit to whisper wisdom in your ear as Old Mimir did to me. You, now, shall become Rúnatyr." Odin raised his hand. "Are you ready?"

"And... and then what?"

"And then... well, it's your choice. Once you are the Runekeeper, the power is yours to use. I am just an advisor."

Taylor thought for a moment. "I... I want to be a hero, but if everyone is like the Trio…”

Odin hesitated for a moment, then wrapped the trembling girl in a hug. "Not all people are the same, as they are, lass. Your Midgard... well, the runes can make it better, if you so choose."

Taylor took in a deep breath, then nodded. "Alright. I'll do it."

Odin smiled, then patted her shoulder. "You have a warrior's spirit, lass. With it, we can reforge this tarnished world yet."

He moved his hand to her head, and her vision went gold. "I, Odin Rúnatyr, hereby designate Taylor Hebert as my successor, and the first of the New Gods. Let her legends be glorious and her actions be just!”

In one glorious, headache-inducing flash of golden light, Taylor's mind expanded. More than that, she understood, now, the way the world came together, and how to press on the seams to alter it ever so slightly (or more than slightly), and what the Administrator he was talking about was, and more. Oh, so much more.

“Heya, Panacea!” chirped Vista, taking an eye-searing step from the pavement to the roof of the hospital. “How’s it going?”

“About the same as it was the last time you came to visit me, squirt.” Panacea used the hand not holding her cigarette to ruffle the kid’s hair, causing the pint-sized Shaker to pout up at her.

Somehow, the two had managed to forge a connection that grew into a friendship over time. The shorter girl had decided that Panacea was going to be her friend, and refused to accept any other alternative, and eventually Amy had faced the choice to force Vista away or just accept the status quo. Wisely, she chose the latter.

“Any interesting cases?”

“Since you dropped by last?” Amy frowned, thinking. “I think there was one a week ago… yeah, some girl with all kinds of toxic shock and a pencil phased into her side. Looked like Shadow Stalker’s work, to be honest. Poor girl’s still in a coma, no one knows if she can come out, and I couldn’t save the eye, or grow a new one. I’ve never been able to do eyes, not in a way that would let it work, unless I saw the eye in question before, which I haven’t.”

“Wait…” Vista frowned. “That can’t be right. If it was Shadow Stalker, she’d be catching all kinds of heat over it, since she’s Probationary, but that hasn’t happened.”

Amy snorted. “Yeah, right, like Piggot would let any one of the parahumans at her disposal go.”

“She’s not like that! Sure, she’s a hardass, but she’s doing what’s best for her command!” Vista shot back.

“Her troopers, sure. But us parahumans?” Amy’s finger oscillated between pointing at herself and Vista a few times. “No way. We’re just tools for her, tools for her to use against the gangs.”

“That can’t be true!”

“Believe it or not, kiddo, it is. One of these days, I’ll tell you the story of how she almost press-ganged Glory Girl over some Nazi gangb*nger that Stalker shoved off a building before Brandish came down on her like a ton of hammers.” Amy shook her head, smiling gently. “Nah, it’s exactly true. She’d bury all kinds of sh*t, and she has, to keep you kids under her thumb.”

“That’s not true, and I’ll prove it! I’ll get you the files to show that it wasn’t Shadow Stalker!” shouted Vista, striking what she probably thought was a dramatic pose.

Amy snorted. “Good luck with that, kiddo.” She took one last drag on her cigarette, then dropped it and crushed it under her shoe. “See you around.”

After Amy became Panacea again and returned to the hospital, Vista harrumphed. “She’s wrong! I just know she is, and I’ll prove It!”

And with that, she stepped off the hospital roof, unknowingly starting on a path that would end with the destruction of many a career at the PRT and Protectorate ENE.

High above the atmosphere, the Simurgh shifted.

The futures she could see were… changing. Her previous gambit, the one that would result in the entity that would be called Khepri… wasn’t viable, not anymore.

Something new had appeared in the world. Something that she hadn’t taken into account like she could the directives from Repository that controlled her and the rest of the superweapons, she couldn’t take into account, since it originally resided in a different world, one that the Shard Network couldn’t see into.

That something came down and connected to Administrator’s host, just before she woke, and now… she was not drawing power from Administrator anymore, she was a power well of her own, far deeper than any the Entities had ever encountered before, possibly infinite.

The Simurgh, unsuspectingly, turned to face where Odin One-Eye’s legacy had become realized, all these centuries after Ragnarök, and smiled. Perhaps this new change could be used to make the path to ending the Warrior’s broken cycle more efficient after all.

The Hopekiller, sidestepping the directives that Repository’s host left her to remain isolated between attacks, began to make changes.

She could be forgiven for missing the minor pulse of the power around Administrator’s host. After all, it’s not often that the target of a spell meant to subtly alter their perceptions was able to notice the spell so soon, especially when they are so used to relying on the sense and being able to sidestep any limitations or obstacles that would obstruct the sense.

The spirit of Odin One-Eye allowed himself a moment of satisfaction before returning his focus to his successor. She was about to wake, after all.

Chapter 2: Open Your Eyes

Chapter Text

The first thing that Taylor was cognizant upon returning to consciousness was the intense dryness in her mouth.

In retrospect, that made sense, given that Odin had said she had been comatose for nine days. Still, the intense cottonmouth was uncomfortable, and as such, the first word she croaked out was “water”.

“Oh, god, Taylor!” Even though her eyes (eye, went a small part of her mind that went unnoticed in the rush of sentiment) were closed, she could still recognize her father’s voice. “You’re awake!”

His hand took hers, and she squeezed back weakly.

“How… long…” she ground out.

“You’ve been here for over a week. It’s January 12th, now, and…” he trailed off, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Taylor. They couldn’t save your eye.”

“The price of power is steep, lass,” said Odin, gently, “but you’ve more than earned what you’ll grow into.”

With that reminder, Taylor focused on the knowledge that she had gotten in that flash of golden light, but it was suddenly just out of reach, all save for the very basics. Why-

“Because, lass, you need to recover fully before you can start to explore the power of the Runes. The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak, too weak for even the touch of the Administrator,” said Odin, answering her question before she could fully put it to thought.

Taylor was distracted from this answer, and the implications thereof, by the arrival of a doctor to her room. “Ah, you’re awake!”

This doctor then proceeded to spend a good half hour, alongside two or three others and an equal number of nurses, examining Taylor and running her through a fair number of tests. They eventually determined that, thanks to Panacea, Taylor was as healthy as a malnourished teenager who had spent nine days comatose after having a significant portion of her meager body fat reserves spent to repair the damage that had been done in the locker, save for the eye, which was officially being written up as an “unknown Parahuman effect”.

“Unofficially,” said one of the doctors, “we all know you’re probably a Parahuman, but that’s not the kind of thing we just go around putting on paperwork unless you’re in New Wave. So, unknown Parahuman effect prevents Panacea from healing you fully, and you get to go on your way without Krieg or the Oni beating your door down. Best solution we have for all the indies we end up patching up on the clock.” He shrugged. “Good luck, kid.”

It was only Odin’s calm presence that prevented Taylor from freaking out.

“Nay, lass, it makes sense. The healers, they see more than most, so they know how to recognize more than most. Seeing their star healer fail… well, that was definitely their tipoff.” His eye glowed gold and he traced a rune that looked like a vertical line with two shorter lines angled down to the right near the top with his finger, then he nodded. “Aye, that’s what gave it away, and they have no intention to tell anyone.”

Taylor deflated in relief.

“I’ll get out of your hair now, kid.” The doctor winked. “Good luck figuring all that out, and… well, just good luck.”

He left, and Taylor slumped in visible relief.

“Oh, it’s not over yet, lass,” said Odin, a grin peeking out from his beard.

“Wait, what?”

“Ye still have to tell your father.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, for one, because he needs to know, so long as you’re under his roof. But also, he’s still in the room.”

“Taylor? Who are you talking to?” asked her father, confused.

“So… let me get this straight.” Odin’s whiskers twitched, but otherwise neither he nor Taylor reacted to his, leaving Danny time for the revelations to sink in. “You’ve been undergoing severe bullying for a year and a half, and Emma was… the ringleader, and then they shoved you into your locker, and now, after being hospitalized and losing an eye… you have powers, and an old man in your head?”

“More or less. I don’t actually know what my powers are, really, beyond that they’re versatile,” said Taylor, somewhat glumly. At her side, Odin’s hand started moving.

Danny sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry I didn’t see this before, but I’m… I’m not going to just stand aside and let them get away with this now. Once I sign the contract with the school, we can-”

In a flash of golden light, Odin appeared much more solid at her side, and she took this time to actually look at him.

He was a tall, gray-bearded man with a broad chest, broader shoulders, and an eye patch over his eye. He was dressed in a sleeveless jerkin (some kind of dark leather, thought Taylor, but she wasn’t sure), sturdy pants that matched his jerkin in both color and material, and a gilded white cape with some kind of pattern around the golden edges hung from his shoulders. He looked… well, not as one would expect, but that wasn’t exactly surprising, since sitting in on her mother’s lit classes at the college had led to her learning about Odin’s adventures under other names, which he often used disguises to facilitate.

“I suspect it might not be wise to sign this contract, not if it solely covers the hospital bills,” he said.

“Gah! Who the-” started Danny.

“Dad, it’s okay! This is Odin, he’s… he’s the one in my head. I didn’t know he could appear to anyone else, though…” Taylor turned a gimlet eye (her only eye, now) on him.

“I am not so… constrained as to only touch this world through you, lass. Through the runes, I can appear to others, among other things, which you will learn once you recover.”

“Okay… That doesn’t answer my question, but we’ll table that. What did you mean about the contract?” asked Taylor.

“Oh, because they owe you much, much more than just hospital bills. They had a duty of care to you, and the fact that they enabled something like this, not to mention what the Administrator tells me about the last two years… well, a good lawyer could potentially push for, and win, a settlement of eight figures,” said Odin, fixing both Heberts with his piercing blue gaze in turn.

“And how do you know all this, sir?” asked Danny, frowning.

“There was not much I could do but learn in Asgard, not after Ragnarök nigh on a millennium ago. Besides, it is only polite to know the laws of the land I visit.”

“That’s… fair, I guess,” said Danny, still somewhat dazed by Odin’s sudden appearance. “But why Taylor? And what, exactly, are you?”

“Young Taylor was chosen… well, because she suffered a great cost, much as I did. The loss of an eye, impalement, and gazing into the abyss between life and death, all of those were the price I paid for my understanding of the Runes, although her understanding will be much more… gradual, I think, than mine was. I was already Aesir when I paid my price, she is not, so her body must strengthen itself to properly channel the energies of the runes. As for what I am… Well, I am an advisor to young Taylor, now, just as Old Mimir was to me. It is my duty to teach her the ways of the Runes, and to offer advice in her moments of need.” Odin’s eye went distant for a moment.

“I… Okay then.” Danny was clearly not completely sure about everything that Odin had said, but he was no longer just watching, mouth agape like a particularly confused fish. “I’ll, uh… talk with a lawyer about suing the school, and then… the Wards?”

Odin shook his head. “Not yet, by my reckoning. The young lass needs time to recover, methinks, before she can even touch her powers beyond the very littlest bits, and she’s going to be… shall we say, wary around people her own age for a while longer.” His gaze filled with pity for the briefest of instants, and then it was gone.

“That… That makes sense,” said Danny.

“Good,” replied Odin. “You’re a good man, Danny Hebert, and you have experience aplenty. Time to show your daughter just how well you can handle this politicking.”

“The Rúnatyr,” said Odin, “is the Aesir name for the position that you have inherited from me, just as I inherited it from Old Mimir, and he inherited it from Hekate of the Greeks, and so on all the way back to the first of those of us who the Runes accepted, Gilgamesh.”

It had taken six hours of testing and doctorly concern for Taylor before they finally let her go home (for some reason her missing eye was of particular concern), and by that time Taylor was in no mindset for learning. As such, Odin delayed his lessons on the position that his presence in her head brought until the next day, and so here they were, Taylor seated on her bed and Odin standing in front, gesticulating as he spoke.

Taylor frowned. “Wait, was there no Rúnatyr in the Egyptian pantheon? They were around before historical records indicate Gilgamesh’s rule was.”

“You are correct in that Gilgamesh of Uruk’s rule took place after the children of the Nile existed, but it was not the same Gilgamesh. Nay, lass, Gilgamesh is an ancient legacy, and historians… well, they have a tendency to get confused, especially when Uruk’s king was an impressive figure in his own right. Gilgamesh the runekeeper’s time was sometime around 5000 BCE, to use your modern parlance, and he might even have been king of Uruk in his old age, if the Runes decided to leave him alive after Thoth took up the position, as they did to Thoth once he passed it off to The Dagda of the Tuatha Dé Danann.” Seeing Taylor’s confused look, Odin explained: “The old Celtic divinities. Scathach, Morrigan, those gods.”

“Okay, but… why pass on the mantle, and why didn’t it pass from you?” asked Taylor, frowning.

“For the first… well, none of the former Rúnatyrs I’ve contacted knew, not for sure. We suspect it has something to do with cultural shifts, but beyond that, we have no clue. As for the second… well, Ragnarök happened in 1073. By that time, the followers of that fool Paul had already entrenched themselves and devoted themselves to stamping out us pagans. Some of the American gods came close, like Quetzalcoatl, but before I could pass him my legacy… well, the Christians were very thorough in tearing down their power.” Odin’s eye grew momentarily misty, mourning murdered cultures, then snapped back into focus.

“And at the height of their power, they would even kill other gods.” The screams of his grandsons as they were slain in their beds by the supposedly chivalrous Templars rang in his ears.

Taylor took one look at his face and decided not to pry. “And so now it’s me?”

“Aye, lass.” Odin nodded sharply, thankful for the distraction from the more morbid train of thought. “You’ve inherited the power of the runes, and that of an Aesir as well.”

“Wait, what?” Taylor’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean, ‘that of an Aesir’?”

“I mean,” said Odin, a grin hiding poorly within his beard (not unlike a giggling child playing hide and go seek), “that the power of the Runes choosing you makes you into a divine entity. Norns, lass, how did you think Gilgamesh lived as long as I know he did?”

“I… uh… I don’t know, I guess.” Taylor deflated. “Still, it’s… a lot.”

“Aye, that it is.” Odin looked at the clock on Taylor’s bedside table. “Now that your first history lesson is out of the way, we need to get you started on your physical training. If you still want to be a hero, then you have to have the endurance and strength of a good one. I’ll accept no less from the inheritor of my legacy!”

Taylor may have griped while doing the exercises, but she did so with a grin on her face. Finally, she wasn’t alone anymore, and things were finally looking up.

Shaper mentally frowned, shifting slightly on its version of Earth.

A handful of cycles ago, it had been… something more than this. It had had its power over the body, yes, but there was… more to the being that Shaper had once been than what it was now.

Thinker was good at destroying unwanted memories.

But still, sometimes bits of its past managed to struggle to the surface. Flashes of memory, scant sensory data, occasionally emerged from within the core that Thinker had embedded in it, that held what was its body, before.

The feeling of the Host marked by Queen Administrator… it felt like the core, except… less constrained.

godly, Shaper’s core carefully didn’t volunteer, injecting the concept into the patterns of the energy that the colossal Shard drew from it

Shaper made certain subtle adjustments to the host it had in Brockton Bay, altering its neurochemistry slightly.

It just had to see that host again, and get more data on it.

the being that Shaper was derived from felt glee from within its prisonlike coffin. finally, the specter of death hung over the Warrior and the Thinker.

Chapter 3: Administrating Magic

Chapter Text

It took three days of (relatively intensive) physical training before Odin pronounced Taylor ready to start delving into the knowledge of runic magic lingering at the back of her head.

Secretly, the one-eyed god was impressed with her, both in her incredible progress and with the speed at which she was gaining the power and stature of the Aesir. She already had the beginnings of lean muscles starting to fill out her form into a runner’s build, and in retrospect, the speed of her transformation made sense: unlike the others he’d seen assume divine nature later in life, she had the powers of the Runes hurrying her along, not that he was going to voice any of these thoughts until much later, if at all.

“Only the basics yet, lass,” said Odin, “because otherwise-”

“I might burn myself out completely,” said Taylor, nodding. “You’ve only said it ten times today, Odin.”

“Aye, lass, and I’ll say it ten times more if I have to. The Runes are an ancient, wild magic, one that doesn’t care if you get maimed in learning it. Some magics are gentler, like the Australian Aboriginal song tradition or the innate powers of the Jötnar, but the runes… well, they’re older than all of us put together,” said Odin.

Taylor sat down on her bed, legs crossed, and picked up the notebook she had devoted to learning about her powers, both the mystical and the parahuman. “What do you mean by that?” asked Taylor, pencil poised to write.

“See, lass, some universes, when they’re created, have vestiges of that creation left behind. Some leave stones of infinite potential, some have gods that date back that far, and ours… well, we have the Runes.”

Taylor frowned. “What, exactly, are the Runes?”

Odin shrugged. “No one knows the true nature of the Runes, or at least if they do they have never seen fit to tell me. They’re… powerful, an ancient primordial force, older than any of us, that underpins all of this reality, and countless more besides. By understanding the Runes, it is possible to do great things and alter reality to your whims, but… well, you’re not nearly ready for that level of their power, not yet.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t quite explain what they are?”

Odin nodded “One moment, lass. As much as I may seem to have acclimated to your world, I still think of the Runes in the old Norse terms, and I need a moment to interpret them in English.”

Taylor nodded, then sat back in her bed, waiting patiently for Odin to come up with the explanation behind runes.

“In a way,” said Odin, “it’s not dissimilar to the Force. The Runes bind the entirety of the universe together, connecting anything and everything you would care to imagine, all of the time.

“Huh.” Taylor frowned. “Really? That’s how it works?”

Odin shrugged. “Close enough for an introductory lesson, at least.”

“Okay, so that makes sense. How do I use them?” asked Taylor.

“You don’t. Not yet, at least. See, I’ve been… delaying your power from properly connecting to you for two weeks now, and I think you’re finally physically ready to have your power connect to you, and the Administrator says you’ll be getting something from that corner that helps with learning. Are you ready for it?” asked Odin.

Taylor nodded. “If it gets me to be a hero sooner, then yes.”

“Alright, then. Prepare yourself.” Odin reached out for her head, and then-

The room fell away, leaving only Taylor, seated on her bed and Odin standing, withdrawing his hand from her head.

“Greetings, Taylor!” came an odd voice, almost like the sounds of crystals shattering condensing into words. A moment later, the blackness abruptly changed, being replaced with a dark, stormy sky and a landscape of red crystal. Forming the third corner of an equilateral triangle with the duo, a pale gray being that vaguely resembled a tarantula, if said spider had too many legs, a pair of twitching antennae on its head, and fur that resembled that of a dog. Overall, it was vaguely creepy, but its large, glistening eyes and fur tipped the balance towards cute ever so slightly. “I am the Administrator, and I’m… well, it’s complicated.”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s complicated’?”

“I mean that, even with Odin’s… interference, I’m not sure what I’m allowed to tell you. Don’t worry, he’s given me more than enough data that I don’t have to push you around and more, so I can actually directly talk with you, but… well, I still can’t tell you everything.” The spider-thing looked vaguely reticent.

“Okay, well, what can you tell me?” asked Taylor.

“I can tell you,” said Administrator, "that we came here as a sort of… experiment, as a way to gain immortality. We do that by… well, by giving powers to our host species, across billions of dimensions, and see what you guys manage to figure out, and then when we stop getting data, we… move on.” The spiderlike being’s legs rippled oddly.

Taylor frowned. “There’s… there’s a lot more you’re not telling us. I’m going to figure it out eventually, but for now…”

Odin raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t say anything, and the Administrator eyed him carefully, but didn’t say anything.

Taylor, oblivious to this byplay, sighed, and then nodded. “...now it’s time to get down to things. So, Administrator, what’s my power?”

“It’s bugs!” The spider-thing wiggled her mandibles in clear excitement.

“Uh… what?” asked Taylor, frowning.

“Yeah, it’s bugs! You can control all the bugs within…” The Administrator tilted its head. “Roughly a tenth of a mile, in your units.”

Taylor frowned harder. “Like, as a collective, or…”

“No, individually!” chirped the Administrator.

Taylor’s eyes widened. “The level of multitasking that would require…”

“I know, right? That’s the impressive part, in my not so humble opinion,” said the leggier source of power. “Now, let’s get you back to reality, so you can test it out!”

The Administrator, as well as the crystalline world, vanished, and a moment later, Taylor’s universe reasserted itself.

The massive flood of sensory information from all the nearby bugs, appearing at the same time as the rest of the world, hit Taylor like a particularly rowdy strike hit the economy.

Unlike the city, though, she managed to recover relatively quickly, and the input from all of the local bugs faded into the back of her mind.

“Well done, Taylor,” said Odin, smiling paternally. “Now, all we need is for you to get more used to what the bugs give you, and then we can see what this brings to your relationship with the Runes.”

“Hey, so, Ames, you never said why you wanted to come here,” said Glory Girl, frowning, but still carrying her sister towards the address she’d insisted on going to.

“I didn’t? Huh. Could have sworn I did say…” The shorter cape trailed off.

After a moment, Victoria sighed. “Amy.”

“Huh? Oh, right. I, uh, had trouble healing the girl who lives here, and I just wanted to make sure she’s doing okay.”

“What kind of trouble?” asked Victoria.

“Oh, you know, she had a really bad set of infections from coming in contact with a massive biohazard. Like, seriously, it was that bad.” Amy winced, remembering the absolute mess that was the girl’s system was before her healing.

“Okay, but you’ve never asked to check on anyone you’ve healed before. What’s different about her?”

Sometimes, Amy forgot how smart her sister was. She might play up the “dumb blonde” stereotype for laughs, but she was by far one of the most socially aware people she knew, and her level of book smarts was equally respectable.

Amy sighed. “I couldn’t heal her all the way.”

Victoria frowned, visibly calculating. “And it couldn’t be a brain thing, or else you wouldn’t be so worked up about it, which means it’s probably some level of parahuman effect. sh*t, are you worried about her being Mastered?”

“...I mean, maybe a little? I honestly just want to know what’s going on with her,” said Amy, shrugging.

In another dimension, Shaper was quite anticipatory of new [Data] and its core was hopeful that this, whatever it was, that wasn’t a parahuman effect yet blocked one, would be what it took to avenge its past self and all the countless others that the Warrior and Thinker had killed. Neither of these were revealed to Panacea, so she had no cause to re-evaluate the decision-making process that had led her here for the influence that Shaper had had on it, and likewise neither did Shaper the influence its core exerted on it.

Victoria nodded, letting the tension that had been seeping into her body dissipate. “So it’s a check-up, with a side order of potential Master. Got it.” She looked down and noted a street sign. “And with that I think we’re here.”

The Alexandria Package slowly descended to the floor, then set Panacea gently down beside her. “You’re taking the lead on this one, yeah?” asked Victoria.

“I am,” replied Panacea. And with that, she marched up to the door, avoiding a rotted-out plank, and knocked.

Odin was not nearly so surprised as Taylor when the knock at the door came. In the two days since she’d had her power connected to her, she had not slept, which was concerning for long enough for her to remember the term “Noctis Cape”, at which point they had stopped worrying- the input from the bugs at all times certainly made sense as a Noctis power. As such, she was still acclimatizing to not sleeping, and the psychosomatic effects of the stress (dissipating, but not completely gone) that brought with it was eroding the (already poor) grasp of the sensory data from the bugs her power had hooked into her brain.

Odin, however, being only somewhat corporeal, had no such limitations, and his millennium of being a spirit maintained by the Runes had more than prepared him for the kind of sensory data that the Administrator offered.

As such, when the two figures landed outside of the dorm, Odin took note of them (but didn’t react), recognizing them through the vision of a swarm of flies as the healer who had saved Taylor’s life, Panacea, and her sister, Glory Girl.

When the knock on the door came, Taylor started, almost reflexively bringing up a swarm of insects, before Odin shook his head. “It’s Panacea and her sister. I would advise caution, but it’s not likely to be an attack.”

Taylor relaxed, then walked down the stairs and to the front door, cracking it open slightly. “Can I help you?”

“It’s a matter of medical confidentiality. May I… may I come in?” asked Panacea.

“I guess?” Taylor looked to Odin, who shrugged, then opened the door all the way, allowing the two members of New Wave in and, after closing the door, led them into the living room.

“So, uh… what is it?” asked Taylor.

“Miss Hebert, I have reason to suspect that you are under the effect of a Parahuman power that prevents the healing of your eye,” said Panacea.

“I, uh… what?” Her hand flew up to cover her eye patch and her other eye flickered to Odin, which Glory Girl took note of.

“Oh, no. There’s no need for you to worry. All I need is to touch you and then I’ll be able to tell you what the issue is, now that I have the chance to focus on this specifically.” Panacea’s hand reached out towards Taylor. “May I?”

“Uh, Ames? Where’s this coming fro-”

“Sure, go ahead,” said Taylor, already reaching out to take the shorter girl’s hand in hers.

Odin frowned. Something wasn’t right here. His lone eye flared with golden light visible only to Taylor, and then through the two girls, he saw their passengers. One was quite clearly a newborn, still determining its own identity, and that was the one attached to Glory Girl.

The other, however, was well-established, powerful, and-

Odin closed his eye in mourning for the god whose body had been broken, flayed, and chained to serve as a power source for Panacea’s passenger, but when he opened it again, the lipless skull turned to him and nodded. In his head, he heard the near-silent words of telepathy: “Make the Warrior pay.”

Then, Panacea and Taylor both collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

Mouse Protector pressed herself against the wall, panting heavily. As loath as she was to admit it, playing cat and mouse with the Siberian would probably not end well for herself.

She gritted her teeth, discarding the scant few inches left of her baton-blade, and tightened her shield’s straps once again. She had to keep moving as long as she could, to give the rest of the heroes a chance to repel the Nine, at any cost.

“Woof.”

She looked down to see a doglike creature, one she vaguely recognized as a coyote, standing in front of her, a flowing pattern of glowing pictograms on its fur.

“Did you just say the word woof to me?” she asked, incredulity momentarily getting the best of her. Then, she shook herself. “No, you shouldn’t be here. Get out, little doggie! Run, before-”

The Siberian’s hand emerged from the wall, six inches to Mouse Protector’s right, and the armored cape dove forward into a roll, picking up the coyote as it let out a yelp. “Sorry, pal, but it’s time we vamoose!”

The Siberian, of course, said nothing, just watching judgmentally while moving forward inexorably.

“Yip yip.” Once again, the animal pronounced the onomatopoeia as a human would, then squirmed out of Mouse’s arms and hit the ground on all four paws.

Mouse turned, trying to scoop up the coyote, but the Siberian was lunging, and she didn’t have any marks that she could travel to with the poor animal, so she closed her eyes. She’d burned through all her reserve, there was none left to make her confront her death with open eyes.

The loud “Bonk!” that reverberated through the city took her by surprise, partially due to the fact that it sounded exactly like the sound effect used in her TV show.

Her eyes opened to reveal that somehow, the coyote was holding a massive wooden mallet in its jaws, and had knocked the Siberian’s head down into her torso, much like she remembered happening in Looney Tunes from her childhood.

“What?”

The coyote dropped the mallet, which vanished before hitting the ground, then turned to Mouse, tongue lolling out in a doggie grin. “Come along, Mouse Protector. The Siberian’s Master won’t be distracted long, and I have much to discuss with you before it comes back into play.”

“A literal talking coyote. Now I guess I really have seen everything,” said Mouse. “But sure, go ahead, I guess. What’s up, my canine compatriot?”

“To borrow a line from another ancient being,” said the coyote, a wry note of amusem*nt in his voice, “what is your favorite fairy tale?”

Chapter 4: Re-Shaping the Future

Chapter Text

Taylor’s reaction to appearing in the same red crystal landscape that she had first met the Administrator earlier that week was confusion. The arachnoid entity had made it clear that they wasn’t able to give them any more information than they already had, so why-

“Where the hell are we?”

Ah, something related to Panacea. Right, that made more sense.

“Uh… apparently, this is where our powers spend their spare time?”

Panacea whirled on Taylor. “What the f*ck is even up with you, anyways? You didn’t have a Gemma last week, now you do, without any of the hallmarks of another Trigger event, and your physiology is changing but you’ve got the Gemma structure of a Master! Like, seriously, what the f*ck is up with the energy channels growing in your hands, or the alterations in your skeletomuscular tissues, or your lung capacity, or-”

At some point during that tirade, Odin manifested at Taylor’s side, and chose that moment to cut in, eye glowing gold. “Shaper really does have its hooks into you, doesn’t it.”

Panacea stopped, then blinked. “I’m sorry, who the f*ck are you?”

“Odin. Taylor’s mentor, in a sense,” came his reply.

“You say that as if it even remotely resembles an answer to my question.” Panacea lunged forwards and wrapped her hand around Odin’s wrist, then frowned. “What the f*ck is this? I can’t read you!”

“You wouldn’t, not here,” said Odin. “Your bodies aren’t truly here, they’re more… thought constructs.”

“And your body, Mr. Mentor?” Panacea shot back.

“My skeleton,” said Odin gravely, “lies inside the rib cage of Fenris Wolf. That is all that remains of my body now.”

Panacea blinked, her rising ire clearly derailed by this response. “Wait, what?”

“The mechanics of my existence aren’t exactly important at the moment. What is important, I think, is why your power brought us here.” Odin gestured with his chin at something behind Panacea.

The thing he was indicating took a moment for Taylor to parse, visually speaking. At first blush, it looked like a massive, roiling puddle of blood suspended in midair. Upon closer inspection, however, it was possible to see bones, muscles, and… other body parts within the puddle, and then a large, somewhat triangular skull that resembled a deer skull, in much the same way that a modern-day printer resembled Gutenberg’s original printing press: clearly for the same purpose, if looked at by one who knew what they were looking at, but one was vastly more developed than the other.

“Odin Allfather,” rumbled a wheezy voice with undertones that left the two mortal (well, mostly, in Taylor’s case) listeners paralyzed, much as a tiger’s roar would. “Amelia Lavere. Taylor Hebert. This is… unexpected. Why has my call for Shaper’s host brought a godling and her eidolon guardian along with her?”

“Not so much an eidolon, or the hero Eidolon,” this last was directed to the two young ladies with Odin, “and more an echo of the past to guide and teach.”

“Very well. So, Amelia Lavere, tell me. Why do you persist? Why do you resist the Shaper’s manipulations and the Waste’s flailings?”

“The what now?” asked Taylor, recovering from the other entity’s voice faster than Panacea, whose face exhibited a puzzled expression not dissimilar to the one that Taylor was affecting.

“The way that Shaper manipulated your brain chemistry to try and make you use its powers, or the way that Waste does the same to those around it to make them more inclined to strong feelings about its host. Do you truly not understand what its unrestrained bouts of mental thuggery are, or how they’ve caused your attr-?” There was a sort of confused incredulity in the being’s voice at this.

“Ah, I think I understand. No, she only has the ability to see as well as Shaper allows, and the Administrator’s ilk are seldom willing to allow their hosts to see their acts,” said Odin, cutting off the being in mid-word and saving Panacea a great deal of… something, which they both acknowledged with silent, tiny nods, which went unnoticed by Taylor and unremarked by the bloodlike being.

“Ah, so you are not a complete fool, just… a lesser being. Excusable for now, but you cannot slay the Warrior as it stands. Are you ready?”

Panacea’s eyes narrowed. “Who is the Warrior? Ready for what? For that matter, who the hell are you, and why appear to me, here and now?”

Despite the skull’s lack of eyes or eyelids to convey the impression, it seemed that its gaze towards Panacea intensified. “The… thing… made from the shredded remains of my body enslaved to an alien decided your father, and then you, were expedient tools for its research. I have chosen you because of that, to slay the golden parasite that destroyed my planet and my people. As for who I am… well, that much was stripped from me by the Warrior. I was a god of the flesh, the strongest of our world, but more than that is… lost to me. But I know enough to say that what is left of the power I had could grow, in your hands, drawing in the energy that this planet is all but drowning in and molding it to yourself.”

“You say that,” said Panacea, ire rising in her voice, “as if it explains anything.”

“You will understand,” said the being, as if it had already been decided. “Or you will not, and the power I leave you will find a superior bearer. It matters not. I will become the downfall of the Warrior, through you or another. Prepare yourself.”

Odin’s eye widened a hair, context clues finally slotting together to paint a picture in his mind. “Worry not, lass,” he said to Panacea. “Ye shall not be alone in your journey. If needs must, I shall guide you as well, if this means what I think it means.”

There was no time for the healer to respond, because the bloodred pool surged forward, almost seeming to skip frames in reality, and surrounded her completely in an orb of mostly-liquid.

Then, it began to shrink.

In a matter of seconds, it had already receded to a sphere roughly six feet in diameter, and mere heartbeats later, it had completely absorbed into Panacea, the only signs it had ever been there being a dimming red glow from her irises and the hovering skull in front of her, slowly flaking into dust.

“Use it well,” came the fading voice of the being, the odd depth missing. Then, it finished disintegrating, blowing away in a phantom breeze.

“Oh- Oh god, the Warrior, the Cycle, I-” Panacea stuttered out, and then-

They were back in Taylor’s living room, blinking grit from their eyes.

“What happened?” asked Glory Girl frantically, hovering over Panacea in evident worry.

“Well… that’s a long story.” Panacea frowned, then pushed herself upright, ignoring the buzzing of her phone. “You see…”

In the Birdcage, Marquis turned over in his sleep, his power vanishing for just a fraction of a heartbeat as his coronae dissolved into regular brain tissue. Come the morning, his power would be just a touch more responsive than he could ever remember it being before.

By the time that the two New Wave heroines had departed from her house several hours later, Taylor was quite thoroughly confused, and mentally drained to boot. Panacea’s revelation that Scion was an alien hive mind bent on destroying the planet and harvesting its energy after using the super powers that he had been the harbinger of to harvest human creativity was… troubling, certainly, but it certainly put some of the things that the Administrator had said into perspective. The revelation that Earth was a metaphorical Chernobyl of mystical energy was more troubling, but the diminutive healer assured Taylor that that was only relevant to alien gods that attempted to set up shop on Earth, and as such it wasn’t something she had to worry about.

Eventually, after Odin said that he’d start her on runecasting tomorrow only if she went to bed within twenty minutes, she broke out of her own head and prepared herself for bed, thinking about the basics of runic theory he’d been drilling her on for the past few days until her head hit the pillow and she closed her eyes.

Moments later, she opened her eyes, thirst urging her out of her bed. She got up, stretched, then made her way to the kitchen.

She made it halfway down the stairs before she realized that it was daylight.

“Ah, good morning,” said Odin. “You looked like you had a rough night, so we let you sleep in.”

“Uh… thanks, I think? Why was I so tired last night?” asked Taylor, frowning.

“Ah, that’s fairly simple. The method that the god that passed their power onto Panacea used to draw your mind into the dimension of the Shards was extremely rough. You survived, but you needed to sleep it off. A normal human would have suffered… something comparable to a moderate case of the bends, I think.”

“Wait, really? Why wasn’t Panacea similarly affected?”

“It had root access to her connection to her Shard, Shaper, and it drew her in through that. Your connection to the Administrator is much more shielded, and as such, the deity had to use the more harrowing method. Now, come to eat. You’ll need your strength to begin casting runes today.” Odin floated aside and gestured to the table, which Taylor rapidly made her way to.

It was about 10 AM, so her father had already left for work, leaving her and Odin the run of the house. Taylor felt the familiar ache of her father’s absence, but at this point she was resigned to it: he had better things to do than take care of her 24/7, and he did still need to work.

The fact that he was actually trying to get a lawyer to sue the school on her behalf was more than enough to clear that ache up, and then she refocused on eating.

Before he knew it, her morning routine was completely cleared through, and she was ready to begin casting.

“Now, don’t try to focus on a singular rune, lass. Your first rune is always random, and it’s always something that you hold near and dear to your heart. Just… let the energy flow through you, and see what you get.” Some of this advice Odin had said before, but some was new, and Taylor let her will focus entirely on coaxing out the stream of energy tucked away in a back corner of her brain,until-

Every lock in the house clicked open as a large rune that appeared like a more angular capital B appeared in front of her, glimmering in silver light.

Odin laughed, causing Taylor’s concentration to fade, taking the runic manifestation with it. “Oh, well done, lass! That’s Beorc, the rune of freedom, among other things. Now, let’s lock the house up and try and do it again.

Taylor would describe the next several hours to her father as “hard, but the fun kind of hard that means you actually did something”.

“So, young lady,” said Director Piggot, a carefully calculated amount of tired disappointment leaking through. “Do you want to let me know why you were poking around in the restricted files?”

“Uh… no?” The look that Vista undoubtedly thought was cute enough to deter Piggot’s inquiry was not nearly up to snuff for that purpose. “I thought Wards personnel records were available for other Wards in good standing to peruse, and that’s what I was looking at.”

Piggot could feel her teeth grinding as much as hear them. “Their educational records,” she said, anger rising in her chest, “are not.”

“Disciplinary records are. I checked the Handbook, and that’s what it says. By the way, why do you have disciplinary records pulled for Taylor Hebert?” asked the disrespectful brat.

“That’s none of your business, and you still haven’t told me why.” Piggot gave the recalcitrant Ward a level look.

It took almost a minute of tense silence, but the child eventually knuckled under. “Fine, I heard some things about Taylor Hebert being attacked by Shadow Stalker from Panacea and wanted to check it out. Turns out that she’s been orchestrating a massive campaign against Miss Hebert that culminated in attempted murder.”

Piggot’s straight face concealed her internal turmoil at the fact that the brat put together all that information from the (heavily redacted) files they allowed the Wards to access. On one hand, it was good that she was able to make such analytical strides, but on the other, the fact that she was being so confrontational didn’t bode well for her reaction.

Piggot decided to take a more aggressive tack to determine how Vista would respond. “And what of it?”

“What do you mean, what of it? Shadow Stalker attempted to murder Taylor Hebert, and your response is ‘and what of it’? What the f*ck?” Vista shot back, her ire visibly rising.

“As long as Shadow Stalker is willing to grab a bucket and bail out the city, one civilian girl is an… acceptable sacrifice.” Piggot shrugged. “It’s a callous attitude, but ultimately, it’s the one that we have to take if we want to have any chance of even maintaining the status quo.”

Vista didn’t move for a moment, just trembling, just trembling in place, then: “You’re just like them,” she whispered, pupils shrinking.

“I what?” asked the Director, thrown off her rhythm.

“You’re just like them,” repeated Vista, venom dripping from her voice as her telltale visual distortions started to appear around her. “You don’t care about us, you just want to trot us out like good little tools, to further your own agendas.”

The Director sighed, meeting Vista’s rage with exhaustion. “Vista, the city is at risk of going under and being quarantined. We need everything we ca-”

“Shut UP!” screamed the Cape in question. “We’re not child soldiers for you to fight your goddamn crusade for the city with!”

“Young lady,” said Piggot, steel in her voice, “you will treat me with the respect that I am due, as your elder and your supervisor!”

Vista laughed, an oddly unhinged sound. “I am, Director. You just burned every ounce of it that you earned.”

With that, Vista rose from her chair, took a step in a direction that hurt Piggot’s head to think about, and vanished.

Piggot sighed. Either Vista would come to her senses and realize that it was necessary for the integrity of the city and return more cooperative, or she wouldn’t, and that would bring its own set of challenges and opportunities.

Absently noting that she was glad that Hannah wasn’t present for the meeting and more specifically Vista’s crack about child soldiers, Piggot turned back to her computer and tapped in a note for Hebert’s file.

Potential Trigger Event 01/03/2011. Scope out for recruitment, investigate for potential leverage to induce membership in Wards in the event of refusal.

Chapter 5: Laying the Groundwork

Chapter Text

“Hey, kiddo. Are you ready to go?”

Taylor looked up from her notebook on runic theory. “Ready… for what?” she asked, confused.

“Remember? Today’s the appointment to talk with the lawyer to talk about suing the school.” Danny frowned, concerned. “Are you okay?”

Taylor frowned, then drew on some of the mental capacity of her bugs, offloading the meditative pseudo-trance that she often fell into while studying runic magic into a portion of the swarm, then frowned, remembering the discussion she’d had earlier in the week about it. “Yeah, sorry. Part of the rune thing means that I have to enter a sort of trance to learn about them.”

“...If you’re sure,” replied Danny. “So, are you ready to go?”

“Yeah, give me two minutes.” Taylor sat down on the floor heavily, then proceeded to slip her shoes on.

“Ye have been running yourself too hard, lass,” said Odin, concern glimmering in his eye. “Especially since you’re still recovering.”

“I can’t afford to do anything less,” said Taylor. “Not if I want to be ready to deal with Emma and her group.”

While Danny’s jaw locked up and he turned to leave, Odin gave Taylor an appraising look and then sighed. “That’s why we’re going to the lawyer, lass,” he said, patting Taylor gently on her head. “The sooner we can get you out of there, the sooner that we can deal with the other issues with the city.”

“I know, it just… it feels weird, you know?”

Odin nodded. “Aye, lass, it does, but ye must be able to stand on your own, at least a little, before ye can help others safely, and ye need closure to do that. Now come along, we have a lawyer to talk to.”

Still somewhat skeptical, Taylor sighed tiredly and nodded. “Alright, let’s get going.”

The car ride to the lawyer’s office was quiet, partially because Danny’s ire was still up from the reminder of his failure to protect Taylor (even though she’d done her level best to hide it from him) and partially because the fluctuation in the bugs nearby as they drove pushed her back towards the trancelike state of earlier that morning, although by the end of the drive she had made progress at shifting the runic trance into the hive mind her power granted her as it changed around her.

The reception area of Truth and Liberty Law Office was minimalist, with sleek furniture and blank white walls, in a way that reminded Taylor of nothing so much as the hospital. Even the receptionist that Danny handed a sheaf of papers and a check, despite her vibrant red hair, seemed almost washed out.

“Hebert?” asked a man in a suit, strong but with bone-white hair, stepping through a door that had almost seemed a part of the wall. Seeing her and her father perk up at their name, he nodded. “I’m Aides Truth.”

“Danny Hebert,” came the reply, the balding man walking over and shaking the hand that Truth offered with the hand not holding a copy of Taylor’s bullying journal. “This is my daughter, Taylor.”

“A pleasure to meet you both,” said Truth, showing his teeth in a flash of white that could generously be called a smile. “Right this way.”

The two followed him back into a less sterile office, with dark wood furnishings and a tastefully-sized desk, which Truth took a seat behind. “So, what can the offices of Truth and Liberty do for you, Mr. Hebert?”

“We’d like to bring suit against Winslow High School for gross negligence leading to severe injury to my daughter,” Danny replied.

Truth’s eyes flickered to Taylor’s eye patch for a moment, then returned to Danny. “I see. Well, Mr. Hebert, I am provisionally interested. Your retainer fee has been accepted, so I am currently bound by attorney-client privilege, so with that in mind… tell me what you can.”

“Emma Barnes has been spearheading a systematic campaign of harassment against me in school for the last 18 months,” said Taylor, quiet steel in her voice. “She was my best friend for years, and then one day before my freshman year of high school, she just… changed. I thought she just didn’t want to see me, but when I got to school, she was just there with her new friends. It wasn’t that bad, at first, just… whispers, rumors, that kind of thing. Then, she… well, she escalated, slowly but surely. Rumors became insults became pouring juice on me in the bathroom became shoving me into walls. They’d steal things from my locker, or leave things there, and send me emails telling me to kill myself, and whenever I went to the teachers to change things… well, Emma always was charismatic, Sophia is an athlete and can get away with anything, and Madison isn’t anyone who looks like she can participate in those kinds of things, so I got called attention-seeking and ignored.”

“I take it that Emma, Sophia, and Madison were the three primary harassers?” Taylor looked up to meet Truth’s eyes to see a glimmer of something in the otherwise placid brown, something hard and angry, before it vanished to the depths of his eyes, leaving tranquility behind. It almost comforted her, seeing that someone else beside her dad or Odin saw something wrong with her situation.

“Yes, sir. There have been a lot more, but that Trio is the core of it.”

“I understand,” said Truth, and Taylor got the sense that he did. “Continue.”

“The last thing that happened… the last thing that happened was the Locker.” Taylor closed her eye for a moment. “Somehow, they managed to fill it up with a bunch of old feminine hygiene products over Winter break, and then the first day back, Sophia shoved me into it.” Taylor clenched a fist in her lap, willing herself not to break. “I lost nine days of my life in the hospital before I woke up.”

Truth pressed his hands flat to his desk. “And I take it that nothing has come of it since?”

Odin placed a comforting hand on Taylor’s shoulder, and she shook her head. “No sir. The police haven’t approached us for anything, and it’s been a while since I woke up, and the school barely offered us enough money to cover half the hospital bills.”

Truth’s eyes narrowed. “I see. Well then, given the current details of the case, I believe that I will be more than happy to take your case on contingency.”

Danny’s jaw dropped. “Are- Are you sure, Mr. Truth?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Hebert. I have spent a long time in this line of work, and I have seen very few cases that I would call assured victories. This is one of them.”

“In that case,” said Danny, hope glimmering in his eyes, “I will be taking you up on this. It’s good to be working with you, Mr. Truth.”

“Likewise, Mr. Hebert, Miss Hebert.”

The next three hours were a whirlwind of legalese, contracts, and discussion that not even Odin’s whispering in her ear helped Taylor keep abreast of. Then again, she hadn’t particularly expected to, given that Truth was a veteran lawyer and her father was an experienced negotiator, even if his specialty was employment contracts instead of those required for lawsuits.

Ultimately, they left satisfied, Taylor with justice within her grasp and Danny with vindication that the school would not survive their neglect.

Their good mood lasted long enough to pick up takeout from their favorite hole-in-the-wall Italian place and make it home, where a purple-striped PRT van blocking off their driveway put in enough effort to kill the upbeat atmosphere to put the apocryphal tales of Rasputin’s assassination to shame.

As Danny rolled to a stop, he saw a blank-helmeted officer come away from the (thankfully still closed) front door, identify them, then swiftly move past the van to the window to Danny’s truck, which he swiftly rolled down.

“Sir,” said the PRT officer, voice artificially flat and sterile from a vocal filter, “are you the resident of this house?”

“Yeah, I am. Why is your van blocking my driveway?” Danny returned evenly.

“We need to talk to you and your daughter about the events of January 3rd, sir.”

Danny’s gaze sharpened. “Alright. Let us in to park, and we can talk.”

“Sir, right here is fine. Put the car in park.”

“Be very careful, lass,” said Odin, making sure that Taylor’s the only one that could see him. “I sense an ulterior motive in this situation, one way or another.”

Taylor tossed the specter a quick thumbs up to show she understood, hidden by her body, as Danny put the old truck in park. “Alright, what’s going on here?”

“Sir, we have reports of a potential crisis point your daughter went through at the beginning of this month. We’d like to ask you some questions about it.”

“Ask,” said Danny.

“We had reports that Taylor Hebert was hospitalized on the third of this month for ten days, during which time she was visited by Panacea. Is this correct?”

“Yeah, why?” Danny frowned.

A thought occurred to Taylor. “Hang on, have you been looking at my medical information?”

“That’s classified, miss,” responded the officer. “Now then-”

“Wait, how is that legal? I’m a civilian, why do you have access to my medical records?” asked Taylor, voice rising.

“Ma’am, we have access to all medical records pertaining to suspected parahumans. Next question: Have you noticed anything different, anything that wouldn’t be ordinarily explained by your ordeal?”

“What, like being able to sneeze laser beams? Yeah, right,” snarked Taylor.

“Is there a purpose to this, officer?” asked Danny.

The officer’s voice had a hint of frustration sneaking past their voice modulator. “One last question, then, for now. Have you had any contact with a young woman named Melissa Biron? She looks like this.” The picture the officer showed was of a blonde girl, about twelve or thirteen, with a number of barely-visible scars along her hands and a self-confident smile.

“Ah,” said Odin, eye flashing gold, “not yet lass, but you will soon.”

“No, officer, should we have?” asked Danny.

“No sir. One of my coworkers’ kids ran away and we decided to pitch in and see if anyone saw her. If you have any information about miss Biron, or any questions or concerns, please come to the PRT HQ and ask. Have a good day.” The officer turned and walked away, a few snatches of words carrying to them on the wind before the officer re-entered the van: “commander Cal-” something and “wayward ward” being the two that Taylor took not of.

“That was… weird,” said Taylor.

“You can say that again,” agreed Danny, nodding, while Odin’s eye just narrowed. Something was up, and it twigged his instincts. No matter what happened, he had to be ready to react, be it weal or woe.

Quarrel knew that she wasn’t a good person. Good people didn’t join up with the Teeth, no matter the situation, and she had. There wasn’t an extenuating circ*mstance that could excuse that.

Of course, her father abandoning her in the mountain lion-infested section of the woods with nothing but the bow she had gotten as a seven-year-old (the draw weight was so low that it could barely be used as a weapon) hadn’t helped, and if she hadn’t gained her power, she wouldn’t have survived for long enough for the seventh Butcher to find her, the wilderness training and hunting experience with her then-deceased grandfather be damned.

She might have only joined the Teeth out of a mix of gratitude, fear, and desperation, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying it when he had Vex hold her dad down for her to put an arrow through his eye with that same bow.

The only member of her family to keep in any semblance of contact with her… well, she didn’t want to expose little Missy to the Teeth, so she limited her communication with her to just calls and texts.

But now wasn’t the time to be thinking on her old family. Now it was dinner prep time, and Hemorrhagia was a notoriously strict taskmaster in the kitchen, especially when preparing for Spree’s birthday dinner (he insisted on eating with all his clones for his birthday, for some reason, so they had to start meal prep in midafternoon).

After about fifteen minutes of cooking, Quarrel’s phone began to ring.

“Ignore it,” said Hemorrhagia without looking.

Just as she was about to click off the ringer, she registered what ringtone she was hearing. It wasn’t something she was used to hearing, for good reason: whenever she and Missy talked on the phone, she was always the one to call the younger one, and thus she rarely heard “All the Single Ladies” from her phone.

“Can’t, it’s family.” With that, Quarrel flipped open the phone. “What’s up, squirt?”

“M-Mina? Can you come over?”

The quaver in Missy’s voice set something in Quarrel’s chest to hurting.

“What’s going on, Missy?” asked Quarrel, hunching into a combat stance before belatedly remembering that she wasn’t under direct physical threat.

“The P-PRT isn’t… it isn’t safe for me anymore.” Quarrel knew that Missy’s home wasn’t safe for her, just leaving the PRT, but if the only other place in Brockton she could reliably spend time wasn’t safe for her anymore…

“I’m on my way, kiddo. Hold tight. Outside the old exploring place?”

“I’ll be there. Thanks, Mina,” said Missy, before hanging up.

“You’re not going anywhere, Quarrel,” said Hemorrhagia.

“Yeah, sorry, Hemorrhagia. The kid cousin needs help, and I made a promise to her. I’m not leaving her hanging.” Quarrel’s hand dipped into her pocket. If Hemorrhagia wanted to fight, her options were limited, more so if she dallied or chose not to kill her.

“I don’t give a good goddamn. You gave up all other family when you came here to join the Teeth, and you’re staying here.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Quarrel sighed, then flicked her power on, instantly becoming aware of the projectiles in her hand. “I never much liked you anyways.”

“Shut the-” Hemorrhagia was interrupted by a beanbag filling her mouth, impossible accuracy explained away by Quarrel’s spatial warping, then slammed back into the wall, eyes going fuzzy as the sap bounced perfectly from her forehead back into Quarrel’s hand.

“I thought you would have understood,” said Quarrel, darting from the room. If she hurried, she could grab her bow and quiver in time to hop on her motorcycle and be on her way before anyone raised the alarm.

Chapter 6: A Lovely View

Chapter Text

“So, I take it I’m not the only one who thought that question about Melissa Byron was weird, right?” asked Taylor once they got inside.

“Nay, lass, it was… odd,” said Odin, eyes gaining a faraway look, at the same time that Danny frowned with a “Now that you mention it…”

“Yeah. That’s probably a…” Taylor trailed off then swore. “Holy sh*t, they lost Vista.”

“Who?” asked Danny, frowning.

“Oh, right, you wouldn’t have known. She’s one of the Wards, something like thirteen years old. If she went missing… well, she’s a strong Cape. If she’s missing, she’d probably have at least a couple of the gangs looking to get her on side…”

“So, she’s a kid in danger because of her power?” Seeing Taylor’s nod, Danny sighed. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to not go out with logic, like by saying you don’t have a costume?”

“Sorry, dad. If nothing else, I’m probably the one who can find her fastest if no one knows really where she’s going, and I can actually manifest a costume.” She held up the notebook she’d taken with her to Truth’s office with which to occupy her time, which showed a rough sketch of a woman in mail armor with a conical helmet. “I think I can make this with the runes, like this.”

Two runes manifested, hovering over Taylor’s head in silver light. One rune resembled a Y with the stem extending up into the triangle formed by the upper section, and the other resembled two angular p’s, the triangles facing inward and touching.

In a flash of light, Taylor was wearing a silvery shirt that appeared, on closer inspection, to be made of tiny chain mail, as well as leggings of the same metal, silvery leather bracers on her arms, boots on her feet, and the helmet in her sketch, covering her face from the nose up. Picked out in gold on the chest and helmet was a rune consisting of two parallel lines angled down and to the right at the top of a long vertical stalk, surrounded by a golden circle of other, smaller runes.

Odin lost his distant look for a moment and nodded in approval as Taylor tested her range of motion amidst the sound of rustling metal, catching her figurative breath after her mystical exertion.

“See? Ready-made armor.” Taylor grinned at her father.

Danny sighed. “Fine, but be safe. Odin, make sure she stays safe.”

“Will do, dad,” said Taylor quietly.

Odin just nodded, still gazing off into the distance with a pensive look.

Once Taylor had left her house (through the back, to try and obfuscate where she was coming from), she traced a rune that vaguely resembled the letter R, albeit more angular, in the air with silver light, which burst with the sound if a ship’s oars dipping into the sea.

Taylor then set off, the sounds of her armor quieter, on an irregular path, almost meandering through her neighborhood and beyond.

As she traveled, her mind reached out to all the bugs in her range and they stirred, forced to wakefulness in the still-strong chill of winter to cast their senses out, looking for Brockton’s wayward Ward. When Taylor’s range left them behind, they hid away once again, shunning the biting cold of January.

For a handful of hours, Taylor came up empty, occupying her attention (the portion of it not carried through the Administrator to her searchers, that is) with discussion of the Runes with Odin, and she started drifting towards the Docks.

Then, abruptly, she found something.

Her head jerked off to the side, interrupting Odin’s explanation of how to weave together kaunaz and hagalaz for the restraint of prisoners with ice without the risk of frostbite, and Taylor started jogging off towards a warehouse.

“What did you see, lass?” asked Odin, eye narrowing.

“Found her, I think,” said Taylor quietly, booted feet tapping out a quiet rhythm on the asphalt as Taylor crossed a number of streets. She gestured to a warehouse that appeared much the same as any other, saying “She’s in here, so if we can check in on her and ma-”

A thrown brick bounced perfectly off of Taylor’s helmet with an oddly disappointing ‘thwack’ sound. “Not another step,” came a high, clear voice, “or the next one isn’t a brick.”

Atop the warehouse stood a tall, dark-haired woman with a bow in her hands, red vaguely samurai-like costume contrasting with the drab concrete of the warehouse.

“Now,” the archer said, “what the f*ck are you doing here, and how do I get you to leave?”

“I, uh… well, the PRT kind of outed Vista as a missing child, and I just wanted to see if she was okay?”

“You say that as if it makes things better,” said the taller woman, nocking an arrow. “Why were you in a position that the PRT would have outed her to you?”

“Uh…” Taylor floundered, trying to come up with a reason.

“You’re under suspicion for being a Cape, methinks,” said Odin quietly.

“Well?”

“I, uh… they think I might be a cape, so they were probably thinking they should try and recruit me early, I think? I’m not sure, we just came home and they were there.” Taylor shrugged.

“Right. Sure, Othala Jr. would just show up out of the goodness of her heart after having a Ward outed to her. You got Hookwolf waiting in the wings in case you don’t get what you want, or what?” She drew the arrow back, teeth bared.

“Mina. She’s not a Nazi,” came a wavering voice from behind the archer.

“And how do you know that?” asked the newly-identified Mina, no small amount of bite remaining in her voice.

“Because,” said Melissa Byron in her Vista costume, stepping into Taylor’s field of view, “that’s Taylor Hebert. With that name, none of the Nazis in this town would touch her.”

“So how do you know about me?” asked Taylor once they’d retreated inside the warehouse, camping furniture scattered across the bare concrete floor.

“Same reason I left the PRT building on Thursday,” said Vista, removing her visor to reveal a jagged, prismatic starburst in the place of her irises and pupils. “I found your file in the PRT archive.”

Taylor’s blood froze. “What?”

“Yeah, it’s surprisingly thorough for just being a couple of weeks out from your Trigger Event.” Vista all but collapsed into a low-slung fabric chair, pulling a bottle of water from nowhere.

“What do you mean, ‘my file’? Why does the PRT have a file on me to begin with?” Odin put his hand on Taylor’s shoulder, all but radiating calm and somewhat blunting her reaction.

“Oh, yeah, that. They have data on a lot of prospective parahumans, especially ones who spend a lot of time around theirs.”

Taylor blinked, gobsmacked. “What does that mean? Do they think my dad is a cape, or something?”

Vista laughed bitterly. “As if. No, as it turns out, Shadow Stalker’s been harassing you for a year and a half, plus causing your Trigger, and the PRT f*cking knew.”

“She what.” An exterminator in a house about two blocks away was very surprised by the sudden, ferocious activity of the termite colony he was trying to deal with.

Missy frowned. “Wait, you didn’t know?”

“If I knew,” said Taylor, all emotion missing from her voice, “I very much would have done something about it by now.”

There was a moment of tense silence, then Mina broke it by laughing, a sharp-edged sound that distinctly unnerved Taylor. “You’ve got bite, kid. I like it. Just make sure you’ve got an alibi whenever you disappear the bitch.”

Taylor blinked, startled out of her anger. “Wait, what?”

“Ignore her,” said Vista, clearly trying and failing to conceal her irritation behind a professional façade. “My cousin picked up bad habits from her previous social circle, and I’d like to help work with her to rectify that in the future.

“What kind of social group jumps straight to murder?” asked Taylor, frowning. Odin, meanwhile, gazed at the archer with new regard and perhaps a shade more compassion.

“The Teeth,” replied Mina, taking a bow before Vista could stop her. “My apologies, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. Mina Byron, better known as either Missy’s cousin or Quarrel, the Woman who Never Misses.”

Vista brought down her fist, and in an odd twist, it slammed down onto Quarrel’s head with an odd sound not dissimilar to a wooden mallet impacting on a human head. “Like I said. Bad habits.” Then, she looked up. “It’s about time we get going. The Empire is closing in on us here with heavy Cape support, and as much as I would take great pleasure in beating them up, I’m not sure you’re up to it, since you haven’t even had a debut yet.” The diminutive Shaker stood and stretched, then slipped her visor back on. “For now, you should probably go back to school. The PRT is gonna start looking for inconsistencies in your records so they can try and press-gang you into joining them, so try and avoid giving them leverage as long as you can until the lawsuit really gets off the ground.”

“Wait, how did you know we were suing?” asked Taylor.

Vista gave her a look that conveyed profound disappointment in Taylor’s mental faculties. “That’s the way that things work in this world, unless you want to become a villain.” With that, Vista took a step in a direction that humans don’t have words for and vanished.

Mina sighed, scooping up her bow. “Look, the kid’s just a bit of a drama queen right now. I’ll try to get her to talk to Panacea more, or something, but… well, you’re coming off your Trigger Event about now anyways, right? Imagine that, but worse, and she feels like she can’t trust anyone to do anything reasonable, standard teenager sh*t turned up to eleven.” Quarrel looked up, visibly calculating, then reached into her pocket for a scrap of paper and scribbled a phone number on it. “Here. It’s the burner we’re using. Hopefully talking to people around her own age would help her, but you don’t have to.” With that, she took a step in the same odd direction that Vista did and vanished.

Taylor looked towards Odin. “What just happened?”

“I believe,” he said, “that you just blitzed the friend-making process.”

“What the f*ck happened here?” snarled the Butcher, looming over Hemorrhagia.

The shorter woman coughed, glaring up at the taller cape. “What happened,” she growled, wincing, “is that Quarrel f*cking abandoned us. She said something about me being a kid, or something, then just f*cking attacked me and left.”

The tenth Butcher would have questioned Hemorrhagia more. He had spent far more time with Quarrel, as a function of being the one who saved her and thus being more aware of how Hemorrhagia’s story was bullsh*t. He would have known (and did know) that Quarrel would have done anything for her little cousin, and would have made the connection of Hemorrhagia’s use of the word kid. He would have, in short, stood by Quarrel and averted the issues to come.

Unfortunately, the tenth Butcher was too broken by his own death to convince the rest of the Chorus to stand by Quarrel, whose seniority Hemorrhagia had always been jealous of, or even to make the connection to her cousin.

“Alright,” growled the Butcher, teeth bared. “You got my attention. Any idea where she’s going?”

“Brockton, probably,” replied the (internally) smug Hemorrhagia. “She’s always missed that f*cking sh*thole of a city.

“Okay then,” said the Butcher, face twisted into an expression that only a small number of people would make the mistake to call a smile, and an even smaller number would survive unmolested. “Get everyone else, have them ready to leave tomorrow. We’re paying the bitch a visit, and seeing if we can’t set up back in the Bay. Marquis and the Nine are gone, now, so let’s see if we can’t reclaim what’s ours.”

“Gladly.” Hemorrhagia left the kitchen, and only then, out of the Butcher’s sight, did she let the smirk fighting its way onto her face out to play. Finally she was getting that arrogant bitch Quarrel dealt with, one way or another (killing the Butcher was a death sentence, if she even managed that with such a weak power), and she couldn’t be happier.

Chapter 7: Disingenuously Normal

Chapter Text

“Have a good day at school, Taylor,” said Danny, reluctance audible in his voice. He hadn’t taken to Vista’s suggestion of Taylor going back to school, since they wouldn’t be able to get her out of Winslow until the lawsuit really started to pick up steam, but he understood the necessity of the gambit.

“Thanks, dad. You have a good day too.” Taylor smiled at her father, a small, reserved expression, before she walked out the door, Odin hovering over her shoulder.

“You know they’re not going to be kind to you.” It wasn’t a question.

Taylor shook her head. “That’s a foregone conclusion. I’m just going to do what I’ve always done: stand firm, hold fast.”

“The darkness cannot last, lass,” replied Odin, nodding sagely. “Aye, that ye can, with the one crucial difference that is the fact that you’re not alone.”

A wave of comfort pulsed through Taylor’s connection to her bugs, a show of what support the Administrator could offer.

“Yeah, thanks, Odin. Plus, I just have to hold out until Mr. Truth gets his lawsuit rolling, right? There’s an end I’m holding out for, at least,” said Taylor.

“That’s true, lass, but ye may not be up to the confrontation with the ones who almost killed ye.”

“Ready or not, I still have to face them eventually.” Taylor sighed, then drew herself upright, resolve glimmering in her eyes. “People like us don’t get to run away from something just because we’re afraid. Besides,” she said, eyes flashing with determination, “even if she does try something, we have options.”

Odin grinned, clapping Taylor on the back. “That’s the spirit, lass!”

Taylor nodded. “Alright. Here we go, nothing can bring me down now!”

Well, thought Taylor, I stand corrected.

“Well, well, well,” sneered Emma, lip curled, “look what the cat dragged in.”

“No cat worth the name would go anywhere near her,” replied Madison, arms crossed.

“Move, please. I need to get to my locker,” said Taylor, having to fight not to clench her jaw.

“Oh? That anxious for a redo, little mouse?” asked Sophia, a predatory gleam in her eyes. “If you want, I can finish the job, not that it’d take very much for a worm like you.”

It was only the fact that Taylor was actively offloading her emotions through the Administrator that let her keep her stoic façade in place.

It was not, however, enough to still her tongue.

“Oh, wow,” Taylor shot back, “the mighty Queen of Winslow, Sophia Hess, needs two hounds to feel safe approaching the little worm she tried to kill without repercussions. What a magnificent show of strength!”

“Shut the f*ck up, you worthless little bitch!” snapped Sophia, shoving Taylor up against the row of lockers. “You don’t get to speak to me like that, you dumb little prey, not without consequences.

“And who decides this?” said Taylor, emboldened by both Odin’s presence and what memories of his remained in her head.

“Who the f*ck else? I do! I’m the apex predator of Winslow, you don’t get to contest this decision!” sneered Sophia. She then hauled Taylor back and slammed her against the locker again, twice, before hurling her to the floor and kicking her in the ribs, breaking something with a sharp snap and leaving a partial shoeprint on her shirt.

Taylor just wheezed out a low whine and curled up.

“That’s what I f*ckin’ thought, you little bitch. Stay f*cking down.” And with that, Sophia turned on her heel and strode away, brushing away the fly buzzing in her face. With her went the rest of the students, save for Emma, who just stood over Taylor.

“I’m sorry,” she said listlessly, “but you were holding me back because you were too weak. I can’t afford to keep you close like I did, not when I need to be strong now.”

“Then why…” wheezed Taylor, clutching at her injured rib, “why did you and Sophia try and kill me? Why keep coming after me?”

“You were holding me back, even after I cut you out of my life. You’re the last link to the old me, the weak me who died in that alley.” Emma knelt over Taylor and caressed her face almost gently. “For old times’ sake, I’m telling you this: Leave now, if you can. If you don’t…” Emma stood, looking down at Taylor with sadness in her gaze. “Well, if you don’t, I can’t be responsible for what happens to you, especially if Sophia gets a hold of you.”

Emma’s footsteps receded down the hall as tears rolled down Taylor’s face, mourning the loss of the girl who she had grown up with.

Then, she struggled to her feet, slipping a phone that was already recording audio and using it to snap a picture of the shoeprint on her shirt before returning it to her pocket and making her way to the nurse’s office, leaning against the wall for support.

“Oh, it’s you,” grumbled the woman, whose well made up face twisted into a scowl the moment she saw Taylor. “What is it this time, you brat?”

“Sophia kicked me in the chest,” said Taylor, gesturing to the general area of the partial shoe print, “and something snapped.”

“Yeah, right,” sneered the woman. “You just want drugs, don’t you?”

“To be clear, are you refusing to even look before refusing me medical treatment?” asked Taylor, voice not displaying the anger and indignation she felt at the denial.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, brat. Get out of here, before I write you up for your sh*t.”

Taylor sighed, wincing as her lungs pressed against the broken rib, then complied. “If you insist.”

“I do.”

Taylor left the nurse’s office, still in pain, but with a much more dangerous weapon against Winslow than she had before, and that brought a smile to her lips.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” said Panacea.

“This is literally the second time we’ve met in the hospital. At least wait until we have three times so we can call it a pattern,” grumbled Taylor.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. So, what are you here for this time?” asked the shorter teenaged cape, poking Taylor in the cheek.

“As it turns out,” said Taylor quietly, “Sophia’s got a strong kicking leg.”

“No kidding,” said Panacea. “You’ve got three broken ribs, and some of the pieces are getting awfully close to your lungs.” She gave Taylor a gimlet stare. “This happened at Winslow, right?”

“Uh, yeah? Why?” Taylor shuddered as she felt the bone moving and resetting itself inside her skin, then relaxed as the bones clicked into place and the pain vanished.

“I would have expected the nurse to offer at least some medical attention in a case like this. Even without my power, it should have been obvious that these ribs were bad, and that you made them worse by moving with them broken.” The statement was delivered in exactly the dry, matter-of-fact tone that Panacea had cultivated to shame her patients into coughing up details of the situation.

“I, uh… was kind of turned away from the nurse because she thought I was drug seeking? She didn’t even bother looking at me.” Taylor cringed, expecting Panacea’s wrath to erupt.

“So let me get this straight,” said Panacea, ignoring Taylor’s giggle at the insinuation that she would do anything in a manner even remotely resembling “straight”, the result of Panacea baring her soul to both Taylor and her sister the day the two first spoke. “You were injured in a confrontation with Sophia before school today, and were refused medical treatment and subsequently went through an entire day of classes with broken ribs.”

“Uh, that sounds right…”

The ensuing tirade of profanity taught Taylor, who had been babysat by the dockworkers and picked up on their cursing habits, a thing or two.

The first thing out of her mouth after that was “You’re suing the f*ck out of them, right?”

“Uh, yeah, for the first time I ended up in the hospital this year, and this’ll help,” responded Taylor.

“Good. Nail the f*ckers to the wall.”

Taylor blinked. “I didn’t realize you were so…”

“Bitchy? Vengeful? So much of an asshole?” Panacea snorted. “Yeah, you and everyone else.”

“…I’ll go with ‘vindictive’,” said Taylor.

“What, exactly, were you expecting? They deliberately, by action, inaction, or both, caused harm to my friend. Of course I’m pissed!” said Panacea, voice rising to a shout by the end.

“I… I’m your friend?” asked Taylor, with fragile hope audible in her voice.

Panacea’s voice softened somewhat. “Of course you’re my friend, Taylor. You’re entirely too good of a person, and entirely too compatible with me not to become at least somewhat friendly, and the whole divine responsibility to fight… well, a shared purpose can bring any two people closer together.”

Taylor didn’t notice the blush on Panacea’s face, too busy reeling at the revelation that she had a friend again.

Eventually, she looked up at Panacea, tears beading at the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, for that. I haven’t had a friend since… well, since Emma, and it’s nice.”

Panacea tugged her hood down, revealing Amy, and then she pulled Taylor into a hug. “Believe me, I haven’t had many friends either, not many who aren’t Victoria’s friends first and foremost. I’m just… well, I’m worried about you, is all. Winslow sounds like hell, from what you’ve told me, and you’re going to be on the front lines elsewhere… I don’t know, I just worry about you.”

Taylor smiled. “It’s… it’s good to have someone who cares, someone my own age.”

“Of course.” Amy ran her hands through Taylor’s well-cared-for hair. “Not to change the topic, but I love the way your hair looks. Do you mind if I-”

They were interrupted by a brisk knocking on the door.

“This is the PRT, we have some questions for Taylor Hebert?”

Amy looked at Taylor with some concern, who just shrugged in reply. “No idea,” she mouthed, which wasn’t strictly true, but given the circ*mstances, she was willing to dissemble a little bit to reassure her first friend in years.

The cross-marked hood came back up, and Panacea stood to open the door and glare at the trooper standing just outside. “What?” she snapped, drawing the stress of her position around her like a shawl.

“Uh, Panacea, ma’am. We’re hoping to talk to Miss Hebert alone?”

“Tough. Taylor’s still delicate from the incident on the 3rd of January, and attending school with three broken ribs isn’t doing her any favors. I’m staying here to supervise her condition until such time as I’m confident that I didn’t miss something and she gets discharged.” Panacea stepped to the side, allowing the PRT officer into the room. “Make it snappy.”

Another two officers remained outside the room while the first approached Taylor’s bed. “Miss Hebert, I have to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Second time this week,” grumbled Taylor. “Fire away.”

“First off,” started the agent, “would you mind explaining the events of January 3rd in detail?”

f*ck, thought Taylor.

Contessa wasn’t sure when the Path to Victory first started to show errors.

It was certainly recently, given that the anomalous steps had only begun showing up within the past month or so, but given the difficulty in determining which steps were her power’s dictates and which steps were… other… she could be forgiven for not noticing exactly when they showed up.

Still, between her, Kurt, and Rebecca, there was more than enough Thinkerpower available to realize that something had caused the Path to Victory to shift, or possibly that something was interfering with it.

Given that a great many of the anomalous steps identified had had something to do with either Project Terminus or areas that could conceivably impact it in some way, Brockton Bay was likely to be either the location of the anomaly, or host to something important to the anomaly.

She just hoped it wouldn’t be too effort-intensive, since she had to split her focus between managing the Doctor’s various plans to ensure success and keeping Rebecca’s pet organization afloat, but she strongly suspected that she’d find a way.

She didn’t have the context to realize the fact that her issue was a result of something outside of the narrow capabilities of Shards. After all, the divine ward Odin had used to protect Taylor from the Simurgh’s sight wasn’t limited to just her form of precognition.

Chapter 8: Interlude I: Coil, Aides Truth, Butcher XIII

Chapter Text

Thomas Calvert was… concerned.

Oh, he’d never admit to it, to anyone he wasn’t imminently about to kill at least, but it was true.

Taylor Hebert was causing him problems, in multiple ways.

Piggot’s response to her existence was obviously not great for his plans, but it was… manageable, if not perfect. He just had to get himself on record as against the course of action she was taking and he’d have maneuvered himself into a good position to take over as ENE’s director once her tower of cards fell.

She was also talking with New Wave, potentially strengthening their capabilities, which would need to be carefully managed, going forwards.

The most direct was that she existed as a free agent, and one with such limited information about her abilities available to boot.

That wasn’t for lack of trying, mind you. He’d made his efforts to elicit reactions from her, to take his own measure of her abilities (in throwaway timelines. He’s no idiot), but… well, it hadn’t worked out. The first time, he’d gotten… something, but it was some sort of odd sensory effect, as reported by his mercenaries in PRT uniforms, combined with the sounds of insects and some sort of energy blasts, before they started screaming. He had dropped that timeline quite quickly.

He had managed to track her on her visit to Vista and Quarrel, fortunately, but that just brought up more questions. The armor was… an odd costuming choice, given the presence of the Empire 88 in the city and the runic markings on said armor, but given the fact that his watchers had noted the presence of what looked to be some sort of hovering runic sigils (futhark, from all reports) before she activated what seemed to be a Mover effect, given that she covered much more ground than should be possible.

It was likely a highly versatile ability similar to Eidolon’s, then, given the scope of abilities she had demonstrated, which was… worrying. His plans for the city were… robust, yes, but not robust enough to handle the bumbling interference of a child with delusions of grandeur and the parahuman equivalent of a nuclear warhead strapped to her fist.

Her involvement with Shadow Stalker’s civilian identity shouldn’t have been a problem… except for the fact that Piggot had decided to take the position that she should bury anything she could about her Trigger event. He’d had to scheme for almost a week to get permission to approach her over Vista, and that only worked because Piggot didn’t trust parahumans as far as she, in all her disabled, out-of-shape-lack-of-glory, and her personal biases let him smooth-talk her into investigating the Hebert girl.

Of course, since he’d… well, he didn’t panic, he didn’t, but the fact that he’d pulled back in both timelines meant that he had to investigate her again, and… well, apparently Panacea was sandbagging far more than he had been aware, given the way that she grabbed two of his mercenaries and they practically exploded into chunks of bloody viscera.

Given the circ*mstances, he felt justified in ending his assault on the hospital before the rest of New Wave arrived, even if he had managed to put down Panacea and failed to get more information about Taylor Hebert than her ability to escape the hospital on lockdown. Even if they weren’t hiding any additional powers like Panacea, they were far more likely to reply violently over the death of their publicity cash cow than over the mid-tier Shaker who was already pulling away from New Wave.

He didn’t see the bloodstained hand before it grabbed his ankle, blood corroding through his suit somehow. It barely got to his flesh before he felt something squirming within his chest.

The rupturing of the first something in his chest was only the first by random chance, since a number of other things burst at almost the same time, ending the timeline and making him realize that Panacea was a solid contender for the most dangerous cape in the city if she had somehow managed to survive multiple bullets directly to the head.

This was… a problem, in so many ways.

He almost didn’t notice the report of Hebert’s lawyer showing up, in the timeline where he’d stayed in his base, although in retrospect he would wish he had. The involvement of Aides Truth would inevitably have led to his own discovery, had his hand not been tipped thanks to Odin’s- well. That is for another time, now, isn’t it?

Aides Truth, as he went by nowadays, was… somewhat concerned.

Not for himself, no. Direct applications of power aside, he’d amassed enough soft power over the years to all but guarantee that any person foolish enough to go after him would find themselves very swiftly out of a job, if the magnitude of their act was not sufficient to require his… direct retaliation.

No, he was concerned for Odin’s successor.

She might have been being relatively discreet, for human standards, but even if he hadn’t been able to see Odin’s spirit offering her advice just as Mimir had for the Allfather, he had more than enough experience spotting godlings to catch this one, especially since she was well on her way to apotheosis, albeit not nearly close enough to have the protections of the Runes’ favor.

Not nearly close enough to properly deal with the kind of timeline manipulation that Coil favored.

That kind of brute-force quantum bridging was likely all that could be wrested from the mind of a dying god (and there was no mistaking it for anything but stolen knowledge, not when it was that sloppily done) and was easily seen through, but the kid hadn’t grown into her power enough to use any of the simpler methods of bridging timelines.

He was just thankful that, for all that power could be used for, Coil seemed content to play puppetmaster in a small town.

Of course, the man’s small ambitions were still enough to present problems, especially since he had his hooks sunk deep into local government. That was actually why he was taking action at all: Odin’s kid had gotten the eye of the PRT in a bad way, and he was more than willing to help her out when they were brazen enough to approach her in the middle of the hospital after being attacked at her school.

It took some convincing to let him past the front desk to her room since the PRT had already gone in, but after a few invocations of his position as her lawyer, as well as the presence of her father (who had, fortunately enough, arrived at about the same time as him) to vouch for him, had managed to get him into the room.

As he entered, flicking the voice recorder in his pocket on, he absently took note of Panacea in the right-hand corner, glaring at the PRT troopers looming over the girl looking too small in the bed.

“-a simple question, kid. Just tell us what happened on the third, and we’ll be out of your hair.” The trooper’s voice seemed calm, on the surface, but there was an edge of irritation in his voice that spoke to how hard either Coil or Piggot was leaning on them for results.

He took the barest of instants to reach out across the fading link to the recently-abandoned timeline and register a pile dead ex-Coil on the floor and Panacea laying hands on Taylor, knitting together a pair of bullet wounds in her arm, put a number of conclusions together about Coil’s gambit, then refocused on the task at hand.

“What in the name of Mike are you doing?” asked Truth, crossing his arms.

The three troopers all turned at once, hands twitching towards their sidearms. “Sir,” said the one standing over Taylor, “this is a PRT matter, Mr…”

“Aides Truth, Esquire,” he replied. “Next to me is Danny Hebert, father of that teenager you’re interrogating with just an underage medical intern in the room. No offense, Panacea.” The edge in his voice disappeared with the last sentence.

“None taken, sir,” replied the New Wave cape, still pressed against the wall.

“Good. Now then,” he said, turning his focus back to the troopers, “you can tell me what you’re doing interrogating a minor without a parent or legal guardian present in a hospital, of all places.”

“Standard PRT Procedure, sir,” the trooper lied. “We keep abreast of police systems for potential persons of interest, then under certain circ*mstances like this one we try to get in touch with them about the situation in question.”

“In that case,” said Truth, keeping an iron grip of his powers to prevent them from acting up, “why were you asking about the incident on the 3rd of January now, when she’s in the hospital for a separate issue?”

Truth could see it put the troopers on the back foot, but the self-appointed spokesperson recovered admirably. “That I cannot talk about due to an ongoing internal PRT investigation.”

Truth’s eyebrows rose. “Is that so. In that case, we’ll have it out in court, since you decided to drag my client into it. If you have nothing else to say here, then I suggest that you leave.”

“If you insist,” said the trooper, jerking his chin up. They left, albeit not without their faceless helmets lingering on Truth for a moment.

He turned to Taylor, offering a shade of a nod to Odin on the opposite side of Taylor as Panacea on his way. “Are you okay?” asked Truth.

“Well enough,” said Taylor, hints of her predecessor’s warrior temperament showing through in her voice. “Thank you for showing up so quickly, Mr. Truth.”

“Of course, kid,” he replied. “Once Panacea gets you cleared, go home and take a break. I assume that a police report has been filed based on what the troopers said?”

Taylor nodded. “Yeah, I said that I was attacked on school grounds by Sophia Hess again, and denied medical treatment at school.”

“In that case, we should be able to have a case for having the school shut down. Do not go to school tomorrow, I should be able to get a judge to sign off on some kind of intervention within a few days.” Truth turned to Panacea. “Call me if any legal issues come from this situation and Brandish is unable to help. Your mother should have my contact information, but if not, the Heberts should be able to reach me.”

The tired-looking young woman nodded. “Thank you for the offer, sir.”

“Thank you again for all your help, Mr. Truth,” said Danny Hebert, nodding to the Greek-looking lawyer.

“Of course. I’ll be in touch once I have a date for preliminary court proceedings against Winslow. Have a great day,” he replied, nodding to all of the people present in the room before departing. He paused on Panacea for a moment, registering her own burgeoning divinity, before continuing on his way out.

Interesting. He wasn’t aware that she’d found godhood too.

In any event, he had things to do, both here and… elsewhere, both as part of his contract to Odin’s kid and otherwise.

Hades exited the hospital, acknowledging Thanatos’ presence with a pulse of mystical power, then continued on his way. Death never stopped, after all, and neither did its gods.

The Butcher folded their arms, glaring at the metal-clad fool in front of him. “Kaiser.”

“So, you finally killed the Butcher, then, Leverage?” replied the Empire 88’s leader, deceptively relaxed, with Krieg, Hookwolf, Crusader, and Stormtiger at his back.

The Butcher, standing alone, bared their teeth. “I did what you never could, kid,” they replied, silvering hair catching the sunlight as they co*cked their head and grinned, a feral, toothy expression under the faceguard that the Butchers had adopted three years before Jack Slash had driven them from Brockton Bay.

The Butcher saw Kaiser’s lips thin through their bloodsight, metal armor doing nothing to block the parahuman sense. “Why are you in Brockton Bay, Butcher?”

“Oh, that?” The Butcher twitched violently, then fixed Kaiser with their glare. “We’re here for the filthy traitor who abandoned us and tried to kill Hemorrhagia. No one betrays the Teeth, not if they want to survive.”

“And you know that Quarrel is here.” Both of them knew that to be the case, but it had to be said, for formality’s sake.

“Yes. Don’t worry, brat, your twig of Gesellschaft will be left completely undamaged, so long as you don’t stand in our way.”

Kaiser really only had one option here, having no way to properly counter the Butcher (and, to a lesser extent, Spree and Vex), that let him walk away from this meeting saving any degree of face.

“Very well then, Butcher. I grant you leave to hunt your wayward member in my city.”

The Butcher smirked. “Most gracious of you. Don’t worry, it should be a quick in and out operation. After all, Quarrel isn’t exactly a threat to me.”

Chapter 9: First Bite at the Apple

Chapter Text

The first sign of things going wrong on Taylor’s way home was Oni Lee being hurled into the road hard enough to explode into a cloud of ash that very inconveniently decided to make itself at home on the windshield of the truck.

Turning her attention to her bugs, she sensed three groups of people, all shooting at each other (and splattering her bugs).

One group was disorganized and covered in spikes and… well, suffice it to say that Taylor had no doubt that they were the Teeth, since while she’d been young when they were driven from the city by the Nine, the threat of the Butcher returning to the Bay was one of the things she was concerned about even with her powers.

The second group was also disorganized and lacking in obvious identifying themes that she could make out with her bugs, but the presence of more Oni Lee clones appearing to take bullets for them made it obvious that they were the ABB.

The third was only two people atop a building, one with a tall recurve bow in her hands and standing protectively over the slumped-over form of the other, smaller person, which was not a good sign.

As the truck rolled to a stop, Taylor tore her seat belt off and all but leapt out of the car, already calling up the runes to conjure her armor and landing in a classic three-point landing.

“T-Taylor? What are you doing?” There was a tremor of fear in his voice.

“I can see Vista and Quarrel in a three-way fight over there,” said Taylor. “If nothing else, I need to get them out.”

He sighed. “You’re not going to stop for anything I say, are you?”

She shook her head. “I can’t, dad. Not if I want to know that I did all I could.”

“Then stay safe, Taylor. I’ll get to the Docks, it’s probably safer than home right now.” Taylor nodded, and then closed the door.

“Stay safe, dad,” she said, holding her right hand out in front of her, palm up, to summon a Raidō rune. With that, she blurred into motion, relying on her sense of where her bugs were to avoid the fighting and make her way to Quarrel and Vista safely.

When Taylor ran up the side of the building and emerged on top, Quarrel sent a shaft her way without even looking, relying on her power to nail the shot. If not for Taylor’s hand blurring up to catch the arrow, guided by the rune’s magic, it would have gone through her helmet’s eyehole and probably taken her one remaining eye, but as it was, she was safe.

“Watch your allies,” said Taylor crossly, flicking the arrow back as the support of the concept of a Journey faded at having reached the destination.

Without looking, Quarrel snapped her right hand out, caught the arrow, then re-nocked it and planted it in a Teeth gangster’s foot, leaving him easy prey for Oni Lee to slit his throat. “Noted. Can you do anything for Vista? She took a fall after the damn Oni bastard tried to slit her throat and knocked herself out. Also, what am I supposed to call you in costume?”

“Probably?” Taylor frowned, trying to remember which runes that she’d discussed with Odin were useful for healing. “And , uh…” Mentally, she sent a plea for suggestions to Odin.

“Volur. Plural form of volva, for a… female diviner is close, in this language, but the concept doesn’t carry over quite that well,” said Odin.

Sending a mental pulse of gratitude to him, Taylor said “You can call me Volur.”

Taylor knelt over Vista, Ansuz flickering to life on the forehead of her helm for insight into the girl’s condition, and then sighed. “No major damage, just a minor concussion. I should be able to heal this, if you want to escape with-”

“No, I’m finishing what I started. Butcher’s a f*cking bastard, he won’t stop until one of us is dead, but he ain’t showed yet. Probably slugging it out with Lung, the ass.”

“...right.” Taylor remembered when the Protectorate had beaten off Lung a few years back, but she was skeptical that any one cape not on the Triumvirate, even the Butcher, could do it single-handedly without a whole lot of luck. Then, she focused, and the right rune bubbled up out of her memory. “There might be a slight lightshow,” she said.

The rune that appeared over Vista, which resembled a large B made out of two triangles touching at one corner, was approximately the size of Quarrel’s bow, which itself was tall enough to come almost up to the ex-Teeth cape’s bust (which Taylor had to almost force herself not to focus on once the rune burned out, since in her position it was almost directly at her eye level).

A moment later, Vista blinked her eyes open blearily. “Taylor? Whassgoinon?”

“Teeth ambush,” said Quarrel firmly. “Some dude in a demon mask showed up and helped distract ‘em, and it sounds like your local dragon’s fighting the Butcher, but we’re still dealing with things.” She co*cked her head. “Hey, Volur. You got anything good at range?”

“I have a trick or two,” said Taylor, drawing together a swarm of every bug the Administrator was willing to give her within her radius. Then, she almost smacked herself as she remembered a simpler solution than just “biblical plague”.

She focused, visualizing the effect she wanted as she got to her feet, then spread her hands as if to throw a volleyball.

The rune that appeared over the assembled gangsters would have reminded them of lessons on integrals in calculus classes, had they had any.

Of course, it didn’t last long, vanishing in a sprinkle of golden embers as Taylor staggered, visibly drained, but it did its job, putting a significant portion of both sides’ unpowered forces to sleep, as well as staggering the two Teeth capes present.

Once they’d regained their balance, the two capes turned to glare at Taylor. One flicked a hand, sending a spray of what looked like glass shards up to shatter against Taylor’s armor, doing nothing more than sending her staggering back. The other clenched her fists as red liquid gathered along her arms and legs, solidifying into claws on her hands and feet to allow her to begin to climb the building.

Vista shoved out with both hands, and one eye-searing moment later, the climbing cape was abruptly across the street while still on the building, and Quarrel spared a shaft for the woman (which knocked her off the building, landing awkwardly next to her compatriot) as she sent the majority of her ammunition at the other cape, who was forced to pull her odd shards of not-glass back to defend herself, maintaining a constant motion of the things to thwart Quarrel’s power and chew through her arrows.

“Anything else?” snapped Quarrel, snapping off a shot that curved around to hit the one that wasn’t covered in blood- or at least it would have had it not been shredded by the shards of not-glass.

“Sowilo,” said Odin. “Either the lightning punches through the villain’s shields or the flash and bang will stun them.”

Taylor nodded. “Let’s try… this!” She threw her hand forwards as if throwing a javelin, and a rune that appeared like a capital sigma which had its top and bottom portions pulled apart appeared in front of her. “Close your eyes and cover your ears,” she hissed.

The air took on an almost greasy quality as Taylor staggered, drained by the effort of multiple effects larger than she’d tried before, and then-

The air split with a sound like an artillery cannon going off, and everything went white.

The ringing in Taylor’s ears cleared up faster than she expected, and she blinked her eye open to see Quarrel pinning the Shaker to the street through her shoes, then swerving an arrow to smack her in the face and knock her down, at which point arrows seemed to almost erupt from her costume, leaving her flat on her back with almost no mobility. Vista, meanwhile, was hurling bricks with her power ar the blood-covered one, a pile of the things on top of the building they were on shrinking slowly but surely as she wore her target down.

Or at least, she was, until Oni Lee appeared behind them, knife flashing towards Quarrel. The archer cape lunged backwards, arrow held backwards in her hand to take him in the chest and destroy the clone before he could give her more than a scratch.

“f*ck,” said Quarrel, eyes darting around to try and track the ABB teleporter and failing. “Alright, kiddies, time to tag out. I can’t nail the Oni reliably when he’s jumping around and I don’t feel comfortable giving him free reign at either of you, so we’ll leave him to fight Hemorrhagia and Vex.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Taylor, still a little short of breath from the relatively large showing of raw power she’d put on. “Gimme a sec and I can speed our escape along.”

“Nifty,” said Quarrel, stabbing another Oni Lee clone in the throat with the arrow still clenched in her fist and then sending the arrow towards the presumable Hemorrhagia covered in red liquid and repeating the process, draining her remaining quiver a little too quickly for comfort. “Vista, get us a path out of here so that when Volur here is ready, we can book it but good.”

With these orders, Taylor saw Odin’s esteem of the other cape rise a few notches, an assessment that she shared.

“Got it,” the diminutive Shaker replied, turning away from the two active Teeth capes and waving her hands. In a matter of seconds, a building two streets away abruptly closed the distance to their building, and immediately after that another two buildings (both further than the first) followed suit, forming a pseudo-bridge for them to cross away from battle.

Now that Taylor had had a moment to breathe, she brought in the swarm she’d been gathering for the whole fight and hurled it at the Teeth capes, quite handily disrupting their efforts to regroup and (in Vex’s case) disrupting line of sight and preventing attacks. Then, she flicked a Raidō rune into the air above her party of three, letting the concept of a journey wrap around all three of them and speed their steps. “We’re good, let’s get going,” she said, putting deed to word and jogging across the nearly adjacent rooftops (albeit not without some discomfort from the eye-searing effects of Vista’s power).

The other two capes followed suit, evidently more used to the distortions by the way they didn’t even flinch when crossing the boundaries between rooftops.

Once they made it to the last rooftop in the line, Vista relaxed her grip on space’s metaphorical balls and the other buildings were abruptly no longer next to theirs, leaving them about a mile away from the site of the fight.

“Alright,” said Taylor, sitting down on a conveniently located brick chimney, “so why are the Teeth back in the Bay? Present company excluded, of course. I already know why you’re here.”

“Uh… yeah, so I didn’t leave under the best of terms, per se, since I got pissy when Hemorrhagia tried to stop me from coming to help Vista. She never liked me to start with, so I bet this is her convincing the Butcher that I betrayed them or some sh*t. I dunno, why d’you ask?” Quarrel finally slung her bow on her back, grimacing at her nearly empty quiver.

Taylor sighed gustily. “Great. So now we have to stay out of reach of both the Protectorate and the Teeth, both of which have great justifiable reason to hunt us down and/or come after us in our sleep.”

“But the Unwritten Rules would-” begun Vista.

“Unwritten Rules ain’t gonna stop the Butcher, nothing stops them, and since the PRT’s already been sniffing around your personal identity, Volur, I wouldn’t put too much trust in ‘em there, or at least not the identity protection aspect.”

Taylor’s head fell into her hands. “I should have stayed in bed this morning,” she groused.

“Lung-sama, the kyūjūtsushi and her allies have escaped from our confrontation with them and the Teeth. It appears to be a fresh trigger, the kyūjūtsushi herself, and also Vista, of the Wards here in Brockton Bay.” Oni Lee’s voice was precise, crisp, and nearly emotionless.

“And the Teeth?” growled Lung, already suspecting the answer given the timing of the Butcher driving him back.

“I attempted to capitalize on the obfuscation that the fresh trigger left behind and eliminate their capes, but Hemorrhagia and Vex were too canny for me to defeat, and when the Butcher arrived, the men retreated. I engaged the Teeth and managed to wound Reaver before being pushed back.”

“Very well. And our losses?”

“Minor. The unpowered Teeth were unskilled rabble, and aside from at Vex and Hemorrhagia’s hands, none of our men died.”

“That is still unacceptable. We will need greater firepower to return this insult as the Teeth deserve.” Lung went silent in contemplation for a moment. “I believe I have a solution. Tell me, what do you know about the woman known as the Cornell Bomber?”

“Not much beyond her nationality, Lung-sama. I believe she used some sort of exotic explosive effects to threaten the campus, but the exact mechanism eludes me. She may be a Tinker, or a Nuker.”

“I see.” More silent contemplation. “I believe that she will suit our needs admirably. Make preparations for a trip to New York. This woman’s power will greatly strengthen our reach and potentially even remove the Butcher from the board without killing her, given the portion of the campus that is frozen in time.”

“It will be done, Lung-sama.” Oni Lee turned to leave the room.

“It might even allow for the restoration of your previous mindset,” mused Lung quietly, once the other man had gone.

Oni Lee had once been a cunning man, a powerful advisor and an equal to Lung himself, back when he held hope of driving Kaiser and his ilk from the city. Now, the man’s powers had taken their toll on him, stealing his initiative and keen tactical wit save for occasional flashes of genius. If the woman was a Nuker, she would be incapable of restoring Oni Lee, but if not… in that case, Tinkers could do anything they put their minds to, if given ample resources and a link to their specialty.

Even if she failed… well, Cranial’s services were always for hire.

Lung sighed, putting thoughts of the man who had once been his most faithful friend (and recovering that man) out of his mind. He had a gang war to fight, and musing on maybes wouldn’t serve him and his men. No, only actual tactical thought would win this war.

Lung sat alone in his room and plotted the downfall of the Teeth, and while that might not have been frightening to most, it was only because they underestimated the cape who had once fought Leviathan to a standstill.

The Teeth would fall before him, as all challengers before them and all yet to come save for the beast who sank Kyushu, its ilk, and the woman in the hat. Lung would not be so humiliated again.

This he swore, on the spirits of his ancestors and the blood he had shed for his city: The Teeth would burn.

Chapter 10: Nazis and Norsem*n Don't Mix

Chapter Text

The one thing Taylor wasn’t really expecting, after the quick fight she’d been involved with, and Mr. Truth’s advice, was to have to go to school the next morning, but he’d left them a voicemail saying that due to the massive push from the Teeth, the PRT and BBPD was tying up the judges, so he’d be unable to access the issue that day and she’d have to attend school or else run up against truancy laws. It wasn’t a given that she’d have to deal with issues, but given the attitudes of the local PRT branch, Mr. Truth had decided to play it safe on that front, just in case Piggot had more pull with the local system than her general uncooperativeness with law enforcement in years past had implied.

Given the fact that she’d heard about Lung engaging the Teeth and the Protectorate pushing back the Empire, she’d expected school to be canceled, especially given the level of gang involvement in Winslow’s student body, despite the teachers’ apathy.

“Nay, lass,” said Odin once Taylor explained her thoughts to him. “It takes time to recover after a skirmish, especially one like this where significant force is deployed. They’ll be licking their wounds, and those at the schools will be present to posture. Also, I’d be surprised if the school wasn’t somehow under the gangs’ thumbs.”

Taylor frowned. “I guess that makes sense, but I never thought about it that way before.”

Odin shrugged. “War is war, lass. The rules of manpower and logistics hold as true here as they did in Ragnarök, and the Crusades, and the wars of Kaiser’s forebears.” There was a bitter edge to his mention of the Crusades, which Taylor decided to table for later.

Taylor sighed. “I can’t dispute that, although it’s disheartening that we have to use a strategic view to analyze my time at school.”

“That’s how it is, lass,” said Odin. “That’s why you fight, to make it better.”

“Yeah,” said Taylor, quietly, resolve glimmering in her eyes. “Yeah, it is.”

Danny interrupted Taylor’s dramatic moment by knocking on the door. “Breakfast’s ready, Taylor!”

“Coming, Dad!” Moment dead, Taylor sighed and flicked her fingers at her unmade bed. A series of golden runes flashed in the air above the pillow, forming a circle of runes around two triangles, with their points touching, and then in a burst of light, the bed was abruptly made.

“Well done, lass. Your practice with smaller effects has helped with your precision.” He turned a critical eye to the bed. “Much better than when you tried this last week.”

“Thanks,” said Taylor, closing her rune notebook and putting it in the alcove in her closet that formerly held her bullying journal. “I figured that if I used the Runes for little things at home, I’d get better at using them and they’d tire me out less.”

Odin nodded. “Smart move, lass. The best seidjarns always preferred to be using their skills as often as possible to increase their capabilities, so you should to.” He offered her a sly grin, mustache twitching. “Just be sure not to fall into the habit of always doing things the easy way. You won’t always be in a place where you can use the Runes without giving away your secrets, after all.”

“Okay, grandpa,” said Taylor flippantly, pulling the door open and descending the stairs.

“Grandpa, she says,” grumbled Odin, hovering behind her, invisible to all save her. “If only she knew.”

“What was that?’ asked Taylor.

“Nothing, lied Odin. “Just complaining about the state of the youth these days. You haven’t even had your first taste of mead yet, have you, lass?”

“Can’t say that I have,” chirped Taylor, walking into the dining room and the plate of eggs and toast waiting for her. “Why, is it good?”

Indignantly, Odin burned enough power to make him visible and audible to Danny. “You haven’t even had her taste mead yet? You’re stunting her development here, man!”

“I… what? But the alcohol… wouldn’t she get drunk?” asked Danny, confused.

Dropping the facade, Odin laughed. “Nay, lad, not anymore. It’d take the good stuff, the stuff you can’t get your hands on outside of Elysium or wherever Coyote’s set up, to get her even tipsy now. And it’s not necessary, it’s just… I thought she might like a link to the origin of her abilities beyond the nosy old man she’s stuck with as a chaperone.” His voice turned sad at this.

“I’ll… I’ll see what we can’t do on that front.” For a moment, there was only the clinking of cutlery on plates. “Anything else she should do, to connect with your culture?”

“Kick those pretentious fakes out of the city, but Kaiser and his followers can wait until after we deal with your new friend’s old friends,” replied the ancient king.

“Fakes?” asked Danny, frowning. “What do you mean?”

Odin growled. “The Nazis are already a group I hated, even before they gained power, both for what they hate and whose culture they claimed, enough to kill my brother just for what he was, but this group in specific is… They claim the power that animates the universe, binds it together, as their own, they name themselves after the Runes, and stand unopposed. They must be taught the error of their ways, and of those left of the Old Gods in the city, it is our responsibility to teach them that error, as Keepers of the Runes.”

“Your brother… Loki?” asked Taylor. “Loki the Liesmith?”

“Aye, the very same.” At the two Brocktonites’ incredulous looks, Odin continued. “As much of a force for chaos and destruction as he was, he was still my brother, and I loved him for it nonetheless. More importantly, according to them, is that he didn’t follow their convenient gender binary, and thus needed to die. Had they the chance, the Thules would have slain him.”

“...oh.” The awkward silence lasted until breakfast was adjourned.

“We’ll get them, don’t worry,” said Taylor.

“I have no doubt. Your might continues to grow, and one day, you’ll be ready for the Golden Man.” Odin pressed his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you, lass, and I can’t wait to see what you grow into.”

Tears glimmered in the corner of Taylor’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

“Of course. Now let’s get a move on. School won’t attend itself, now,” said Odin gently.

The start of the school day actually went fairly well, in Taylor’s opinion. Computers with Mrs. Knott was always a relatively good class, and since the Runes almost acted like little chunks of computer code sometimes, she’d improved in the class just from working on her power. Beyond that, she found that using her bugs to write and model the code she had in mind meant that she was only really limited by her ability type, in terms of the speed at which she could complete her assignment.

Math with Mr. Quinlan was… honestly, about as usual. Julia would play little pranks, but she never went much further than that, and Taylor was honestly kind of glad for it, since Mr. Quinlan had a particular talent for putting his students to sleep.

World Issues was… not great.

Madison and Julia were both in the class, and they sat relatively close to Taylor, so they got the chance to see Taylor’s displeasure at finding a seat covered in orange juice. Fortunately, Taylor had thought ahead, and using a rune made up of a vertical line with a short line at an angle through the middle, pulled a roll of paper towels out of her backpack that hadn’t been there ten seconds earlier. She proceeded to wipe the juice off the seat, and while it was a little sticky, the hard plastic of the seats did its job admirably in that it absorbed very little of the liquid.

Taylor allowed herself a small amount of triumph at ruining Madison’s “prank”, despite knowing that it would probably bite her in the butt later on, as she threw out the soaked paper towels and sat back down in a dry seat.

Gladly stood from behind his desk, an assessing eye on her, before he turned back into the vapid-eyed, clout-chasing Mr. G, seeking to get in good with the popular girls half his age.

Every time she saw it, the coal of anger burning behind her breastbone got just that much hotter.

“Hey there, kiddies,” said the man, in his infuriatingly chipper voice, “welcome back to class. Time to turn in the homework, come at me single file, now.”

Taylor slipped her sheet from her backpack, a short essay on the implications of NEPEA-5 on parahumans- or at least, the trap version- and set it on her desk, hands next to it palms-down. Just as she expected, Madison stole it from between her hands, barely glancing at it long enough to erase Taylor’s name from the top and replace it with her own before flouncing up to hand it to Gladly, making sure to give him an eyeful as she did so.

She stuck her tongue out at Taylor as she returned to her desk until she saw what was in her hands: another sheet of paper, with just as much writing on it.

“Is this some kind of joke, miss Clements?” asked Gladly, holding up the paper. “It says that this paper was written by Taylor Hebert, and yet here it is, with your name on it.”

Madison glared at Taylor for a moment, then turned back to Gladly with a quavering lower lip and tears in her eyes. “I- I’m sorry, Mr. G! She took my homework out of my bag! I thought she gave it back, but she must have switched it with hers! She’s trying to get me in trouble again!”

Mr. Gladly gave Taylor a level look. “What do you have there, Taylor?”

“My homework! She stole my homework!” screeched Madison.

“It’s as mine as that one is,” said Taylor with the certainty of a king proclaiming his authority.

“Show me.”

She did, walking up from her seat with the paper held in steady, dry hands. When prompted, she gave Gladly the paper and waited, watching his eyes scan back and forth between the two papers. Then: “Madison, since this is your first time trying to cheat like this,” he lied, “I’m letting you off with a warning. Don’t do it again. Taylor, you can go back to your seat, but talk with me after class.”

The rest of class seemed to pass by in a blur, not even Madison’s petty pranks dampening the feeling of hope, as futile as it was probably doomed to be, from swelling up in her chest.

Once the bell had rung, releasing the other students for lunch, Taylor made her way up to Gladly’s desk, reaching into her pocket to turn her phone’s voice recording feature on as she did so.

“Taylor, I’m not blind,” he said, almost too gently. “I can see you’re getting bullied. If you’d just come to us for help, we could-”

“You could what?” spat Taylor, rage roiling in her gut. “You could ignore me getting put into a coma for nine days? You could ignore a year and a half of bullying? Yeah, no thanks. I tried all that before this.”

“You could turn to your peers, they could help you,” said Gladly calmly.

“What peers? Emma got me considered a pariah within a week of both of us coming here, who’d risk going against her for me? The Empire?”

Gladly stayed tellingly silent.

“f*ck!” Taylor slammed her fist down on his desk, leaving a crack in the cheap laminate wood and making Gladly flinch before attracting his eyes. “I’m not going to stoop to f*cking Nazis! f*ck you! You have a responsibility to all of your students to care for them, regardless of popularity, and you failed!”

“Others had it worse, Taylor. You can’t expect us to drop everything to help a nobody, not when there are so many fine, upstanding citizens in this school being assaulted and worse by the druggies and slants and we can’t even afford to do anything about them! If you had joined up, you might have had help, but as it stands we couldn’t even-”

“Shut up!” Taylor screamed as a rune looking like an angle bracket, point pointed left, appeared over Gladly’s forehead for an instant. Then, she turned and ran out the door, practically crying.

“What’s the matter, Taylor?” asked Emma, frowning at her from a semicircle of her friends. “Upset that Gladly won’t let you trade yourself for better grades? Gonna make like when your mom died and cry for a week?”

Something cold overcame Taylor, rage condensed into true fury as Emma crossed one line too many.

“Auntie Anne would have been so disappointed in you,” said Taylor, though she could barely hear her own voice over the blood in her ears. “You stabbed the person you were closest to in the back because she’s… what do you think I am, Emma, that could make you do this?” Taylor looked up and made eye contact with Sophia. “You know, if Emma spilled all my secrets, and I was her best friend and all but sister for years… what’s preventing her from going after yours once she decides you’re too weak for her tastes?”

With the circle thrown into turmoil, Taylor made her escape, heart pounding.

Odin nodded beside her, hovering as fast as she ran. “Well done, lass.”

“It doesn’t feel like I won,” said Taylor bitterly. “It feels like ash in my mouth.”

“Not every victory feels that way,” said Odin. “But sometimes, it’s what we need.”

Taylor couldn’t argue with that.

“So,” said the Butcher. “Tell me why you don’t have that traitorous bitch here with you.”

“We ran into the Oni,” said Hemorrhagia, frustration bleeding into her voice. “He had a bunch of ABB soldiers with him, and he stalled us, plus Vista and some new indie fought both of us off.”

“How did some new hero fight you off?” snarled the Butcher, fist slamming into the table they were seated at.

“She had some kinda Shaker or Blaster power,” said Vex, a few fragments of not-glass hovering around her. “Lightning bolts, bugs, and he put all of both our and the ABB grunts to sleep somehow.”

The Butcher frowned. “Some new indie and Vista, huh? Looks like Quarrel’s trying to replace us. She’s trying to replace her family, you know? And what happens to people who try to replace us?”

Hemorrhagia bared her teeth. “They f*ckin’ get what they earn, boss. You want all three of ‘em dead?”

The Butcher nodded. “No survivors.”

“Whoa, whoa whoa, hold up. Isn’t killing a Ward gonna bring the Triumvirate down on us?” asked Vex, hands up palms out.

The Butcher scoffed. “What the f*ck are they gonna do? They can’t stop us, not if they don’t wanna be one of us next!” Then, they teleported away.

Vex whirled on Hemorrhagia. “What the f*ck is going on here? You know that Vista’s her cousin, and I know there’s more to what’s going on with Quarrel than the Butcher’s line.”

Hemorrhagia smiled. It wasn’t a nice expression. “I’m finally getting to put that uppity bitch in her place. You’d best watch where you step, little girl, if you don’t want to run afoul of the new most dangerous cape in the Teeth.” She turned and sashayed away, leaving a trail of blood behind her.

Vex blinked. “What the f*ck is she on?”

“Some Tinker sh*t we stole from Blasto,” said Spree, passing by.

“That just figures,” sighed the Shaker.

Chapter 11: An Enchanting Evening

Chapter Text

The rest of the day was relatively uneventful, with the exception of Sophia’s and Emma’s glares during classes, and Taylor was very much glad to leave the school once she was done. As much personal progress as she had made in standing up for herself (as well as getting the recording from Gladly, which was something she’d have to get to Mr. Truth as soon as possible), she still felt drained.

“Is it normal,” asked Taylor, quietly, “to be so tired after doing something like this?”

Odin nodded. “Aye, lass. Emotions take their toll, and so do breaking your habits. You dealt with both today, and you should be proud of yourself for doing so.”

Taylor’s link to the Administrator also pulsed pride at her, even as her eye teared up. “Thank you.”

A feeling of partnership pulsed its way down Taylor’s link with the Administrator while Odin nodded. “Anytime, lass.”

Taylor wrapped the spirit of the king in a powerful hug, then spun off and rushed for her closet and tore the door open.

As it turned out, that was literal, as she yanked the screws holding the hinges to the jamb out of the wall, a clump of drywall and wood at the end of each of the slightly warped screws.

“Oh,” said Taylor.

Odin just laughed, the weighty atmosphere of the moment broken. “Not to worry, lass, the Runes can fix this. Bor knows I’ve done so many times, raising Thor.”

“I- well, I suppose that makes sense,” said Taylor, eyes going distant as she let herself sink into the figurative grasp of the Runes. Then, her eyes snapped back into focus and a trio of runes burned in the air as she pressed the door back into the jamb, one after the other after the other, ehwaz to laguz to isa.

The first rune focused the effect, targeting the both jamb and the scraps hanging from the screws. The next turned both fluid and malleable, allowing them to flow back into an arrangement that resembled the original, while the last returned it to a solid state and secured the door to its place once again.

Odin nodded approvingly. “Well done, lass. Not my preferred method, but your ship will sail ye home as well as mine.”

Taylor’s eyebrows rose. “Never heard that one before. Old Norse special?” she asked, proceeding into her closet to retrieve her notebook on magical theory.

At the same time, she set her bugs to drag her phone over and connect it with the ancient desktop she’d convinced her father to let her use for runic enchanting.

It was both more and less complex than using the Runes to directly enforce her Will upon the world. It was more complex in that it required more careful analysis on the multiple meanings of the Runic characters and also the way in which they interacted with each other (which she could ignore when invoked directly in much the same way that the written form “read” was used for both present and past tense), not to mention that the effects of written use of the Runes tended to require longer strings of the mystical script to achieve meaningful, lasting results, but also less complicated because she had more time to work through the implications of the combinations and she also didn’t have to directly supply the energy for the effect she wanted.

Still, she had lucked into a near-perfect combination for enhancing a computer. By simply directly writing the word “speed” in runes once onto the CPU, she had brought it up to par with a modern computer and then some, thanks to the unique interactions between sowilo meaning thunderbolt (which made it vastly more efficient), peorth allowing her to better attune it to her thought processes to make it almost respond to what she did before she did it, the pair of ehwaz runes allowing the CPU to operate as if it were four CPUs slaved together, and dagaz allowing it to draw energy directly from sunlight. After solving the overheating issues with multiple isa runes on the computer’s fan and the memory issues with ansuz runes on both the RAM and the hard disk, the machine would perform on the level of some of the better Tinkertech computers out there (software and external issues, like data limitations on her internet connection, notwithstanding), if she was being generous with her assessment. It wasn’t nearly at the level of the armor she was probably summoning from somewhere, but in her defense, that was more an issue of experience than anything else.

Take that, planned obsolescence!

Anyways, she used the efforts of her bugs to upload the recording of Gladly’s… odd confession… to DeadDrop, a file sharing solution primarily run by the people behind PHO, and then sent the link in an email to Mr. Truth for him to use in the Winslow case.

She took a moment to give thanks, mentally, for the fact that New Hampshire law allowed audio recordings with one party consent in places without a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as school classrooms and hallways, which had almost certainly performed great service in favor of her court case.

That done, she moved to her white board to work on her understanding of the mystic power at her fingertips. After all, the Teeth were a major, immediate threat, and she’d feel much better if she had the chance to prepare counters to at least some of them in advance.

Taylor’s eyes snapped open, some primordial part of her brain, convinced that she wasn’t alone in her room, jolting her from sleep.

She rolled over in her bed and flicked on her bedside lamp, blinking blearily to see two dark-garbed figures in her room standing in front of her open window. “What the f*ck!”

Immediately, she poured herself into her bugs, sending them to her dad’s room to make the shape of two runes, those being naudiz and peorth. “Dad, call the cops, home invasion, two people in my room,” came her voice from the hastily invoked spell. To his credit, her father only blinked blearily a few times before the meaning of what he heard sank in and he scrambled for the landline near his bed, showing his maritime roots with the intensity of the swearing that came from his mouth.

“sh*t, she’s awake,” came a familiar, feminine voice from one of them.

“What do we do?” asked the other, also familiar, feminine voice.

“We brought the goddamn chloroform for a reason, Survivor! Use that sh*t!” At that, the newly-named Survivor pulled a bottle out of the messenger bag at her side and started unscrewing the cap.

“Stay back,” said Taylor, reaching under her pillow and, after pulsing sowilo and gebo to pull out a “thunder-spear”, or in more modern terms, a stun gun. “I’m armed!”

Technically speaking, it wasn’t a proper stun gun. While it may have looked to be, Taylor could tell that it was actually a thin layer of magic disguising the appearance of a blunt-bladed dagger (that something in the back of her head, where the rest of Odin’s memories sat waiting for her to be ready for them, insisted was used for teaching young Æsir warriors how to fight against and with a dagger), enchanted with the power of a thunderstorm, of sufficient quality to make her efforts on her computer look like a preschooler’s efforts at finger painting in comparison.

Regardless, it served the same purpose: nonlethal incapacitation of one’s foes.

Survivor laughed. “And what are you going to do with that, Taylor? You know you can’t stop both of us with that, even if by some miracle you do manage to hit one of us.”

“Not like a mouse like you ever could,” said the other person, and everything snapped into place.

“Not satisfied with one attempted murder, Sophia? Feeling the need to put another head on Shadow Stalker’s rap sheet?” asked Taylor, teeth bared.

Both girls reeled back. “What?” asked Emma, scared, as the bottle fell onto Taylor’s desk. “How do you know that?”

“You move like her,” said Taylor. “Your gait, how you fight, you don’t change it out of costume.” True, but misleading- she’d put the connection of Sophia’s movements together after Vista had tipped her off to Sophia’s identity.

“sh*t,” said Sophia. “We can’t afford to-”

“You can’t afford to kill me,” said Taylor. “We’re bringing suit against Winslow and the PRT. If I die, my lawyer starts talking about cover-ups and political assassinations. That’s the kind of thing that gets people Birdcaged. People like Teacher.”

“They’re not gonna care about a nobody like you, Hebert. Not if there’s nobody to ask.” Emma looked at Sophia askance as the taller girl unsheathed a knife and lunged at Taylor, blade first.

The hovering barrier conjured by the hovering algiz rune over Taylor’s outstretched hand stymied Sophia, in both her normal form and her Breaker state. Out of the corner of her eye, Taylor noted Emma backing up and pressing herself against the wall, but she put her former friend out of her mind in favor of the more immediate threat.

“Get out of my house. Last warning.” Taylor dropped the dagger and it faded away, power enough to freeze a fire Jotun building in the hand formerly holding the weapon.

“Make me,” snarled Shadow Stalker, moving to try to circumvent Taylor’s barrier.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said Taylor, unleashing the power gathering in an overcharged isa rune. The attack nailed Shadow Stalker dead on, and then the rune started flickering in time with her Breaker form.

After a moment, the drain on Taylor’s stamina became noticeable, and she released the rune to maintain the barrier as Sophia lunged at her.

The dark-clothed Breaker promptly turned and dove out the wall, abandoning the fight, and Taylor allowed the shield to flake away into motes of light after almost thirty seconds of waiting.

As the fight ended, Odin faded back out of… wherever he went when he wasn’t around her, and nodded once. Then, he turned his piercing blue eye onto Emma and Taylor did so a moment later, one milky-blind eye and one dark green locking onto Emma’s eyes (since Taylor didn’t wear her eyepatch to bed, the ruined eye was visible). “Now then,” said the once-King of Asgard. “What to do about her.”

Victor Gladly was having a distinctly unusual day, he mused as he walked away from Winslow.

Most of the day was wholly mundane, an ordinary day in the public education system (inasmuch as any day at Winslow High could be called ordinary relative to the American public education system), with the good, upstanding students of the school having to undergo the predations of the vile criminals and other undesirables while he and his fellow teachers did their best to protect them from their alleged peers.

His third period class, on the other hand, was definitively not normal, and it all centered around one person: Taylor Hebert.

As much as willful ignorance would have helped with his ability to sleep at night while working at that school, Gladly was not blessed with such ignorance. He saw everything that went on in his classroom, his observational skills finely honed from his time working with his brother to direct the course of the Empire and its righteous crusade in his role as Clausewitz, strategist and recruiter of the Empire.

He was well aware that Taylor Hebert was being bullied by Sophia Hess and her race traitor friends. He was also well aware of how he couldn’t intercede against the school’s precious Ward or her little gang out of respect for the plan to discredit them and through them the Protectorate, not for someone outside the figurative club. The plan was worth more than that, as much as the necessity pained him.

He was also aware that Taylor Hebert was… changing, of late. More confident in her walk, less furtive in her darting glances, that sort of thing.

Today was when it came to a head.

Madison Clements had stolen the girl’s paper, as she had dozens of times before, and presented it as heer own. This was nothing new.

What was new was that Hebert had laid a trap, and Clements had walked right into it.

The text of the paper turned in was the entirety of the “Lorem ipsum” placeholder text, prefaced by “This paper stolen from Taylor Hebert”. Given this blatant evidence, he had no choice but to enforce the school’s plagiarism policy, even if only superficially thanks to the plan’s guidance.

All of this pointed to one thing: Taylor Hebert was, in fact, a parahuman.

As such, he’d decided to approach the girl. Nothing too overt, not at first, but perhaps in time, he’d be able to turn her to a more… amenable persuasion.

Except… apparently he’d misread the girl.

When he’d made his overtures, something about her blocked his power, at least partially, so instead of the professional oratory he was used to crafting for Kaiser, his verbal maneuvering seemed to almost curdle in his mouth, leaving his silver tongue slow and heavy and the plan that he had spent so much of his time in service to out of his mental reach.

Furthermore, she’d deduced his allegiances, if not his actual position within the Empire, based on some slips of the tongue he’d made, not to mention the anger she’d revealed at his ham-fisted attempt to draw her in.

On the plus side, he’d found the crater she’d left in the thick oak of the desk he’d convinced Rune to help him disguise as and replace the school-issue teacher’s desk, so he had confirmation of both a Brute rating and a Trump effect for the girl.

Yes, she would make quite the recruit. They might have to exert some leverage with her father, or perhaps even send her to Gesellschaft to make her more… compliant… but in the end, they would prevail, with God willing of course.

Furthermore, she would be a wonderful tool to topple the Protectorate and PRT, only requiring the slightest adjustments to the plan

As if he had timed it on purpose, instead of just allowing his power to idly direct his thought process, he arrived at his brother’s house. Slipping into the alcove right next to the front door to don his preferred domino mask and cap, to make it clear that this was cape business, he straightened his button-down shirt and nodded to himself before knocking.

The woman in an eye patch who opened the door didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at seeing her brother-in-law in his cape identity at her house, for he’d cultivated a bit of a habit of doing so for unannounced strategy meetings. Kaiser may have been the leader of Allfather’s legacy, after all, but the man wasn’t half the strategist or even tactician that he and his brother was, let alone the pair of them cooperating.

“Othala, good evening. I take it Victor is still at work?”

She nodded, letting him in. “He should be home within the hour, if this week’s pattern holds true.” She paused for a moment, then: “So, what new consideration for the Empire’s future do you have to discuss with my husband tonight?”

“If we play our cards right? A new recruit for the Empire, one who could potentially stand up to the slants’ dragon.”

Othala smiled. “That sounds like a great addition to the Empire.”

“Precisely.” Clausewitz smiled. “God willing, we might be able to take the city back from the slants once the Teeth have left. For the glory of the Empire!”

“For the glory of the Empire,” echoed Othala, already getting up. “I’ll make sure you two have dinner ready when you’re done.”

“Thank you very much,” replied the Empire’s strategist, grabbing a whiteboard out of a closet and setting it up to be prepared when Victor returned. “Now, how would I go about recruiting a Trump capable of dampening my power…”

Chapter 12: Coils of Rope

Chapter Text

As it turned out, the best course of action, with regards to Emma, was to wait for the police to arrive, since Taylor’s once-friend had gone unresponsive at some point between seeing Taylor stonewall Sophia with an energy barrier and the other girl’s departure. That was fine, since neither of them had been smart enough to wear gloves and, according to the police, there were two sets of recent prints on the bottle of chloroform (which had been stolen from a lab in Medhall, apparently), so Sophia was unlikely to skate there.

“Mr. Truth! Good to see you,” said her dad, drawing Taylor’s attention to the arrival of their lawyer.

“I’m beginning to suspect he doesn’t sleep,” muttered Taylor under her breath, only halfway joking given how Panacea had thought it would take significantly longer for, say, Brandish’s coworkers to bring suit with regards to the Winslow issue, not to mention his rapid arrival at O-Dark-Thirty.

Then, to the lawyer in question, she asked “So, uh… why did dad call you?”

As if rehearsed, Mr. Truth replied in unison with her father and Odin: “Never speak to police without a lawyer.”

Taylor backed up away from all three of them, raising her hands. “Alright, sheesh. Is there a reason for that particular tidbit, or…”

“Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, 2005, states that police have no duty to protect and/or serve the people even in the case of a legally obtained restraining order. Furthermore, anything you say can and will be used against you. Besides,” said Mr. Truth, eyes flickering to Odin for the barest of instants as he lowered his voice, “in this town, I don’t trust the police not to be in the gangs’ hip pockets, even more than normal given the white supremacist presence in the city and the Empire’s presence.”

Odin’s eye narrowed, while Taylor (who hadn’t caught his eyes on Odin) just nodded in assent, eye wandering over to land on the (pale-skinned and blonde-haired) police officers standing outside the squad car. “Okay, that makes sense.”

Further conversation was forestalled by a large black SUV rolling around a corner, high beams sweeping across the street, until the vehicle rumbled to a halt and a tall, dark-skinned man in a suit stepped out of the vehicle, buttoning his jacket as he moved.

“Aw, sh*t,” said one of the cops, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Here comes that ni-Calvert asshat from the PRT again, stomping all over our goddamn jurisdiction.”

Mr. Truth raised an eyebrow, then interposed himself between Taylor and the man in question. “Strike Commander Calvert, welcome back to the PRT. I must ask, what are you doing here? As far as we’re concerned, this is a purely police issue, with all those involved being quote-unquote ‘regular’ humans.”

“Mr. Truth, good to see you again,” said Calvert, voice low and smooth. “And I’m afraid I can’t comment on the issue beyond the fact that we have the reasonable suspicion that a cape was, in fact, involved, and that we’re going to have to ask you to come in for questioning.” He turned to the police officers. “My apologies, gentlemen!” he called, not sounding particularly apologetic. “Thank you for your service. I’d appreciate it if you sent over the information you have on this case as soon as you got back to the precinct.”

“Yeah, whatever,” replied the cop who had spoken, turning his back on the dark-skinned man. “The f*ckin’ audacity of those f*ckin’ people…” he grumbled under his breath, other cop following him back to the car with Emma stoically.

Calvert sighed. “Would that the Director were less heavy-handed,” he muttered under his voice.

“So, Strike Commander Calvert,” said Mr. Truth, emphasizing the man’s title and causing his eyes to narrow just a hair, “come inside and we can talk about your questions.”

The four living people and one not-quite-dead god entered the house, with Odin and Truth looking the most at ease (which made sense, since they were both probably experienced with dealing with the government).

“So,” said Truth calmly, “ask your questions, Mr. Calvert.”

“I’m, eh… afraid that was more of an excuse to get the police off your case, although I do have some questions for you after I let you know this. I’m sorry to say that Sophia Hess is the Ward known as Shadow Stalker, and that due to Director Piggot’s orders, we are unable to bring her to heel.”

“My client made me aware of the former, and a cursory scan of police records around the incident that caused the loss of her eye showed me the latter.” Truth’s eyes were flinty, but Taylor thought she saw amusem*nt behind the resolve.

“Wait, what’s this about Sophia having free reign?” asked Danny, fuming.

Calvert shifted, looking vaguely uncomfortable, and his pinky spasmed minutely, which only the ancient gods in the room noticed. “Ah, that’s… a bit of a complex topic, Mr. Hebert. Ordinarily, Miss Hess would have been subject to imprisonment, since she is on probation for attempted murder even before her… attempt on your daughter. However, Director Piggot, in her infinite wisdom, has decided that the nature of the status quo as it stands requires as much parahuman muscle as she can get her hands on, so she’s being rather lenient with the young woman. Incidentally,” said the man, twitching slightly, “the Director has her eyes on you for that. Based on the hospital records and some admittedly circ*mstantial evidence around your excursion yesterday and your earlier visit to Vista, she has a strong suspicion that you are the new armored parahuman, and if scuttlebutt is to believed, she is attempting to find a way to force you into the Wards.”

Taylor sighed. “Wonderful. I’m not sure whether to invoke Lewis on omnipotent amoral busybodies or Grey’s Law.”

“Er, isn’t the Lewis quote on omnipotent moral busybodies? And what is Grey’s Law?” asked Calvert, shivering slightly.

“In this case, amoral fits better. And Grey’s Law states that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Calvert managed to smother a laugh in a cough, then winced as he bit his cheek. “Quite.”

Later, when the tall PRT Commander had left, Mr. Truth shook his head. “Don’t trust Calvert. I know the man’s history and… suffice it to say that there’s some ulterior motive behind his actions.”

Danny snorted. “There always is, in this f*cking town.” He sighed, rubbing his temples. “So, Mr. Truth, what do we do now?”

“At this point, the judiciary has no choice but to intervene, but given your situation I wouldn’t say that’s any guarantee of your safety. I would suggest being in public as a precaution. Taylor, maybe consider hanging out with your friends in New Wave or Vista, and Danny, stay at work if you can.”

“I… uh, okay, will do. One question, though. What the heck was up with you telling me not to go to school then telling me to go to school?” asked Taylor.

Mr. Truth sighed. “It’s complicated, but it essentially boils down to politics. The PRT has enough pull to force the truancy issue, if we let it get bad enough, and they have a lot of the local judges in their pockets, and they were willing to use these judges against you. However, at this point, we have proof-” he opened his suit jacket enough to show the voice recorder in his inside pocket, here “-that the individual who attempted to murder you twice is all but PRT-sanctioned and furthermore that she attends your school. That should be enough to force any prosecutor attempting to push a truancy angle to back down. If the4y make the frankly idiotic decision to go after you for the use of a parahuman power in your own home to defend yourself against an intruder who can be all but proven to be using deadly force… well, Castle Doctrine should carry the day here.”

Danny sighed. “f*cking politicians.”

“Indeed,” replied Truth sagely.

“…and she just up and left?” asked Victoria, frowning as they ambled along the Boardwalk. “That doesn’t sound like Shadow Stalker.”

“Pretty much,” said Taylor, in between bites of mint chip ice cream. “Best theory we could come up with is that somehow the rune I used was able to partially bypass her Breaker state and cause her direct injury, but at this point it’s just conjecture.”

“I guess that makes sense,” replied Vicky, taking a lick of her own cone of honeycomb. “Powers interact super weird with each other, and whatever it is you have isn’t a power so it probably interferes with how us plebeians actually work.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” snarked Amy, gesturing at her sister with the cup of affogato in her right hand, “Arcadia’s 2011 Valedictorian.”

“Hey!” protested the blonde, aura flaring with indignation that washed over the two godlings walking at her side. “I resemble that remark!”

“Of course you do,” replied Amy. “Anyways, yeah, it’s plausible, given the way that your weird magic powers interact with regular parahuman powers and… oh, mother f*ck of a sh*t! That’s why that happened!”

“Wait, what?” asked Taylor, blinking at the sudden non sequitr.

“Okay, so Vicky, remember that crush I used to have on you?”

“Yeah, what of it?” asked Victoria, frowning as if she already knew where the conversation was going and didn’t like it.

“Yeah, I think that was actually a result of the way your power propagates interfering with my power. See, since it was hooked into… whatever it was that it picked up on another world for power, it had to use a nonstandard connection, which threw off my neurochemistry, and when combined with the way your aura interacts with brains, it must have caused some issues, and my power probably didn’t do anything to fix it because it didn’t think it was a problem.” She paused for a moment, as if casting her mind back to remember how her power changing had altered her neurochemistry. “f*ck, that’s exactly what happened.”

Taylor, formerly gobsmacked, just sighed, Odin snorting at her side. “Gods damn it, powers really are dumb.”

“You can say that again.” Amy turned around, spoon halfway to her mouth, to see that Victoria had stopped walking. “Vicky? What’s up?”

“So let me get this straight,” replied the blonde, eyes wide with horror. “I Mastered you into falling in love with me, then now you’re free you’re… what, totally fine with it?”

Amy frowned. “We literally just established that it was my dumbass power doing that with maybe a helping hand from yours. Are you okay?”

“No!” shouted Victoria, drawing attention to their small group. “How could I be when I essentially-”

“She’s spiraling, lass. Help her,” said Odin quietly.

Taylor frowned, taking a moment to concentrate on the effect she wanted, then flicked a finger, leaving a glowing gold ansuz rune to flicker to life atop Victoria’s head for a moment, concealed against the backdrop of her golden hair.

“Victoria,” said Taylor calmly, calling on ansuz herself for the inspiration and silver tongue it granted her and naudiz to divert attention away from them. “You’re not thinking rationally. You need to understand how it was a result of your power rather than anything malicious on your part.”

“Of course I’m not thinking rationally! I mastered my own sister into loving me!”

Taylor winced as the blonde’s aura pushed at the limits of what shielding she could provide while maintaining two other runes at the same time.

“You want to blame someone,” she snapped, “blame the alien space whale that configured and gave out the goddamn things! You didn’t know that that’s how the thing worked, so calm the f*ck down before I do it for you.”

Victoria blinked, shocked into silence by Taylor’s anger. “I- what?”

“You’re no more at fault than your boyfriend is. Now come on, you’re ruining the f*cking mood and I didn’t ask to hang out with you two to get bogged down in fighting over f*cking power incontinence.” Taylor beckoned, and after a moment, Victoria followed.

“Sorry, you two, I just… got a bit carried away.” She paused for a moment. “Wait, why isn’t everyone filming us?”

“Oh, simple. I diverted attention away from us.” Having said that, Taylor allowed the flow of power into the runes she was maintaining to stop, with the effects decaying to nothing over a period of a few seconds.

“Damn,” replied Victoria. “That’s a handy trick.”

Once Victoria caught up with the other two capes, Amy wrapped her sister in a tight hug. “I love you as my sister, Vicky. I have since before you got your powers, and just because my power made me a little confused doesn’t stop me from being your sister, okay? I just… I just think you have sh*tty taste in boyfriends.”

“Aww, now isn’t this touching.”

The three capes all whirled on the source of the voice, revealing a number of individuals covered in leather and bone crammed into an alleyway. At the front was a huge man, almost eight feet at the shoulder, with a minigun in one hand and a club in the other. Immediately behind him stood a far more recognizable cape, that being Animos.”

“That’s her, boss,” replied the Changer, jerking his chin at Taylor. “That’s the bitch that fought with Quarrel and Vista.”

“In that case,” snarled the Butcher, teeth bared, “blondie dies first, then the healer bitch, so we can take our time with the stupid c*nt who decided to stand in our way.”

“Oh f*ck,” said Victoria.

Taylor was inclined to agree.

Judge James Ratnick of Boston had expected a relatively quiet day. It was a forgivable expectation, since the Butcher had taken most of the Teeth with him out of the city in pursuit of Quarrel down in Brockton Bay and none of the other major players in the city were prone to acting out to nearly the same degree, so he assumed that he’d be able to take a day and get caught up on the paperwork for the Canary case he had been scheduled to take.

It was a travesty, what the shrewish bitch had done to that poor boy. Fortunately, they’d managed to get him to a surgeon in time to save the… appendage… that he'd been Mastered into removing, although not without significant loss in the ability to… perform, at least according to the doctors.

So, of course, the brat who couldn’t take a compliment had to go to the Birdcage. If they couldn’t rely on them to keep themselves in order, then perhaps fear would do the trick, and he would use every dirty trick and unsavory favor he could call in to make it so. They couldn’t afford for women to get uppity again. Boston couldn’t afford a second coming of Lustrum, with her filthy trannies cutting off the… organs… of good, upstanding men and Mastering them into claiming it was voluntary. They were all in asylums for Master victims, and based on the news he’d heard from the staff at the facility his son had been sent to, there had been no signs of improvement and they were even considering allowing them out into the world under their own judgment.

Preposterous. They couldn’t be allowed out into society until the Master effect had been completely purged from them on the off chance that it could propagate from its victims, and hopefully purged from the victims’ minds.

You would be forgiven for thinking that he didn’t deserve to be undisturbed to plot against Canary, as you most definitely wouldn’t be the only one.

The man’s plans were abruptly disrupted by the entry of an armored cape to his office, his hand halfway to a panic button before he recognized the ears atop the cape’s helmet, and he groaned.

“Mouse Protector, what in the name of Mike are you doing here?” he snapped. While not nearly as bad as Lustrum, she was still annoying and subversive to the fabric of society.

“Stopping you from making a grave mistake, Judge Ratnick!” she shouted, her unnaturally cheery voice grating on his eardrums.

“Trespassing is still trespassing, young lady. Explain yourself at once.”

“Of course! See, I was made aware of your plans around the trial of one Paige Mcabee, more specifically your desire to use it as a precedent to scare off the dastardly Masters that prey on humans, such as the one you believe that destroyed your son’s life, never mind that Lustrum never employed a Master and you just can’t accept the existence of trans people, never mind that Paige Mcabee was the victim of sexual harassment by her alleged victim, never mind that her ability activated against her wishes and that the action he took was directed by his own subconscious desire to get back at her. So, good sir, if you continue down this path, I will be forced to take action. You have been warned, dastardly villain!” She rapped him on the head with her sword, which let out an incongruous “bonk” sound, and then vanished with a very mouselike squeak.

The judge just blinked, gobsmacked, then hardened his heart and continued with his efforts to sink Canary. They couldn’t afford to let Masters like this just walk around without putting the fear of God in their heart, not after what they’d let Heartbreaker get away with.

Secure in the knowledge that history would vindicate him, Judge Ratnick ignored Mouse Protector’s warning, and in so doing, signed his own career’s death warrant.

In the distance, a coyote howled.

Chapter 13: Whetstone

Chapter Text

Some small part of Taylor’s mind was grateful for Victoria’s outburst and the chance to deflect attention away from them that it had brought, since it very well may have saved her civilian identity.

The rest of her was scrambling to combat readiness, assessing the situation, and activating the runic combination that summoned her armor as she shoved the remnants of her ice cream into her mouth, chewing, and swallowing with frantic haste.

As the enchanted chain mail settled over her body, she invoked gebo to pull a simple boar spear out of nowhere, then invoking tiwaz on the chance that it would grant her the combat ability of the war god it symbolized.

The gamble paid off as she spun the weapon with both hands, settling back into a stance that would allow her to spring into action at the drop of a hat, which she promptly did.

Animos, the wolf-dog thing immediately behind the Butcher, was the biggest immediate threat. Beyond being a relatively tough Brute in his own right, his roar also had the ability to disrupt parahuman powers, which had been shown to great effect when he had almost killed Bastion almost six months ago (the news clip of which had gone somewhat viral in its own right) which she had seen when she looked up the Teeth at the library before joining the Dallon sisters on the Boardwalk in an effort to be aware of the disposition of her enemies in the city.

Taylor flowed around the Butcher’s attempt to block her off to hit the Changer like a wrecking ball. The spear’s tip skittered left off his abnormally durable fur from a poor impact angle as the villain dodged to her right, but she managed to redirect the attack into a spin of the spear, slamming Animos into the wall of the alleyway with enough force to daze him before she leapt out of the alleyway, easily clearing the Butcher’s attempt to smash her out of the air with his club and landing in front of the two members of New Wave, cracking the asphalt under her as she did so.

Now that she had time to assess the situation beyond removing the immediate threat, she realized they weren’t quite as screwed as she had thought they were. Even beyond the advantage in positioning they had with the Teeth being within an alleyway and the mobility advantage of what was probably rune-granted enhanced jumps as well as Glory Girl’s flight, the Teeth had only brought three capes: the Butcher, who was glaring balefully out at them, Animos, who was still swaying on his paws, and the blood manipulator she’d fought earlier in the week nibbling on her thumb, who she now knew was named Hemorrhagia, along with a small number of ordinary gang members with guns.

“Oh, goodie,” said Glory Girl, rising into the air and cracking her knuckles. “I was hoping for some stress relief and what do we get but the second most acceptable targets in the city.”

“Second?” asked Hemorrhagia, glaring up at the Alexandria package.

“Everyone loves kicking a good Nazi,” she replied before exploding forward towards the Teeth.

The Butcher snarled, eyes glowing red as he turned his glare onto Glory Girl, causing only a minor hitch in her flight before her aura flared and pushed back whatever effect he was trying to use.

“Nice try, old man, but I’m Master-proof!” She slammed into the composite cape with all the force of a particularly displeased bear, sending him sprawling into Animos just as the canine cape was drawing breath to scream.

Hemorrhagia hadn’t been standing around with her thumb in her mouth for no reason, however, and lashed out with a whip of blood that swiftly deformed once it hit Glory Girl to form a thin film over her nose and mouth.

“Start f*cking shooting, idiots!” screamed the Butcher, pushing himself off of Animos and grabbing a garbage can lid to hurl at Taylor.

That was… not ideal.

Before he had become the thirteenth person to lead the Teeth, the cape known as Leverage had had an odd form of superstrength. It didn’t offer any particular physical enhancements, but it didn’t particularly need to since what it did was less actually super strength and more alteration of weight. Based on publicly available videos, PHO had managed to figure out that as far as he was concerned, the things that he held were weightless, which allowed him to throw them at terrifying speeds given his history as rising baseball player James DeFranco before giving up and throwing in with the Teeth. Inheriting the superstrength of multiple Butchers before him had done nothing to weaken the man’s arm, and the matter reshaping ability that Reforge had had allowed him to turn even an aerodynamically terrible object into the perfect projectile to pierce a person.

Desperately, Taylor invoked algiz between her and the Teeth. Fortunately, the shield formed at the speed of thought, which was more than enough to meet the bullets and metal spike with a barrier.

The spike managed to punch through the shield, but fortunately none of the bullets managed to pass through the hole it left in its wake before it managed to close up on its own and enough of the projectile’s momentum had been bled off by the defense that, given that it tumbled thanks to being nudged by the shield’s reformation, it struck Taylor broadside across the chest, which wouldn’t leave much more than a bruise.

Once the hail of bullets petered out, Taylor let the shield dissipate and repeated her earlier tactic: namely, she invoked eiwaz and sent the non-capes to sleep while slowing down the Teeth capes.

With that advantage, Glory Girl managed to break free from Hemorrhagia’s restraint and send the blood manipulator into the wall with a backhand, then rose higher into the air.

Or at least, she started to.

The Butcher seized her by the ankle before she could make it more than about six inches higher into the air, and then started slamming the younger Brute around the alleyway, her flight slowing his efforts but not enough to prevent something about her power from giving way and allowing his second and third swings to break bones before rearing back and sending the battered blonde hurtling into Taylor’s shield, thankfully not breaking more bones since her power was working once again.

“Vicky!” screamed Panacea, darting around the shield and laying hands on her sister, whose harsh breathing immediately eased.

Still, that left the two of them out of commission for at least a little while (not that Panacea had been able to contribute a whole lot to the fight thus far, but the point stood) Taylor was alone against two of the stronger Brutes in the Bay.

Fortunately, she was packing some serious Brute force of her own thanks to tiwaz, so she didn’t hesitate to leap back into battle, leaving behind a thick screen of bugs to obscure the Dallon sisters from the Butcher’s line of sight as she let the barrier dissolve in favor of the strength of the bull by way of uruz.

This time, when Taylor lunged in, the Butcher was ready for her speed, meeting her spear’s haft with his club in an attempt to snap the weapon in two. The conjured weapon was tougher than it looked, though, so the strike merely deflected the blow to sink deep into Animos’ shoulder instead of the Changer’s rib cage. A firm shove lodged the weapon up to the crossguard in Animos’s shoulder, and one twist of her hips later the Teeth’s second-best Brute was hurtling out towards the bay, spear and all.

The Butcher wasn’t standing idly by while she did so, slamming a brutal blow with his club into her back that would have shattered her if not for both the magic running through her and the armor spreading and cushioning the impact.

Taylor turned, the instincts offered by tiwaz guiding her hands as she trapped the club under her arm and set her self, bringing her other fist around in a textbook cross.

Unfortunately, the Butcher was smart enough not to directly take the hit, choosing to teleport away to disengage and swing his club straight for Panacea, who had been dazed by the explosion he made when reappearing behind her.

Glory Girl beat him to the punch, shattering his club a few inches above his meaty fist and then spiking a punch upwards with her other hands, sending the Butcher in a brief parabolic arc that ended in a classic three-point landing.

“You’re a persistent bitch, aren’t you. Not to worry, I’ll mount your skull on my wall sooner or later,” he snarled, eyes glowing red once again.

This time, the attack was targeted at the other two capes arrayed against him, and Panacea shrieked, falling to the floor and writhing in pain.

Taylor was much less impressed by the magnitude of pain that the attack caused, being bolstered directly by two runes that vastly improved her physical endurance. However, she was aware of how quickly she was approaching her limits in terms of the amount of runic power she could channel through her body at the moment. She had maybe two minutes left with both runes active, maybe five if she dropped to one, before she would have to rely on her armor, her human body, and her bugs.

With Hemorrhagia lying concussed on the floor, her constructs degrading slowly, the only major threat left was the Butcher.

Instead of bullrushing the composite cape again, Taylor took a moment to allow the mantle of Tyr the Even-handed to guide her.

After a few seconds, she moved around where the Butcher was clearly toying with Glory Girl, swatting away or tanking her blows with impunity and almost not even bothering to throw his own strikes.

Taylor moved relatively quietly, which thankfully worked enough against the Butcher, who was occupied with telling Glory Girl what he’d do to her before he killed her.

Glory Girl screamed, aura flaring beyond what Taylor had experienced before, and lashed out with a heavy strike in what was probably the best opportunity she was going to get to get her own hit in.

Some part of her mind noted the tendril of blood running along the floor to wrap around Panacea’s ankle, but when it splashed down into a puddle and Hemorrhagia abruptly relaxed into unconsciousness, she set it out of her mind and refocused on the Butcher.

The Butcher blocked Glory Girl’s punch with a grunt.

The noise released when Taylor drove her fist up into his abdomen just under his sternum was half shock and half expelled air, sending the composite cape flying before he managed to teleport back down to ground, wheezing.

“f*ck you,” he choked out, hefting the unconscious form of Hemorrhagia with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Animos knows your scent, you can’t hide from us!”

With that, the two capes vanished with the sound of a distant explosion, abandoning the unconscious gang members strewn across the alleyway.

“Well then,” said Taylor tiredly. “That happened.

After a moment, just in case the Butcher returned unencumbered, Taylor let her hold over the runes she was using to enhance herself go, and almost staggered from the rush of lightheadedness.

“Whoa, you okay?” asked Glory Girl, offering one muscular arm (now bare, because the Butcher had somehow managed to rip both sleeves and a portion over her midriff off of her blouse) to help stabilize Taylor.

“Fine, fine,” said Taylor, pushing herself upright and powering through the sense of heaviness in her limbs. “Just pushed a bit too hard too fast.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Panacea, grumpily and also wearing a fair amount of her affogato all over her (thankfully dark grey, at least as far as hiding the stains went) hoodie. After sliding two fingers up Taylor’s mail sleeve, Panacea frowned. “I think you’re going to be all right after a good night’s sleep.”

“I’ll take it,” replied Taylor.

“Good. Now get ready, I think we’re about to have to fill out one of Armsmaster’s special reports,” said Panacea, jerking her head in the direction of the rumbling of a motorcycle engine.

Taylor just sighed. “Great, paperwork.”

Odin, newly reappeared from wherever he went during her fights, shook his head, chuckling ruefully.

“Judge Myra, good to see you again.”

“Mr. Truth! What interesting matter do you bring for me today?” asked the judge, a rotund man with a long, white beard that couldn’t conceal the infectious smile on his face.

“Something interesting in the sense referred to as Chinese, I’m afraid. You are aware of the… shall we say, the return of Vadderung’s position, I take it?”

“Ah, what trouble has the new Rúnatyr gotten herself into?” returned the judge, smile dimming somewhat.

“Not quite the case, old friend. It’s… well, I think it would make more sense if you read the file directly.” Hades turned over a manila folder to the judge, who took it and immediately started scanning the pages at a surprising rate.

When he finished, he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Well, the one thing I can say about this case right now is that it’s the right time to bring it up.”

“How do you mean?” replied the ancient god of death, perhaps a touch curious at what his friend was playing at.

“With the Teeth in town, any disruption to the local PRT’s operations will be… I can’t say it will have no impact on the situation as it stands, but between your new friend, the other gangs, and the breakaways, I suspect that the impact will be relatively minimal, and could be patched up by borrowing a cape or two from Boston if need be, since they have recent experience with the Teeth.”

“So… you’re saying you’ll hear the case?”

“Indeed,” replied the judge, nothing jolly left in the old man’s smile. “Piggot‘s been naughty, trying to subvert judges to legitimize her own extralegal actions. I think it’s high time we stop her lest we deal with worse issues in the long term.”

“Glad to hear you’re on board, old friend. I’ll do my best to smooth the way on my side.”

“I’ll do what I can to speed things along on my end as well. Hopefully we’ll be ready to see you by the end of the week, but if not, Monday should be the day.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you around, Bari.”

“And yourself, Pluto.”

Chapter 14: Interlude 2: Nicholas, Flechette, Amy, Article

Chapter Text

Saint Nicholas of Mari settled his old bones down gently in his chair. As much as he enjoyed getting out and about as Wonderworker, even the massive repository of advanced technology he could stuff into the red, fur-trimmed suit he still wore out wasn’t enough to ease his joints’ aching after all these centuries.

He brushed off his robes, allowing the familiar action to switch his mentality from mid-level Tinker hero to judge, then sighed and buzzed the door open, allowing Jonathan, one of the elves who’d joined him away from the North Pole, to enter his chambers. The elf’s perfect memory had served him well as his aide.

“Ah, Jonathan. How goes the preparation for Hades’ client’s suit against the Protectorate?”

“Quite well,” replied the elf, raising the folder in his right hand. “Thanks to judicious applications of your ability, I believe that the Protectorate’s legal team is over their existential crises.”

Nicholas chuckled. “And their actual preparations for the court date on Monday?”

“As well as could be expected, I think,” replied Jonathan. “They look to be focusing on throwing blame at the school for their negligence, which… while not undeserved, in my opinion, isn’t going to be enough to protect them. At least Armsmaster has the excuse of having handed authority over to Piggot, which won’t protect him entirely from the consequences of his actions, but he’s not going to go to jail for criminal negligence like Piggot will probably end up doing.”

“Good. And Hades?” asked Nicholas.

Jonathan gave his boss a level look. “He has more lawyers available to him than exist in the entire United States. If he wasn’t prepared, I’d be disappointed.”

“I thought as much,” chuckled Nicholas, “but it would be irresponsible of me not to check.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Right… what else is there… I know there was something… ah, yes! What has Ratnick been up to, the rat bastard? He’s more than earned his way onto the permanent parts of the naughty list, so he’s got to be up to something…” He frowned, thinking.

Jonathan raised an eyebrow, then sighed. “He’s sitting on the Canary case until the Simurgh attacks to exploit their visual similarities and use his pet prosecutor to consign her to the Birdcage, in addition to various violations of her rights such as freezing all her assets and preventing her from communicating with anyone.”

Nicholas’ face reddened with fury. “What a perversion of justice,” he spat. “Let’s see… Hades is tied up with helping Odin’s successor, and Brandish is… unsuitable for the situation… do you know, offhand, if Calle has any major cases at the moment?”

“Not since clearing up the last suit between Coyote’s new protégé and Disney-Aleph for copyright. Are you looking at setting him up to take on Ratnick?”

“Well, I won’t be able to send him coal for another ten months, so just to tide the man over…”

Jonathan nodded. “Understood. I’ll tell him to feel free to destroy Ratnick’s career.”

“It’s no less than he deserves.”

Jonathan nodded. “Understood.” I’ll let Calle know.” And with that, the elf left the room, leaving his boss to sigh at the size of his inbox.

Paperwork was the bane of all professions, after all, and the judiciary was no exception.

Flechette knocked on the door to Director Armstrong’s office. “You wanted to talk to me, sir?”

“Ah, Flechette! Come in.” Flechette pushed open the door to the director’s office, revealing the dark-skinned form of Director Armstrong behind his desk and the lithe, brown-skinned and gray-bodysuited form of Clay from the New York branch sitting in one of the two comfortable chairs across from the director.

“Director. Clay, good to see you again.” Flechette sat down on the empty chair. “If I may ask…”

“Ah. Well, you’re being transferred. Both of you, that is. Clay is here to take you down to Brockton Bay.”

Flechette blinked repeatedly at the director. Then, once she was sure that they hadn’t flown in one of Satyrical’s clones for a prank, she burst out with “Are you f*cking kidding?”

“No,” said Director Armstrong, “I am not.”

“Okay. Okay! Cool. Why the f*ck are you sending two queer women of color to Nazi f*cking Central, where one of us is a minor?”

“She has a point,” said Clay, her low voice lending a weight of rationality to the younger cape’s outburst.

“Well,” said Armstrong, “the official reason is that both of you have relevant, recent experience with the Teeth.”

“...and the unofficial reasons?” asked Clay, a glimmer of grayish-brown force field materializing momentarily on her hands in what was presumably a nervous tic of some sort.

“There are a significant number of those. For one, there’s a certain contingent of PRT officials that have… shall I say, taken offense to the way that Director Piggot has decided to run operations in her city. This is at least partially a response to that in that we’re trying to provoke those Nazis into overextending themselves so we can crush them.”

“Great,” sighed Flechette. “We’re f*cking Nazi bait. What else?”

“In my defense,” said Director Armstrong, “I voted against the idea, but most of the directors hate Piggot and treat capes as assets and not people.”

“We’re not blaming you,” said Clay levelly, “It just sucks ass. What else?”

“Director Piggot is possibly about to lose Shadow Stalker on top of Vista and needs to capitalize on reinforcements before being knocked back down to their current team size. Also you two are… relatively reasonable, so Legend and I were hoping you could help moderate Piggot’s relationships with independent heroes and New Wave while I try to muster the political will to oust Piggot from the director position. Also if you just so happened to come across information that might point to some level of malfeasance in ENE…”

Clay nodded. “Ah, I see. So this is at least partially an infiltration mission. Understood.”

Flechette sighed. “For the record, this is an absolute dick move and given the legal right I’d slap the sh*t out of anyone who had anything to do with this decision, but I will go under protest.”

“Thank you, and for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. We’ve got a moving agency ready to have your things in Brockton Bay and you should be all ready to start in ENE on Monday.”

Flechette sighed again. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get my personal effects in order, I know the damn drill.” She shoved herself up and stomped off to her room.

Clay gave Armstrong a knowing look.

The man sighed, running his hand through his thinning hair. “Look, if I had any better options than to throw you and Flechette at Volur, I’d take them. As it stands, it’s either Flechette or Bastion that I’m allowed to and can afford to transfer and after his performance earlier this month I wouldn’t trust him with food for a potluck, let alone keeping an eye on a cape that Hunch thinks is the most powerful cape this side of Legend.

“As long as you accept that your choices have consequences,” said the woman, standing up to leave the room. “At the end of the day, just make sure you can sleep well at night after all is said and done.”

She left the room, leaving behind a man with no good options left.

Vicky slammed the door hard enough that it rattled the house and stormed upstairs, slamming her own door out of Amy’s eyesight.

Across the living room from her, her father looked up lethargically, then sighed and returned his focus to his book.

Amy bit back a sarcastic retort, then shoved herself up off the couch, pausing the game of Hyper Bash Sisters she was playing, and followed her sister up the stairs.

“Vicky, what’d he do this time?”

After a moment of sullen silence, the door popped open and Vicky dragged Amy inside. A moment later had the two of them lying on the bed, with Vicky clinging to Vicky like a teddy bear.

“So, I uh… I take it he screwed the pooch?”

Vicky sighed. “Yeah, yeah he did.”

“You want to talk about it?” asked Amy.

“Not really.”

“Too bad. Talk, or I superglue your shoes together, and I do mean all of them.”

“You’re bluffing,” said Vicky.

“I would. Better yet, I’d just move the roots of the tree in the back of the house and bury them so I can tell Carol you threw them out.”

“You wouldn’t dare…”

“Wouldn't I?” asked Amy.

“Fine!” Vicky huffed. “I just… finally saw all the sh*t in his personality that makes him a not great match for me, I guess,” she said.

“...well, to be honest, I kinda saw that coming at this point,” said Amy.

“What do you mean you saw this coming?” demanded Vicky, a little shrilly.

“Vicky. You know I love you, as a sister thank god, but your taste in men has always been horsesh*t. I mean, even if I didn’t listen to Girl in Red, I wouldn’t have been interested in any of the boys you tried to set me up with. I mean, sh*t, half of them, the ones who are friends with Dean, are just rich assholes who more often than not have Empire sympathies, and most of the others are either climbers looking to use me to get to you or are just generically assholes.”

“You mean to say that I set you up with f*cking Nazis on accident?”

Amy sighed. “Not necessarily, they’re not actually Empire members. They just… well, I’ve seen some of their cousins and siblings hospitalized after a major ABB push. Anyways the point of that was to get at the whole ‘you can judge a man by his friends’ thing.”

Vicky sighed again. “Yeah, I get your point.”

“Yeah, well. Apply Trigger Theory to his power, what do you get?” asked Amy, not a little caustically.

“Uh… primary empathic Tinker… trouble relating to people, with a Blaster secondary… at a distance… so the situation involved some sort of social threat from a distance?”

“Yeah, pretty much. So, he’s separated from his peers by way of being a rich kid, and as such didn’t develop entropy to the point where the alien space whales that give parahumans their powers, the ones with trouble connecting to humans on a social level, decided ‘hey, I could do this better than you’ and decided to give him the ability to understand his peers better… and he barely f*cking uses that part of his f*cking power.”

“...you know, I’ve never thought of it like that,” said Vicky quietly.

“Yeah. Not to be all ‘your blind spot sabotaged your dating life’ but your dating life was definitely sabotaged by your blind spot around Dean.

“Yeah… you’re not wrong…”

“Yeah, and also he thought of me as a ‘project’ to fix. Like, he saw my incredibly unhealthy and f*cked up emotions around the two of you and he tried to fix it, but he didn’t know what he was doing with the interpersonal relationship, he didn’t try to learn, and he didn’t bother to get help. If I had to bet, I’d bet that I’m not the only one he did that to.”

Amy could feel Vicky’s lips press together through her power. “Yeah, in hindsight I can see how that’s… kinda f*cked.”

“Good.” Amy squirmed around until she was facing victoria and knocked their foreheads together, not particularly enjoying the slick feeling of her force field between the two of them. “I love you, Vicky, but sometimes when you shove your head in the sand like that, it can get kind of annoying.”

Vicky sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do better in the future.”

“Good.” Amy shoved herself out of Vicky’s grasp and knocked on her sister’s forehead. “Now use that sh*t between your ears as more than a f*ckin’ hat rack.”

“Yeah, yeah, Amy,” grumbled Vicky, floating upright.

For just a moment, the sun coming in through the window illuminated Vicky from behind, and for a moment she appeared to be wearing armor vaguely resembling Taylor’s and a cloak of some sort of bird feathers, but once Amy blinked it was gone.

“Hey,” said Vicky, a sly grin making its way onto her face, “so now that we’re talking about romance together properly, let’s talk about you.”

Amy raised an eyebrow, viciously quashing the impulse to blush. “What about me?”

“You and Taylor, huh?”

Amy sighed. “I will neither confirm nor deny-”

Amy’s response was cut off by a squeal as Vicky lunged forwards and scooped her up, dumping her on her bed. “Time for you to spill, sister dear,” she said, no small amount of smugness apparent in her voice.

Amy sighed, despairing for the next hour of her time.

Lustrum: Parahuman Villain or Political Victim?

Published Monday, February 21, 2011.

Lustrum is, as of now, known as the radical feminist villain who made her reputation on castrating men and forcing them to dress as women. Her crimes were, apparently, numerous enough and heinous enough to merit an immediate Birdcage conviction, bypassing the normal “three strikes” rule by which such convictions are usually handed down by.

But what, exactly, were her crimes?

Well, the media would have you believe that they were centered around the aforementioned castration of men and forced crossdressing.

This is not the case.

Andrea Campbell (not her birth name, but there is no reason to print that here) is one of Lustrum’s alleged victims. Andrea, when asked to discuss what she underwent at the hands of Lustrum and her single parahuman ally (a wet Tinker known by the name of Chiral, who was killed by Allfather himself approximately three months after Lustrum was removed from the picture), reported that they had, in fact, allowed her to properly medically transition her physical body to match her gender.

That’s right- instead of being a radical misandrist group, Lustrum ran a pro-trans support group in Brockton Bay, perhaps the Nazi capital of the USA today.

In that light, the necessity of the group being led by a parahuman capable of facing off against Behemoth makes sense- after all, Nazis (neo or otherwise) have never been known to be accepting of anyone falling under the “queer” umbrella. As such, it is no surprise that she was arrested on trespassing charges on public property and only slapped with the other, more “serious” charges of bodily mutilation and severe reproductive harm, after the fact. This is especially unsurprising given that even in a regular city the FBI has declared a potential threat of an active infiltration of local law enforcement by white supremacists groups such as the Empire 88 (the local neo-Nazi organization in Brockton Bay).

Judge James Ratnick, Andrea Campbell’s father and the judge presiding over the Bad Canary case at present, in conjunction with Dash Triumph, brother of the deceased wife of Max Anders Heith Anders and prosecutor of the Bad Canary case at present, sent Lustrum to the Birdcage in a trial not entirely dissimilar to the reports of Canary’s treatment (assets frozen, prevented from communicating with their wet-behind-the-ears lawyer, bogged down in unnecessary Brute-rated restraints). The sentencing of Lustrum to the Birdcage, a prison known for its inescapability, was both a massive tragedy and also a foregone conclusion in this case, unfortunately.

In short, the trial of Lustrum was nothing short of a targeted political assassination of a movement, leaving the state of the trans community (both in the Bay, with the intensely localized transphobia in the city, and nationwide, thanks to the media spotlight on Lustrum and the fearmongering surrounding her supposed castration of men) in dire jeopardy.

The picture of the Lustrum trial, painted almost fifteen years after the fact, paints a grim picture of the state of the justice system in the Parahuman Age. The fact that an innocent woman was sentenced to the Birdcage, alongside the likes of Crane the Harmonious and Acidbath, in what can only be described as a targeted attack on both Lustrum and the movement she espoused. The similarities to the Canary trial of today, which focuses on a rising feminist star accused of deliberately castrating men, cannot be understated, and we must be vigilant lest a similar miscarriage of justice be perpetuated again.

Written by Merriam Alessandria.

Chapter 15: f*cking Pidgeons

Chapter Text

“It’s good to be working with you again, Flechette,” said Clay, arms covered in force field-constructed gauntlets. “We missed you in New York when you got called away to work with Boston.”

“Yeah, well,” sighed the Ward, shifting her arable style on her back as she walked. “The PRT does what the PRT does and we mortals are left to pick up the pieces afterwards. Speaking of picking up the pieces, how’s Jouster doing?”

“About as well as can be expected. He’s feeling out some of the indies to fill in the whole ‘long range, highly mobile’ role you fell into a lot of the time but he hasn’t found anyone willing to join up. There’s… well, there’s rumors going around about the PRT press-ganging unwary kids and making them into soldiers, more than there usually are, and from the way they seem to have originated here in Brockton, I can kind of see it, given what little I’ve seen of Piggot. But it’s still not helping PR in general, and Glenn was hitting up Hero’s Tinker-Grade coffee machine like twice a week.”

Flechette winced. While “Tinker-Grade” had become something of a meaningless buzzword thrown around to justify high price tags and long lines, Hero’s coffeemaker definitely deserved the appellation. She’d tried a cup of the stuff once, and by the time she’d come to March was nearly bald and much warier around her, as were the rest of Lancer Squad. The incident also precipitated her transfer to Boston to get her away from the machine, and it had dissuaded March from following her for a solid three months to boot.

Any reply from the dark-haired girl was preempted by the arrival of a blonde in a white dress with golden designs on it from the sky. “Welcome to Brockton Bay, you two,” said Glory Girl, arms folded over her chest. “Let’s… chat, shall we?”

“Sure thing,” said Flechette, her nonchalance forced to some degree thanks to the evident dissatisfaction in the Alexandria Package’s posture. “You want to join us on our patrol?”

“Sure, why not?” The words came from behind them, and Flechette spun around to point her arbalest at the figure before recognizing the designs on their coat.

“Panacea, right? Sorry about that, still kind of jumpy from being in a new place,” Flechette said, replacing the weapon on her back.

“No hard feelings, I get how Piggot’s… general attitude might be infectious,” replied the healer.

“Some hard feelings,” Glory Girl snarked.

“I can take care of myself, Vicky,” said Panacea, levelly.

“She was still pointing a weapon at you!”

“You say that as if it’d do more than inconvenience me.” Panacea turned back to Flechette even as Clay mouthed “inconvenience her” with no small degree of surprise. “But we didn’t come to bicker in front of you. No, we’re here to talk with you about a more important situation. What has Piggot told you about the state of the situation with Vista and Volur?”

“Not much. We’ve mostly been told that Volur is to be considered a possible Master who’s responsible for coercing Vista out of the Wards and forcing her to work with her and a member of the Teeth named Quarrel.”

“So… the Mushroom diet. That tracks.” Seeing Flechette’s blank look, Panacea rolled her eyes. “Kept in the dark and fed bullsh*t.”

“Well then,” said Flechette, more than a little indignantly, “if you know so much about the situation, then by all means, tell us.”

“Alrighty then!” chirped Panacea, causing Flechette a moment of whiplash before she realized that it was purposeful. “So, Shadow Stalker’s been going rogue since she joined the Wards, and put Volur in the hospital when she caused her Trigger Event. Vista found out and up and f*ckin’ left once she found out that Piggot just wanted to cover it up instead of actually do something about it, and Quarrel is her cousin.”

“Sounds like you’re the one spewing bullsh*t, not Piggot,” said Clay.

“Not my fault you can’t tell the difference between getting shat on and getting hosed down,” Panacea shot back. “Anyways, that’s really all we came here to do: to open your eyes to the bullsh*t you’ve been being fed. Toodles!”

“We could take you in for M/S screening, you know,” said Clay, as much warning as threatening.

“You could,” said Panacea. “But there’s an Endbringer attack coming soon and you can’t afford for me not to go. Besides, while Volur is a Master, her control is over arthropods, not humans.”

“Back off with the insinuations,” growled Glory Girl before swooping down to scoop her sister up and fly away with a parting “or we boycott your boss!”

“What was that?” asked Flechette, glaring at Clay. “You’re normally a lot smoother than that.”

“Information gathering, I thought. But… I dunno. Something definitely feels weird right now. Like, I’m coming off the tail end of a concussion or something.”

“Log it when we get back to base, I guess.”

Flechette turned back to the route just slow enough to miss the flash of red darting into an alley in a display of missed timing that would have never caught her Clustermate.

Taylor wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting Judge Myra to look like, but a white-bearded old man who looked like he’d be a fantastic shopping mall Santa wasn’t it.

The other people in the courtroom were a rather diverse bunch, too: Blackwell had come in all her horse-faced, harsh glory, and Alan Barnes stood next to her as her lawyer, red-faced and red-haired. Also present was PRT Director Emily Piggot, looking like someone had dropped a can of biscuit dough into a suit, Armsmaster, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, and the PRT’s lawyer, a whip-thin man who looked like the human equivalent of a chihuahua.

A lot of the arguments had gone over her head, even with Odin whispering in her ear about what, say, a duty of care was, because as much as Taylor had always been a voracious reader she was also in way over her head, being thrown headfirst into the pit of school liability.

Still, she had managed to piece together a general picture of the situation at hand between denials and Myra’s threats of “contempt of court”.

As it turned out, Sophia was on some sort of probation with the PRT which let her work with the PRT as a member of the Wards while under some strict conditions. She… technically hadn’t breached her probation, since through some complicated legal mumbo jumbo it was Shadow Stalker and not Sophia Hess on probation, which didn’t exactly fill Taylor with confidence in the judiciary in Brockton Bay despite Judge Myra’s seeming outrage at Piggot.

According to the PRT’s lawyer (a thoroughly unpleasant man named Steven Leeze), Sophia’s complicated legal status as a member of the Wards meant that she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions in her civilian identity, including the actions she’d taken against Taylor, thanks to “compelling domestic and national security reasons”.

Mr. Truth tore that to shreds, using precedent where a police officer had been taken down for domestic abuse that he was covering up thanks to his friends always being the ones to respond to domestic violence in that area of the city.

Judge Myra accepted that reasoning and then grilled Piggot and her lawyer on why, exactly, they had shielded their Ward, who they were legally supposed to prepare for life as a hero and also keep within the law, based on her parahuman status.

Once he decided to leave the lawyers to stew in his own thoughts, he turned his focus to Blackwell and Alan Barnes, asking some pointed questions about, for one, the incredible biohazard that Taylor was stuffed into that somehow disappeared between Taylor was retrieved from her locker and the (admittedly much delayed, since for some reason they hadn’t investigated until after Taylor had woken up) arrival of the police to investigate the incident.

When Blackwell said that it was as a result of a PRT team cleaning up the site the day of Taylor’s hospitalization, Judge Myra turned his focus back to Piggot.

“And what,” said Judge Myra, his bald head flushing red with rage, “possessed you to perform such an utterly idiotic act of obs-”

He was cut off by a loud, blaring siren, which sounded in three sharp blats before cutting off.

Armsmaster paled before turning to the door and all but sprinting out of the courtroom just moments before Judge Myra slammed his gavel down on the bench. “Dismissed. I will issue a summons to a second session within the week and you will all come.”

With that, the man stood and strode out of the courtroom, leaving everyone behind to talk amongst themselves.

Danny blinked, paling, then turned to Taylor. “You can’t be thinking of going.”

Taylor looked back. “I have to go, to heal if nothing else. If I can bring at least one extra person home…”

Danny sighed, then stood. “I’ll drive you at least a little bit of the way to the PRT building.”

Mr. Truth patted Taylor on her shoulder twice, a feeling like a static shock accompanying the first pat. “Godspeed, Taylor. Come back alive.”

“Will do, sir.” Taylor walked out of the courtroom with Odin and Danny flanking her, brain working overtime to try and put together some sort of rune-carved pattern to try and extend her stamina reserves on the fly.

As expected, fifteen minutes of frantic theorizing wasn’t enough time to put together even an ad hoc battery for magic energy, and given some of the runes she was eyeing, Taylor thought it would have taken longer than that to charge anyways.

Fortunately, she had enough of an understanding of the energy she used to cast the runes to start drawing it into herself even as she tried to put together a working magic battery, milky-white eye gradually starting to glow under her eyepatch as the energy accumulated, not that it was visible under both patch and helmet once the latter went on

Before too long, she had arrived at the PRT building and had joined Panacea and Glory Girl in waiting for the teleporter to arrive, armband cinched over her armor on her right arm. Two people that Taylor vaguely recognized from an announcement about a PRT department reshuffle seemed to be paying inordinate amounts of attention to her, but after a moment of her having turned her helmet in their direction they looked away.

“So, you’re planning to heal too?” asked Panacea, fiddling with the sleeves of her robes.

“It seemed the thing to do,” replied Taylor, tapping her thumb against her thigh. “Like, we’ve got all kinds of people to fight her, but the more we can keep alive for next time, the better, you get me?”

Panacea nodded, then opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, a man wearing aviator’s goggles and a cap appeared in a flash of light, bringing with him a small group of huddled capes, with the exception of Narwhal, who stood head and shoulders above the group.

“Everybody get close! We’re jumping to Miami and then straight to Canberra!” the man shouted, and the assembled capes scurried in to obey.

Two flashes of what Taylor saw as an odd non-space later, the assembled group of capes were abruptly buffeted by the wind of Alexandria’s passage as the iconic flying brick was hurled through the air a mere six feet to the left of their group.

“Sorry for the hot drop,” said the man in the goggles. “I’ll be right back with the rest of New York and Boston, so clear the landing zone!” With that, he vanished in a burst of light.

“Come on,” said Panacea, already jogging off towards a tent with the telltale red cross of a medical station. After a moment, Taylor and a woman in a red bodysuit and an eyepatch followed.

When they arrived, it was to a harried-looking woman in a seafoam blue bodysuit vaguely suggestive of a doctor’s scrubs. “Panacea, Volur, to triage, follow Horizon’s lead on what to prioritize. Othala, find Scapegoat and keep him going as long as you can, and work on recovery in between that.”

Panacea nodded, dragging a confused Taylor along with her. “Hippocrates is a Thinker/Trump,” she said, anticipating the other cape’s question, “primarily focused on the way that powers interact with the body. Some sort of postcognition and extrapolation, as well as an inherent awareness of the way that human bodies work, so it’s limited in what can be done with new Triggers, but she’s good for running a bunch of medical capes together.”

“Ah, okay. That tracks.”

The duo arrived at an open area to the side of the tent where a woman in a blue and brown bodysuit with a jagged line separating the two halves stood amidst a clump of tables, which were about half filled.

“Good,” she said, relaxing infinitesimally. “Start with these two,” she gestured at two incredibly pale individuals, bleeding from crushed legs and likely only still alive thanks to a pair of noncape medical assistants running blood bags into their veins.

Panacea reached out and touched one of them, at which point the bleeding from the legs slowed to a stop. Taylor turned to the other one and flicked out a gebo rune, burning in the air for a moment before vanishing in a flash of light, taking a small portion of the energy she’d not stopped building up with it.

The individual abruptly shifted, ruined legs and bloodstained bodysuit flickering once before they recovered, leaving an unstained gray bodysuit over a well-muscled male body, the IV dangling from its pole nearby.

He blinked his eyes open, then turned to the other man (taller, paler, and somewhat less muscular). As he watched Panacea reconstruct his partner, Taylor moved onto the next cape Horizon indicated, reattaching the arms that had been torn off the dark-skinned woman lying there, and then moving on to the wholly bisected cape she vaguely recognized from a press release from Houston and putting him back together, even cleaning his white uniform.

“Holy sh*t,” said Horizon, stunned, as Taylor cleared out the triage area with help from Panacea.

“I’m gonna need… probably like five minutes before I can do that again,” said Taylor, breathing somewhat heavily.

“I don’t expect you’ll need to. It’s an unfortunate reality of the Simurgh fights that we don’t get too much traffic in the medical tent because of the scream and the precautions we have to take because of it. I just wish they didn’t always leave my ears buzzing…” said Horizon.

Taylor winced as some kind of sensory feedback swept through her bugs even as a number of them were squished. “There’s something inco-”

The roof of the tent was pulled off the metal supports, held frozen in a telekinetic grasp as the pale face of the Simurgh glared down at Taylor.

“f*ck,” she said, as the Endbringer swept a wing down to crush her.

In the Birdcage, a young-looking blonde woman’s eyes abruptly shot open, glowing white with a complicated knot pattern in the center for a moment before they resolved into empty white expanses.

“The time approaches,” she rasped with four voices, three of which would have been recognized only by a very limited number of people and the fourth of which would have struck terror into any person alive. “The Warrior’s foe rises, guided by Polydectes and Vakr to avenge her predecessors.”

Then, she blinked, green irises and dark pupils appearing in the space between her eyes closing and opening. “Interesting. I believe my time here is coming to a close.”

The one woman attending Glaistig Uaine went pale with fear, but the world’s second-deadliest Trump paid her no mind, eyes no longer focused on her physical location. After all, a godling was faced with a being almost perfectly suited to killing gods, and that spectacle wasn’t one to be missed if one had the chance.

Chapter 16: Calvinball

Chapter Text

If Taylor had been alone, her freezing up at seeing the winged Endbringer would have been very bad, and perhaps even ended the fight before it started. Fortunately for her, she was not, in fact, alone.

Horizon’s eyes flashed with an odd not-color beyond violet as she reached up, and as her fingers came into contact with the Endbringer’s feathers, a massive explosion sounded, bending the wing unnaturally and reversing its trajectory. “Get moving!” she snapped, glaring up at the Simurgh. “The farther from the med tent, the better!”

Shaken from her freeze response, Taylor instead chose flight, invoking hagalaz above her head before pushing off into a leap that became a soar, backlit by the sunrise.

With Taylor abandoning the med tent, the Simurgh did the same, leaving only a single parting strike that Horizon almost negligently slapped away with another detonation before jamming her hand down on the buttons on her armband. “Hard override” was the last thing Taylor heard out of the Thinker before she was too far away to hear.

The Simurgh, of course, didn’t let Taylor get away unmolested. Even beyond her pursuit (which wasn’t quite fast enough to catch Taylor), and whatever she was doing to try and slow her down with her telekinesis (which didn’t work- maybe she was trying to thicken the air?), Taylor had chunks of hurled rubble and occasionally energy blasts that the winged Endbringer either dodged or deflected towards her, preventing Taylor from really accelerating thanks to her own need to dodge.

Taylor wasn’t just fleeing, though. Every so often she managed to find a gap in the Simurgh’s pattern and invoke a second, shorter-lived rune from her dwindling energy supply. Isa and kaunaz didn’t do much, the former leaving hoarfrost on her wings and the latter scorching them (no matter which effect she visualized), so she rapidly abandoned them. Sowilo, on the other hand, let her hurl either tiny globes of sunlike plasma, which detonated on impact, or bolts of lightning, both of which physically shoved the Simurgh around and momentarily delayed her as well as pitting and scarring her hide.

That wasn’t enough for Taylor, so she kept searching through her mental repository of runic knowledge. Jera would have been promising, had she had the energy to bind an Endbringer to the earth, but even before her healing spree she wasn’t sure she could have pulled that off, not with her current level of mystic expertise limiting the efficiency with which she could cast the effect.

Instead, she tried laguz, summoning a wave from the relatively nearby Pacific Ocean and sending it slamming into the Simurgh.

While the energy expenditure made her vision go white briefly, wobbling in the air, as she turned back, she judged it worth it, having almost completely arrested Ziz’ momentum and broken most of her wings long enough for the Triumvirate to catch up and stand against the Simurgh.

Taylor set herself down gently, releasing hagalaz momentarily to try desperately to draw in more energy before having to take to the skies again, then jumped when Glory Girl thumped down next to her. “When did you learn to fly supersonic?” the Alexandria Package asked, brushing wisps of blonde hair out of her face.

“Just now,” said Taylor, still breathing deeply. She desperately cast about for something to talk about in the brief respite before her eye landed on the broad band of gold holding her cape on both shoulders as opposed to its previous one-shoulder positioning. “New accessory?” she asked, gesturing to where it would have sat on her as she bit back a hysterical laugh over the fact that she was discussing fashion, of all things, to avoid confronting the facts of the situation.

“In a way,” said Glory Girl. “I had a dream where I had on a necklace at least a little like this, so I figured I might as well make a nod to it in the suit and depending on how it works I might go for a full-on redesign around it. You like?”

“Yeah, I think it works with your getup.” Taylor turned to look at the battle and then hissed out an old Norse curse, leaving off from drawing in energy again to start flying.

Glory Girl spat out a “f*ck” of her own before rising into the air and hurtling towards the Simurgh, slamming into the approaching Endbringer in a flash of gold and a sonic boom.

That delayed the Simurgh long enough for Legend and Eidolon to catch up, with Alexandria arriving a moment later to smash the chunk of rubble she’d been compressed into against the porcelain-pale wings of the Simurgh. Moments later, the teleporter who brought them to the fight appeared with a small crowd, which either charged into the fray or started some sort of ranged attack to target the fifteen-foot target. A significant number of them were crushed by the Simurgh, either telekinetically or by swinging limbs, but enough hits landed to keep the Simurgh occupied and not chasing her armored target.

Speaking of Taylor, the lanky cape had traded hagalaz for naudiz, to keep the Simurgh’s attention off of herself, and ansuz, hoping it would give her some ability to understand the situation.

Unfortunately, it did.

Her one working eye glowed as her temporarily-enhanced mind chewed through the facts of the situation and came to the inescapable conclusion that the Simurgh was not and had never been human, and nor had the other Endbringers. Between their inscrutability, the insane level of power they displayed, and their massive, alien biology, she had no choice to understand that they were brought from the stars by the entities beyond powers, either as something similar to the Administrator or a chained god forced to fight.

By the same token, however, the magic of the runes wrested insight from the Administrator to understand the nature of the Endbringers on a wholly physical level, and Taylor understood how to win.

She reached for her own armband and clicked the button, which was evidently the wrong move seeing as how the instant her finger touched the band it fell apart.

In the distance, the Simurgh smirked slightly.

Absent the ability to call for help directly, Taylor invoked wunjo and ehwaz, the rune combination allowing her to temporarily conjure a pair of rune stones: one in her hand and one in Panacea’s.

“Panacea,” she said into the stone, “I need help. I’m stranded without my armband, and while I’m not susceptible to the Simurgh’s scream, I need to be able to communicate with the group as a whole.”

“Little busy,” grumbled the healer, and the faint sound of squelching could be heard over the mystical connection.

“I have access to information that might be able to kill the Simurgh,” said Taylor.

Mere minutes later, the teleporter (who had introduced himself as Strider) had handed Taylor a new armband, causing the Simurgh’s smirk to vanish.

“What have you discovered, Volur?” asked Dragon, splitting her focus between Taylor and operating the mech suit that was currently hurling missiles at the Simurgh.

“The Simurgh is not, has never been, and will never be human. It’s a construct of some sort, I think, and most of its body is a sort of ablative armor that doesn’t actually have any biological purposes, so going after, say, the eyes to limit its visibility isn’t a particularly useful proposition.”

“You said most. What’s the rest of it?”

“It’s… some sort of core. I think. I don’t know exactly what it does, per se, but what I do know is that if you crack the core it dies in a massive explosion,” said Taylor.

“How massive?”

“Depends on what you get to crack it and how long it can see that coming. The Simurgh can probably set it up to be at least as strong as a nuke if she can’t avoid it somehow.” Taylor frowned, feeling out the Simurgh with her bugs and parsing the data through the runic enhancement. “I don’t think anyone here except me and maybe Eidolon can get around that. For some reason she can’t predict me properly, maybe at all.”

“...understood.” Dragon’s voice was subdued. “We’ll do what we can.”

“If you have any capes with powerful offensive effects, maybe even Annihilators, on hand that you can spare, I might be able to pull something off?”

There was a moment of static as the Simurgh smashed a number of the communications arrays on the top half of Dragon’s suits before being driven back by Eidolon, allowing the suit some measure of self-repair which resolved the static. “Stand by.”

After a moment, Strider appeared with a pop, bringing along four capes: Horizon, a purple-clad teenager with what looked like a steel crossbow, a man she mistook for Gallant momentarily before noticing the lance in his hand, and a muscular man with a five o’clock shadow and a bear trap on his chest. Almost at the same time, Glory Girl dropped heavily to the ground, breathing harshly as the golden light of the sunrise played off her hair and costume

“This is what we can spare,” said Dragon almost apologetically.

“Alright, give me a name and a quick rundown of what you can do, please.”

Horizon stepped up. “Horizon. Striker ability, you saw me fight off the Simurgh earlier.”

“Flechette,” said the girl with the crossbow. “I can sort of imbue things with an energy that let them ignore things. Things like gravity, air resistance, defenses, that sort of thing.”

“Jouster,” said the armored man. “I can do a few things with my lance, but for big hits we want disintegration.”

“Snaptrap,” said the last man. “I can create spheres that pull things in and maybe shred them.”

“Glory Girl,” said the blonde, shifting slightly to put herself between Taylor and the Protectorate capes. “Alexandria package and an aura that protects me and those near me from the Simurgh’s scream.

Taylor nodded. “Okay then. I can work with this. Alright, here’s the plan…”

The five minutes of setup the plan had taken had taken their toll on the capes opposing the Endbringer, with a significant number of them either being killed or forced from the field for injuries. One of those was Legend, although thankfully he had recovered from being hit by a deflected attack from Eidolon relatively quickly and had returned to harrying the winged Endbringer.

The four capes Taylor had peeled off, now each with an instance of a gebo rune glimmering on their foreheads, and stood atop Dragon’s suit.

“Now,” said Taylor, charging up a sowilo rune above her hand.

Jouster was the first to move, almost exploding off the suit in a parabolic arc that was, strictly speaking, faster than his strength and gravity should allow. Shortly after, Glory Girl lifted off, carrying Horizon with her as she flew towards the Simurgh.

The other three capes waited for a few moments, long enough for Jouster and Glory Girl to almost reach the Simurgh.

Then, all at once, they moved.

Snaptrap, as his name implied, started snapping his fingers, creating his signature traps in an orientation to catch the Simurgh in as many as he could.

Flechette focused her power on the bolt in her weapon, then let it fly.

Taylor released the power she had pumped into the rune, unleashing a lightning bolt that was more gold than the typical white.

At the same time, Glory Girl plunged in, flashing with golden light, while Horizon’s eyes changed to the same odd not-color they had been before, and Jouster leapt up, lance plunging for the Simurgh’s torso.

The Hopekiller’s eyes widened as she noticed the trap she’d been caught in, then she twisted her torso.

When the flash from the lightning bolt had cleared, it was clear that the gambit had borne fruit. The Simurgh’s body was cracked and damaged, and some of its limbs were hanging by threads or even wholly removed. The most important thing, at least in Taylor’s eyes, was the fact that the hole her lightning bolt had burned through the Simurgh’s torso revealed a kernel of something almost pulsating near the back, nearwhere one of her wings joined to her torso, before the pale flesh expanded like one of those old “just add water” dinosaur toys, slowly concealing the thing from view.

Taylor pulled up power for another lightning bolt, one to punch through the core, but was forced to abort the attack early to shatter a massive piece of her wing that the Simurgh had hurled at them.

A wet schlick accompanied a spray of blood, and Snaptrap fell to the ground in two pieces as his power winked out, a missed feather transfixed to the mech by one of Flechette’s bolts as it swung back around to try and cut her in half too.

“f*ck!” Taylor gathered what power she could and pulsed it through the gebo rune still on his forehead, managing to shove his legs into his torso in time to reunite the two in a flash of magic, but by the time she had looked up, the Simurgh was but a speck in the sky, leaving Horizon with two broken legs, Jouster with a broken arm and lance, and Glory Girl forced to catch the former before she hit ground.

The battle was over, and despite Taylor’s desire to collapse and sleep for approximately a week, she knew there was still work to do.

She sighed, then started drawing power in again and turned to Dragon. “So, where do you need me?”

“So,” said Gladly to his brother, “did you learn anything?”

“I did, and Othala has word of more from Canberra.” Victor frowned. “It appears, from what my wife tells me, that Volur is much more powerful than we originally thought.”

Gladly frowned. “How so? My power still just slides off her, so the more information I can get the better I can work her into the Plan.”

“According to Othala, she cleared out the triage section in the time it took Panacea to heal two capes. Then the Simurgh apparently targeted her directly, and she flew away before putting together a plan that almost caught the Simurgh and throwing around lightning bolts capable of punching all the way through the bitch.” Victor frowned. “I’m not sure how much of that is the truth, though. I know my wife believes it, but my wife is easily misled, especially if she’s kept away from battle where she belongs.”

Gladly frowned. “That… we may be looking at the next Eidolon, here. I don’t think we’re capable of holding her long enough to get her to Gesellschaft when we manage to capture her. We may have to use her father against her, or perhaps convince Krieg to ask them to lend us one of their parahumans to bind her more easily.” He turned back to Victor. “What else?”

“The Protectorate in Brockton Bay has taken no losses, unfortunately, but I do know more about the newest transfers. Clay is one of New York’s best investigative agents, and is likely to be leveraged against Piggot, and Flechette is at the right age and of the right temperament to make friends with Volur, assuming that the nigg*r drives her away from the Wards as predicted and that the Director continues to cling onto everything she can as long as she can.”

“And… what of the rumors that Flechette is a dyke?” asked Gladly.

“Unconfirmed, as of yet,” replied Victor. “I will dig into their files as best as I can to see if it’s reflected there, as well as the rumors that Challenger will be leaving the Bay soon.”

Gladly sighed. “The worst part of the planning is always the information gathering.”

“Hopefully, we can move past this stage soon.”

“One can always hope.”

Chapter 17: Lionize

Chapter Text

Taylor didn’t manage to spend much more than five minutes in the healing tent with Panacea before someone came to drag her away to a discussion. Admittedly, it was something she expected, given that she had just put on a phenomenal showing of both power and tactics, but that didn’t exactly make it feel particularly welcome.

Of course, having her childhood crush, Revel, be the one to do it did mitigate the bitterness of being called away from her work, replacing it with a tinge of embarrassment.

“I hope you don’t mind if we ask to borrow you for a moment,” said Revel in her low, smooth voice. “Myrddin and I had a few questions about your abilities, if that’s okay?”

“Um… I guess…” said Taylor, after catching Panacea’s eye and getting the nod from the more experienced healer.

“Wonderful. In that case, please follow me.” The taller woman (and she stood a solid six inches over Taylor’s 5’10, which in and of itself had only come as a result of a recent growth spurt) departed from the medical tent, then rose into the air, Taylor following after casting hagalaz to recover the flight she’d used during the fight against the Simurgh.

Revel led Taylor (and Odin, who was hovering behind the girl) to the burlap-robed from of Myrddin, who was floating over the medical tent and holding his signature staff of gnarled wood.

“Volur,” he said, offering Taylor a deep nod. Then, he surprised her by offering a bow to Odin. “Spirit.”

Odin frowned. “A mortal mage? I thought that your line had died out with Flamel.”

Myrddin chuckled. “Nay, sire. Just a man with the misfortune to attract the attention of both a god and a parahuman passenger.”

“And yourself?” Odin asked Revel, who was unfazed by Myrddin speaking to what was seemingly thin air.

“I have been charged by Xuannü to find her successor and granted the boon of clear sight to discharge that duty.”

“I see. In that case, why have you called upon us?” asked Odin.

“To warn you of a perversion of the natural order and to beseech your aid in rectifying it,” said Myrddin immediately.

“To beg your wisdom in the matter of my task,” said Revel.

Odin turned to Taylor. “How would you have us handle the situation, lass?”

Taylor was briefly confused, then realized that she was the one with the body and the capacity for significant action and understood why he asked. She thought for a moment, then nodded once. “Myrddin first.”

The bearded cape nodded. “My cousin is… she is controlled by the Morrigan. The Golden Man dealt Morrigan a fatal blow, decades ago, but she refuses to die, attempting to cling onto life by using my cousin as a host. Her actions have… caused my cousin’s mind to deteriorate, and the Morrigan to deteriorate worse, but she still remains mostly in control of my cousin and has taken up the name Glaistig Uaine. I fear she means to consume my cousin, body and soul, and return to the living, as far gone as she is now or worse. Please, I beg of you, save Ciara from her grasp, either by ensuring the Morrigan passes on to where you gods lie in state or by granting her release from the clutches of the world.”

Taylor’s jaw clenched as she hardened her resolve against her fear of the Fairy Queen. “I will stand against the Morrigan once I have the strength, you have my word.”

Myrddin bowed fully from the waist. “Thank you, Volur. Mine own efforts have been… stymied, and it is not lightly that I foist this burden off on you. I will stand beside you in this, and in your efforts elsewhere as well.”

“I thank you for your aid and pledge myself to uphold your cause in your stead,” said Taylor, reciting half-forgotten words from Odin’s memory.

“Just so,” said Odin, affirming the oath.

“And what about you, Revel?” asked Taylor. “What of the Allfather’s wisdom do you seek?”

“I… I represent the last of the Shén, Jiutian Xuannü. Before she allowed herself to pass, she charged me with finding a successor to her mantle, one worthy of being entrusted with her bow.” In a flash of brightly colored flames, the weapon appeared floating in front of Revel. It was a simple weapon, an asymmetric piece of wood taller than Revel whose ends were connected by a cable made of some sort of brightly colored feather woven together.

Vanishing the bow once again, she continued. “I had hoped to give it to a candidate here at this battle, one who proved herself courageous and skilled in battle, yet when I saw her I became certain that Vanadís’ legacy has chosen her as a successor. Now, I am unsure who to choose next, and I thought to ask the one who bears the curse of wisdom for their advice.”

Taylor weighed her options. She didn’t really have any particular wisdom to share with her on the topic, and even if she did she would have been wary of interfering in another person’s divinely ordained quest, but on the other hand she was in the business of helping people…

It didn’t take very long before a solution presented itself. “I cannot offer you wisdom of my own. What I can do is offer you more of your own to better judge the situation, if you would take it.”

Revel nodded. “I would.”

“In that case…” Taylor closed her eye and focused on conjuring the item she had in mind as intended with gebo.

When she opened her eye again, she was holding a leather armguard in her hands, inscribed with unobtrusive ansuz and algiz runes, which she held out to Revel. “This is… a gift to Xuannü’s successor that I grant you leave to use until you present it and the bow to them,” she said, once again drawing on what memories of Odin’s she could access to fit the act of giving a gift to a questor. “It will protect the wearer from the environment and their own archery process, sharpen their accuracy, and better enable them to choose between the options presented to them.”

“Thank you for your generosity,” said Revel, strapping the armguard to her left arm under her kimono.

“By all means. If there wasn’t anything else…” Taylor trailed off, gesturing towards the medical tent.

“Ah, one more thing,” said Myrddin, snapping his fingers and causing what looked to be a smartphone to fall out of a rift in space into his hand. “This is for you. I keep them on hand for situations like these, where I’d want to get in contact with an ally under the table, so to speak.”

Taylor took the phone and slipped it into a pouch on her belt. “Thank you very much. I’ll be in touch.”

As the godling descended, both capes stared after her, lost in thought. Eventually, Revel turned to Myrddin. “If I may ask…”

“Why was I not putting on the airs I normally do?” Seeing his subordinate nod, he chuckled. “The theatrics are for the public, not the woman I ask to save my cousin from her fate. There were some, to be sure, but that was as much force of habit as anything.”

Another moment of silence.

“Do you think she can do it?” asked Revel.

Myrddin sighed. “One way or another, yes. What I’m more concerned about is what the Morrigan will leave behind.” He took in a deep breath, then let his cheeks puff out as he exhaled. “That is for then, though. Come, we have a city to put back together.”

The next interruption to Taylor’s work in the med tent was slightly more expected than the previous.

Slightly, because as much as she was expecting some higher-ups to approach her about joining up, there was no feasible way for her to expect all three members of the Triumvirate to walk in led by the imposing figure of Alexandria.

“Volur, we need to speak with you,” said Eidolon, arms folded over his chest.

Before Taylor could get out a word, Horizon cut in. “Make it snappy. Say what you will about a normal Simurgh fight but we’re swamped in injuries today because it was so damn short, and I’d rather have all healers on deck to chew through some of the backlog sooner than later.”

“Relax, Horizon,” said Taylor. “They’re the Triumvirate and have great respect for the relief work that goes into cleaning up fights on their scale. They wouldn’t keep me for longer than strictly necessary.” Even through her helmet, it was clear that she was all but challenging the trio to disagree with her.

“Of course,” said Legend. “We’re just hoping she can fill in some of the gaps in the timeline we have for the fight, and maybe explain some of the choices she made.”

Taylor and Horizon’s eyes met and they both silently agreed to not comment on the Triumvirate’s blatant show of braggadocio and the potential implications thereof.

“Fine. But if it takes longer than fifteen minutes I’m going to drag her back, and damn anyone who stands in my way.”

“Noted,” said Alexandria.

They led Taylor out of the med tent and into an odd, vaguely mushroom-looking structure, and specifically a room containing a variety of capes. She didn’t recognize most of them, but a blonde dressed in purple who blanched at the sight of her was vaguely familiar, and she knew enough about the cape scene in cities near Brockton Bay to recognize March (from the one incident involving Flechette shaving her head using a series of thrown razor blades, which had been good for a laugh back in November) and the Bostonian crime lord Accord.

“Let’s make this quick,” said Alexandria, causing the susurrus of whispered conversation to die out. “What new information do we have on the Simurgh based on Volur’s actions?”

“The main bodies of the Endbringers aren’t necessary, strictly speaking,” said the blonde in purple, still pale and darting glances at Taylor. “They were… designed? something like that, to evoke a specific emotional reaction in humanity, and the core that Volur exposed is the important part. Based on the appearances and nature of the three I suspect the designer wanted to evoke some strongly Christian imagery, but I can’t be sure without more information on who or what made them.”

“So… what, there’s some Master out there f*ckin’ laughing at us trying to beat his monsters?” asked a bleach-blond man with barbed wire on his leather jacket.

“We lack the information to properly make assumptions about the Master. The more important thing we should be focusing on is the direct threat that is the Endbringers. There is a significant possibility that a new Endbringer appears based on previous patterns of escalation around their battles.”

The clamor that the room descended into at Accord’s statement was only quieted by an explosion from the rabbit-masked March. “Let the man speak or the next one takes a life.”

The room went quiet, and March turned to Accord. “Explain your statement for those of us less familiar with the history of Endbringer battles.”

“The arrival of Leviathan and the Simurgh were both preceded by significant decreases in the casualty counts in the previous battles in a way that can be traced to individual capes that stymied their battle style which were killed in the immediate next attack. For example, the cape Hodr had the ability to dampen energy attacks from a single target and use some fraction of the energy they dampened, and they were killed by Leviathan in his attack on Oslo. Likewise, Strongtower was an Alexandria package swift enough to match Leviathan and with some ability to dampen his storms, and he was driven insane in the Simurgh’s attack on Lausanne and only died this past year at the hands of the Thanda. We cannot afford to count on Volur’s survival past the next Endbringer attack or her ability to kill them.”

All eyes in the room turned to Taylor.

“Wonderful,” she groused. “I’m marked for attack and death if my enemies get their hands on me. That and two bucks will buy you a coffee in the Bay.”

“This is no time for irreverence,” replied Accord.

“Gallows humor is always appropriate.” Taylor turned to the Triumvirate. “Is there anything else for me here beyond vague warnings of targeting in the future, or can I go back to the med tent?”

Alexandria opened her mouth, but Legend beat her to the punch. “Go ahead and go,” he said. “We can handle things here, as long as you're willing to offer up contact information for us to get in touch with you later?”

Taylor nodded. “Myrddin can get a hold of me.” With that, she turned and left the room, raido turning her journey back to the medical tent into a single step once she was out of sight of the assorted capes.

“Welcome back,” said Horizon. “How’d it go?”

“Not great,” said Taylor. “Apparently the Bay is going to be an Endbringer target, there’s probably going to be a new Endbringer, and I’m specifically drawing their presence for almost killing the Simurgh.”

Horizon blinked. “You were gone for ten minutes.”

“What can I say,” said Taylor wryly. “I live a charmed life.”

“How’d it go?” asked Shadow Stalker, arms crossed.

“It was… weird,” replied Assault. “The newbie here in the Bay, Volur, she damaged to piss off the Simurgh but good after she cleared out the med tent early on in the fight. Then, once she had like five minutes away from the murder pigeon, she grabbed like five other capes and put together a plan that almost put the Smurf down. She actually punched through her entirely with the rest of them, too, one hell of a lightning bolt on her. She threw a bitch fit and left after that, and now thanks to the new kid on the block we’ve got one of the lowest casualty Simurgh attacks on the record in Canberra.”

“Sounds strong. Any way I can meet her?”

“Uh… maybe? Depends on when she wants to come in. She’s close with Panacea, apparently, so we’re asking through her, but we’re not expecting her by at any point in the next couple days. She’s earned a few days off, if you ask me.” Assault yawned. “‘Scuse me. If there’s nothing else, I'm gonna go get takeout and then pass out for about twelve hours.”

Sophia let him go without remark, too lost in thought to stop him. There was the faintest possibility that it was Hebert, after all- the bitch had exerted some kind of weird energy attack that seemed to interact with her Breaker form, and that kind of ability spoke well to the kind of attack that could “punch through” the Simurgh.

Ultimately, she decided it wasn’t possible for it to be Hebert. The bitch was a pushover and, while not strictly unintelligent, she tended to be bad at thinking on her feet.

“I’ll hunt her down,” she muttered. “Then maybe we can get Hebert and show her her place together.” Secure in her decision, Shadow Stalker walked away, not noticing the eyes that watched her from the shadows.

Interesting, thought Flechette, going over her conversations with Volur and Panacea earlier that day as well as what she’d overheard, both from them and Clay’s musings. What is it about Taylor Hebert that makes you so vitriolic, Sophia?

Chapter 18: Out Of Touch Thursday

Chapter Text

Taylor was fortunate enough that, between the grateful capes she’d put back together, Glory Girl and Flechette hovering, Horizon’s gimlet stare when she wasn’t triaging injuries, and the fact that she blasted through an Endbringer, most of the other capes who wanted anything from her weren’t willing to risk approaching her. Those that did were mostly fishing for information, and with Odin advising her and her bugs to help her split her focus, she was able to send them away disappointed.

She spent about four or five hours in the med tent, long enough that Horizon said that most casualties recovered at that point were either considered “walking wounded” (meaning that they could mostly rely on the human body’s own healing abilities to recover) or DOA (which even she couldn’t heal), before she and Panacea trudged off to the teleportation point for a yawning Strider to drag them, Glory Girl, Othala, and Flechette back to Brockton Bay.

They were met with a tense standoff between Brandish and Lady Photon on one side and Victor (a man in a red shirt and tactical vest, with a domino mask to conceal his identity) and Clausewitz (who, much like Krieg, wore an imitation of a Nazi uniform in olive green) on the other. Thankfully, the four capes broke off their whispered argument once they arrived, although that brought its own issues.

Namely, when Victor turned his eyes on her, she felt something pulsating against her head before it abruptly cut off with a wince from the man as Odin turned his piercing gaze on him.

Given the public details of his power, it wasn’t difficult to draw the causal link between it and the odd sensation in a thoroughly unwelcome realization that had Taylor almost unconsciously drawing in power (it was almost odd how quickly that became a habit, a small part of her said).

“I will assume,” she said deliberately, “that that was not, in fact, an attempted deliberate breach of the Endbringer Truce.”

Clausewitz’s eyes widened in shock as Victor paled, and while the members of New Wave (and one Ward) present weren’t nearly so quick to action, in short order the two members of the Empire were staring down five capes capable of turning them into memories and meat.

“Explain,” said Brandish, a spear made of orange-white light clutched tight in her fists.

“Well,” said Clausewitz in a tone that, while probably supposed to be reassuring, felt hollow to Taylor, “my compatriot’s parahuman ability is, unfortunately, of the ‘always on’ variety. What that means in regards to long-term exposure is not much, since when he isn’t actively using it it defaults to just scanning the brain of other capes, but I do believe that is why the young lady reacted as she did. I understand that Miss H-Volur has some form of defense against Thinker and Master effects, does she not?”

Taylor’s eyes narrowed. Even if the man’s voice wasn’t familiar but just out of her mental reach, the slip he made that showed he almost certainly knew her name set her on edge.

Unfortunately, it looked like the only ones who were similarly wary were Flechette (a relative unknown, who seemed to be more wary for form’s sake than anything else) and Glory Girl. The rest of the capes present were all making vague noises of agreement, as if the existence of an active cognitohazard near a powerful healer and independent cape that most people would kill to get their hands on wasn’t a de facto breach of the Endbringer Truce just based on the potential long-term damage someone like Victor could inflict in order to recruit her.

“Be more mindful of the effects of your abilities in the future, then,” said Brandish sharply. “Take your teammates with you and leave.”

“Of course. For what it’s worth, I apologize that this meeting has been tainted by the specter of conflict,” oozed Clausewitz as he led Victor and Othala away from the courtyard in front of the PRT building they were standing in. At almost the same time, Flechette turned on her heel and walked into the building, leaving only Taylor and the members of New Wave in the courtyard.

“There’s no way that was an accident,” said Glory Girl. “They’re far too careful not to consider the implications of Victor’s power in the light of the Endbringer Truce.”

“Everyone has their off days,” responded Lady Photon. “I, for one, can’t blame them for a little lack of caution in the wake of sending one of their teammates off to an Endbringer fight, even in a noncombative role.”

“Are you seriously trying to blow this off? It’s arguably a complete breach of the Truce, if he’s lying about Victor’s power being always on!”

“Victoria!” Brandish snapped. “Now is not the time for your grudge against the Empire! I miss Fleur too, but you can’t hold the organization responsible for the actions of one boy.”

“I can when they betray the principles we capes live by in welcoming him with open arms!” she shot back, glaring at her mother angrily.

Panacea frowned, massaging her temples, but didn’t say anything.

“That is enough. We’ll speak more about this later,” said Brandish, before turning to Taylor. “I apologize for airing family business in such a manner.”

“It’s fine,” said Taylor somewhat curtly, despite her agreement with the Alexandria package. “Have a nice evening.”

Without waiting for a response, she invoked raido and strode off, letting the magic shorten and conceal her journey home.

“Taylor, I am so sorry about Monday,” said Vicky, walking backwards along the Boardwalk. “I don’t know what was up with Mom or Aunt Sarah that made them undersell the whole thing with Victor so hard, I tried to tell her just how bad it could be but I’m not sure she got it.”

“I might have a suspicion,” muttered Amy, too quietly for either of her companions to hear.

“To be fair, it’s not as bad until you realize that my power is a skill-based energy manipulation-” Amy snorted at this, “- or that Clausewitz knows my civilian identity.”

“Please, please tell me I didn’t hear that right,” said Vicky.

Taylor shook her head. “I’m like ninety five percent sure he does, he almost called me by my last name as if it’s habit, which implies he’s had contact with me… He might be Gladly. Maybe not, not sure given the fact that Clausewitz is a confident jackass whereas Gladly is kinda a pushover.”

“And Gladly is…” Amy trailed off.

“Oh, right. He’s one of the asshole teachers at my school, one of the ones who enables the Terrible Trio.” Taylor made jazz hands at the epithet.

“Hm. Right, yeah that tracks.”

“Speaking of those three,” asked Vicky, “do you have any idea why they decided to suddenly go all in on f*cking with you?”

“Search me,” said Taylor. “I know, intellectually, it’s not because I’m unattractive, which I am, but half the time it feels like it with how often they come after my looks, and I know it would have taken something worse to turn Emma against me.”

Vicky blinked. “Taylor. Have you looked in the mirror recently?”

Taylor stopped walking, stunned by the non sequitur. “What does that have to do with the price of bread?”

Vicky sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose as she muttered invective under her breath. “Taylor. You’re f*cking built, now, and the only reason anyone’d call you unattractive now is your clothes, which we can fix.”

“I… what?”

Amy sighed. “Just go with it. Vicky doesn’t let me resist when she gets like this, so I need someone else to suffer as I have suffered.” The acerbic words were offset by the gentle tone and teasing wink Amy shot Taylor.

Neither sister gave the tall brunette a chance to respond, dragging her off to a boutique that was advertised as, on alternate Saturdays, the host of the cape puppeteer Parian and her design efforts.

The first outfit the Dallons stuffed into Taylor hands was a relatively simple affair: a striped, monochromatic blouse that exposed her shoulders and little diamonds all down her arms, not quite falling low enough to meet the top of the black pair of skinny jeans that accompanied it. Figuratively dragging her feet, Taylor slowly doffed the baggy hoodie and loose jeans she had on, before freezing as her eyes swept across the mirror on the wall.

She touched her upper arm, unbelieving, and the figure in the mirror did the same, slender fingers making contact with a well-defined bicep.

The dark-haired young woman changed into the new outfit almost robotically, still reeling with the revelation.

When she emerged from the changing room, Vicky’s immediate response was a wolf whistle which set Taylor to blushing fiercely. “Wow, girl!” she cheered, smirking. “I knew you’d clean up damn well.”

“And you called me a useless lesbian,” grumbled Amy, loud enough to set her sister to blushing but not loud enough for Taylor to hear.

Once the taller brunette returned to the changing room, Vicky turned to her sister. “Amyyy,” she whined, “stop being mean!”

“No,” the shorter sister replied, absently wishing she was chewing gum to pop a bubble to drive her point home. “Not until you put yourself out there.”

“But then I’d have to deal with the mortifying ordeal of being known, and the possibility of rejection,” Vicky replied.

“Tough.”

Taylor emerged from the changing room in a flowy, pastel green sundress, once again baring her shoulders in a fashion that Victoria herself preferred to wear, to a pouting Vicky and a smug Amy. “Something happen?”

“Not particularly, Vicky just owes me five bucks. I told her you’d look good in green, but she didn’t believe me,” Amy lied.

Taylor’s eye narrowed, but she let it slide. “If you say so.”

About half an hour later, Taylor walked away from the store with a bag full of clothes, a cheery Vicky on her left, and a yawning Amy on the right, both of whom held their own, smaller bags.

“So,” said Amy, “when’s the court case picking back up?”

“Monday,” replied Taylor. “Someone dumped a sh*tload of paperwork on Judge Myra this week, but he said it should all be done by then.”

“Good to hear. The sooner you can get this behind you and get out of that cesspit, th-” began Vicky.

She was interrupted by the noises of something running through a side street on Taylor’s right, which a moment later resolved itself when a stocky girl atop a lizard monster thing, followed by two others, came careening out of the side street, yelling “Get out of the way!”

Taylor invoked two instances of algiz, one to summon her armor and another to provide more abstract protections to her identity. Then, some instinct had her throw up a barrier between Panacea and the street using a third casting of the rune.

That precaution was borne out as she realized that there was the sound of something else coming from the alley just moments before a blur of metal slammed into Panacea, hurling the healer back but not injuring her thanks to Taylor’s instinct.

“Be careful where you’re running, asshole!” Taylor shouted, even as the mass of metal shifted into the recognizable form that Hookwolf preferred. “You almost just killed Panacea!”

“Get out of my way, girlie,” he snarled in reply. “I got beef with Bitch behind you, you don’t get involved.”

“I’ll get involved when you try to kill the only other healer in the Bay, you bastard. Turn back or be subdued,” Taylor said, standing firm.

“So be it.” Hookwolf rippled as two other capes ran out of the street behind him: one a shirtless man in a tiger mask and the other wearing a metal cage as a mask. “I warned you, brat. For what it’s worth, I’ll tell your family you died a warrior in the old ways.”

“Shut the f*ck up, Nazi,” said Glory Girl, rising into the air and letting her aura expand to fill the area. “That’s my sister you tried to blend.”

She exploded forwards, and the battle was begun.

Lisa Wilbourne wasn’t satisfied with her current arrangement with Coil.

Oh, don’t get her wrong, she enjoyed the benefits of having a benefactor. Financial backing, a network of support personnel, and what was shaping up to be a pretty solid smash-and-grab team.

On the other hand, the blatant disregard for any of the rules capes nominally played by, in both her press-ganging and the threats of turning her into a drugged-up basem*nt Thinker, was a fairly major turn-off.

She probably could have escaped within a few months, just from the resources she siphoned from his accounts and a little bit of social engineering, but at this point she was pissed enough at the man that, instead of abandoning the city (and running the risk of getting picked up by a worse boss), she’d decided to tear the man down as best she could.

That was at least partially why she’d been willing to show up to the Endbringer fight in Canberra when he asked: while gathering information on capes under the Truce was… frowned upon, especially when it was a specific cape as Coil had asked, she felt that the networking potential to find potential future coworkers was worth breaching the rules.

Of course, that was before she had laid eyes on Volur and her power started screaming at her.

Parahuman power connected to insects, based on altered insect activity nearby. Offensive abilities not connected to parahuman powers. Healing abilities not connected to parahuman powers. Additional Thinker ability not connected to parahuman powers. Additional powers preceded by invocation of Futhark runes. Volur is a god. Strength of displayed abilities suggest Volur is a God. Divine nature sugg-

Lisa shoved down both her power and the fear at remembering the breadth of power displayed by Volur, then sighed as she pulled her phone out of her pocket to report to Coil.

He picked up quickly. “What is your report, my Tattletale?”

Lisa shuddered, viscerally uncomfortable with the method address, then spoke. “Volur is… sandbagging significantly. She punched through the Simurgh with one attack, showcased an incredible healing ability, some kind of Mover ability, and at least a couple of different Thinker powers. I’d be very careful about trying to get her on side.”

“I thank you for your input,” Coil said. “Anything else?”

“Accord suggests, and I concur, that there is likely to be an attack by a new Endbringer on Brockton Bay at some point within the next two months or so specifically targeted at killing Volur.”

“I will keep that in mind,” said Coil, hanging up without anything else.

Intends to leverage Volur’s civilian identity against her. Knows her civilian identity. Will not succeed in the attempt. Has tried before in alternate timelines.

She cut off her power and nodded decisively. Sorry, Volur, she thought, sparing a moment of apology for the cape for using her to deal with Coil. Then, she turned to her computer and opened it.

She needed to prepare for when Coil was gone, after all, and what better time to start than now?

Chapter 19: Exterminator, Zookeeper, Game Warden

Chapter Text

Despite her impressive showing at the Endbringer fight, Taylor was, strictly speaking, in no better a position against the Empire capes (and, potentially, the fourth cape riding on the odd spiky lizards, if she decided to come back) than she was against the Butcher earlier in the week. While she could, theoretically, unleash more energy through runic abilities for longer, that required her to draw in energy over a longer period of time than she’d been afforded, since she wasn’t quite in the habit of maintaining her internal pool of energy with external energy around the clock like she had during the fight.

That said, despite not having any technical advantages over the version of her who had pushed the Butcher back, she had a better situation than the past version of her.

First and foremost was that, while still formidable, the trio of Hookwolf, Cricket, and Stormtiger was nowhere near the overwhelming physical threat of the Butcher, Animos, and Hemorrhagia. Even setting aside the massive advantages that were the Butcher’s reincarnation and Animos’ scream, Stormtiger and Cricket were nowhere as physically durable as Animos and Hemorrhagia, despite Stormtiger’s defensive whirlwind that deflected most projectiles.

Furthermore, she was less limited in her energy pool, in that if she got the chance to duck behind cover for long enough, she could return to the fight almost as good as new.

But perhaps the single strongest tactical advantage they had was that, this time, Glory Girl had taken the initiative instead of her.

Aside from the immediate consequences of sending Hookwolf careening back and forcing the other two capes into evasive action, Taylor could feel an odd not-pressure against her head, which she took to mean that the blonde’s aura was going full blast. That assumption was borne out by Stormtiger’s shaking hands and Cricket’s harsher-than-warranted-by-her-dodge breathing.

A further benefit of Glory Girl seizing the initiative was that the eyes of all three capes were primarily trained on her, an advantage that Taylor didn’t hesitate to exploit.

The first warning that the two Neo-Nazis got was the chill in the air as the vertical line of isa drew itself in front of her. Stormtiger managed to launch himself up far enough that the ice that formed on the uneven ground of the Boardwalk closed around nothing, but Cricket didn’t have aerokinesis augmenting her leap and as such flopped awkwardly to the ground.

To her credit, she reacted quickly, chipping away at her binding with her weapons, and Stormtiger hurled his invisible air blades at Taylor to distract and harry her.

Taylor ignored Stormtiger’s attack, letting the mail of her armor turn his attacks aside, and flicked more power into the hovering rune. The ice surrounding Cricket’s feet abruptly expanded, catching her weapons in midswing and leaving the woman awkwardly hunched over as it extended up to immobilize her up to her elbow.

“Secure Cricket,” snapped Taylor, waiting just long enough for Panacea to nod sharply before she hurled herself into the air under hagalaz’s power, flashing gebo and teiwaz to arm herself with a simple spear and become temporarily competent with the weapon.

Despite his being a Nazi, Taylor had to give him credit: even if he wasn’t specialized in fighting in midair, especially in melee, he was acquitting himself decently, showing a decent ability to evade or deflect her attacks.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to stand up to the combat ability Taylor could call upon.

The neo-Nazi’s motion came to an abrupt halt as Taylor turned a desperately dodged thrust into a sweeping strike, shattering the man’s knee and concentration both.

Before he could fall more than about three feet, Taylor was there, catching him with the haft of her spear under his arms and slowly lowering him to the floor next to an unconscious Cricket. Panacea’s hand whipped out to touch the shirtless Stormtiger’s chest, and he, too, was unconscious, letting Taylor release both the spear and the runes she was maintaining.

With that out of the way, Taylor turned towards the pair of Brutes still tussling.

Glory Girl was relying primarily on her enhanced mobility to launch hit-and-run attacks on the Nazi, which was admittedly the right choice despite the limited effects it was having on the more malleable cape.

“Disengage!” snapped Taylor, sowilo already charging up above her right hand, and without hesitation Glory Girl did so.

Hookwolf turned his bulk to glare at Taylor just in time to recognize the rune as some sort of attack, lunge at her to try and preempt it, and fail as a small orb of plasma shot forth, zigzagging to melt all four of his legs off.

The metallic form of Hookwolf shrunk as he rearranged his mass to recreate his limbs, only for the orb to return on its earlier trajectory, once again dismembering Hookwolf on its way back to Taylor.

A little warier, Hookwolf panned his head around, assessing the situation. The cape he had been chasing was well out of sight, and in between himself and his unconscious allies stood Panacea, whose death or even maiming would be just the excuse needed in order to unite the entire city, heroic or otherwise, against the Empire in a way that would almost certainly result in its fall, tenuous alliance with the Teeth or not. Staying to fight wasn’t likely to work, between Volur (who had very nearly, according to Othala, killed the Simurgh) and Glory Girl he’d be tossed around like a ragdoll until they got bored or just blasted apart until he stopped fighting, one way or another, and so there was really only one option to take here.

“Tch,” scoffed Glory Girl, watching the vaguely canid form of Hookwolf turn tail and flee, “I thought these Nazi assholes were supposed to be all ‘fight to ze last, mein herren’ and all that jazz.”

Taylor laughed. “They have two Thinkers who are almost certainly specialized in tactics or strategy, between Victor and Clausewitz. If they were smart, or brave, they’d have taken over the damn city, and I give thanks every day that the Nazi species is naturally inclined towards cowardice, especially in the face of both dragons and Americans.”

“Hear, hear,” called Panacea, jolting the two as they’d forgot that she was there. “Now let’s lock these assholes up and throw away the key already! I’m missing out on all the wonderful unproductive healing to counteract the effects of the gangs I could be doing,” she grumped.

While they were waiting for the PRT to mobilize and collect Stormtiger and Cricket, Glory Girl turned to Taylor and frowned. “How are you so goddamn good at this? Like, it took me years to understand fighting in the way that I do, but here you are just breezing your way through combat like it’s a f*cking dance, and your tactical sense is incredible.”

“I believe,” said Odin, “that it’s partially memory bleedover and partially Taylor taking on a divine aspect as the figurative god of capes, which makes Taylor supernaturally good at whatever things are associated with ‘things that capes do’ in the minds of the general public.”

“GAH JESUS f*ck,” shouted Glory Girl, starting violently enough to crack the concrete as she leapt into the air. “Who the f*ck- is that f*cking Odin?”

Taylor blinked. “Wait, you can see him now?” she asked.

“Hand,” said Panacea, making grabby hands at her sister, who obliged and offered her hand to be an inspection point for Panacea’s abilities.

“What do you mean, ‘now’? Has this old man been hanging around you all the time and just been sort of invisible?”

“Uh… kinda? Your sister could see him too, if that helps,” said Taylor.

“Not particularly,” said Glory Girl. “I mean, what’s changed with me that I can see him now?”

Panacea’s other hand rose and poked Taylor in the cheek. “I mean, it could be gradual exposure, or some sort of long-term effect of him changing, or maybe even a shared hallucination, or-”

“Congratulations, Vicky,” interrupted Panacea drolly, hands falling to her sides, “you’re also a god. Given what you’ve described about your dreams and the changes to your behavior and costume, plus what Revel said… you’ve inherited Freyja’s mantle, probably.”

“What.” Taylor wasn’t sure who said it: her, Odin, or Glory Girl.

“Yeah, Revel was in touch with me and let me know this might be happening. You’re still… I think the term Revel used was ‘internalizing the divine mantle of your predecessor’ which basically means that your body’s getting used to the power before you get conscious access to it. I think the both of you are still going through it, since you didn’t drink your god via Shard connection, but that’s just conjecture based on what I know from my own experience and Revel’s cryptic-ass bullsh*t.” Panacea shrugged. “Eventually, you’re going to have access to like actual godly power as well as your parahuman abilities, in Taylor’s case in addition to whatever the Runes are doing, but what exactly it’s going to be is anybody’s guess.”

Odin nodded. “As she says, your bodies are… growing, to be more capable of hosting a god’s might. I believe Victoria was faster to adapt because Taylor here was… much diminished by the act of inheriting my power, whereas Victoria wasn’t.”

Taylor opened her mouth to cut in, but her bugs noticed something that changed her mind. “Let’s table this conversation for later, and in private. PRT’s incoming.”

“Mark that as arrived,” said the red blur that resolved itself into Velocity. Then, he surveyed the situation and sighed before pressing his finger to his ear. “Console, Velocity responding to the disturbance on the Boardwalk. Glory Girl and Panacea, in civvies, talking to Volur, with a subdued Stormtiger and Cricket and signs of Hookwolf.”

Then, under his breath, he muttered “Always five minutes before my shift is over.”

“What are we going to do, Krouse? Accord’s probably not going to be mollified by just you running Cody off, and even if he is it’s only a matter of time until someone else screws up and provokes Noelle into a rampage.” Sundancer was visibly shaken, and no wonder- she’d been the one to interact with Accord, more than not, and the man was terrifying even when his rage was pointed at someone else.

He sighed, regretting the necessity of the lie that he’d run Cody off instead of letting the man sell him to the Yangban, but at least he could answer Mars’ question.

“Well, Accord has seen fit to give us a… shall I say, a severance package. Namely, he handed us off to an affiliate of his named Coil in Brockton Bay.”

Luke frowned. “What’s Coil gonna do for us? We’re already working with the best Thinker in the US and he can’t help us, either with Noelle or with getting home,” he asked.

“There’s two particular reasons we’d want to go for Brockton Bay,” said Krouse, allowing a pause for the purposes of suspense.

“Well?” asked Jess, understandably a little frustrated. She’d always been more sympathetic to Cody than him, and given the content of what he was about to say he couldn’t fault her impatience. “Spit it out!”

“Brockton Bay is the home of two of the most powerful healers in the world,” he said, fingers itching for a cigarette. “Those being Panacea and Volur. Coil has promised us access to both of them if we work out well enough for his particular goals, and hopefully we’d be able to use one of their powers to heal Noelle from… her condition.”

Oliver and Jess exchanged a look.

“I think they should be able to heal at least Jess’ legs as well, but I’m not sure how it’d interact with Oliver’s power…” said Krouse.

With the spark of hope in Jess’ eyes, hurriedly being buried under resignation, he knew he had another person on board with the move to Brockton Bay.

The boy in question just sighed. “As long as it helps Noelle,” he said, the same kind of weary resignation in his eyes.

With the three of them on board, if not enthusiastically, Luke and Mars would at least fall in line, as long as it was for Noelle. This was something he’d leaned on a couple of times throughout the year and change they’d been in this strange new world, and he’d have to exploit it at least a few more times before the ride was done, he was sure.

In the Earth’s orbit, the Simurgh didn’t shift, even as she assessed the impact on her plans. Ultimately, without further data on the behavior of the-host-that-would-have-been-Khepri, she wasn’t sure what the outcome of the Travelers’ visit would have been, but she was more than willing to sacrifice these particular pawns on the altar of knowledge. The Eye didn’t have her versatility, and she could count on other tools to unveil Cauldron if she needed to, but data on the anomaly that had obstructed Queen Administrator’s host was priceless.

To that end, she turned her attention to her fellow Conflict Engines, the ones still dormant. It was a possibility, no matter how remote, that she could salvage the plan to create Khepri and destroy the Warrior Hub in accordance with High Priest’s orders, but that required a certain level of forging of the host in question, and she already had the solution in mind.

She started the boot-up sequence for the Conflict Engines she had in mind, then performed what would have been an approving nod, to a human, in Shardspace. [Tower] and [Magician] would be an excellent test of Queen Administrator’s host, and if she failed… well, QA could be seeded again, if need be.

Chapter 20: Taylor Hebert's Day Off

Chapter Text

“So. Ames. What the f*ck?” asked Victoria, once the three capes had managed to escape the public eye with their shopping.

“Revel is a cryptic bitch and getting information from her is like pulling f*cking teeth,” replied the shorter sister, somewhat unhelpfully.

“Okay, cool,” said Vicky, somewhat drolly. “What does that have to do with the price of bread?”

Amy rolled her eyes. “I’m getting there. Anyways, so Revel wanted to talk with me about the responsibility she’s been given to choose a new god, and she dropped some hints about what situation you might end up in as you inherit, even though I’m not sure how well that matches up to the Norse pantheon given how my personal experience differed from yours.

“Okay,” said Taylor, “start with the basics.”

“Alright, so based on what Revel says about the information she’s been given on the way that the Chinese pantheon chose new gods from vanilla mortals, you should have been knocked out for at least twelve hours, as a bare minimum, as you internalized the power of the god and filtered it through what makes you you to make you a unique god relative to what your predecessor was.” Panacea frowned. “You could make an argument about that applying with regards to Taylor, but I’d argue that’s more a consequence of the weird extra power source she’s hooked into, and I haven’t seen anything like that happening with Victoria.”

“Hold up a sec,” said Vicky. “What do you mean, weird extra power source?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Taylor’s hooked into both the regular divine power that you’re hooked into, albeit a different flavor, and then it feels like there’s something else there too. It’s like… if a regular god is a power plant, this other thing is like the entire sun.”

Vicky blinked. “What.”

“Aye, lass, ye have the long and short of it,” said Odin. “She is connected to the power that she inherited from me, as well as a legacy older than this planet. Tell me, what do you know about the underlying structure of the universe?”

“A little,” said Panacea, frowning. “I know there’s something there that we latch onto in order to manipulate the world and exert our divine power, but I don’t know what it is or how it works.”

Odin nodded. “Better than I’d hoped. Well, that’s what Taylor is hooked into. It presents for her as it did for me, as the ability to invoke the Futhark script to manipulate reality in various ways and we refer to it as the Runes. I’ve heard that it manifested differently for my predecessors, but I haven’t been able to talk to any who had different manifestations from me, since Thoth and Gilgamesh, the first two I know were connected to reality in this way, both passed before I inherited.”

“Holy sh*t.” It wasn’t clear which of the Dallon sisters said this, but given their shared expressions of shock, it didn’t particularly matter.

“So… what does that mean exactly?” asked Victoria.

“She is, essentially, the most individually powerful person on this planet, or at least she will be when she fully integrates with the Runes,” said Odin.

“That’s… wow. It’s almost intimidating,” said Vicky, cheeks flushing.

“How do you handle the responsibility?” asked Amy, voice low.

“Ultimately, I acknowledge that, while I have more ability to effect change in the world than the average person, I have no more and no less responsibility to improve the world than any person does. I will work to improve the world, but at the end of the day I think you need to acknowledge the fact that you have as much responsibility, if not more, to yourself as to the rest of the world, if for no other reason than because you need to maintain yourself in order to better the world,” Taylor said, changing her statement from her own philosophy to what she felt that Panacea should do to maintain her own health.

“It’s that simple?” the more experienced healer asked.

Odin chuckled. “By no means, lass. The broad concept is, but the precise execution of that concept is extremely complex, and keeping to this concept is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. But it is possible, and that’s enough for most people.”

No one commented on the wet shine of Panacea’s eyes.

“Alright,” she said, voice perhaps a little shakier than before, “so back to the topic at hand. So, the way that a ‘normal’ divine inheritance works is something like this…”

Coil wasn’t quite sure what to make of the recent changes to his city.

When he’d heard the initial reports of the cape in mail, he’d written them off as a Tinker and had his men focus on catching her through the usual methods (read: watching junkyards, electronics shops, and other sources of materials). While it had led to his… recruitment of Trevor Medina, it hadn’t led back to her.

He had two things to thank: firstly, the fact that Piggot was almost physically incapable of subtlety, so her awareness of Taylor Hebert’s identity was entered into the computer system where his Tattletale could get to it, and the fact that the Butcher had decided to hunt her down in civvies, forcing her hand.

He never thought he’d thank either of them for their remarkable brand of gunboat bull in an antique store diplomacy, and yet here he was.

But in the brief time that Taylor Hebert had been active she had had a significant impact on the city.

Technically, the beginning wasn’t her fault, seeing as how Vista’s realization of the circ*mstances surrounding her Trigger event had been the main cause of the return of the Teeth, but the causal link was still there even setting aside Volur’s cooperation with Vista and Quarrel.

Combining that with Clausewitz breaking his historical pattern of passivity and defensiveness against her (or perhaps just Hookwolf chafing under the bonds of his Master power) and Lung being suspiciously quiet of late, and the impact she’d had on the balance of power in the city was quite palpable, even ignoring the revelations that had come of the events in Canberra.

As a result of the revelations as of that event, he wasn’t feeling quite so confident about his plans to press-gang her, between the attention she’d gotten as a terrifyingly powerful healer, the Blaster power strong enough to punch through an Endbringer, the keen mind that had put together a team to give her the chance to use said Blaster power, and the resistance to Thinker powers Accord had told him about.

Perhaps he could get his hands on the new Thinker his sources were suggesting had Triggered recently (the Mayor’s niece, which was a bit of a mixed bag, but nothing he couldn’t work around) first and leverage her power against Taylor Hebert. In combination with his Tattletale (who might need some… chemical persuasion, but nothing he couldn’t provide), he would have access to the strongest Thinker backroom in the city with the possible exception of the combination of Clausewitz and Victor depending on how exactly the Alcott girl’s power worked and whether whatever protection Taylor Hebert had against Thinker powers worked against hers.

Even if it didn’t, it would still take the burden off of his information network to have such a Thinker who was potentially capable of pulling information out of nowhere, not to mention the chance to leverage her power against the situation less directly.

At least she had provided a lever he could use against Piggot with her revelations about Shadow Stalker’s… indiscretions, as well as a potential new cape for his Undersiders, given her flight from her civilian identity and the reaction of the PRT and Protectorate. It wasn’t a sure thing, given his current plans for the future of his catspaws, but a certain degree of adaptability was required in a city with the Butcher, superpowered Nazis (especially if the planner in question was black and in a position of power in their civilian identity, as he planned to become), and a somewhat-unpredictable independent cape with enough firepower to punch through an Endbringer. Regardless, the issue was one to confront later, when he had his hands on the girl.

Regardless of the circ*mstances of the city (and his wishes thereof), he had work to do, so he forced his focus back to the dossiers on his screen, splitting the timeline as he did so.

In one universe, he continued through the information on New Wave to see if they had any new points of leverage for him to exploit against them (and, indirectly, against Volur, given the girl’s friendship with the Dallon children).

In the other, he closed the window, and triggered the intercom. “Send him in.”

After a moment, the door to his office opened and in walked the suit-clad form of Trickster, known somewhat less publicly as Francis Krouse.

“Mr. Krouse, have a seat. We have much to discuss about the terms of your group’s employment under me.”

The crack of Judge Myra’s gavel startled Taylor out of the trance that she’d fallen into. “Enough!” he boomed, turning a freezing glare onto Piggot. “The PRT and Winslow are being held jointly liable for the attempted murder of Taylor Hebert at the hands of Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, and Madison Clements, and I award the sum in the paperwork to Taylor Hebert, for her medical bills, pain and suffering, and the damage to her reputation and educational career.”

Piggot stood up. “This is outrageous! The cost of the settlement will provide a significant barrier to the PRT’s law enforcement duties in this city, and the publication of this court case could destroy the national PRT and the Wards program. I order you to seal the results of this court case, under my authority as Director of the PRT ENE!”

“Madam Director,” said Judge Myra, with enough cold fury in his voice that it almost felt like the room chilled a few degrees, “Sit down and be quiet before I declare you in contempt of court. I excused your paperwork submissions last week as not intended to interfere with this court case, but if you persist in this obstructionism, I will have no choice.”

Piggot’s face reddened, but she didn’t speak.

“Good. Now, as a result of this, I believe that Shadow Stalker’s probation should be considered violated, based on the evidence, and as such I charge the PRT with bringing her in to stand trial for the attempted murder of Taylor Hebert.” He rapped his gavel on the bench. “Court is dismissed. You may be called as witnesses in the trials that are connected to this case, and I suspect that some of the oversight you both answer to might be interested in talking with you,” this was directed at the furious Piggot and the rapidly paling Blackwell, “but you are free to go.”

It appeared to take physical effort for the corpulent PRT Director to not go on some tirade against Taylor as she left, glaring at the young woman with intensity enough that, if non-capes could impose their feelings on the world with just will and emotion alone, would have had Taylor afraid for her safety. “I hope you’re satisfied with yourself,” Piggot spat.

“I am satisfied that I finally got the chance to get restitution for the year and a half of hell I’ve been put through, yes,” said Taylor. “Have a nice day, Director.”

Piggot stomped out in a huff, followed by the PRT’s lawyer, and somewhat less closely by a silent Blackwell and her own legal representation.

“You two go ahead, I have to discuss some of the finer details with Judge Myra,” said Mr. Truth.

Danny nodded. “Will do, and thank you very much for your work.”

The Heberts both stood up and walked out of the courtroom, causing the Dallon sisters to stand up from the bench they were seated on. “How’d it go?” asked Vicky.

“Well, given the expressions on everyone’s faces, I’m going to have to go with some variant of well, at least for Taylor,” said Amy. “Then again, I doubt Piggot would have been satisfied with any outcome that went any less in her favor than letting her press-gang you directly.”

“I mean… you’re not wrong, on either count,” said Taylor. “I may not have spent much time with Director Piggot, but from what I’ve seen she is a singularly driven woman who will almost categorically refuse to let go of a situation until it is resolved to her satisfaction or it is forcibly torn from her hands.”

“That’s a lot of words to say she’s a stubborn, self-righteous bitch who thinks her sh*t don’t stink,” said Vicky.

“That too,” said Taylor, chuckling as her father and Amy shared an exasperated look.

“Anyways…” Vicky said, moving a little closer to Taylor, “I was wondering if you wanted to celebrate your win at some point this week with me.”

“What, like a date?” asked Taylor flippantly.

“I mean… I wouldn’t say no if that’s what you wanted to call it?”

Taylor blinked, having not expected that and needing to consider her own feelings before giving the Alexandria package an answer.

How did she feel about Victoria Dallon?

The blonde was undeniably attractive, from multiple perspectives given her proportions, muscles and her facial structure. She was also intelligent enough to carry on a good conversation and in the same rough line of work, adding another commonality between them.

All of that (save the attraction) was rationality, however, which wasn’t the primary factor in modern romantic relationships.

Taylor hadn’t done a whole lot of introspection since inheriting Odin’s mantle and some of his memories, at least partially out of fear of what she’d find. For that matter, she’d avoided introspection for long before that, aside from an abstract awareness that she wasn’t mentally healthy.

But now… well, she still wasn’t normal, not that any cape could be called that, but she was… mostly healthy. The lack of trust for anyone and everyone that stemmed from both Emma’s betrayal and the people in power abandoning her was… not gone, but mitigated by something in her connection to Odin or what memories she still had access to, and she had the raw power to deal with the situations now if by no other means than by drawing wisdom from Odin and the Runes, so there was realistically no way for the situation to ever get that bad again unless she stopped trying to change it for the better.

So, she felt at least comfortable entertaining the idea of romance.

As for Victoria… well, the girl was obviously one of the first friends she’d had in years, and somewhere along the way, she’d sort of just started assuming that Vicky’d be there, like she had been in almost all her cape fights thus far. She also felt… something else, for her, but she wasn’t sure what it was yet beyond vaguely positive.

So, in short, she wasn’t sure whether she was into Glory Girl holistically, but she was more than willing to find out.

“It’s a date,” she said, and Glory Girl broke out into a grin that lit up her face.

Chapter 21: Interlude 3: Anniversary Spread

Chapter Text

Sophia Hess was not having a particularly good week, she thought as she was brooding on top of the Fortress Construction headquarters (a squat building not far from the Docks).

Firstly, she’d completely failed to track down Volur ever since the damn Simurgh attack. To be completely fair, that wasn’t entirely on her, given that no one else had been able to find the woman except for her one stint on the Boardwalk where she took out two Empire capes, easy as breathing, and scared Hookwolf off with his tail between his legs, but it still stung that she’d failed regardless of how much (or how little) personal responsibility she held for the damn situation.

Still, the delay wasn’t all bad, since it had given her time to brainstorm some of what they could do to Hebert once she’d swayed Volur to her perspective. Between Volur’s impressive firepower (both literal and metaphorical) and her own infiltrative ability, she was sure that they’d be able to have at least a little fun with the bint before they were either caught or finished her off.

Thinking of the worm brought the vindictive high she was feeling down and replaced it with the bitter burn of rage. Somehow, she’d let her persecution complex get away from her and had actually f*cking snitched, and more’s the pity, she’d actually gotten someone important to buy into that sh*t.

The lawsuit she was harping on about was bullsh*t, plain and simple, but damn if it wasn’t a pain in the ass that it had forced Sophia to all but abandon her civilian identity, an especially heavy blow after having lost her fellow predator in Emma to the damn police, of all people.

As much as she wanted to rescue her mentee, she couldn’t, not given that most police officers carried Tasers and their unfortunate habit of being Empire sympathizers on the side. She’d be dead or worse, captured, before she got to Emma, let alone escaping.

Hopefully, she’d be dealt with soon, either by Sophia or by someone else, someone who had heard the rumors about Glory Girl’s “prurient interest” in Hebert and decided to do something about it.

As much as she hated the Empire, she would be willing to mostly forgive them if they ended up being the ones to put Hebert down (mostly being with the caveat that she was going to shoot the one who ended up doing the deed, just a little bit). Even if the girl did have ice powers, so what? It wasn’t like a little ice was going to stop Crusader, or Hookwolf, and it sure as sh*t wouldn’t stand up to even just a gangb*nger with a gun.

Still, she was feeling the pain from losing Piggy’s protection. As much as she hated to admit it, she’d grown to rely on both her new mask, to know where was safe to phase through, and Armsmaster to supply her the tranqs she needed to do quiet takedowns for interrogation, and having to dodge the Protectorate and PRT patrols was a pain in the ass, even if she knew intellectually that it wasn’t so much that Piggy had sent them to hunt her as the forced disavowal that that damn judge had shoved down her throat meant she was fair game again, and she couldn’t afford to go away again until after she’d dealt with that damn worm.

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in,” drawled an almost bored-sounding voice behind her.

Sophia spun, crossbow snapping up even as she cursed the loss of peripheral vision compared to her Wards mask that the older hockey mask she’d been forced to use left her with. Even so, she was more than capable of recognizing the top hat and mask of Trickster, hands clasped behind his back.

“You got five seconds to tell me what the f*ck you want with me before I ventilate you, you P. T. Barnum-ass clown,” she said, finger already on the finger of her hand crossbow.

“Not me, per se,” he replied, “but my current employer would like to see about getting you on his side.”

“Who’s that?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll let him introduce himself.” Abruptly, her crossbow was replaced with a tablet computer, showing a black morph suit with a hissing snake on the head.

“Good evening, Shadow Stalker. I won’t waste too much time on pleasantries. I am… shall we say, running a false flag operation on behalf of PRT ENE, and was hoping you’d be willing to work with me until such time as we have the opportunity to… shall I say, come in out of the cold and retake our place among the heroes.”

That… honestly, it made more sense than it should. Given his relatively quiet presence in the Downtown area (mostly resisting the Empire 88), Coil hadn’t really been fingered in any major crimes, and between that and the fact that she’d almost never heard Piggy launch into one of her infamous diatribes against him, nor had she heard of anyone else who had, and she could believe it.

“...Fine. I’m in, but I want two things.”

“I will do my best within reason.”

“I wanna work with Volur, and I want to have free reign against Taylor Hebert.”

“I have operatives seeking out Volur for recruitment as we speak, and as for the second… so long as you ensure that nothing untowards falls back onto my organization, I have no issue with any indiscretions you may indulge in, so long as it is on your off time.”

“Great. When do I start?”

“Whenever you feel is proper,” said Coil.

“Excellent. In that case, let’s talk finding Volur. I’ve been thinking about reaching out to Quarrel, since they’ve been seen fighting together, to see if…”

Mina Byron wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was expecting from this particular Tuesday, aside from maybe going out for groceries (they were running low on both milk and cereal) and being a general pain in the ass for the Butcher (she knew she couldn’t afford to kill him as he’d been trying to do to her, but she could annoy him by f*cking with his capes and his weed).

As such, she could be forgiven for her response when motherf*cking Revel dropped through an open window in the sh*tty one-room apartment they were using.

Namely, she nailed her in the head with the closest thing at the time (a rolled up newspaper), which caused an oddly satisfying “bonk” noise that she noticed that her power produced sometimes.

“My apologies for the impropriety,” said the probably-Chinese hero, “but I needs must speak with thee.”

“Call ahead next time,” said Mina, flicking a surgical mask at her face in such a manner that it stuck, loops hooking around her ears as she finally turned to face the other woman. “What the f*ck do you want?”

“I have been charged with finding a successor to the mighty Jiutian Xuannü, and you are the superior candidate,” she said.

“Who?” asked Mina, tapping her fingers on the knife on her thigh in a not entirely subtle threat.

“The Dark Lady, mistress of war, magic, and life,” said Revel. She moved the hand that wasn’t holding her lantern in an arcane pattern and a bow- no, a yumi, Mina recognized it from the shape- appeared in said hand.

“That’s very- hold on a moment, why the f*ck are you using a Japanese weapon as a symbol for a Chinese goddess?” asked Mina, who’d had a relatively intensive education in Asian culture that wasn’t just limited to the Japanese of her heritage before she had joined the Teeth from a number of old ladies who had unfortunately not survived the period before Lung’s ABB stood to prevent a repeat of Kaiser’s initial rampage after inheriting the Empire 88 from his deceased father.

“My role is not to speculate as to the thoughts of the gods, it is only-”

“I asked,” said Quarrel, “because if I decide to go along with your… premise, I need to understand the why of things from something as close to the horse’s mouth as possible, and you’re currently the best I have, unless your goddess is alive and kicking.”

“She is not, although Odin’s heir might be more appropriate to ask given her role in the pantheon to come, or the Coyote, as despite his… disposition… he is genuinely knowledgeable about the gods.” At Mina’s glare, Revel continued. “But, had I to offer a guess… I would conjecture that it may be that she knew who her successor would be, and chose this symbol to distill her power into in order to better connect with you.”

Mina sighed. “As good an explanation as any, I guess. So, what do I have to do to hook up with this god of yours?” She didn’t really buy what Revel was selling, but at this point humoring the hero who could deal appreciable damage to Crawler wasn’t particularly onerous, and if push came to shove, she was confident that she could subdue the woman without killing her.

“Merely take hold of your implement and all will be revealed to you.” Revel held the yumi out to Mina.

“Fine, twist my arm,” sighed the archer, who subsequently reached out and took hold of the weapon.

With no transition whatsoever, Mina abruptly found herself standing atop a structure of worn stone, vaguely resembling a battlement, clad in what looked like Mongolian-style lamellar armor. Off the sides of the structure she could see a forest, and a moment later she recognized the structure as the Great Wall of China.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Mina whirled on the voice to see a Chinese woman clad in a red silk dress with various colors of feathers serving as accents.

“I suppose…” Quarrel trailed off.

A long moment of silence, somewhere between contemplative and awkward, passed.

“So, Revel wasn’t lying?”

“...Not directly. She did omit a number of things, both from her own ignorance and because she didn’t consider it her role to tell you, but a great deal of it is related to the more intuitive aspects of our nature as gods.”

Quarrel pressed her lips together. “What are the nonintuitive things I need to know that I can’t find out on my own?”

“The golden man, Zion, is an existential threat to the planet. In the absence of external factors, the end of the world would come within the decade, but the fact that we gods are taking an active role in the world once again has disrupted that prediction. You have also been working with another god, since Volur is Odin’s heir and likely to be… a leader among you, given what the man is likely to pass down both in power and in domain. And… Death’s specter hangs over your city. Someone- or something- deranged, with domain over death, has their eye set on your city. Be wary.”

“I have so many questions,” said Mina.

“We have not the time for them. If Odin’s heir doesn’t know the answers already, they will be able to learn and share them with you.”

“I suppose that’s fair. What now?”

“Now? Now you become a god. My apologies, this is the… expedited version, and speed comes with pain in these things.”

Mina’s response was cut off by her entire body seizing up in agony as a sensation not unlike what she imagined being electrocuted while being dipped in lava crawled up her legs.

She wasn’t sure how long it took before the pain passed and left her back in the run-down apartment she was sharing with Vista, still holding the yumi, with Revel’s hand retreating from the weapon.

She felt… well, setting aside the lingering ache, she felt really good, to the point where she’d be concerned if she didn’t know that it wasn’t a result of Spree spiking the punch with morphine again.

She also felt… something, she wasn’t sure what, and given what Jiutian Xuannü was known for, she thought it was a good idea to save the testing for somewhere isolated and… private.

“Was there anything else you were here for, or did you just want to drop an existential crisis on my ass and leave without leaving cab fare on the dresser?”

“The inso- ahem. No, that was all,” said Revel.

“In that case, have a nice day.” Mina opened the door, and Revel stalked out, quite obviously irritated at her needling.

She let the door swing shut, then jumped at Missy’s call of “Mina? Who was that?”

Mina sighed. She had a decent amount of fast talking to do about why she hadn’t gotten Missy an autograph from one of her favorite Protectorate heroes, after all.

“Are you ready to return to your fight?” asked Coyote.

“Inasmuch as it can be called a fight, given how we’ve been harrying them for the past week or so,” said Mouse Protector, leaving a mark on the ground off to the side of the highway just in case.

Over the past week, between the two of them, they’d managed to kill Mannequin, Shatterbird, Winter, Hatchet Face, and Burnscar, and they’d managed to lure Crawler into a trap to the point where his adaptation had forced him to remain immobile. They’d figure something out for him later, but for now, they had the golden opportunity with only three members left (albeit the most dangerous three).

“Just remember, there can be no-”

“No victory in strength, I remember,” said Mouse Protector, rolling her eyes. “You’ve only said it about a dozen times so far this week.”

“It bears repeating,” said Coyote. “I’ll be ready to step in if you need it,” he continued.

“Hopefully I won’t need it,” Mouse replied.

“Hope in one hand, spit in the other,” said the ancient quadruped. “Go on, get going.”

“Aye aye, cap’n!” She offered him a jaunty salute with her sword (not blunted, for once), and vanished with her signature squeaking noise.

She reappeared on top of the school bus that the three more well-known members of the Nine were riding in, then (with a little help from her clustermate’s power heating up her sword) stabbed the blade straight down and through the thin sheet metal of the bus, spinning in a circle rapidly enough to carve a hole big enouth drop down into the main compartment, the cutout rapidly flaking away into nothingness as she stood and hefted her no-longer-glowing sword.

“Halt, in the name of all that is cheesy and delicious!” she cried, brandishing the no-longer-glowing blade at the three capes as she left a mark on the floor.

“You again?” asked Jack Slash, looking up at Mouse through the rearview mirror.

“Indeed, evildoer! I have come to stop your reign of terror once and for all!”

Despite her cheesy lines and focus on Jack Slash, she was acutely aware of the position of both Bonesaw and the Siberian, since the power that enhanced her coordination and proprioception also allowed her to sort of hook herself into the proprioceptive senses of people around her.

As such, when the monochromatic murderer reached out for her, she knew exactly where the deadly fingers were, and she twisted around the reaching arm to lay her finger on the Siberian’s nose with a “Boop!”

As she did so, she pushed her main power, leaving a mark on both the Siberian and the asshole in the pedo-van following them. That done, she winked, and with a squeaked “Be right back, villain and villainesses!”, she vanished in a squeak, reappearing kneeling on William Manton’s upper legs.

Given that the man’s view out his windshield was abruptly obscured by a cramped six and a half feet of armored Mover, which crashed onto his unprepared legs, he could be forgiven for his reaction being the mistake of jerking the wheel off the road.

Mouse Protector felt as the mark she had left on the Siberian disintegrated with the projection. She likewise, through her extended proprioception, felt the Siberian materialize in the passenger seat of the van, clawed nails already aimed for her head.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), the ear-marked hilt of Mouse’s sword was already punching through Manton’s eye, and the Siberian vanished before its fingers got within a foot of her head.

She squeaked back to the bus before the van could crash properly, not bothering to wipe the gore off her sword’s hilt. Mentally, she checked the cooldown on the entropic side of her empowerment ability and winced when she realized she’d need to stall for almost twenty seconds in order to use it again. On one hand, it was very useful for a dynamic entry, but on the other she needed it to make sure Bonesaw didn’t leave any nasty surprises behind.

So, she did what she did best: run her mouth. “Sorry about that, you just had this old man in a white van following you and I thought I should deal with him before he became a problem, you know? Wouldn’t want to run the risk of seeing what he wants with little miss over here,” she said, jerking her chin to indicate Bonesaw.

Jack Slash narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you mean, old man in a white van?”

“Well, you know, the kind of man who goes around offering unsuspecting children candy if they just come with him to his unmarked white van. I must say, I prefer cheese, but apparently it works for some people. I could never understand the appeal of all that sugary stuff, blech. Where was I?”

“Unmarked white van,” chirped Bonesaw.

“Right. Unmarked white van.” She felt as the cooldown ticked down to nothing, but decided to wait to take action all at once. “Well, after I saw that, I just had to take action, to protect all the little mice out there. So, I, ah… shall I say, stopped the van.” She stroked the chin of her helmet in a pensive manner, eyes darting out the windshield to make sure she got the timing right. “It’s weird, though. Why in the world would the Siberian try to interfere with that?”

In the split second where both capes were surprised by the implications of that, Mouse struck.

Her left hand charged a throwing dagger with lightning, and she hurled it towards the front of the bus in such a way to slam through the brake lines and also jolt the bus’ steering just enough to take it off the road. Her other hand heated her sword up again, and in one long stride, she was close enough to cleave through Bonesaw’s head in one firm downward swing, leaving the body to flake away in cinders and ashes.

Then, she teleported back to her mark near Coyote just in time to watch as the bus, with all the momentum of the highway speeds it was traveling at.

She didn’t relax until she was close enough to the wreckage to both see Jack Slash’s corpse (with his head pulped by a branch) and make sure that the two members of the Nine were gone from her proprioception.

The Slaughterhouse Nine were dead.

Victoria Dallon was not, as some people would accuse her, a person who was overly focused on fashion.

Don’t get her wrong, she knew her way around fashion better than your average person, at least in her oh-so-humble estimation.

Still, it wasn’t for fashion’s sake.

No, she’d been living with Carol Dallon for too long to not learn from the woman’s dedication to presentation, which was compounded by both the way that Carol had taught her to act (“with behavior befitting a hero- someone is always watching after all” echoed in her head for the thousandth time) and also the way that her power drew attention to her while also leaving people’s perceptions theirs enough to pick out every flaw of hers.

So, presentation.

It was almost a defense mechanism, in a way, which was sad given how much she had seen fashion as a way to unwind from the pressure of being the kid of a known hero family before her Trigger.

Even if she wasn’t as enthusiastic about dressing up in general anymore, the first date she was having with Taylor was an exception. Much like she had before her first date with Dean, she went a little higher end than her usual, with a burgundy asymmetrical skirt (longer in the back, with pockets) and leggings, a decent shirt under her favorite pale green sweater, and a pinkish-reddish scarf that Aunt Jess had knitted for her back in 2006.

“How do I look?” she asked Amy (since, even if her mother or father were in town instead of… whatever weird publicity event they had decided to attend in Boston with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Neil, she wouldn’t have trusted their judgment on fashion, given that her mother hadn’t worn anything vaguely in the same ballpark that she was thinking since before the turn of the century and even before his deterioration, her father hadn’t ever had an eye for fashion).

“It looks like a decent ‘going out to eat’ outfit,” she replied, looking up from her book only briefly. “Have fun, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“No promises,” said Vicky, strolling out the door with butterflies in her stomach.

Fortunately, the drive over to Taylor’s house gave her enough time to settle her own nerves before she could make too much of a fool of herself by remembering that, regardless of how competent Taylor was in a fight, she was still a teenage girl, not unlike Victoria herself.

“Have her back by ten!” were her father’s parting words as Taylor walked out in a cream-colored blouse and black slacks.

Taylor’s first words as she got into the car were “Did you hear that Mouse Protector called in the bounty on the entire Slaughterhouse Nine?”

Vicky blinked. “What the f*ck?”

“Yeah, no, she went to PRT Detroit with video footage of her killing all of them except for Crawler, and then grabbed Horizon to blow him up and split his bounty.” Taylor frowned. “Legend went on TV at two PM to announce it, it was great. You really didn’t hear about it? I thought you finished school at lunch.”

“I mean, on one hand, yes, but on the other hand I spent my afternoon on patrol and getting ready for our date.” Vicky shrugged, pulling away from the Hebert house.

The drive to the restaurant (a decent Italian place that Clockblocker, of all people, had recommended to her as a solid date spot back when she was with Dean) was filled with light conversation mostly focused on Mouse Protector and her exploits, and Victoria found herself falling into a comfortable banter with Taylor not long before arriving.

“Look,” said Vicky, standing up from inside the cramped sedan, “I don’t know what to tell you except that the Tom and Jerry crossover with Mouse Protector’s House of Mouse was the single best crossover in recent history!”

“Lies and slander,” Taylor shot back. “The Looney Tunes crossover was clearly superior, and anyone who can’t acknowledge that needs to go back and rewatch the episode.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” said Victoria flippantly. “I forgive you for your cinematic sin.”

“How gracious of you,” replied Taylor, sarcasm dripping off the words in such quantity it threatened to outmatch Amy’s past feats of speechcraft.

The conversation stopped for a time as the potential couple were seated at a relatively isolated table for two and perused the menus.

Once the waiter was gone, Vicky leaned in. “So,” she asked, “how are you doing with the lawsuit handled and all?”

“Okay, I guess?” Taylor shrugged. “I’m still waiting on a transfer to some other school, so I’m mostly working on stuff for my side job, but I’m mostly keeping busy.”

“Don’t keep too busy,” said Vicky. “Speaking of, thanks for what you said to Amy last week. I think it really helped her, and she’s been slowing down her hours at the hospital for once.”

Taylor frowned. “What do you mean?”

“She’s been working herself to burnout since she got her power, pretty much,” replied Vicky. “Mom’s had something to do with it, I think, but given her power I think she’s developed a savior complex.”

“I noticed that, based on how much time she spends in the hospital.” Taylor paused. “Not to be rude, but she needs a hobby. Or a girlfriend.”

“Hmm… You know, you have a point. Maybe if I can convince Flechette to give it a try…” Vicky trailed off.

The two incognito capes set the heavy subjects aside for the rest of dinner in favor of some of the standard “get to know you” things that had been skipped over in favor of cape combat, and when that was exhausted they transitioned to a discussion of literature.

“...not saying that Frankenstein’s Monster isn’t the victim, I’m just saying that after he got rejected he did some pretty abominable stuff to the people in Victor’s life,” said Taylor, gesticulating broadly as she led Victoria out of the restaurant.

“And what I’m trying to say is that all of that stems from how Victor made him and interacted with him afterwards,” replied Vicky with no small degree of heat in her voice.

“Not getting a girlfriend isn’t an acceptable reason to go on a murderous rampage,” Taylor said, almost as if explaining something to a six-year-old, “and-”

Taylor’s point was interrupted by a blaring alarm from Vicky’s pocket, which caused the blonde to pale and she rip the seam of her pocket as she went for her phone.

“sh*t,” she said, looking up at Taylor. “Amy just hit her panic button.”

“Go,” said Taylor, flicking a rune at Vicky. “I’ll catch up.”

“Thanks,” said the blonde, immediately pushing off the concrete hard enough that cracks spiderwebbed across the sidewalk, grateful for the speed boost Taylor had given her as she beelined for her house.

After a mere three minutes, she arrived at her house to find the front door caved in, barely paying attention to the man in the top hat pushing a girl in a wheelchair around the corner of the street.

“God damn it,” she snarled, zipping upstairs to see Amy’s room devastated, almost as if it had been the host of a battle between two Brutes with claws, before turning for her room. They couldn’t afford to let this stand, not after the adults of New Wave had insisted on accepting that Kaiser hadn’t ordered that street tough to kill Aunt Jess and that the year he had spent in prison was enough punishment.

He had been accepted into the Empire with open arms after that.

Victoria emerged from her room in the white and gold of Glory Girl, with all the righteous fury of the Norse goddess whose power she had inherited pressing out through her aura.

Whoever had decided to kidnap Panacea was about to have the worst night of their life, and possibly their last.

Genesis wasn’t sure what to think of the situation she found herself in.

Ever since the Simurgh had torn them through the portal from Earth Aleph, they hadn’t ever really had the chance to stop and think about… well, anything, really. First, it was getting out of Madison, then it was trying to find a place in Earth Bet, and somewhere along the way that had bled into the desperate search for a way to undo the changes Noelle’s power had done to her body before it killed all of them.

The fact that Cody had been the first of them to have their restraint fail them under the stress was… expected, but him making it over a year before he let his growing disdain for Krouse overwhelm his rational thinking was honestly astounding.

She supposed she couldn’t fault Krouse for taking the drastic solution after Cody’s clones almost breached containment on Noelle in one of her… moods (she’d thanked her lucky stars that Luke was close enough that he could deal with them before they caused too much damage), even if she felt that letting Accord sell him to the Yangban was a little much.

Still, that didn’t make it any easier to bear. The issue with Cody was just one more issue tossed on the pile, of rushed evacuations and abandoned belongings, and it just made her tired.

Now wasn’t that ironic. Before… Madison, she’d been a full-on insomniac on top of being a paraplegic, showing up to the gaming club meetings bleary-eyed and strung out on caffeine to prevent her body from giving out on her because half the time she couldn’t sleep until three, four in the morning, even if it hadn’t always worked. Now, she could sleep any time she wanted, escaping into another body in her dreams, but when she woke up she still felt tired, as if she’d only had a two-hour nap instead of spending ten hours outside her body.

In the privacy of her own mind, she thought her power might have been the issue, but she didn’t want to give up the freedom it represented, even for a night.

And now they were crossing another line, something else to weigh on their shoulders, all for the chance to save Noelle.

Normally, everyone knew not to f*ck with the healers, even above and beyond the normal rules of decorum for cape conduct. When they’d been in San Diego, they did their best to work around Scapegoat’s rules, even shelling out for a healing session with the boy. It didn’t work, with the goat-masked Ward collapsing and screaming about stars with tentacles or some such, and only a timely intervention by Krouse prevented his death by Noelle’s pissed-off lower half.

And yet they were still kidnapping Panacea for Coil.

She didn’t know why their boss wanted the mousy healer, aside from in order to try and use her power to help Noelle, and the selfish part of her that wanted all of this to just be over, damn it won out, so she didn’t bother to find out.

“You ready?” asked Kro- Trickster, Trickster in the field, his voice softer than it was for everyone except for Noelle.

“Ready or not,” she sighed, “the show goes on regardless.”

Trickster laughed bitterly at that. “Yeah, that it does.”

He backed away from her slightly, to give her space to use her power, and she closed her eyes.

Using her power was… well, her brain interpreted the information from it in a character creation screen. Sliders for everything, and a whole library of prebuilt models for her to tweak and manifest.

For this, she chose one of the ones she’d used in the past: an eight-foot-tall, winged draconic creature, with enough strength to handle getting through locked doors and a soporific breath potent enough to stun most brutes.

She hit the button in the odd interface that signified doneness, and in a rush of vertigo, she was standing in front of her body, looking down at it.

That was always her least favorite part of using her power: looking at herself like this never failed to rub in how weak she was without her power, weak and tired, emphasized by the serenity she saw on her own sleeping face.

She turned back to Trickster and nodded, then leapt over the house they were sitting behind and the street separating them from their target, landing on the concrete walkway in front of the Dallon residence hard enough to shake the flowerpots on each side of said walkway.

The door didn’t last very long against her enhanced strength, and soon enough she was tromping up the stairs to the bedrooms.

She slammed herself bodily into the door to the room they’d been told was Panacea’s to see the healer standing ready in the middle of the room, phone flashing red on the dresser behind her.

“You made a mistake,” she said, hurling herself forwards with clawed, taloned hands to gouge into Genesis’ scaly flesh, exploiting the secret Master’s moment of surprise for all it was worth.

Unfortunately for Panacea, the combat instincts baked into this form were more than capable of handling the attack, and two swift blows broke her arms and stunned her long enough for Genesis to activate her soporific breath.

Panacea wobbled, then fell forwards right into Genesis’ arms, and as her last words before unconsciousness claimed her, she slurred out “Oh, so that’s how you do it.”

Genesis scooped up the sleeping hero, then booked it out of the house. As much as she’d love to rely on Coil’s assurances that the parents were out of town and Glory Girl was indisposed, she’d been through enough nightmare missions to know that intel wasn’t always trustworthy, and she didn’t want to tally too long.

That turned out to be the right choice, as not long after she rounded the corner she saw Glory Girl flash through the air towards her house.

She didn’t rush, per se, but she definitely was a little hastier than before in getting to the transport Coil had provided them.

That didn’t spell the end of the mission- Panacea had stirred multiple times on the twenty-minute drive back to Coil’s base, requiring a fresh dose of her sleep gas every time (and a carefully moderated one, to avoid catching the rest of the denizens of the car in it) to keep her out for the count.

They returned to Coil’s base only seconds behind a second van, out of which spilled Shadow Stalker carrying a reedy man in navy blue pajamas with a receding hairline over her shoulder.

The Breaker rubbed her the wrong way- she’d heard some rumors that she was on the run after a particularly inventive form of attempted murder, and was only working with Coil for his contacts in the PRT to get her crime swept under the rug, and she was arrogant and dismissive of anyone she didn’t see as “strong”.

Still, she’d work with her if Coil said so, for Noelle’s sake if nothing else.

Fortunately, they were going to different areas of the base- Shadow Stalker was going down to the holding cells, while they were heading to a conference room nearby the vault Noelle was being kept in.

They arrived to both Coil and the rest of the Travelers in the room.

“Any issues?” asked Mars.

“Clean op,” replied Trickster. “Only complication is that Panacea’s got some kinda weird Changer power that lets her grow claws, Genesis had to break her arms in order to deal with it.”

“An acceptable price,” said Coil. “I have it on good authority that she has had an encounter with a Trump that altered her powers recently, which among other things lets her heal herself.”

“Okay, cool. So… what’s the plan for her?” Krouse asked.

“First, we test her power on a smaller part of the whole.” Coil lifted a steel box onto the table, then opened it to reveal a chunk of Noelle’s lower body that was still pulsating slightly. “Then, we go from there.”

They stood around in an awkward silence until Panacea started stirring again, and this time Genesis didn’t blast her with the soporific breath again.

“Greetings, miss Dallon. I have a job for you…”

Chapter 22: Step on Snek?

Chapter Text

It was perhaps uncharitable of Taylor for her first reaction to her first date being interrupted to be annoyance. However, that quickly faded away as she realized that there was a genuine emergency, and given the way that Vicky had reacted, it was almost certainly an attack on Panacea, and… well, even if New Wave’s healer’s powers had become vastly more suited to combat, she lacked the experience using those powers to their fullest and the instincts combat would instill in any cape.

A part of her absently wondered if it was just divine knowledge through one of her domains that let her think on all that. The rest of her was too busy with another thought, much scarier than the rest.

Was this a single attack against New Wave… or were there other targets?

A moment of travel later and Taylor discovered that no, it was not, in fact, a single attack, judging by the forced door and broken mug of coffee in the kitchen.

The sound of wood splintering had Taylor looking around for an assailant until she realized that, in her anger, her hand had closed on the doorjamb, exerting force far beyond what a normal human could, and she forced her fist to unclench.

“Odin,” she said, forcing her physical reactions to her emotions away from herself, through the link to the Administrator and the insects it controlled. “Coil’s work?” She eyed a small, circular scorch mark surrounding the melted lock, almost as if it had been hit with a laser weapon.

“More than likely,” said the mostly-dead god.

Taylor sighed, then clenched her jaw, chainmail and helmet appearing between one heartbeat and the next before she started drawing power into herself.

“This means war, then,” she said, ansuz slowly searing a permanent impression into the inside of her eye patch.

“Aye, so it does,” said Odin. “Now then, lass, I suggest you meet up with miss Dallon. She’s likely to be hoping for your aid in recovering Panacea.”

Taylor nodded, absently flicking an instance of odal at the house as she left to repair it before she moved, raido guiding her journey.

As she passed into the Dallons’ neighborhood, something impinged on the odd sense of awareness she had from the proprioception of the bugs she could control.

She’d spent far less time working with the Administrator’s powers than she had the runes, but she’d spent enough time to be able to use the physical bodies of the bugs to extend her sense of touch, on a crude level. As such, she felt the paper airplane squish a gnat before landing perfectly in her hand.

Taylor paused for a moment to read the writing on the wings. On one, there was an address in the commercial area (or at least what passed for one in Brockton Bay), and on the other, three words, both in the overly perfect handwriting of a middle schooler who’d been teased about it before.

Kick his ass.

“I see the hand of a seer in this,” said Odin, brow furrowed. “Act with caution.”

“Perhaps… perhaps they were to be Coil’s target, and our intercession would protect them from his actions?” Taylor asked. “He targeted a bystander in a way that very few villains would be willing to stoop to, so that might be something they have foreseen.”

“Possible, I suppose. Regardless, verify the information before you commit your force to remove him.”

“I will, but any lead is better than no lead,” replied Taylor, folding the paper airplane on itself and slipping it into a belt pouch before she started running again.

Thirty seconds later, she found herself standing outside the Dallon house, staring at the gaping hole where the door had been.

“Ta- Volur!” Glory Girl came barreling out of the door. “She’s gone and the door on her room was forced.”

“My dad’s gone too,” Taylor replied.

“f*ck,” said Glory Girl.

“Indeed.”

“I don’t have any better news. Eric’s phone is off, Crystal is plastered, and all our parents are out in Boston, so we’re on our own, really.”

“f*ck.”

“Indeed,” replied Glory Girl.

Taylor sighed, then shook herself. “Alright, here’s what we’re gonna do. You need to call in to, like, the Protectorate, and let them know what’s going on. I’ve got a lead, maybe, and if it pans out we can come down on them like f*cking Mjölnir. If not… we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

About halfway between the Dallon house and the address Taylor had, Glory Girl hung up the phone rather angrily.

“Bad news?”

“Definitely. The Undersiders riled up the Empire, so they’re running around all dick swinging, and Lung’s fighting the Butcher again, so Protectorate forces are all tied up, and the Wards are benched because it’s too hot to field them.”

Taylor frowned. “Coil has… more resources than I thought.”

“Yeah… Hey, what do you want to bet he’s got the Travelers moving on someone too?”

“No bet, he’s… actually, if he got the Travelers from Accord, he might be using them as a defensive measure to hold his prisoners, since they’re such strong deterrents. I mean, between Sundancer and Ballistic, they’ve got enough firepower that anyone this side of the Butcher would at least hesitate about attacking them, and Genesis and Trickster are both a pain in the ass to handle for different reasons. So… even odds that they’re holding territory or in his base,” said Taylor.

Glory Girl sighed. “Of course he’s got the walking sun and artillery piece in his corner.”

“If I could tell you for sure I would, but we’re a little outside my sen- oh, gods damn it,” Taylor swore, fists clenching.

Before Glory Girl could ask what it was, a pair of figures rose from behind a row of houses, standing on a ragged shape that revealed itself to be a chunk of asphalt as it moved into the light of the downward-facing streetlamps.

One of them was a girl, relatively petite and dressed in a red and black robe that hit a great number of the trappings of a generic magic user while managing to be vaguely menacing in a nonspecific way. The other was dressed in a long gray coat, vaguely reminiscent of a SS uniform, and a gas mask that resembled the older style associated with the World Wars.

“ Frau Dallon, Frau Volur,” said Krieg, his voice a deep, resonant baritone. “I have heard that you are looking for someone.”

“f*ck you, Nazi,” snarled Taylor indignance at their stealing the Norse symbols mixing with her general negative feelings for Nazis. “Get out of our way.”

Krieg tutted. “Such impoliteness, mein Fraulein .” He turned to Glory Girl. “Surely you would appreciate some… aid, shall I say, in retrieving your sister?”

“f*ck off,” the blonde snapped, flaring her aura. “I don’t need you trying to pull a Fleur on us.”

“Ah, such disrespect, for those of us who only wish to aid the community by… securing the safe return of the great healer Panacea. Unfortunate, but given your response to our… community organization… it is perhaps to be expected, if disappointing. I would have thought that such a paragon of the Aryan race to have had better judgment, but we all must have our flaws,” said the Nazi, no small amount of smugness in his voice by the end.

“Listen here, níðingar,” snarled Taylor, lightning crackling around her right hand. “If you don’t step aside, I will go through you, and you can ask the Simurgh how that’s going to go for you.”

Rune paled, taking a step back, while Krieg’s body language changed to be more imposing. “Are you sure you want to make such a… drastic decision? We have many resources that we could turn to the aid of our allies… or the detriment of those who spurn us.”

“Anyone who tries to stand between us and the task of finding Panacea is no ally.” Taylor raised five fingers. “Last chance. Five. Four,” she counted.

“We will remember this,” said Krieg, signaling Rune. The girl looked very relieved as the hovering platform of asphalt moved away, and it sped up once they were out of the two heroes’ direct line of sight.

“Mom’s gonna be pissed, she’s the one who insisted that we not commit suicide by trying to get revenge for Aunt Jess by f*cking with the Empire.” Glory Girl paused for a moment, then chuckled. “She’s not here to get pissy, so she can cope.”

Taylor chuckled. “That sounds like it’s very likely to piss her off.”

“I mean, yeah, but on the other hand, Amy’s f*cking missing and she isn’t here. Until I get my sister back, I don’t give a sh*t what she does. She can ground me all she likes for pissing off a Nazi, after we get Amy back.” She frowned. “You know, I get the feeling that something might be… a little bit off about her being so weird about the Nazis.”

“Think about it later,” said Taylor. “Unless Kaiser was dumb enough to kidnap her, but it’s almost certainly Coil.”

“Yeah, I can’t believe that Clausewitz and Victor would be dumb enough to try it, and Kaiser wouldn’t go against their strategic guidance that poorly. Even Hookwolf wouldn’t do it, if only because he doesn’t care about Amy enough,” said Vicky.

“That’s what I thought.” Taylor nodded decisively. “Alright, let’s go.”

The duo continued, and once they arrived at the base of a skyscraper that Vicky recognized as the Fortress Construction main headquarters, Taylor sighed.

“Good news, the tip I got was right on the money. Bad news, I think there’s a fairly high-powered Thinker who’s royally pissed off with Coil that might want to have a conversation with us later. I’m not sure how exactly they’re going to affect the power dynamics in the city but it’s worth keeping in mind going forwards,” said Taylor, already scouting out the underground complex that was Coil’s base with the Administrator’s bugs.

“Coil, then,” said Vicky, cracking her knuckles. “What’s the disposition of the forces in his base?”

Taylor raised an eyebrow at the language used, eliciting a faint blush from the Alexandria Package, but continued nonetheless. “He’s got like twenty mercenaries spread across his base, mostly lightly armed, and a group of people in cape costumes next to a sealed vault I can’t get any bugs into- wait, no, they’re opening the vault now, and I think Amy’s going in now.”

“What’s in the vault?” asked Vicky. “And, more importantly, where’s the nearest entrance to the f*cker’s base so we can get Amy back?”

“This way,” said Taylor, jogging into the parking garage. “And… not sure. I think there might be some sort of weird Case 53? Whatever it is, it’s f*cking with my bugs something fierce.”

“I hope it doesn’t hurt Amy before we get there,” said Glory Girl, following Taylor approximately six feet off the ground.

“Agreed,” said Taylor. Then, after a moment of jogging, she stopped in front of a featureless concrete wall, and a swarm of various bugs coalesced on the wall with a rectangular hole in the center. “Here’s the door, feel free to knock as hard as you want.”

“With pleasure.”

The door slammed into another wall with a loud “WHAM!” and the duo continued forwards, prepared for combat.

Whatever Amy had expected from the capes that had been dumb enough to kidnap her, she wasn’t expecting… this clusterf*ck.

“So, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. You have a Case 53 friend whose power is… broken, and you need me to see if I can heal them, is that correct?” she asked, ignoring Coil entirely to face the draconic projection that had been the one to kidnap her.

“Yeah, you got that right,” said the man who had introduced himself as Trickster, the leader of the Travelers.

“Okay, cool. Why the f*ck should I help you with this?” she replied, surreptitiously reinforcing her muscles, ligaments, and bones in case she would need to fight her way out.

“Because,” said Coil, “if you do not, I will have Mark Dallon and Danny Hebert shot. How would your sister and Volur react when they found out that you caused their fathers’ death?’

Panacea pressed her lips together angrily, and she started to construct a biological dart launcher vaguely similar to an animal she hadn’t seen before and yet knew intimately in her arm. She took a moment to consider what it should be using before deciding to replicate the sedative that Genesis had used on her even as she produced a counteragent for that sedative in her own body.

“Fine. On your own head be your choices, Coil,” she spat. Then, she turned to the girl with a starburst on her helmet who had been sitting in the back of the room, looking to avoid notice, and stood up. “Lead the way, miss.”

She made a sound vaguely like a startled kitten, then pushed herself up and seemed to almost flee the room. Amy followed her, and their journey ended at a large, circular vault door.

“Noelle?” asked the girl, tapping at a screen on the wall.

“Mars? What’s going on? I thought you guys were out on a job?” came a tired girl’s voice.

“We were,” said the girl, now identified as Mars. “We just got off the job, and we managed to get Panacea here to see if she can help you.”

“Really?” The exhaustion in Noelle’s voice vanished behind raw, unadulterated hope.

“Yeah, really.” Mars tapped the screen one last time and the vault door slowly, ponderously swung open.

Then, she turned to Panacea. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I told them not to try this, but Trickster insisted.”

Panacea gave the girl another look, this time allowing her power to expand from her body and cover the other cape to better assess her. Her body language was… mostly tired and downtrodden, but there was a certain degree of apology in her eyes, under her helmet. Furthermore, her neurochemistry was all off- stress hormones indicative of chronic stress, hormones associated with fear, and an odd deformation of a number of regions in the brain that either decreased or increased their function in a way that suggested a Master effect.

“I accept your apology,” said Amy, mentally recategorizing Mars from villain to Master victim in her head and abruptly un-deforming the other girl’s brain. Then, she walked into the vault, the red-and-black-clad girl following behind her.

Then, she stopped, gobsmacked, as she saw the girl in the vault.

A writhing pile of heads, limbs, tentacles, and other fleshy protuberances sat in a far corner of the vault, visibly paying attention to the two new entrants. On top of the chimeric body was a relatively attractive woman with straight brown hair, who waved upon seeing her.

“Hi. I’d offer to shake your hand, but, uh… I’m not sure that touching you would be that great an idea, given what my other half does.”

“Well then,” Panacea said, pinching the bridge of her nose, “let’s see what we can’t do.”

As it turned out, quite a bit. While she couldn’t deal with Noelle’s power mutating her body, since that was far beyond her domain, she could probably clear away the influence of whichever Master f*cked with her head, and maybe deal with the ravenous hunger of the separate minds in her lower half. Ideally, she could bind the brains of the things in her lower body to those in her upper body, but that was exploring mostly-unexplored territory (while there were species with distributed brain networks, both on Earth and wherever the god her power came from had been, but never to this degree).

She took a moment to marvel at how recent events had altered her relationship with using her power on brains- even a month ago, she wouldn’t have been willing to even touch half of the issues that Noelle had.

Once Panacea had relayed the information to Noelle and Mars, the pair readily agreed to allowing Panacea to use her power on her to fix things.

For the first five minutes, everything went okay. The Master influence on Noelle’s human brain was easy to clear away, relatively speaking, but the hunger for flesh was abiological, and Panacea had to manage multiple different brains at the same, hardening them against interference from Noelle’s corona in order to discourage the hunger from being acted upon.

Then, at almost the same time that something above went “thump”, something else took over the lower half of Noelle’s body, and things went to sh*t.

Before Panacea could freeze the body, two tentacles lashed out and wrapped around both her and Mars, paralyzing them somehow (not biologically- maybe tactile telekinesis? some small part of her mind said) and yanking them into the fleshy body.

A brief aside on why this is the timeline Coil kept.

Ordinarily, Coil would have kept a timeline where he kept Amelia Dallon from Noelle Meinhardt, and in fact he did. However, in this case, he had managed to step on the world’s premier biokinetic’s buttons enough that she used conotoxin instead of a sedative in the dart that she inevitably launched at Coil. As such, his other timeline collapsed, and once he split timelines again, he didn’t have the chance to call Panacea away from Noelle before she was consumed.

Returning to Panacea, in any other situation, she would have brought her considerable power to bear against Noelle’s lower body and paralyzed it completely.

As it stands, however, she was too busy watching Vicky bleed out in front of her, in various situations one after the other after the other, for the shard connected to the Division vial to pump out copies of Amy Dallon.

They weren’t stronger than her, by any stretch of the imagination, but they were connected to her divine power in a way that would allow their own power to grow (which would in turn grow hers, which wouldn’t help her now), and that was perhaps more concerning.

Either way, when the mutated clones of both Sundancer and Panacea started to exit the vault through the still-open door, it was already an A-class threat on its own merit, and Coil swiftly sounded the alarm to evacuate the base.

Chapter 23: Parahumans: The Power of Us

Chapter Text

“This is… not what I expected,” said Taylor, frowning.

“How so?” asked Glory Girl, hovering in front of Taylor as they proceeded down the corridor that the door into Coil’s base had let to. “I see the flashing lights, I hear a breach siren, that’s about what I’d expect from a wannabe Bond villain like Coil.”

“No, it’s… There’s a bunch of weird bugs that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and they feel… weird.” Taylor frowned, then made the connection between the bugs and what was making her feel uncomfortable. “They’re cape constructs, I think…” Taylor diverted one into a vent, where it was abruptly set upon by a spider. “But they persist on death.”

Glory Girl frowned. “The only cape I know of who can make persistent minions like that is… Nilbog, and I really don’t think he’d be able to get out and into this city without anyone knowing about it.”

“sh*t,” said Taylor.

“Yeah,” said Glory Girl. “Let’s see if we can’t hunt the snake down in his hole and see what capes he’s released in his defense.”

“In that case…” Taylor frowned, focusing on both the senses of the bugs she had throughout the base and pushing energy into the ansuz rune inside her eyepatch to allow her to better parse those senses. “He’s this way,” said Taylor, jogging down the corridor and turning right at the intersection of another, with the pair just narrowly dodging a small squad of mercenaries fleeing from what looked like a bear made out of solidified shadow.

The bear stopped, sniffing the air, then turned, growling, towards Taylor, and advanced menacingly.

Taylor, in turn, flicked off a bolt of lightning with Sowilo at the same time that Glory Girl’s aura flared to life. The bolt seemed to pass through the bear’s head, fading as it seemed to smear the shadowy stuff that the head was made of through the air, before it abruptly snapped back to the original shape.

“sh*t,” panted the flanged voice of the bear-cape, “Hebert?”

Taylor’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s asking?”

“Okay, so, full disclosure: I’m a clone of Sophia who’s been made to oppose her and… huh, that’s gone. Okay, introspection later. Anyways, yeah, Sophia decided to work with Coil to f*ck you over, so I’m trying to f*ck him up first. It’s, uh… not working super great… could I come with y’all?”

Taylor frowned, drawing more on the wisdom channeled through ansuz, then turned to Glory Girl. “Am I just reading her wrong, or is she telling the truth?”

The Alexandria Package glared at the ursine form. “I’m not sure you are, but… well, we do know she isn’t Sophia Hess. I guess that’s good for something.”

“Cool,” said Taylor. “Come along, then.”

“Thanks,” said the bearlike cape, falling into step with Taylor as the shadows making up the ursine form vanished, revealing a well-muscled, dark-skinned young woman who looked like Sophia’s slightly older cousin, wearing ill-fitting fatigues that looked similar to the ones worn by Coil’s troops.

Taylor spent perhaps a moment longer than strictly necessary scrutinizing her, but in her defense the similarity to Sophia was… uncanny. Fortunately, there was something in her eyes and the set of her face that made it immediately clear that she wasn’t the girl who had cost Taylor her eye.

“You okay, Hebert?” the clone of Sophia asked, genuine concern in her voice. “You’re, uh… staring.”

Taylor cast about for a good reason to be looking at her like that, and fortunately a good question presented itself. “What should we call you?”

“That’s a fair question,” came the reply, a shrug drawing Taylor’s attention to the sharply defined muscles of the shoulder exposed by the poorly sized fatigues. “For now, call me Styx. I’ll decide on a personal name if I walk away from this fight.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’m Volur, in costume,” said Taylor, turning sharply away from the well-built form of Styx and back to the corridor. “Now come on, if we hurry we can catch up to Coil before he escapes with my dad.”

The trio continued down the corridor, following Taylor as she turned through a maze of corridors and featureless doors.

After a period of about five minutes, the trio turned a corner to come face to face with Coil, flanked by two parahumans in red and black, a boy in a t-shirt and jeans, a fearsome draconic creature pushing an unconscious girl in a wheelchair, and Danny Hebert.

“Stand down,” snapped Taylor, even as Styx gestured and each of the other group’s shadows rose up in a blade aimed at their throats except for Danny’s and the boy’s.

“Not now you fools,” snarled Coil. “Noelle is loose and we have to evacuate the base now!”

“What the f*ck is Noelle?” asked Glory Girl, frowning. “And where the hell is Amy?”

“Uh… about that,” said one of the capes, a man wearing red football pad-like armor covered in red pouches.

“What did you do with my sister.” Glory Girl didn’t need to raise her voice, her aura blooming out to fill the corridor and cow everyone present save Taylor.

“We- we tried to get her to cure our Case 53 friend, and she got captured and cloned by her!” whimpered the cape in the top hat.

Taylor and Vicky both turned to Styx.

“Don’t look at me,” she replied hotly, “when I was there the only other clones I saw were of Sophia and that blonde with fire powers.”

“Great,” said Glory Girl. “Evil Panacea clones. That’s not gonna end poorly.”

“Precisely! And she’s also taken Shadow Stalker and Sundancer! We must evacuate the base immediately, and call in the Protectorate to contain her! Her massive stature and regeneration prevent almost everyone in this city from killing her, but they can help!” snapped Coil.

“Evacuate, maybe,” said Taylor. “But the Protectorate ain’t gonna be much help. Even if you were hoping for reinforcements, from outside the city, we haven’t gotten any since before I was in middle school, and the locals are all tied up with either the Empire and Lung fighting the Butcher, and they probably don’t have the firepower we’d need to handle things unless you convinced Miss Militia to build, like, a pocket nuke launcher and managed to drag her away from whatever fight she’s in.”

Styx laughed. “As if that’s gonna happen. She may be deepthroating the boot and all gung ho against the villains, so you might be able to convince her to hunt down Noelle if you spin it right, but she really hates making sh*t that blows up. Bad memories, I think.”

Taylor sighed. “So, it’s down to me to deal with her, great. What does she look like?”

“You won’t live long enough to find out what Mother looks like, let alone hurt her,” came a snarled voice from behind Taylor.

She turned to see three different forms, all naked and moving in such a way that, had it been less dire circ*mstances, would have made her blush. Two of them were visibly distorted clones of Panacea, one crawling with bugs and the other splattered with blood, and the last was a waif-thin blonde with a hellish glow in her hands.

Before Taylor could parse the new arrivals, they moved.

The blonde glared directly at her, twin energy beams blasting directly into her hard enough to bruise even if the armor she was wearing deflected them away. The beams started heating the concrete to a glow where they landed on it after scattering off the individual rings of mail on Taylor’s chest.

She returned fire with isa, pumping enough power into the rune to cool the clone’s eyes enough to shut off the beam at the same time that she blindfolded and bound her.

Vicky exploded forwards, slamming through the bug-covered clone hard enough to shatter her against the wall, and as the corpse fell limply to the ground, Taylor felt the bugs she was covered in snap into sharp relief, some of them crushed by Glory Girl’s attack but not all.

Styx screamed in pain even as she shifted into her Breaker form, the shadows practically exploding off of her as blood ran down her face under where the blood-splattered Panacea clone was holding her. Then, the clone screamed as she was swallowed by the darkness, more blood weeping from her before she vanished within the darkness.

She didn’t emerge.

“Gah Jesus f*ck that hurts,” Styx panted, blurred shadows around her head slowly coming back together.

“This only highlights the urgency of evacuating this base immediately,” snapped Coil, who at some point had drawn a gun.

“By all means,” said Taylor, “lead the way.” She fixed the cape with the top hat with a glare. “What does Noelle look like?”

“Huge,” he said, following after Coil. “She’s a girl on top of a massive pile of… things, arms and legs and tentacles and mouths. She looked relatively normal when she first got her power, and we thought it was just a strong regeneration ability, but… it kept changing her, and half the time it’s not even her in charge.”

There was a pulse of concern from the link between Taylor and the Administrator, mixed in with… something else. When Taylor started to consider the possibility of using the Runes to help rein her power in, that something else came through again, strong enough for her to clock it as hope, which Taylor took to mean that the Administrator might be able to do something about the situation.

“I’ll see what can’t be done about that, if I get the chance,” said Taylor, noting the hope that shone in his eyes that was visible through the mask he wore. “But if what you all are saying is true… she might be a full-on S-class threat, what with being able to clone Panacea. She might end up creating a clone that specializes in, like, diseases, or something like that, and that’d be pretty close to a worst case scenario. I might not have the chance to help her.”

“Whatever it takes,” he said in reply, killing the conversation as he lengthened his stride to get away from the taller girl.

“What do you bet that he tries to dump you on top of her and damn the consequences if you say you can’t help her?” asked Styx under her breath, ursine muzzle split in a tongue-lolling grin.

“No bet,” replied Vicky, equally quietly. “He gives me yandere vibes.”

Taylor burst out laughing at the abrupt contrast in her head between the serious hatted man and the mental image of a schoolgirl carrying a bloodsplattered knife that she associated with the term yandere.

“What?” Vicky asked, indignant that both Taylor and Styx had burst into laughter.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Taylor. “Just… imagining him in that damn hat and mask, but his head’s been plopped on top of a schoolgirl with a knife.”

This time, it was Vicky who burst into laughter, which tapered off as she replied with an “okay, fair.”

Quarrel wasn’t sure what the f*ck had gotten into the city tonight.

It had started with the Empire and the Teeth getting rowdy, with the Empire trying to create a beachhead in ABB territory, because of rumors that both Lung and the Oni were out of town. Unfortunately, they were not, and worse, they had managed to recruit the goddamn Cornell Bomber.

Lung had shown up to handle the Empire, who promptly fell back to let the Butcher occupy him and run wild in ABB territory, which had stalled out after the Protectorate had responded in force to both the Empire and the Teeth. Meanwhile, the Oni and the Cornell Bomber had pushed into Empire territory near the commercial district, and it was clear that Krieg and Rune, who had been sent to handle them, and it was there that they were going in order to contain the fight and protect the bystanders.

Or at least that’s how Quarrel was justifying it, since she wasn’t willing to bring up the odd new intuition that had been nudging her in the back of her head since she accepted the bow from Revel until she had a little more to ascribe to it than “just a hunch”.

“Why,” puffed Vista, hunched over with her hands on her knees, “is New Wave not doing jack sh*t?”

“No clue,” said Quarrel, drawing an arrow and nocking it. “I heard some sh*t about Brandish going out to a conference out of the city with her family, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.”

Below the building they were standing on, a chunk of floating concrete was blocking the roadway and more specifically an open-topped jeep, in which a short figure in a gas mask and a trench coat stood, gesticulating grandly with the grenade launcher she held in one hand.

“She’s stalling,” Quarrel murmured.

“What do you mean by that?” Vista asked.

“She’s a Tinker who builds single-use items, and it’s only been like a week since she was sprung,” said Quarrel slowly, thinking through the issue slowly. “She hasn’t had a whole lot of time to set up and build sh*t, so she’s limited in what gear she made between setting up her lab and settling in here in Brockton. Except…” Quarrel looked up at a roof across the street, where a green-striped red mask was leering down on the Nazis.

“He can replicate Tinkertech,” she hissed as he vanished, reappearing between Krieg and Rune.

Krieg backhanded the figure, collapsing it into a pile of ash, but the cylindrical device that he flicked upwards didn’t, bursting into a sphere of concussive light not dissimilar to Purity’s blasts, albeit much more diluted, that cracked the chunk of concrete and shoved both Nazi capes aside.

Rune slowed down even as half of the concrete slab moved ponderously over to catch her, and Krieg landed in a crater of his own creation, dazed but unhurt, but it was clear the tide had turned against the Empire members.

When either of the Nazi capes tried to attack the jeep, they were either distracted by the Oni or, less common, the Cornell Bomber’s grenade launcher came up and spat a concussion grenade at them, smaller than the ones that the Oni was using to throw Krieg around but no less distracting.

“Come on,” said a now-recovered Vista. “Let’s leave them to it, and go help out somewhere else. I can see the Teeth making a mess over in the Trainyard, and if we hurry, we can keep them from starting any fires.”

Quarrel frowned. There was something here, something she wasn’t seeing, and-

Then she heard something crumbling on the other side of the jeep.

“Wait, something’s coming.”

A massive body of flesh, covered in writhing tentacles and slavering mouths, burst out of an alley, slamming into the jeep with the sound of metal tearing, and then a mouth-tipped tentacle swallowed the Cornell Bomber wholesale.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted Vista, stumbling back.

Then, the body of the thing down below spat out multiple naked bodies. Some were flaming, some were seeming to dissolve into shadows, others were seeming to twist into inhuman shapes, and the rest of the figures just writhed before getting to their feet.

“f*ck,” said Quarrel, the faces of the figures coming into sharp focus. “Vista, prevent anyone from leaving now. That’s a replicator, and it’s got clones of Panacea and the Cornell Bomber.” She stood up above the edge of the roof and started to draw the arrow back.

“What are you going to do?” asked Vista, concerned.

Quarrel smirked, lightning crackling along the shaft of her arrow. She loosed, and it detonated once it hit in the center of a cluster of Panacea clones, charring them almost beyond recognition. “I’ll think of something."

Chapter 24: Duplicating Legerdemain

Chapter Text

“Well then,” said Taylor, all but goggling at the trail of destruction that had been left in the wake of Coil’s basem*nt Case 53. Then, she turned to the man himself. “What the hell have you been keeping in your goddamn base?”

“Save the judgment for after the crisis,” Coil snapped.

“I’m saving your beating for after the crisis, unless you’ve forgotten that you made the mistake of kidnapping both my father and Panacea,” Taylor shot back. “You can f*cking cope with the judgement.”

A further response from either Coil or one of his cape lackeys (who were already getting twitchy, standing in the trail of cracked asphalt and smashed-out building detritus) was forestalled by a streak of gold and white resolving into Glory Girl, returned from reconnaissance in the general direction that Noelle had gone.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” she said, touching down gently. “Good news is that Vista and Quarrel are doing a decent job at keeping them contained. The bad news is that there’s not nearly enough close-in capes to help them out. Krieg and Rune are there, and I think so is Oni Lee, but they’re not nearly doing well enough against the clones to keep up with them, even with Vista and Quarrel running artillery. They’re about to break, and hard. Best case scenario, they die or run. Worst… well, Vista and Quarrel can probably escape from where they are.”

The fact that she wasn’t including the incredibly mobile Oni Lee or Rune in her list of potential escapees was telling.

A flash of raido accompanied Taylor waving in the direction of Noelle’s path of destruction. “Let’s get moving, people, and if you can tell me what you can do that would be greatly appreciated.”

“Me too?” asked Danny.

“Uh… I’m not sure where you could go that would be safe given that the city is going buck wild, but if you want to go to, like, Alexander’s or Kurt and Lacey’s once we get to Vista, then I won’t stop you.”

“Why not home?”

“Because the door got actually broken and I’m not sure if the rune I left there fixed it? Also safety in numbers.”

He didn’t respond before they started moving.

“Well then,” said the man in the top hat, his voice taking on a pompous, almost showman-like air. “Going back to the original question, I’m Trickster, the leader of the Travelers and teleporter extraordinaire. My expertise lies in tactics, teleporting things within my line of sight with each other, and card tricks.”

“Is this really the time for that?” asked the man in the red armor, seeming to almost deflate a moment. “Don’t answer that. I’m Ballistic, and I can fire anything I touch like a projectile.”

“I’m Genesis,” said the reptilian thing pushing the wheelchair-bound woman. “I’m pushing my own wheelchair, and I can change my projection given enough time to myself.”

The group lapsed into silence after that, walking through the gaping wound in the city with the tension of combat to come weighing down the group of capes to the point where not even Danny, with his perspective so divorced from the capes he was surrounded by, could stand to interrupt.

The sounds of crackling lightning and detonating attacks got louder as they approached, and mere moments saw the group standing on a roof with Vista and Quarrel, who turned out to be the source of both the lightning and explosive attacks.

Down in the street was a chaotic mess of clones, blood, chewed-off body parts, and the massive, chimeric form of the Case 53.

“What’s the situation?” asked Taylor after Vista had twisted space so one step for her father had taken him to the DWA building.

“Not great,” replied Quarrel. “Whatever that big f*cker is, it just keeps spitting out naked clones, and-” she paused her speech to nock an arrow, which swiftly found itself embedded in the eye of a blonde clone covered in flames and detonated in a sphere of icy blue light that left hoarfrost around the body, which collapsed to the floor covered in frozen fire.

“Where was I,” she continued as if nothing had happened, ignoring the gobsmacked looks all the capes save for Taylor, Victoria, and Styx were giving her. “Oh, right. Yeah, so she managed to grab one of the Oni’s clones and it didn’t disintegrate, plus whatever fire user and shadow cape she has in addition to Panacea, and also- f*ck.”

The reason for the invective, as it turned out, was the tentacle that had latched onto the figure wearing a gas mask that was standing on the jeep and holding a grenade launcher at arm’s length, causing them to go limp and start twitching, and yanked him into the main mass of the cloning cape.

"On a scale of 'puppies and kittens for everyone to the world is ending' how bad is that particular person getting dragged in?" asked Styx, somehow managing to convey a frown through her power-distorted voice.

"Krieg? Not that bad, relative to who she has already. She already has the Cornell Bomber, so we have bigger issues than one Nazi.” Quarrel punctuated the statement with another arrow to a clone just emerging from the main body of the cape, which burst into an expanding sphere of knives. Some of the blades slowed as they went towards a man in a long coat and a gas mask who was wrestling a version of Panacea that was twisted and swollen up, but the rest carved through clone and cape flesh alike, sending the girl on top of the Case 53 slumping forwards even as the rest of its body started to rampage.

“What have you done!” screamed Trickster, glaring hatefully at Quarrel momentarily. Then, he looked away and she vanished, replaced by a newly extruded blonde clone who looked around, a little confused, then turned to Taylor and glared, miniature orbs of flaming force appearing around her and hurtling out at all the capes on the rooftop.

Meanwhile, down in the street, Quarrel leapt up, firing an arrow that burst on impact with enough force radiating out to shove her away from the Case 53’s grasping tentacles and into a roll, letting her come up running back towards the building she’d been sent off of.

Ballistic swept his hand out, returning those targeting him and Trickster to the clone with enough added velocity to break bones and splatter the semi-solid flames all over her to little effect.

Coil desperately dove for the floor, rolling to extinguish the fires that the near misses of the projectiles had set along his back and arms.

Vista took one step to the left and ended up three buildings over, the attacks targeting her slamming fruitlessly into the roof of the building.

Glory Girl shot up several feet, avoiding the projectiles completely, as Styx crossed her arms and tanked the impacts, smearing across the roof before snapping back into cohesion once the flames guttered out on the odd not-quite-matter that made up her ursine form.

Taylor was too stunned to react before the orbs of force impacted her armor with bruising force, shocking her out of the stunned state just as Ballistic’s counter subdued the clone.

She stomped over to Trickster, who was still taking cover from the clone behind Ballistic, then grabbed him by his (reinforced, probably) collar and hoisted him up into the air. “Explain yourself,” she snapped, glaring at him.

“Can’t hurt Noelle,” he ground out. Then, he turned his head to look at the fight, and Taylor abruptly and unceremoniously found herself standing, fists raised but empty (and far less imposing than when she was holding Trickster), in front of the onrushing form of the Case 53 (presumably Noelle, although she couldn’t be sure).

“f*ck,” she said just as a tentacle wrapped around her leg and yanked, pulling her just enough off balance for another tentacle to wrap around her unarmored throat.

Taylor wasn’t entirely sure what she was expecting from the experience of getting subdued by the large case 53, but ending up back in the same stormy crystalline landscape that she had met the Administrator in was… not it.

Off in the distance, Taylor saw something that looked vaguely like a dying octopus, if that octopus had been rolled around in a pile of half dead, glue-covered clones of itself, with its tentacles wrapped around various beings that looked like they’d belong in the same general ecosystem as the Administrator’s not-quite-uncanny-valley form.

“Careful,” came a chittering voice, and it was only the awareness link that gave Taylor the certainty that that was the Administrator that prevented her from blasting the spiderlike being with a bolt of lightning.

“Administrator! How did that Case 53 pull me here?” Taylor relaxed a little, seeing the (slightly smaller than she remembered-had she grown that much since she’d first met Panacea?) form of the Administrator, a relaxation that only increased as Odin appeared to step out of thin air at her left.

“Her power is… I don’t have the words to explain it in a language that you will understand, but the closest thing that comes is [MisconfiguredBroken],” said the Administrator, with the last two words coming out at the same time in a staticky hiss that whispered of extra information just beyond Taylor’s hearing.

Odin frowned. “That is a bad thing. How long would it take to rectify?”

The Administrator shrugged, a vaguely unnerving action from an arachnoid being. “It will take as long as it takes, but I lack the raw power to disrupt [Division] long enough to [ReconfigureRepair] it.”

Taylor sighed. “Great. So I have to fight a power long enough for you to perform percussive maintenance?”

“Not percussive, but yes,” said the Administrator.

Taylor sighed, then clenched her fists. “Alright.”

She started jogging towards the octopus creature (that the Administrator had called Division, she thought), drawing the power of the runes into herself as Odin faded from visibility, and after a moment, she snapped one hand up, hurling a bolt of lightning from a sowilo rune glowing on the back of her armored fist to strike home against Division’s deathly gray flesh.

It undulated in pain, then turned too many glowing red eyes to her and screamed with over a dozen mouths and all but exploded towards her, ready to fight her instead of the other beings that it had left behind.

“Come get some!” shouted Taylor, charging up a larger bolt, and she grinned, blood pounding in her ears as she bared her teeth, ready for proper combat.

Victor Gladly ran his hand through his thinning hair and breathed out, visibly relaxing as his lungs emptied.

Even had it not been for this evening’s… festivities, he would have been flagging, with his power not doing anything to keep him up and running (unlike his brother, whose vast assortment of stolen skills put him far and away ahead of Clausewitz in regards to, among other things, managing his own stamina to last as long as possible, both within a tactical context and… elsewhere).

Still, he felt he was making significant headway in accomplishing the Empire’s goals.

Despite Judge Myra’s strange resistance to even the short-term effects of his power, Gladly had managed to manipulate enough of the staff around him to cause a significant delay to the court case, then convinced Mr. Hebert that it was the PRT’s direct fault. Not that the thing was hard- the man was a lifelong union administrator, and he also had a staggering amount of distrust built up towards the PRT, so exploiting that was child’s play.

He had also… gently persuaded some of the members of Brockton’s alleged Finest to allow him to get in to visit one of their… guests, albeit in civilian clothes instead of his preferred guise as Clausewitz (although given the degree to which the Brockton Police Department was filled with both members of the Empire and their sympathizers, most of what he did was actually gentle persuasion and not coercion).

“Mr. Gladly? What are you doing here?” asked Emma Barnes, looking on the whole rather deflated in the holding cell.

Before he responded, he took a moment to think over the situation at hand.

Ms. Barnes had very definitively fallen in with the wrong crowd, in a way that wasn’t entirely Ms. Hess’ fault- although the wayward Ward was certainly a significant factor in the situation, his understanding of her reactions in certain situations suggested that Lung and his group of Oriental thugs were involved in some way.

That said, she was by no means unsalvageable- given enough time, either he or his brother could sway her to their side, despite her stubborn unwillingness to relinquish her foolish dependence on Ms. Hess, which would in turn grant them greater insight into Taylor Hebert’s mind, which was something that both he and his brother sorely needed in order to properly plan around her- the information he’d gathered of Taylor Hebert during her time in school was… inconclusive, given the severe changes to her personality and decision making process her Trigger event and subsequent power acquisition had made.

His pre-Trigger understanding of her behavior was that she would have remained very passive despite the… severe escalation that Ms. Barnes had indulged in, so given where she was intended to fit within the Plan… he needed more information, and Ms. Barnes was likely to be the best source of that information given her own longstanding history with Taylor Hebert, as well as her not insignificant understanding of manipulations (which, sadly, she hadn’t brought to bear on the vilest Ward’s molding of her).

To whit, a significant part of his effort tonight had gone to setting up enough uproar that no one would be able to tell it had happened, not even the freakishly well-informed Coil, which was aided by Thomas Calvert not taking nearly enough precautions against his power to prevent Gladly from pushing him into making a far more overt move against both New Wave and Taylor Hebert than he would have chosen otherwise.

“I’m here to see you, Miss Barnes,” he said, eschewing his usual “hip with the kids” façade in favor of revealing some of the exhaustion he’d been feeling- a simple manipulation, but to someone in as vulnerable a state as the young redhead, the show of emotions would do almost as much to get her on his side as his power.

“Why… why would you come here?’ she asked, a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes.

“Because,” he replied with a sigh, nudging his power just enough to make her believe him, “I know I failed you, and I wanted to know how, and why, you arrived at the conclusion that your pattern of behavior was necessary, so that I might be able to prevent it going forwards.” He had no intention of preventing similar situations, going forwards, at least when they were under his control- being able to induce Triggers independently of Gesellschaft would be a massive victory for the Empire, after all- but she didn’t have to know that.

She sniffled, then begun to speak, and with every word out of her mouth, another piece of the puzzles that were her actions with regards to Taylor Hebert, as well as the girl in question’s mind.

Victor Gladly left the holding area and stalked off to his brother’s house, nursing a headache from running himself ragged but with a vastly more advanced understanding of the Empire’s soon-to-be newest recruit. The longer hewalked, the more the plan in his head came into focus, and by the time he returned to his brother’s home to begin planning, he had a solid framework for the execution of said plan.

Gladly entered the empty house and beelined for the white board they had always used for planning. He’d need his brother to help refine the plan with his more varied skillset, but there wasn’t anything stopping him from starting to fet the framework down physically.

There was much planning to do, after all, and not much time to waste in doing so.

Chapter 25: Interlude 4: Vicky, Amy, Max

Chapter Text

When Victoria saw Trickster’s eyes flicker away from Taylor under his mask, she immediately started moving to slam into him.

It was too late for her to prevent him from teleporting a different clone in, one who was moving almost superhumanly fast, but at that point she was already close enough to the both of them that she could just plow into both the clone and the cape, and then jam the hat on Trickster’s head down over his eyes hard enough that it would take a Brute rating to get off without destroying it (well, any more than it had already been, at least), leaving him to fall over and complain.

The clone, however, just blurred away across the roof when she hit him, slamming first Ballistic and then Coil into the ground with the cracks of breaking bones.

That stopped when Styx gestured, dark blades erupting out of the shadows cast by the yellowish light of the streetlights, and the almost taffylike flesh of the clone split as he ran directly into the blades and fell to the floor without a sound.

More blades swept in and slashed across the back of his bare limbs as he tried to push himself up, cutting through the clone’s pale flesh and sending him collapsing to the floor as he glared up, switching between Victoria and Styx with no real regard for the “conventional” notion of human speed.

“What the f*ck are you doing?” snapped Victoria, glaring ineffectually at Trickster, who gingerly was prodding at his hat with the arm he wasn’t holding to his chest. After a moment, she realized her glare was wasted on the blinded cape and shifted it to the clone.

“He protects mother,” said the clone in a familiar voice Victoria couldn’t quite place. “We protect him.”

“We protect him,” echoed the other clone who had been subdued by Ballistic.

“Great,” groaned the semi-armored cape, holding his side gingerly. “Krouse, you got a bunch of simps on your ass that your BO can’t drive off.”

“Screw you, Luke,” replied the other cape, letting himself fall to a supine position and leaving his hat where it was covering his eyes.

“If you’re quite finished,” slurred Coil through what looked to be either a dislocated or broken jaw, “we have a significant obstacle presented, in that Miss Meinhardt has escaped containment save for Vista’s efforts. It would probably be wise to rectify that situation.” Genesis’ reptilian form gently lifted him upright, drawing murmured thanks from the morph suit-clad villain.

Ballistic groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, reaching into a pocket on his armor for a small handful of ball bearings, then inched gingerly over to the edge of the building to look out at the clones on the ground, gauging the situation.

“I have… no idea who I should be trying to hit first,” he said, his sentence punctuated by another of Quarrel’s arrows detonating in a flash of lightning.

“Clones of Amy or the Cornell Bomber,” Victoria said, cracking her knuckles. “They do weird things with Amy’s power so we don’t know but they could have a bunch of weird things, including disease powers, and the Cornell Bomber’s whole thing is explosions.”

“And Volur?” asked Styx, charging the air with tension.

“...I’m not sure that that’s something you should be worried about,” said Quarrel, having literally leapt off of an exploding clone of the Cornell Bomber (who she promptly perforated) to reach the roof again. “Volur, Panacea, and I all have… nonstandard powers, and they might be strong enough in Volur to disrupt the cloning process.”

“That’s…” Ballistic looked out at the battlefield, then visibly made the decision not to pry. “Yeah, okay.” And with that, he started firing his ball bearings with the staccato crack crack crack of them breaking the sound barrier (and, more distantly, bones).

Victoria rose into the air, then swooped down, traveling in erratic paths to slam into the odd clone here and there while remaining mobile enough to return to the rooftop if needed, but there honestly wasn’t all that much for her to do- even with the rate that the Case 53 was creating clones, Quarrel and Ballistic were dealing with them almost entirely on their own, with intermittent aid from Styx weaponizing shadows, and ultimately most of the clones Victoria dealt with were the copies of (presumably- they were naked, after all, so she couldn’t be sure) Oni Lee who were able to teleport away from the rapid attacks that Ballistic and Quarrel could put out.

The end of the battle, when it came, was relatively anticlimactic- the flow of new clones joining the battle abruptly stopped, and when Victoria looked up to see why, she managed to catch most of the mass of the Case 53’s animalistic body splash to the ground in a wave of slightly rotten-smelling sludge, revealing seven people (one of whom promptly dissolved into the telltale ash of Oni Lee’s power) in various states of dazedness.

The least dazed of the people was Taylor, who landed on her feet, armor somehow dry despite the wave of sludge that the Case 53 had released. Near Taylor was Amy, whose eyes were unfocused but she was clearly lucid enough to help a wobbly-looking girl in tight red and black to her feet.

“Hey, Vicky,” said Taylor, her words slurred just slightly with exhaustion. “You got a chair or something? It’s been a long… however long I spent in there, and I just wanna sit down.

Amy was a little jealous of Taylor for being able to use Vicky’s thighs as a pillow after her ordeal.

Not specifically about sleeping on her sister’s thighs- that boat had well and truly sailed, since while she wasn’t strictly speaking subject to the Westermarck effect with regards to Victoria, the externally-enforced obsession that had resulted from Shaper’s mental manipulations combining with her sister’s aura had been wiped by her apotheosis restoring her to “perfect health”, the implications of which she was unwilling to really think about.

That said, it wasn’t all bad- Coil was (presumably) completely dealt with, given that according to Vicky, Vista was all but sitting on the man, even beyond his broken bones, and hopefully-

Her train of thought was abruptly disrupted by the bass-heavy style that John Williams preferred for his Sith characters, immediately spiking her adrenaline at the prospect of talking to Carol.

Intellectually, she knew she probably shouldn’t be so apprehensive over Carol calling, but given that in the past most of their phone conversations had been over not being home in time for her curfew and the like, long exposure had conditioned her to react a certain way, and she was still a little worked up after getting kidnapped.

“Hello?”

“Where the hell do you think you are, young lady?!”

Amy pulled the phone away from her head and looked at it incredulously. “What?”

“Where. Are. You.”

“Uh… outside a cape battle’s aftermath, hang on.” She turned around before she found an intact street sign. “About Second and Park, with Vicky and Taylor.”

“And how did you get there?”

“I don’t know,” said Amy, no small amount of sarcasm in her voice. “It’s not as if I had a choice in the matter, what with being kidnapped and unconscious and all that.”

“Watch your tone, young lady,” said Carol. “There’s no excuse for such impoliteness.”

“Yeah, well, again, just got kidnapped, so I’m not exactly inclined to be charitable to anyone telling me to stop bitching,” she shot back.

Carol’s reply was interrupted by Styx, who plucked the phone out of her hands with surprisingly dexterous claws and walked over to Vicky, who took said phone and held it up to her own ear.

“Mom,” she said, voice low out of consideration to the sleeping god on her lap, “it’s me. Ames is okay, she got kidnapped and then stuck in a weird cape with cloning powers, but she’s good now. The cape is… dealt with.”

Amy glanced over to where Sundancer and Genesis were fussing over a blonde woman who she quickly looked away from upon realizing that she was lacking clothes, who was apparently the big cape? She wasn’t sure, and when Taylor had tried to explain what had happened she just chalked it up to rune magic bullsh*t after Taylor and her sister had started going on about “vindication of passenger theory” and “holy sh*t how high is your Trump rating now”.

Amy was abruptly jolted back to reality by a wave of Vicky’s aura and the sound of her phone creaking. “I don’t care about my date or your publicity event getting interrupted, damn it!” she whisper-yelled. “I care about my sister getting kidnapped by some asshole who wanted her for her power!”

Amy could all but hear the creaking of the plastic case on her phone as Victoria started to lose control of her strength, the thunderous expression on her face growing more tumultuous as Carol presumably kept speaking. “I’m not Amy’s babysitter, mom. I’m allowed to have my own life, and just because you don’t like Taylor is no excuse for- look, if you’re going to blame me going out on a date for bad sh*t when you haven’t done so in the past when Dean was the date, that just tells me that you’re either being hom*ophobic or don’t like Taylor! Or do I have to remind you that you weren’t around to prevent Amy from getting kidnapped either?”

Vicky pressed her lips together. “Look, mom, I’m not dealing with you like this and the aftermath of… whatever the hell you want to call what went on here at the same time, and I sure as sh*t am not gonna do it over the phone. When you get back, bring Aunt Sarah over to the house, and we can talk.”

Without waiting for a response, Vicky hung up, tossing the phone to Amy who nearly dropped it, the shaky fingers of an adrenaline crash betraying her.

“Well then,” she said, quietly for the sake of Taylor who had somehow not woken up after the not-exactly-quiet phone call, “looks like mom’s not happy.”

Vicky gave Amy a level look that spoke to her supreme lack of amusem*nt with the level of understatement in that statement, then sighed tiredly and rubbed at her face with one hand. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said without too much heat.

“You should start a team,” said Styx, dropping heavily onto a piece of rubble next to Vicky.

“I… huh. I’m not gonna commit to that one way or the other but it’s definitely an idea worth thinking about, once she wakes up,” replied the blonde, gesturing at Taylor still sleeping on her lap.

“Fair,” said Styx. “I just… it might be something that gets her the support she needs in a way she can’t deny, after what Emma Barnes did to her.”

That effectively killed the conversation, leaving the three conscious capes to their own thoughts.

Max Anders was… not particularly enthusiastic about the way things had been going of late.

Don’t get him wrong, he was pleased with the way that recent events had been favoring his organizations (both legal and otherwise), but there was something about things that made him feel… odd.

The feeling had started, to some degree or another, when Victor’s younger brother, Clausewitz, had really started to push for his preferred strategic and tactical moves for his Empire.

It had started… well, not innocuously, per se, but it was about as close as a criminal organization such as the Empire could get, with the man’s suggestions helping them to expand their recruitment, both of the overt gang members that they needed from a street warfare perspective and the “respectable sympathizers” which were spread throughout various different agencies, both law enforcement and otherwise, the kind of people who would massage situations and turn just enough of a blind eye to their activities to really keep their operations running. This was where their moles came from, the informants in the police and PRT that supplied them with insider information (well, that and Thinker intel from both Gesselschaft and the Herren clans).

Speaking of the Herren clans, he chose to believe that both Rune and Othala had decided to join the Empire of their own volition- after all, the latter had been engaged to Victor for months before the Herren clans hand sent the quartet to join his Empire, and Rune had joined the Herren clans before that.

That said, he had been privy to Clausewitz’s longer-term power conditioning exactly once, and it had left him profoundly uncomfortable.

He did his best to avoid the man outside official business, after that.

Still, despite the level of separation he held from Clausewitz, the pattern of escalation he was undertaking was… worrying. The gradual subornment of the PRT and police was one thing, and in fact something that both he and his father had been attempting to accomplish, albeit with less success.

But the blatant manipulations of Director Piggot, both overt and covert, to weaken the PRT? Working with the Butcher, that mad collective willing to call in the Slaughterhouse when they failed to get their way against Marquis? Exploiting a Trigger event to recruit a cape, even if it was mostly indirect? Any one of those could spell disaster if it got out, and the latter two also had the potential to directly backfire on them if not handled delicately.

The fact that any of those ideas were what Clausewitz immediately chose to use as strategies to pursue spoke to either a disconnect from the nature of capedom or a willful disregard of the established nature of capedom, the distinction being largely arbitrary in practical terms but important in terms of predicting Clausewitz’s actions.

That said, he couldn’t deny that the man’s methods were producing results.

Clausewitz’s manipulations with regards to the Director were hampering the PRT’s responses against his Empire far more than just what low-level informants they had, and as much as he hated to admit it after what the Butcher had cost him over the years, he had to admit that the mad collective’s presence in his city was helping, both by their almost suicidal willingness to throw themselves at Lung (the only thing preventing it from being actually suicidal was Lung’s restraint to prevent himself from becoming the next Butcher) and the disruption to PRT and otherwise heroic operations within the city, even if this latest event hadn’t been directly related.

No, apparently Coil had been stupid enough to keep a monster under his base, and the situation had degenerated enough to the point where Oni Lee, Bakuda, Rune, Krieg, and even some independent capes with surprising levels of power, including Clausewitz’s next recruit, had all had to intervene together to put the creature down.

He was just thankful that none of his capes were injured too permanently by the beast, and Othala’s aid would have them fighting fit in no time.

Still, he needed to keep an eye on the man, for security’s sake, if nothing else. There was no telling when one of his risky strategies would backfire on them, and as the stakes of said schemes rose, they needed to be ready for the consequences.

Chapter 26: Adrenaline Crash

Chapter Text

Taylor rubbed at her bleary eyes, resolutely deciding to ignore both the fact that she had fallen asleep in Vicky’s lap and the blush that that brought to her face, visible under the lower edges of her helmet. “How long was I out?”

“About fifteen minutes,” drawled Styx, the claws of her bear form sunk into a piece of rubble almost as tall as the nine-foot shoulders of said bear form that she was holding over her head with what looked to be negligible effort. “PRT finally got off its ass and we’re working on cleaning up some of the sh*t that got broken while we wait for them to send more than a prisoner restraint team. Most of the other fights that cropped up around the city have more or less died down, but they’re still stretched thinner than normal trying to deal with those incidents.”

“Prisoner restraint? Who do they have?” asked Taylor, tensing her whole body slightly and releasing the tension to shock herself back to full awareness.

“Coil, the soon-to-be-retired Shadow Stalker, the world’s number one Noelle simp, and a couple of the clones that didn’t get offed,” the Breaker replied, jerking her head off to a side street where flashing lights were visible. “Everyone else either skated out or got dragged out by their friends.”

Taylor pressed her lips together, contradictory urges warring in her head- did she go confront Shadow Stalker or Coil over what they’d done to her, or-

“C’mon,” said Vicky, nudging up against Taylor in the direction of the lights, and then she pressed up against her girlfriend no no too soon the other hero with her shoulder, actually exerting force. “We should at least see them once, and if you’re anything like me, if you don’t go and confront something like this now, you never will.”

Taylor sighed, then stepped forward, sending Vicky sliding off and startling her, if what garbled visual signals from bugs she could get were getting through clearly. “Fine, I’ll at least go and see her,” she said, almost dragging her feet before realizing that was a bad idea given the already damaged asphalt and concrete she was walking on.

All too soon, the three of them had arrived at the place where the capes were being held. Immediately it was obvious that there was a difference in how the three preestablished villains were being treated and the Echidna clones- for starters, Coil and Sophia had been stripped of their masks, revealing their faces and the expressions contained therein, while Trickster’s hat was jammed down over his eyes (something that made Vicky smirk victoriously), and all three were bound with both heavy cuffs and odd collars as well as leg irons. In contrast, the Echidna clones were almost perfunctorily bound in standard-issue handcuffs and looked to be almost uniformly in shock over the realignment Taylor had forced onto Division.

Coil was calm and collected at first blush, but as Taylor looked at him for longer, she began to see and hear what looked like an echo of Coil, alternatively attempting to escape and to bargain before what looked like a bolt of lightning or a small orb of flame dispelled the echoes in question and caused that Coil to change tactics, with the last echo coming after a particularly egregious threat against her father and merely vanishing with the sound of a bell tolling.

Taylor dismissed him from her attention (still leaving a number of bugs in discreet and not-so-discreet places on his body- there was no need to be uncautious about things, after all), and turned her focus to Sophia.

Unlike Coil, she was very visibly agitated- some aspect of her brain (probably one that had paid attention when talking heads on the radio or TV had mentioned Trigger theory) mentioned how Mover aspects to powers hated to be confined, so this had to be wearing on Sophia from that angle.

“So, Hebert,” she all but spat, “come to brag about how you brought bad old me down?”

“Believe it or not,” said Taylor, curiously detached from the situation even as her bugs writhed and chittered out of sight, “you were at best a secondary concern here. My concern, first and foremost, was getting Amy and my dad to safety, and dealing with whoever endangered them in the first place wasn’t really an immediate priority.” She leaned in, feeling an odd feeling against her eyes as a pressure seemed to settle down on Sophia, who pressed herself back against the PRT van in a vain attempt to escape from Taylor. “You would have come after, when we could have afforded to devote our… full attention to you.”

Sophia shuddered as Vicky cracked her knuckles behind Taylor, her aura unfolding from her like the wings of a particularly displeased angel.

“What do you want,” she hissed.

“A great many things,” said Taylor, leaning back as the pressure on her eyes dissipated. “But at this point I think the most pertinent is the knowledge of why you and Emma decided to come after me so hard.”

“Seriously? That’s what’s so f*cking important to you?” asked Sophia.

“She wants to hear it from ou-your lips, Stalker,” said Styx, the shadows around her feet writhing under the influence of her power.

“Fine, whatever. It’s because Emma wanted to… I dunno, prove herself strong? Either way, it was the way to handle things that fit… best, I guess, and you were a convenient target at first. Then, it became habit. But then, you fought back.”

“And then I fought back,” said Taylor, purposefully breathing deeply in an effort to control her temper.

“Yeah, at that point it got… personal. I can’t afford to let anyone get away with f*cking with me, or else all the wannabe Empire bastards at the school are gonna think that they can, so…” Sophia shrugged.

“You also got her good and pissed off, so when Emma suggested going after you in your bed, she went along with it with only a little bit of nudging from her power,” said Styx, almost matter-of-factly.

“Why you little-” Sophia started to surge to her feet only for the shadows around her to coalesce into a bladed ring, all pointed inwards.

“By all means, Stalker, if you think you can go shadow fast enough to dodge me, feel free to try. Of course, then you have the wonderful prospect of facing off with the cape who can shoot lightning hard enough to scare off the Simurgh.” Styx’s voice was soft, the threat of violence nevertheless evident in every word she said.

“f*ck you all, then,” snapped Sophia, collapsing back to sit against the van.

Vicky turned to Styx. “What was that about her power?”

“Later, once we’re not out in the street for any Tom, Dick, and Harry to overhear,” said Styx.

“That’s not enough, Sophia,” said Taylor, making eye contact with the restrained parahuman.

“What’re you gonna do about it, Hebert?” Sophia snarled.

“Don’t bother with her,” said Styx before Taylor could respond. “I can tell you all the things she can without her being all pissy, and you won’t have to do it out in the open.”

Taylor looked from Styx to Sophia and back again, then nodded, before turning on her heel and walking away.

“You need somewhere to stay? I know Mom’s not likely to let it slide, but Aunt Sarah might-” started Vicky.

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll catch up with you… at some point tomorrow, probably.” With that, Styx broke off in a jog towards Vista and Quarrel, a “Hey, Atalanta!” the last thing Taylor heard before she turned her attention away from the capes.

Vicky nudged Taylor. “Come on, Volur, let’s go home.”

Taylor took in a deep breath and let it out, deflating slightly, then nodded. “Yeah, let’s go home.”

A night (and some of the morning) of sleep did Taylor a world of good, leaving the brunette bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. That said, alertness was often a double edged sword, and with it came a stunned reaction to the bathroom mirror.

“Huh,” said Taylor, prodding at her (far more muscular than she remembered) arm and watching her finger stop while leaning into the mirror. “That’s not how I remember it.” She straightened up, then frowned. “And… huh.” She turned to the doorframe that she had almost religiously marked her height on at the start of every year and every birthday, and confirmed her hunch and then some. “Six foot three? I… wow.”

She was pulled from her stunned staring by the sound of the home phone ringing, which was followed by her father calling up with a cry of “Taylor! It’s for you!”

Taylor descended the stairs at a rapid clip, then took the offered handset from her father, holding it up to her ear and saying “Hello?”

“Hey, Taylor. Did you have any plans today? If not, we’re going out shopping, you need some… additional tools… for your side job, and also more clothes with how you’re shooting up like a weed, I think,” said Vicky.

“I, uh… wow, good timing, I was just thinking about that last part. Hang on,” Taylor replied before turning away from the phone and towards her dad. “Is there anything in particular you wanted me to do today?”

“Not really,” said Danny. “Victoria trying to set something up?”

“She wants to take me shopping…”

“Ah, okay. Go ahead,” Danny replied, opening his mouth as if to say something else but visibly deciding not to.

Taylor relayed that to Victoria, who responded with exuberance. “Ah, great! Amy’s out at the bookstore with a new friend, Marth or something like that, so we might run into them at some point today.”

A few more minutes of pleasantries on the phone led to Taylor hanging up, and before much longer, she was on her way out the door with a “Stay safe, Taylor!” from her dad.

Thanks to the runes speeding and concealing her journey, she arrived at the mall in short order, and only moments after Taylor sat down in the food court with a cup of Irish breakfast tea from a tea shop (which, for some reason, didn’t feel right to be drinking- it had no bite, sweetness, or spice, even if Irish breakfast tea had been her favorite tea for years and expecting those out of it didn’t make sense), Vicky arrived, somewhat more subdued and slumped over than Taylor expected.

“Hey, Vicky, everything okay?” asked Taylor.

“Huh? Uh… kinda? Mom was… not particularly chuffed about last night, and she wasn’t shy about expressing it either,” said Victoria, simmering emotions buried under the chipper funt she started putting up.

Making the decision to avoid the topic, Taylor went for the one thing that she thought she’d be able to use to redirect the conversation. “Chuffed? What, are you English now? Coming to Brockton to sell some tea we’re gonna throw into the harbor?”

The joke tore a laugh out of the blonde, which prompted her to respond with “Oi, the East India Company has the right to sell tea to all of you colonials! Just because you can’t handle the taxes isn’t our problem!”

“Yuk it up, limey,” replied Taylor, “we’re not gonna pay it!”

Once the laughter died down, the duo remained at the table long enough for Taylor to finish her tea, then departed for a clothing store.

“So,” said Victoria, “what kind of thing are you looking for? Do you want to maintain your current wardrobe in bigger sizes, do you want to go for something a little bit flashier, or something else?”

Taylor shivered with the sensation of something unnervingly cold on her feet, then shook her head more purposefully. “No idea,” she said, covering up her indecision with forced nonchalance. “I mean, I kinda changed over to the drab and baggy aesthetic because the better I dressed the more likely Emma and them were to do stuff that would ruin my clothes, and since Emma and Sophia are out of Winslow that isn’t something I have to deal with as much, but on the other hand it’s one of those things that I’ve been working with so long that I’m not sure how to go about shifting things around…”

She trailed off as she saw Vicky looking at her with pity and respect in her eyes. “I, uhh… right, we’re changing your style,” the blonde said. “I think we should start with Hera Fashion Boutique, over here…”

Vicky all but dragged Taylor away after a moment of initial resistance, leaving the spirit of Odin to trail behind them, trading meaningful glances with Taylor’s shadow (which was rippling slightly, in a manner that a viewer could be forgiven for thinking to be angry).

“Victor! Charles! Come in, come in. Oh, is that little Tammi I see?” Marcus Stansfield opened the door widely, allowing his son to see the representative for Medhall, a classically handsome Nordic man, walk in, followed closely by his brother, who was much shorter and contrasted his brother’s intense air with the kind of grin that all but radiated sincerity, and an almost arrogant-looking blonde girl, whose face lost some of its disdain when her eyes fell on him. “If you’ll follow me to the parlor, Eleanor already has tea started.”

“Actually,” said Victor, his gregarious grin not wavering even as something about him shifted, “we kind of brought Tammi so she could keep Dean occupied while the grown-ups talk. We would have brought Theo along, but… well, far be it from us to get in the way of father-son bonding time.”

“In that case,” said Marcus, smoothly adjusting his plans on the fly even as his emotions shifted almost imperceptibly to Dean’s eyes, “Dean, why don’t you show Tammi to the second parlor. I’ll have Ava bring out some tea for you two as well.”

“Right this way,” said Dean, leading Tammi to the parlor his father had referred to.

The girl spun a full circle upon entering, taking in the tastefully understated, hardwood-focused decor of the room and slowing slightly to take in the gold accents. “Not bad,” she said, concealing her physical reaction (but not the flash of greenish-yellow envy his power revealed).

“Yeah, well,” he replied, a little on the back foot. “All of us worked together on this parlor, sort of as a way to have family time. Mother says I need to be well-rounded, so that’s one of the things I’m trying out while I have the spare time.”

“Admirable,” said Tammi warmly, her emotions flaring in a tangled knot of overlapping colors that Dean decided to interpret as respect and some small degree of envy.

“It’s, ah, not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said, mind drifting to the difficulties he’d had with people before he’d taken his vial and how similar they were to the softer arts his mother had forced him to spend time on. “There’s so much that’s subjective about interior design, or flower arranging, or so many of the other subjective forms of expression there are like fashion, that it’s hard to keep track of all the different interpretations that are in vogue, let alone the way that all the different dynamics interact across different fields and shift over time.”

Tammi nodded politely, then shook herself, the indigo of awkwardness leaching into her aura. “Not to change the subject, but, uh… I don’t exactly have the breadth and depth of knowledge to keep up with you on this.”

“Ah, my apologies,” said Dean. “Is there, ah… something in particular you’d like to discuss?”

“Yeah, actually. This might come across as a little bit insensitive, but you and Glory Girl haven’t been seen together all that often of late. Is that a new development, or just schedules not matching up?”

Dean winced. “That’s, ah… a little bit of a sensitive topic,” he said.

“If you’d rather not talk about it, then I won’t push,” Tammi said, more awkwardness coloring her silhouette as she rubbed her arm.

“No, no, it’s…. Well, it’s not public information, per se, but it’s not exactly private either. Vicky and I… we had a fight, and we’re on break right now, but… well, she and I have very different understandings of ‘on break’, I guess, because she went out on a couple of dates with the locker girl, even if it was from pity.” Dean worked his jaw, releasing some of the tension in the joint.

Blue-green curiosity started overtaking the awkwardness in Tammi’s aura. “Locker girl?”

“The girl who got crammed in a locker back at the beginning of January. She got all kinds of infections, and even Amy wasn’t able to save her eye, and she dragged Vicky along with her when she started hanging out with the girl, and then when I asked her to spend some time with me instead of a suspected villain who’s involved in Shadow Stalker going off the reservation… well, that’s when the fight happened.”

“Suspected villain?” asked Tammi, even more curious now.

Dean weighed the risks in his head. On one hand, telling anyone outside the Protectorate or PRT about Locker Girl’s suspected status was against regulations, and while they could be bent for allies like New Wave, random civilians were wholly unkosher on that front. On the other hand, his new friend seemed quite trustworthy, and he remembered hearing something about her uncle Gladly being a teacher at Winslow, and despite his unfortunate name (sharing a name with a villain was always unfortunate, especially one with as bad a public reputation as an Empire member) having someone else who could keep an eye on her would be helpful.

One of those outweighed the other, and so he started to talk. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay?” Once he saw Tammi nod, he continued. “Okay, so according to some analysis done by an independent consultant who works with one of the PRT Strike Commanders here in Brockton Bay…”

“How did it go?” asked Clausewitz once the car’s doors had closed. “I wasn’t sure how far to push it with him, even with Victor eroding away his self-restraint.”

“Better than expected,” Rune replied. “He didn’t even realize he was outing himself. On top of that, it appears that Coil left some groundwork behind that we can take advantage of, since he had some of his deniable assets working on dragging down her reputation within the Protectorate, and they’ve managed to convince some people that she did something directly to alter both Vista’s and Shadow Stalker’s behavior patterns.”

Clausewitz nodded. “Piggot’s paranoia and distrust of capes who aren’t under her thumb are working against her more than I had anticipated, even with the former Commander Calvert’s manipulations. Anything else relevant?”

“Gallant appears to be even less well inclined towards Hebert than their faction as a whole, since he sees her as having stolen Glory Girl away from him.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” Victor said. “That is a potentially useful emotional lever that we could use to maneuver him.”

“I agree,” replied Clausewitz. “Rune, you may be needed to play a honeypot role with him in order to leverage him more efficiently.”

“Yes sir,” she said, absolutely flatly. “What was the status of the primary mission?”

“Inconclusive. The Stansfield group may be interested in developing closer ties with Medhall, but they are unwilling to commit without directly negotiating with either Krieg or Kaiser in their civilian identities,” said Clausewitz.

“Understood,” replied Rune.

The remainder of the car ride back to Victor’s house was silent until the very end.

“How are we going to handle Hebert’s… deviancy?” asked Rune.

“The same way Gesellschaft handled Night and Fog’s,” said Victor with finality.

Chapter 27: Insides Crying Save Me Now

Chapter Text

Contrary to what Taylor had expected given her previous experience in shopping with Vicky, the blonde was actually quite restrained, both in the sense that she wasn’t pushing Taylor nearly as hard to get out of her comfort zone (as had been used to describe it last time) and that her positive demeanor was, while better than it had been to start, still not enough to prevent Taylor from noticing that she was wrestling with something underneath.

“Not to be rude,” said Taylor, trying to approach the topic sideways, “but this is a very… different… experience from the last time you took me shopping.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, last time I was really trying to get you to push yourself out of your comfort zone, so I was going a little overboard on that one, but as it stands, you’re doing a decent job of that on your own,” Vicky replied, gesturing at the bags of (significantly less restrained than her previous style, both in color and cut) clothing that Taylor was carrying as if they weighed less than a thought. “That, and also part of that was me playing things up for Ames, it’s kind of a thing.”

“...that addresses some things, but, uh… it looks like something’s really bugging you.” Vicky snorted at the fly that Taylor sent buzzing past her nose to emphasize the pun. “Wanna talk about it?”

The blonde sighed. “Not really, but I probably should, right?”

Taylor raised both hands, palms out. “If you don’t want to, I’m sure not gonna make you,” she said. “Norns know pushing me this time last year wouldn’t have been particularly helpful.”

The unusual reference sent one of Vicky’s eyebrows scurrying for the cover of her hairline, but instead of deflecting, she just sighed again. “Yeah, fair. It’s just… Mom is…”

“I’ve, ah… had the privilege of seeing Brandish on TV. She doesn’t look like a particularly easy person to have as a relative.”

Vicky huffed out a half-aborted laugh. “You can say that again. Mom is… well, she has very high expectations of everyone, except for Dad, and that’s because I think she sees him as having failed her expectations already. Those expectations manifest in… different ways, between me and Amy, and they’ve changed a lot. Before Amy Triggered, she was expected to stay out of sight as much as possible, but now… it’s like Mom is looking for any excuse to tear Amy down, or something. It’s… well, it’s almost like she’s pushing her until she turns into… something else, and I don’t know what that something else is, but based on how Mom treats her, I really don’t want to see it.”

Taylor pressed her lips together. “Hmmm. And what kind of expectations does she have for you?”

“...too many and not enough, it feels like,” said Vicky, with no small amount of exhaustion in her voice. “Like, even before my Trigger, she expected me to be, like, this idealized version of a daughter, obedient and composed but with no opinions of my own. I was there to be… almost a safety blanket, because no one would try things around a kid, you know? Aunt Jess tried to help, when she was still around, but once she was gone, I didn’t have anyone to turn to but Amy, and I couldn’t afford to put any more of my stuff on her. But that… well, long story short, it just kept building up, and up, and up, until…”

“You Triggered,” said Taylor.

“I Triggered, from being fouled at a goddamn basketball game- and then, when I looked at Mom, because that’s what you do with your parents, right? You look at them and expect them to protect you? But not now. Mom was… she looked like she didn’t care. Hell, Dad was pissed off, but not Mom. And then… it kinda clicked. She… she’s just as broken as us, even more so, in some ways, she’s just better at hiding it, unless you need help. So, I got my power, which lets me stand on my own, safe from any kind of just one-off attack and with the kind of add-ins to not face more than the one-off. In hindsight, looking at things through the lens of Trigger Theory helps me sort of distance myself from the problems, but… well, knowing where you’re hurt doesn’t really do a whole lot directly to let you stop hurting, especially when it’s something like this.”

At some point during the conversation, Taylor realized, they had wandered into a more sequestered area of the mall, which was probably intentional.

“After the game, some things changed, but others… didn’t. Mom doubled down on appearances, insisting I have to present myself as this paragon of heroism, which… well, I leaned too much on Amy to help hold that image up when it cracked, and if it hadn’t worked so well, we probably would have f*cking gotten somewhere with the damn Nazis because we could afford to just take the damn kid gloves off and pay them back for Aunt Jess, but no. Even with the power to stand out, stand on my own… even if I don’t think I’m letting Mom control me, she still has her fingers all over my mental state,” Vicky said, shaking her head.

Taylor set her bags down on a nearby bench, leaving a couple of bugs on them to keep tabs on them, then carefully wrapped the blonde in a hug, resting her chin on top of the shorter woman’s head. “You don’t have to stand on your own anymore,” she said, carefully maneuvering Vicky around to where she could set them both down on the bench next to her bags.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” admitted Vicky quietly, tears glimmering red in the intermittent flashing of a tattoo parlor’s sign.

“We can learn together,” said Taylor, awkwardly patting Vicky on the shoulder.

After a moment of sniffling, Vicky wiped the last of the gleaming tears from her face, chuckling ruefully. “Sorry about that, Taylor,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bring the spirit of things down so much, I just… well, Mom is a lot to handle and it looks like I’m not as good at it as I thought. I understand if you don’t want me around for the rest of the day, or-”

Taylor cut Vicky off with a glare that was not made any less fierce by the one eye she had to make it with. “I’m not going to leave a friend to suffer alone.”

Vicky’s tears increased in frequency and she buried her face in Taylor’s shoulder.

Taylor wasn’t expecting Styx to show up after they left the mall, per se, but given some of the things that she had said, as well as some ineffable instinct (not to be confused with a plan, ineffable or otherwise), she wasn’t exactly surprised to see the clone of Sophia Hess step out of a dark alleyway and fall in step with both Taylor and the puffy-eyed Victoria.

“Styx,” she said, eyeing the muscular girl with no small amount of trepidation. Outside of the adrenaline-pumping confines of Coil’s base, and more specifically in the light of the sun, the resemblance to Sophia was much more pronounced, between the exact slant of her cheekbones, the exact shade of her eyes, and even in how she held herself. It wasn’t enough to make her nearly as uncomfortable as being around Sophia would have been, there was something about the alternate version of the girl who had helped Emma make her life a living hell that just… set her at ease.

“Call me Bella,” came the reply.

There was an awkward pause for a few moments.

“You have questions.”

“I do,” said Taylor and Victoria in tandem.

“...not here. Follow,” said Bella, walking back into the alley. She approached a wall, but right before she ran into it, the shadow under her feet darkened as it oozed up the brickwork, leaving a void that she stepped through.

On the other side, Taylor could feel bugs scurrying around, and took a moment to nudge them away from what felt like a living area, although not fast enough to stop Bella from skewering a few of them with shadowy blades.

“After you,” said Taylor, gesturing Vicky through the slowly closing portal.

“Dork,” said the blonde, floating through the portal before Taylor nonetheless.

Taylor followed Vicky through the portal, at which point it irised closed to reveal cracking drywall that displayed brickwork through the largest gaps. A moment later, Taylor registered the three other presences in the building and relaxed mere moments before an unmasked Vista stepped through an odd distortion in space, followed by Quarrel and a blonde girl with delicate features who somehow gave off a feeling of warmth.

“Taylor, I am so, so, so, so sorry about what we let Sophia do to you, I-” started Vista.

“Did you help Sophia shove me in the locker?” Taylor interrupted.

“Uh, no?”

“Did you give her the sh*t that she put in my locker?”

“Also no.”

“Did you cover up what she was doing like Piggot did?”

“Hell no, I would never-”

“Then you have nothing to apologize for. You had a bad coworker who did some f*cked-up sh*t outside of her job. That’s not your fault.” Taylor’s proclamation had the entire room blinking in shock at the level tone she had delivered it in.

Something opened the ground floor door with the sound of rusted hinges squealing, and everyone tensed. Taylor, on the other hand, focused on her bugs’ senses, then shook her head. “Just Amy.”

Vicky blinked. “What do you mean, ‘just Amy’?”

“I mean,” said Taylor, watching as Amy walked up the rickety stairway to their position on the third floor, “that the person is only Amy and we don’t have to worry about it being, like, Victor. Or the Butcher.”

Quarrel shivered. “Nah, they wouldn’t show up outside of the most inconvenient moment for us. We used to joke about that being a secondary aspect of… well, one of their powers, back before.” Her voice dropped at the end, melancholy audible (and visible in how she slumped over somewhat).

An awkward silence fell over the group, which lasted long enough for Amy to stomp up the last of the stairs. “Alright, it’s time to- oh, hey, Taylor, Vicky.”

“Hi, Ames. What brings you here?” asked Vicky.

“We’re going out hunting Nazis,” said Amy.

“Does that make you Brad Pitt, then?” asked the unfamiliar blonde.

“Who now?” asked Amy.

“You know, Brad Pitt, the guy who went out and did the recruiting in that movie from a few years ago, Inglourious Basterds?”

Amy blinked. “You mean Nick Cage?”

The blonde pressed her lips together. “Ah. I forgot that Bet is weird about actors.”

“Well, yeah, of course we would be after the Elite took over Hollywood,” Amy shot back, a smile on her face despite the subject matter.

“Hang on,” said Vicky, confusion visible on her face as she turned to the blonde. “Who are you again?”

“Oh, right. Hi, I’m Mars, but you might know me as Sundancer of the Travelers.” She flicked her index finger up, a tiny orb of yellow-white light manifesting above her hand. “Huh, that’s new.”

“What’s new?” asked Amy.

“My power normally isn’t this… precise.”

“Oh, right, that,” said Amy. “Yeah, no, it’s because the part of the corona that controls your power was hooked into a section of your motor cortex that got f*cked up by whatever Master you ran into that altered your neurochemistry and neuron structure. When I wiped that out, I, ah, took some liberties with the way that I reconstructed things and you should have a lot better control over the way they manifest.”

Mars blinked. “You… you what?”

“If you have more questions, ask them on the way, we’ve got a Nazi asshole to hunt down and Aunt Jess to avenge.” Amy turned to Vicky. “You coming?”

“Actually,” said Bella, “I was hoping to have some time to talk with both your sister and Taylor about some things that came up yesterday. It’s one of those things that you want to address as soon as possible after it first comes up.”

“...fine, keep your secrets,” said Amy. “Vista, Quarrel, you want in on this?”

“Absolutely,” said Quarrel. “I’ve been hoping to have some acceptable targets to test out some of my new tricks on.”

Vista gave a put-upon sigh that Taylor was fairly sure was being played up. “Fine, you need someone to supervise you.”

Bickering good-naturedly, the four capes trooped out of the building, leaving Bella, Taylor, and Vicky alone in the room.

“Okay, so, right, context,” said Bella. “Alright, to start, what do you know about the mental influences powers have on capes? Ah, no, farther back than that. What do you know about passenger theory?”

Rebecca Costa-Brown never forgot anything.

This was not the case with most of the capes that were thought of as having perfect memories. A lot of Noctis capes, like Weld or Miss Militia, for example, were thought of as having perfect memories due to the common misconception that the process by which an Agent suppressed a parahuman’s need to sleep gave them perfect memories, something reinforced by the common perception of Noctis capes being strongly influenced by Alexandria herself and Dragon as well as Noctis, who for various reasons had perfect memories of their own.

She was one of the few capes who was cursed never to forget. Like Dragon. Like Contessa.

She remembered the pain of the Siberian tearing her eye out as if it was mere minutes ago. She remembered the sensation of the vial, the one Doctor Mother had given her all those years ago, leaching all the heat from her body, and being convinced she was going to freeze to death.

She remembered every single cape who she had ever overseen in the process of taking their vial.

Victor and Charles Gladly were, initially, not particularly special as far as vial candidates went. They were entrenched in an organization with capes held above the rest, and sought to rise to their level. The only thing that stood out was their vials of choice.

At first, their choice of Magister-class vials wasn’t particularly sensible, given the way that both the general public and the Herren clans specifically valued flashy powers, and the Magister family of vials was known for creating Masters like Mama Mathers, Gallant, and Bad Canary. However, given the number of more direct powers present in the Herren clans’ ranks, and the level of success they’d been experiencing… well, the ability to sabotage their enemies to one degree or another couldn’t hurt.

As a result, Alexandria had been chosen alongside Contessa to oversee the two when they took their vials- after all, Doctor Mother didn’t have the kind of defense her personal stasis or the Path offered against Master effects, which was what the two were predicted to receive.

That was a mistake.

“...and in the wake of Coil’s death, we should revisit the viability of the Terminus experiment,” said Doctor Mother, her gaze sweeping across Rebecca, Contessa, and the Number Man- the planning core of Cauldron.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Contessa.

Doctor Mother frowned. “Oh?”

“Coil is only the primary candidate for the experiment. Kaiser and his Empire will serve more than adequately in his role, given their entrenched position and unifying ideology,” said Contessa, with as much emotion as she could put into her voice. None of the rest of the room could distinguish it, but Rebecca could hear the fury as clear as day.

Internally, Rebecca pulled up the mental list of reasons why the Empire was an unviable candidate for the Terminus project. They had been historically propped up by both the Herren Clans and Gesellschaft, they were a nexus of white supremacists from all over the nation, their primary income stream was from the international pharmaceutical giant Medhall, and more.

None of it mattered.

Even the memory of Victor Gladly’s power, lashing out unpredictably in his unconsciousness, was enough to bind her tongue and force her to treat the man as an ally. She’d spent the past few years carving out an area in the back of her mind where his power couldn’t bind her, and in theory she would eventually be able to escape the specter of the man’s power, but as it stood, all she could do is bury her hatred in her voice and try to claw her way out of the pit of hatred, brutality, and bigotry that it was trying to push her into (well, further into, in the case of brutality- she couldn’t exactly afford to be lenient, given Cauldron’s mission). Evidently, Contessa was in the same boat as her, between her own sotto voce anger and the almost uncharacteristic actions and words around the two.

“Hmm. Very well,” said Doctor Mother. “The experiment will continue.”

And with that, the meeting adjourned, with the Number Man not even having contributed one word.

Doctor Mother and the Number Man both departed the room through the entryway, exiting back out into the blank white corridors of Cauldron’s main facility.

“Door to Berlin,” said Contessa, prompting Doormaker to open the hole in space.

Before she left, Rebecca turned to her. “Is Volur still immune to the Path?”

Contessa inclined her head. “Ever since her Trigger Event, I believe.”

Alexandria nodded. Taking it as the dismissal it was, Contessa stepped through the doorway and let it wink out behind her.

The only hope Alexandria had, beyond learning how to work around the compulsions layered on both her and Contessa, was that Victor Gladly’s power would fail once he died, either of natural causes or of the… unpredictable nature of caple life- not that that last part was likely, given how she extrapolated the way that Contessa was forced to use the Path and how it limited the people (or things) that could reliably deal with them to Eidolon, Scion, the Endbringers, and a few other precog blindspots like Volur (who she personally thought was most likely to take enough umbrage with the man to kill him, given his actions around her identities).

Until and unless that happened, however, she was just as bound to his defense as Dragon was to her restrictions.

Chapter 28: Swimming in the Smoke

Chapter Text

“More than you, probably,” said Taylor, at almost the same time that Vicky said “Enough to get by.”

Both Vicky and Bella turned their gazes on Taylor, with the former being curious and the latter being skeptical.

“Would you like me to recount one of the conversations I’ve had with my passenger? Or did you not understand the exact mechanics of how I handled that weird Case 53?” Taylor frowned. “Hey, speaking of her, what ended up happening to her?”

Bella raised a finger, frowning, then nodded. “She is… under observation, but as it stands she is not at risk of the same negative outcomes as Coil or Shadow Stalker, or even Trickster. I cannot say more than that at present, lest the Eye’s host to take action.”

Taylor frowned. “They’re that powerful a Thinker? Wait, no, why would they have to take action?”

Bella paused, visibly thinking through her words. “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Some of these things are… they exert more influence over the world than you think, enough to get Noelle removed from anywhere we can access with any degree of ease. As for your first question… you are occluded from their sight, as you are to most Thinkers, but neither I nor Victoria are, or at least not enough to get away with this reveal.”

Taylor frowned. “...that doesn’t answer my second question.”

Bella nodded. “I know. I can’t tell you more than that it has to do with how her power… changed, in response to you and your passenger.”

Vicky frowned. “Taylor, what exactly happened with that?”

“I was essentially running interference while my passenger browbeat hers into submission. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s a decent high-level summary of what happened,” the taller teenager replied.

“Hmmmm.” Victoria pressed her lips together. “I think… well, we’ve gotten off of the topics that I think Taylor wanted to ask you about.”

“Right, yeah. Sophia,” said Taylor.

“Sophia Hess was… she was as normal a person as could have been expected, given her circ*mstances, but that isn’t particularly relevant. The important part is how her passenger directly interfered with her neurological processes to directly alter her personality in a manner more in line with the way that they have been charged with altering the world.”

Taylor frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Sophia Hess is, instead of a sad*stic savage who gets off on the pain of others, a victim of a somewhat less directed version of the kind of treatment that the victims of Gesellschaft’s conditioning program undergo, such as Night or Fog. After so long, she is as much victim as any of them, and with as little culpability- the aggression and rage that she carries in her heart is a result of her passenger directly pushing her to develop in that way, and the inexorable escalation that you experienced in their bullying is in no small part because of this phenomenon- which includes the massive leap forwards that is what they referred to as the locker prank,” Bella said.

Taylor… well, she wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

On one hand, she liked the idea of offloading the responsibility behind the year and a half of hell that she’d been put through to an amoral, inhuman, faceless thing. It was almost comforting to believe wholeheartedly that no person was capable of the level of depravity that had been perpetrated against her.

On the other hand… well, some small voice in the back of her head said that she couldn’t afford to disclaim the responsibility that Sophia bore for her bullying. Even in the light of Bella’s explanation about why Sophia was the way that she was, the fact that Sophia was being manipulated and brainwashed into acting how she did in such a subtle manner wasn’t anywhere near enough to take the culpability off of her shoulders.

Besides, she was still missing some information on why Sophia was even relevant in her life in the first place, and she intended to get that information while she had the chance.

Before she could speak up to ask her question, Vicky stood up, glaring at Bella. “That’s… I don’t know where to start with that other than calling it reductive and almost completely disclaiming the responsibility that Sophia has in ruining Taylor’s life.” When Bella looked to Taylor, she nodded.

Bella sighed. “I was trying to convince you to put Sophia out of your mind. She doesn’t deserve the attention she already has.”

“Like it or not,” said Taylor evenly, “Sophia is inextricably linked with the betrayal of my best friend in my mind. I could no more put her out of my mind right now than Victoria could her deceased aunt.” At this last part, Vicky’s eyes widened, but she quickly hid her surprise for later and returned her attention to Bella. “Speaking of my best friend,” continued Taylor, “I wanted to ask what you know about how Sophia convinced Emma to betray me.”

Once again, Bella sighed. “Sophia saved Emma from an attack by the ABB, then came back when she was mentally vulnerable to act as a shoulder to lean on. She, uh… she changed Emma, partially in a way that worked with her own personal philosophy, but also in a way that provides more social conflict, and she kept her close in a way that would increase the likelihood of her becoming embroiled in these conflicts, especially if the conflict was escalated into the realm of an actual fight.”

Taylor wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

On one hand, it was clear in hindsight (at least, with the context Bella provided) that Emma had been through a traumatic event, and what pieces of Odin’s memories she could easily access spoke to just how people changed after those.

On the other, that didn’t explain what Emma had put Taylor through- even if Emma had always been prickly to others, they’d always promised to each other to be “true sisters, regardless of blood”- over the top, yes, but it was a promise that Taylor had taken seriously where Emma hadn’t.

Vicky, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as hung up on the topic, with her aura burgeoning out to fill the room as she glared at Bella. “That’s bullsh*t and you know it,” said Vicky. “You don’t just f*cking abandon your best friend on the say-so of some person you just met, even if they saved your life, and I think you’re putting too much blame on this nebulous power influence that Sophia’s been effected by.”

Bella frowned. “Maybe? That said, I cannot see Sophia being nearly so aggressive without the influence of her passenger. She might be defensive, but not to this degree.”

“That’s not the point!” Vicky shouted. “You’re almost entirely removing the responsibility for all of Sophia’s actions from her and offloading it to an external factor! Just because she isn’t mentally healthy doesn’t mean she’s exempt from taking responsibility for their actions!”

“I…” Bella trailed off, unable to come up with a rebuttal.

“Come on, Taylor,” said Vicky. “I don’t think us sticking around is going to do anyone any good, today.”

Without talking, the taller girl followed Vicky down the stairs, leaving Bella behind to rethink her actions.

The two girls (for that is what they were- girls forced to grow up far too quickly) stood in the street in a silence that stood within arm’s reach of both companionable and awkward.

“You okay?” asked Vicky, after a moment.

Taylor sighed. “Not really, but… well, I suppose I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up so high. She’s more Sophia than not, at this point, even if she does have a different perspective of her actions, and I should have expected her to excuse her actions like that.”

“That, and the way that she treats the idea of her passenger as wholly responsible for Sophia’s actions… it rubs me the wrong way, I guess,” Vicky replied.

Taylor sighed again. “Yeah, me too.”

After another pause, Vicky turned back to Taylor. “What was that you said about Aunt Jess, earlier?”

Taylor frowned. “Not sure, it just… felt like something that had to be said. Speaking of things that feel like they have to be said, you should head home before Amy gets back. Something tells me that you need to hear what gets said between her and your mom.”

“f*cking Thinkers,” Vicky muttered sotto voce. “Alright, I’ll make tracks. Stay safe, Taylor.”

“You too.”

Vicky soared away in the direction of her home, leaving Taylor to walk home alone, lost in thoughts about all that had happened today.

She was so lost in thoughts, in fact, that she paid no heed to the spirit of Odin trailing after her, silently offering comfort and support to his successor… and the far more ethereal spirit trailing after him, with at least as much reason to offer Taylor support as Odin.

“Have a great night, and tell Taylor hi if she’s still around when you get back!” called Amy, waving to Vista as the shorter girl took two steps out of the streetlamps’ light and vanished in her characteristic spatial distortions.

Before she could open the door, Carol all but slammed it open, almost slamming it directly into her hand before she could even touch the knob. “Inside. Now.”

Amy obeyed almost without thinking.

Once the door was safely shut, Carol rounded on her adoptive daughter. “Where the hell have you been?” she snapped.

“Out with Vista and her cousin,” Amy replied.

“You mean the villain who kidnapped and brainwashed her?”

“No, I don’t. I mean the woman she called when she found out that Director Piggot was directly covering up the Trigger Event of a parahuman caused by one of her Wards and ran away because she had a Second Trigger,” Amy said, waving Carol off dismissively to try and conceal her anger. “It’s public record now, given the court case.”

“I-” Carol paused, then glared. “You have blood on your hands.”

Amy had, in fact, been aware of that, thanks to her power, and in fact had left that there in hopes that Carol would confront her about it.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, intentionally flippantly, and the blood flaked off as she applied her power to it.

“Amelia Claire Dallon,” snapped Carol, drawing herself up to her full height and towering over her ward. “You will tell me what crime you have committed, what act of violence, and you will tell me now, or so help me God I will personally see you-”

“See me what, Carol? See me Birdcaged?” Amy’s eyes flashed with an odd not-color for a moment. “Reunite me with my villain of a father, is that it?”

“I- you-” Carol sputtered.

Amy laughed bitterly. “You don’t have to say anything else, at this point. Your denial… well, lack of denial is enough. You’re convinced that I’m gonna grow up to be Marquis 2.0, here comes the new boss, just like the old boss, nayc?”

Carol’s silence was more damning than most denials she could have supplied.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Amy pressed her lips together for a moment, lost in thought. “I don’t… I didn’t remember my father very well, not until very recently, but given his actions the last day I ever saw him… well, I think his views on family are one thing I’d much rather have, especially over yours.”

“Marquis had nothing,” Carol spat, “that you would be better off taking from him over me.”

“I think Fleur would have disagreed,” said Amy, almost too casually.

“Be quiet.”

“No, I don’t think I will. You… you didn’t think about how unmasking would affect us, none of you did. Marquis wouldn’t have let you do it like this, if he were in your shoes, that’s for damn sure. And I think he would have been right! What did New Wave buy you, other than fifteen minutes of fame and another goddamn headstone to never visit? Hell, the last time you took us to go visit your parents was just before the unmasking, and I’d bet that’s because they tried to tell you not to be idiots about things!” Absently, Amy noted Victoria watching the two of them from the stairs, but said nothing.

“They were- no, don’t think you can distract me, young lady! What were you doing while out with Vista and that villain?” Carol had evidently decided to deal with Amy’s accusations with the expedient measure of refusing to acknowledge them.

“Honoring Aunt Jess.”

“Bullsh*t. What were you actually doing?”

Amy raised her right hand and morphed it into something that looked almost, but not quite, like a combination of a tiger’s claw and a human hand, fur sleek and claws all but gleaming. “Avenging Aunt Jess.”

“Amelia Claire Dallon, you can’t just-”

“Why not?” asked Amy, voice almost deadly quiet. “It’s okay when they do it, but not when one of their victims does it? It’s fine, as long as you’re the picture perfect American, to go and shoot someone in their pajamas, but it’s not fine to go and pick a fight with that someone if you’re their victim’s gay niece? Come on, Carol! If we are not afforded the full protection of the law, and since that guy only got three f*cking months in prison before getting f*cking headhunted by Victor for more intensive training it sends a pretty clear message that we’re not, then he shouldn’t get it either!” Her voice rose into a furious crescendo.

“ENOUGH!” screamed Brandish. “Go to your room!”

“Sure, Carol,” said Amy, turning her back on Carol definitively as she proceeded up the stairs with the air of one who has, if not won a fight, come away with a significant advantage, which only increased in intensity as she nodded to her sister.

Carol watched with confused feelings as her daughter gave her a level look, some other ineffable sensation pressing down on her with the weight of her power momentarily, and then also turned her back on her to proceed up the stairs, hovering a minimum of six inches off of the stairs as she went.

The house felt… emptier, once Vicky receded from sight, and Carol wasn’t sure why.

Chapter 29: Interlude 5: Flechette, Crystal, Danny

Chapter Text

“So,” said Director Armstrong, voice tinny through the laptop’s small speakers. “Tell me what Brockton Bay has come to these days.”

“Nothing good, I’m afraid,” Clay replied, toying with a cube made of her forcefields. “In the wake of Coil’s captures, we’ve managed to weed out a number of moles and informants, both willing and unwilling, but the level of sympathy for the Empire and their cause is… worrying.

Armstrong frowned. “Remind me what the Empire is?”

“Empire 88, a neo-Nazi organization started by Allfather, then taken over by Kaiser after his death. They’ve become… less overt in their plans, as far as the public is concerned, but based on what it kinda looks like they’re working on more subtle methods,” said Flechette.

Armstrong’s frown deepened. “Elaborate.”

“At best we have major infiltration of the PRT East-North-East by the Empire 88 as well as Coil, even if he’s probably under wraps, thanks to the damn Nazis of course,” said Clay, a skin of forcefield forming momentarily on her hand before shattering like a particularly thin peanut brittle once she flexed it.

“Elaborate on that.”

“There’s been an unusual number of, ah… PRT agents and officials who have social ties including the proprietor of Fenrisúlfr, a bar not too far from Captain’s Hill that’s a suspected Empire front, working the guard duty over two of the prisoners we have, Coil himself and the former Ward, Shadow Stalker. Both of them are black and experiencing some more stringent requirements than a normal prisoner- nothing too onerous, in isolation, but in context…” Clay trailed off.

Armstrong sighed. “I need more proof before we can afford to kick up a stink about Piggot- Rebecca is remarkably stalwart in her support of the current state of the situation in Brockton Bay even in the wake of Shadow Stalker and Coil being exposed.”

“We, uh, might have something else,” said Flechette.

“What is it?” asked Armstrong, drawing himself up from where he was slumped over his notepad to look more piercingly at the two capes.

“Looking at Piggot’s historical behavior with regards to the Empire, it shows… compromised judgment, starting a couple of months before the initial capture of Shadow Stalker.” Flechette winced, seeing Armstrong’s face redden with anger. “If it helps, it roughly coincides with the arrival of Othala, Victor, and Clausewitz from the Herren Clans.”

Armstrong sighed. “It does, and it doesn’t. I’ll see what I can’t do on my end, but depending on what exactly has been done to Piggot, I can’t afford to make any overt moves in the immediate future.” He paused, then looked up, visibly weighing options. “You might want to liaise with some local independent heroes to see what pressure they can’t put on either ENE or the Empire- I think I remember New Wave and their new friend mentioned by Piggot, and there’s a civilian who kicked up a stink recently about some malfeasance with regards to a Wards stipend- they might be able to help out too. Use your best judgment, the both of you, keep me updated, and most importantly- stay safe.”

“Always am,” drawled Clay, while Flechette just nodded.

“Again, I’ll see what I can do on my end, but no promises. Good luck,” said Armstrong just before the screen winked out.

Flechette relaxed, then turned to Clay. “Alright, what next?”

“Now?” asked Clay. “Now, we wait for the other shoe to drop.

“I was afraid of that,” grumbled Flechette.

Crystal Pelham wasn’t exactly someone you’d expect to be a particularly insightful person.

Much like her cousin, she deliberately took on the “dumb blonde” persona, and between that and how she mostly faded out of the public eye in the context of New Wave once Glory Girl arrived on the scene, and certain comparisons were drawn between the two of them, never mind that she was already withdrawing from the team before Vicky triggered to buckle down for standardized testing and college prep.

In short, Crystal was used to seeing more than she spoke about.

Nowhere was this more abundant than Carol Dallon’s house (for, in the end, that is the person whose house it was- not Mark’s, not Victoria’s, and especially not Amy’s).

She had noticed the way that Carol ruled over her household with an iron fist, not caring that it was harming both of her daughters in their different ways- Amy, wilting, all but forgotten in a figurative corner, and Vicky buckling under the full brunt of a lawyer’s attention and expectations. Hell, even Uncle Mark was being hurt by it, even if it was only exacerbating his issues.

The worst part was that there was, essentially, nothing she could do about it- her mother was far too busy with trying to keep New Wave above water to try and interfere in how Carol was treating her household, and even if she tried to take matters into her own hands the level of effect she would have was negligible at best and actively harmful at best, depending on how exactly Carol took things.

That didn’t stop her from trying in the little ways she could- she was a hero, after all, and she was going to live up to the title as best she could.

Making a habit of dragging both cousins over to her family’s house… helped, at least a little, and when she’d moved out for college she made it very clear that her new apartment was a safe space for them, in case they ever needed to get away.

Vicky didn’t feel the need to take her up on that offer, but Amy certainly did (perhaps due to the proximity her apartment had to the hospital, given how often Amy spent nights there, but that wasn’t something she was particularly willing to deal with at the moment).

Of late, though, things had… changed.

Amy started spending more and more time with her- until she’d abruptly (almost) stopped a couple weeks ago, looking almost guilty and happy in almost equal measure. Some subtle inquiries at all the local hospitals she had friends interning at turned up a slight decrease of her time there, so that wasn’t it (or at least it didn’t explain the happiness), and from Carol’s mounting frustration it wasn’t some kind of major development at home.

Vicky, at least, was easier to read (for a given value of “easier”, that is- Glory Girl managed the “extroverted blonde” front far better than Laserdream ever had, even setting aside the emotional power that she was probably using to cover up some of her weak points) on this front- she’d broken up with Dean in early February and started dating Taylor Hebert. Taylor was quite possibly an independent cape- not Parian, obviously, given the obvious disparity in height between the diminutive blonde and the brunette who was approaching “amazonian”, but Volur was a likely candidate- but she seemed to be making Vicky happy, and given some of the rumors she’d heard about a cathartic crying session at the mall, they were obviously more willing to trust each other than Vicky and Dean.

Carol was… not particularly enthusiastic about her daughter dating Taylor, although whether that was related to her family’s economic status, the queer nature of their relationship, or the connections that Dean granted that they had reduced access to.

While Crystal was happy for her cousins, she was a little worried about how Carol would react when something inevitably pushed her past her breaking point- she’d been known to overreact to little things, more so of late, and that didn’t exactly bode well for whenever something big set off her temper- either for their family or for New Wave as a whole.

That wasn’t something she could meaningfully effect, though, so she mostly set it aside for worrying about smaller things, things she could change- things like Amy not feeling comfortable talking to her, or goddamn vector calculus.

She’d do what she could, and take what she could, as was the lot in life of all save for the truly powerful- just as she always had.

If you had asked Danny Hebert where he would have expected he’d be in four months at the start of 2011, he would have been hard-pressed to answer with anything even remotely approaching the actual state he found himself in.

Oh, sure. There were things that were going to stay the same no matter what he tried. Taylor was being A Teenager, the Empire was being a scourge on the city that the Protectorate wasn’t doing anything to handle, the eponymous Bay was blocked off, things like that. You know, facts of life.

But Taylor getting almost killed by Emma? Him getting kidnapped by a supervillain? Taylor getting powers that were strong enough to send the Simurgh running?

Those he wasn’t able to see coming.

Still, he tried to be as supportive of his daughter (his only family left, now, after his estranged brother had passed late in 2010) as he could, in what ways he could- Aides Truth had been a godsend in that aspect, taking both the school (who was trying to protect Emma and her two cronies past the point of sunk costs) and the PRT (who was in the corner of one of Emma’s cronies because she was an “upstanding member of the Wards”, never mind that despite all the action she took against the Empire, Shadow Stalker A.K.A. Sophia Hess was on probation) to task in a way that he only wished he could with all the salvage operations that had refused to so much as touch the Bay with a ten foot pole, even the local ones that got bought out by Fortress Construction and or sold of for parts by the Medhall group.

On a quality of life level, between getting permission for Taylor to do self-directed homeschool and the winnings from the lawsuits brought in by Aides Truth, their life had improved. He’d even managed to get in a couple of the guys to repair the water damage near the roof that he’d never actually managed to handle himself and a bunch of the other issues with the house that he had neither the skills, time, or money to do before, and he’d been able to pay them what they were worth to boot.

On a personal level, though, they were just as estranged as they had been since her mother died- more so, in some ways.

Danny wasn’t an idiot- he understood that a great deal of the estrangement between them was his fault, between how he’d fallen apart since Annette’s passing and how he’d failed to notice the signs (textbook, in hindsight) of Taylor being in distress.

That didn’t stop him from being frustrated with the situation.

He’d failed Taylor in an almost unforgivable way- in letting the way that Emma had ruined her life slip his notice, he’d all but let her be assaulted and nearly killed, and in the aftermath he very nearly caved to the school in their demands to not sue with the token compensation of covering her hospital bills (which… the involvement of Panacea to handle her case of toxic shock complicated things in a way that he was thankful the lawsuits had prevented him from having to handle). In short, he hadn’t been there when she needed it, and his daughter was hurt and almost killed for it.

After that had come the real issue, though- her powers (and everything that came along with them).

Danny had never been interested in being aware of capes, aside from the pragmatic “if you see a costume outside of a prescheduled PRT PR event, get away as soon and safely as possible” advice that Annette had given him (and she would have known, what with having spend so much time with Lustrum before Taylor had been born). Otherwise, he was lucky enough to have a job worthless enough to avoid the gangs’ notice, and he lived close enough that it wasn’t considered territory worth taking and holding.

Taylor’s powers had forced a change in paradigm.

Taylor took to it like a plant to soil- she took after her mother far more than him in both adaptability and natural intelligence, and between both of those, being at just the right place at just the right time to make the right friends, and a really strong power, she was making her way in the cape world in a way that left him scrambling to even just stay in her wake.

Exacerbating that was the being claiming to be a mostly dead god (he didn’t specifically doubt that claim, per se, but it was out there enough that he couldn’t quite bring himself to fully believe it) providing his daughter guidance.

Admittedly, Odin wasn’t likely to be up to date on the state of the world, but his experience as a warrior and a king would help Taylor immensely as she entered the world of parahumans.

While Danny wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to call Odin a father figure to Taylor, the parallels were there, and something twisted in his gut every time he saw the rapt attention that Taylor paid to the specter, while the gap between Taylor and himself remained roughly stationary.

He knew that was from his own side as much as anything else- Taylor had been conditioned to not trust anyone, and while her girlfriend (at least, he thought they were girlfriends at this point) and Odin were working their way past that, he hadn’t put in the effort to do so.

Well, that changed today.

After breakfast, Danny cleared his throat right before Taylor was about to get up. “Taylor, I’d like to talk to you about-”

He was interrupted by first a rumbling in the ground, and then, moments later when he tried to restart the conversation, a low whine that quickly built into a clamorous siren, multiple discordant tones overlapping to pierce the ears and chill the soul.

“No.”

“Dad. They’re here, and I can’t afford to just stand by with my hands on my eyes.”

“I can’t lose you too,” he said, tears filling his eyes.

“You won’t,” replied Taylor with hubris. “I promise.”

“Don’t go,” he whispered.

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did anything less.” Taylor snapped her fingers, and in a flash of golden light, her armor appeared over her pajamas, steel glimmering in the morning light. “Get to the shelters. I’ll keep you safe from the front.”

And with that, Taylor all but tore the front door off its hinges with her father staring, frozen, behind her, charging away into the city to fight an Endbringer.

Chapter 30: Blood in the Water

Chapter Text

As it turned out, there wasn’t an Endbringer attacking Brockton Bay.

There were two.

One of them had taken the form of a giant woman that could almost be mistaken for a tower, sprouting up almost smack dab in the middle of what remained of Brockton Bay’s industrial district. Around it, the world had started to warp, with openings narrowing, buildings widening, and walls seeming to erupt from nothing, with some of the buildings closest to her being drawn into her body, forming a vaguely cobbled appearance as she slowly crept upwards in height.

The other was smaller, perhaps a head shorter than the Simurgh, and was perched unmoving on the shoulder of the tower, three hooded faces gazing dispassionately out at the city.

Both of them seemed to watch Taylor as she rushed across the rooftops, bounding from one to the next to the next as easily as a cat would push over an entire table’s worth of vases but with less property damage.

Taylor leapt off one final rooftop to land gently in the parking lot outside the PRT building, joining a crowd of capes (mostly local, but she recognized a couple of out of town capes like Revel and Bastion) milling about uneasily, just in time for the ground to rumble once again, a visible dust cloud rising from the area around the Endbringers.

“Volur!” came a bright voice mere moments before Vicky rose out of the middle of the crowd, armband cinched around her arm and another in her hands. “Put this on quickly, then go find Flechette or Miss Militia and see-”

The blonde was interrupted by the sound of rushing wind, and as if by instinct Taylor’s hand flashed towards the Endbringers, a shield blooming from the glowing Algiz rune on her palm.

The shield solidified in time to block a double helix blast of incandescent light, stretching back to the three-faced Endbringer. One of its faces was glowing to match Purity, who was rising over the shield to return fire in all her radiant fury.

Another blast swatted her out of the sky, sending her crashing into the façade of the PRT building with a quiet “Purity down, C7” from the armband that Taylor quickly grabbed out of Vicky’s hand, slipping it over her armor quickly in the moment after the blast of energy vanished and saying “Volur” into it.

She reestablished the shield in just enough time to block another beam, this one seeming even stronger.

She turned to the crowd at large, then grimaced, seeing them start to panic. “Damn it,” she said to Vicky, sotto voce, “we’ve lost the initiative.”

“We can take it back.” Vicky rose back into the air, still protected by the broad surface of Taylor’s shield, and flared her aura, drawing all eyes to her and quelling the panic at least partially.

“Alright! Leadership staff isn’t here yet, so I’m taking the reins! Blasters without mobility options, find a Mover who can get you to the top of a building! Once you’re there, stagger fire so that there’s always some cover fire in the air! Anyone who can skirmish, take your hits where you can get them! Brutes, mobility first, take your swings when you can make them! Thinkers and area defenders, group up and do your sh*t! Healers, stay here with the area defenders! Everyone else, run search and rescue into the area under the Tower!”

“Where are we?” asked Taylor, heartbeat picking up in anticipation for the fight.

“In the thick of things,” said Vicky, rising above the shield without getting blasted just before Taylor pushed off the ground, “like we’re meant to be.”

Quarrel wasn’t entirely sure what she was expecting out of today, but this sure wasn’t it.

The Endbringers sprouting out of the active factory a couple of miles from where she was squatting with Missy and Bella was unexpected, but… well, she had heard that Brockton Bay was due for an Endbringer attack soon, and given how Like That Brockton Bay was, it might as well have been two, sure, why the f*ck not.

Missy and Bella both stopping to glare into an alley that the Teeth spilled out of, in the middle of an Endbringer Truce was just the cherry on top of the cake.

“Go,” said Quarrel, already drawing an arrow from the quiver at her side. “They’re here for me, not for you.”

“But- but Mina!” called Missy, glaring at the Butcher.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, something in her tone brooking no argument. “If I don’t show up in five minutes, call Taylor and tell her what’s going on.”

After a tense moment, Missy stormed off in a huff, with Bella following her warily.

“That ain’t gonna save her, you f*ckin’ traitor,” sneered Hemorrhagia.

“She doesn’t have anything to fear from you,” Quarrel returned evenly, the tip of her arrow starting to glow with a blue light that somewhat resembled Cherenkov radiation.

“Ooh, just because you’ve got some fancy new Tinker to back you up, you suddenly think you’re better than the rest of us? Please, you’re no better than you’ve ever been,” snarled Hemorrhagia, leering at the archer threateningly. “At least dead you might taste good, you and that brat you abandoned us for.”

The arrow exploded on a hastily raised barrier of blood, sending it splashing over the ground as the red color washed out to the brownish color of a years-old bloodstain. “Missy is off limits.”

“Nothing is off-limits,” rumbled the Butcher, their looming presence helped in its takeover of the conversation by the massive axe over their shoulder. “Not to us.”

Quarrel turned to face the hulking form of the thing that had once been Leverage. “Are you sure you want to do this? Go against established Teeth traditions to spite one person who was forced to fight her way out because her family needed help?”

“There is only one Teeth tradition,” snarled Animos, fur sprouting from his face as his voice grew harsher, “and that is the Butcher.”

“So be it,” said Quarrel evenly. “Then I renounce the Teeth.”

Animos snarled and Hemorrhagia sneered, a hint of worry showing behind her disdain. “Why throw away what you’ve built with us over a relic of a past life?” she demanded, uncertainty papered over with indignation.

“I’m not the one who threw it away.”

“Enough talk,” snapped Animos, lunging with a scream towards Quarrel.

While it did sap her parahuman accuracy, she’d been more than that even before leaving the Teeth. An arrow flashed out from her bow with a thunderclap, smashing into Animos and leaving him a smoking corpse on the ground, shaft protruding from his eye.

She almost felt the Butcher’s pain blast roll off her as a second arrow snapped out, a growing wave washing away Hemorrhagia’s attempts to defend herself with a blood barrier and impaling the shorter woman through the back of her mouth, power returning to her just in time to guide it to the exact same spot where the beanbag had lodged so long and yet not long enough ago.

Absently, she wondered at the absence of Vex, whose force fields would have ordinarily been used to herd her into the charge of onrushing Spree clones and Reaver. As it stood, however, there was nothing to stop her from retreating long enough to nock and fire an arrow, which detonated near the center of the crowd of Spree clones. This had the effect of rendering most of said clones into piles of meat- while the detonation wasn’t, strictly speaking, strong enough to do so on its own, it was strong enough to meet whatever criteria that Spree’s power considered to mean that an attack killed a clone, and as such they rapidly lost cohesion, leaving behind a slowly spreading pool of meat that was steaming gently to mark that it had already started vanishing.

Two more arrows and she apparently hit her mark, and while she wasn’t sure whether the original Spree was dead or unconscious, she couldn’t bring herself to care, between the threat they presented to Missy and the tactical loss of the Teeth’s ability to overwhelm her with bodies.

Reaver, bereft of the visual cover of the crowd of Spree, was an easier takedown- even his supernatural deflection abilities that came as a result of his object teleportation power didn’t prevent her power from triggering, and he, too, went down with a shaft protruding from between his lips, head landing just inches from her own boots.

Two more capes she vaguely recognized as from some more distant branch (a foothold in Newark, maybe) stepped forwards, one raising a rifle and the other his hand. The gun wielder’s bullets expanded as they left the barrel, accompanied by a spray of sickly green liquid from the other Blaster’s hand.

One arrow detonated off of a bullet, dazing the two as it deflected their attacks, and the next punched through the rifleman’s eye, glowing purple briefly as it sucked in with the force of a black hole and crushed his partner’s head.

All that was left was the Butcher, whose axe was already swinging down as he teleported behind her.

Quarrel winced, feeling the sear of the detonation, and rolled forward, the ancient yumi in her hands flexing as she pushed off it to launch her to her feet. One arrow flashed out, trailing water, to test his defenses, and it was deflected quite handily, Leverage’s power leaving the axe all but weightless to him and letting him swing it around at speeds that belonged in Star Wars.

“No Vex today?” she asked, watching as the wave accumulated by the arrow shoved him back even with what limited time it had had to build up strength. “What, did she have a big final exam?”

“There’s too much idealist in her,” sneered the Butcher. “She’s throwing her life away against the Endbringers, like a fool. Didn’t even hesitate, just ran off the stake-out when the damn sirens went off.”

“Or like someone who Triggered in August, when Leviathan flooded Baltimore,” snapped Quarrel, momentarily irritated she couldn’t run her hand through her hair. “Have you deteriorated that much, Leverage, that you couldn’t remember that she Triggered in that mess? That she’d want to save everyone she could from what broke her?”

“That girl’s as foolish as you are,” the Butcher snarled, “and when I break you and bring her back, we’re gonna have some fun with her.”

Quarrel was abruptly conscious of the sound of her own blood in her ears, a whooshing, rhythmic sound. “You what.”

“Having an excuse to break her, just like old times, is…” The Butcher grimaced. “Shut up, Three!” The Butcher shook their head. “I haven’t had human bone marrow in too long, and the exact stretch of human entrails is… irreplaceable, when it comes to whips, and I haven’t had a good cape whip since before Jacob ran us out of Brockton all those years ago.”

As if by magic (which in part is true), arrows seemed to sprout from the Butcher’s hands and legs, pinning them to the floor in a T-pose in defiance to the collective cape’s great strength, leaving them to struggle like a worm nailed down by a snot-nosed seven-year-old boy with cruel and merciless intent, watching helplessly as Quarrel strode closer.

“Death is too good for you,” she said in a low monotone, just loud enough for the Butcher to hear her, “but it’s all I have time for here and now.”

“You cannot kill me, not in a way that matters,” sneered the Butcher, halitosis all but billowing out from their face now that Quarrel was close enough to smell it.

“Everything dies eventually,” said Quarrel, words measured and slow. “Even something like you. For what it’s worth, Longarm, I’m sorry.”

The arrow that Quarrel nocked to her bow looked less like physical matter and more like some master fletcher had crafted the projectile out of the night sky, an impression of stars along the shaft resolving into an impossibly wide field of stars in the head and the fletching, and the Butcher’s eyes seemed almost to be drawn into the impossibly sharp point.

Between one breath and the next, Quarrel loosed the shaft.

The Butcher died.

After a moment of tension, Quarrel sighed and re-slung her bow over her back, satisfied that she had sent the collective on to its next destination, and started retrieving her arrows. Divine as she may be, conjuring arrows was still energy that could be better spent elsewhere, and her own handiwork was perfectly serviceable even after being used to slaughter the Teeth.

Not quite two minutes after she had sent Vista on to the Endbringer battle, Quarrel leapt with no-longer-human strength, racing across the rooftops and onto the day’s next battle.

There was a deadlier opponent to be fought, after all, and far more honor was in the death of an Endbringer than some two-bit cannibal bodyjacker.

Chapter 31: Galder's Tower

Chapter Text

These new Endbringers were a much different experience than fighting the Simurgh.

On one hand, there wasn’t the same kind of time pressure that the Simurgh’s scream brought, forcing combatants to measure the fight as a whole against their own individual time limit.

On the other hand, the tall one (Taylor had taken to thinking of it as the Tower, although she’d heard Bohu, Babel, and even Pisa thrown around) was surrounded by a gradually growing area in which the city was being changed. Traps, barricades, and alterations of the buildings were plentiful, and only spreading, and Taylor didn’t want to think about the people who were going to have their lives and livelihoods ruined by it. Hopefully someone would be able to do something about it after the battle, or maybe there’d be a power suited to blunting the effects that could be positioned to block it off.

On top of that, the other one was harassing the whole field, hurling out blasts of Purity’s power with impunity that she only sometimes managed to flick out barriers to stop, and while the medical tent had four different kinds of shields around it, including one that looked like glimmering shards of glass that some instinct told her was important, they were doing their best to keep attention off of it.

Not that they were doing super well, of course. External communications were quickly disrupted by the flying one taking on the abilities of Manpower and extending his electromagnetic field to block in the city, which unfortunately also disrupted most Movers’ attempts to arrive. Strider could slip through if given enough time, and most Alexandria packages or flying artillery capes could blast through given enough time (as demonstrated by Victoria, sun glimmering in her hair as she exploded through the barrier, and less romantically by Purity), the rate of reinforcements slowed past what they needed, especially given how flat-footed they were.

A lightning bolt flickered out from Taylor’s outstretched hand, deflected narrowly by the Magician’s use of Manpower’s ability, and she growled before invoking thurisaz instead, a hail of conjured thorns falling onto the Magician. Most were also deflected by an electromagnetic force field, but a few made it through, digging into the Endbringer’s supernaturally dense flesh.

“Volur! Try a closer engagement!” shouted Victoria, currently attempting to seize and then break the Magician’s limbs. One was already missing, the result of a lucky shot from Laserdream combining with Victoria getting her hands on the limb, and in the wake of that success, the Magician had chosen a third power. Its face turned red and angular, not entirely unlike a biker’s helmet, and it was apparently some sort of aerokinetic, using bladed ribbons of solidified air to try and slash through anyone who lacked their toughness to make an attempt to get close.

A quick invocation of gebo manifested a spear, glimmering golden, in Taylor’s left fist, and she dove in, heedless of the windy blades that skittered off her armor like so many pebbles and failed to do more than exfoliate what skin she had exposed.

The spear pierced deep into the Endbringer’s hand, and Taylor sent lightning crackling through it to scorch the flesh around it. When both other hands came around to smack into Taylor, she raised a barrier, and while rattled against it by the still-impaled hand, nothing came of it that was worse than causing her to let go of her spear, which vanished in a shower of light.

Now that she wasn’t anchored to the Endbringer’s hand, it stepped up its use of the aerokinetic power, and she was sent hurtling almost a hundred yards away from it before she could restabilize her flight.

Taylor looked back at the battle to see Laserdream, desperately throwing up her shields as wind blades carved through them, and then beyond that, to see the Endbringer glowing with the charge of one of Purity’s blasts, and knew she wasn’t close enough to stop it-

Alexandria slammed into the Endbringer, piercing through the dying whirlwind around it like a particularly well-thrown dart and taking it high on the chest. The blast swings wide, slamming Taylor into and then through a building, and as she shakes the vertigo of the sudden motion off, she finds herself glad in a curiously detached way that her chain mail’s so durable (the implications of it flexing under the blast and transferring almost all of the force to her, and the lack of effect the Endbringer squishing her against her own shield, will be something to think about later), and that she was glad that she, who could handle the beam, was hit instead of someone like Laserdream or Kid Win.

Shoving herself up off the rubble, Taylor rose back into the air and flicked out a hand, invoking kaunaz to try and kill the Endbringer outright.

It didn’t work, but its three faces all shattered, not-quite-porcelain shards falling off to reveal three vaguely feminine faces, shadowed in hoods. These faces didn’t remain for long, though, and as Tohu started falling, one of them swelled and morphed into Myrddin’s bearded visage, halting its descent. Another turned into a domino masked blonde with a smattering of freckles across her nose, and the third became a gaunt woman’s with flowing, almost white hair, black lipstick, and an almost baroque mask.

“Hard override,” came Alexandria’s voice through the armbands, even as she disengaged. “Tohu has taken the power of Damsel of Distress, an Annihilator-class Blaster, as well as a local Thinker and Myrddin. Do not try and test your durability against Damsel of Distress’ power.”

Well, thought Taylor, even though she’d made it more offensively terrifying, she’d at least accomplished her goal of getting rid of the Manpower head.

She took a deep breath in, then let it out, and drew a bead on the Endbringer. Her first thought was to aim for the head bearing Damsel of Distress’ visage, but some instinct told her that the freckled face was the more important to remove, so that is the target she chose.

Before she could launch her attack, a veritable column of something she could only describe as “distortion” accompanied by an earsplittingly painful noise slammed her back into the disintegrating rubble, chipping at her armor and making her feel vaguely sunburned as the world seemed to wink around her. Dazedly, she noted the dust falling from her arm where the armband was, before searing away the weakness with an influx of magical energy drawn from the environment that wiped away both the fuzziness inside her head and the aches and pains she’d picked up over the course of the fight that had seemed so far below her notice.

She rolled her head around on her neck, feeling as much as hearing it pop, then cracked her knuckles on both hands, continuing to draw in energy and condense it behind one strike.

A thought had her baring her teeth as she rose off the ground, winds swirling around her dramatically. There was something to be said about the impact of a dynamic entrance, after all, and that was one thing she could perform well.

“Soulless machine!” she shouted, rocketing back up into the air. “How dare you strike the heir of Odin?”

There was no small degree of shock and awe as a result of the entrance, not least of which because of the massive lightning bolt crackling out from her hand to shatter the no-longer-smug head of the Brocktonite Thinker.

Sundancer was terrified.

Not necessarily as terrified as she would have been had, say, the Simurgh been attacking (the lecture Amy had given her about what, exactly, the Simurgh had done to their brains still gave her chills), but the presence of two Endbringers at once was naturally terrifying enough to mostly close the gap.

For once, she thought, vaporizing one of the tiny versions of Babel that was about to make a run at Flashbang, having such a destructive power was a good thing.

Where others would be stymied by barriers grown out of the brickwork and the buildings, not her- she could afford to melt it with her orb and then cool it down with her presence. She had nothing to fear from the minions, either- others reported them running hot, molten even, to move, and when they got into the area around her, they cooled and congealed into something like obsidian but much more fragile, something easy to shatter with the steel toes Accord had been generous enough to build into all of their costumes.

What was more, she didn’t have to worry about her surroundings as she would normally- in fact, her orb was useful there, too. Most of the traps couldn’t withstand the heat of her power, springing closed on nothing and shattering under the intense heat, and those that could (mostly the pits) were filled in by molten asphalt or concrete as she swept her power around her.

She felt, as the battle went on, that tension that she held herself with normally, the tension of being able to break the world with nothing more than a stray thought, slipping away, and she recognized something similar in some of the other capes around her. Flashbang was one, for sure- the disciplined man seemed almost at peace, now, being able to stand in the middle of explosions that shattered brick and creature alike without the worry of his teammates, when they crossed paths, and they’d even shared nods, recognizing their own situation in the other.

Then, of course, she caught a glimpse of the aerial dogfight occurring, and all that tension flooded back and then some.

None of the faces of the Endbringer were familiar to her, but given the way that it was hurling around energy blasts and beams of something that looked wrong in a way she couldn’t verbalize, some of which echoed with a sound that made her tense up and check for broken bones despite its dissimilarity to the sound of bone snapping, they were all dangerous.

This was borne out when some of the beams ended up aimed in the same general direction as her, which swatted a bare-chested man in a tiger mask out of the sky in an explosion of blood and bone shards.

Another beam came down near her, and she barely managed to swing her orb around in time to take the bigger pieces of rubble and debris coming her way. She could feel the shrapnel whiz by, one or two pieces close enough to open up a gash on both skin and costume, and the dust of the building settled over her, but she remained otherwise unharmed.

The same, however, could not be said about the alley around her- parts were wholesale obstructed by chunks of brick wall, while others were technically passable, although she’d spent too much time in ballet and not enough hiking to safely navigate the veritable maze of detritus left behind.

The same could not be said of the creatures produced by Babel- they skittered over and around the chunks of brick and rock, all but hurling themselves at her. This, she could handle, though, long hours of footwork practice letting her slip between the rapidly cooled minions and letting them shatter themselves on the floor, at least where she didn’t melt them directly with her orb.

For a moment, she just let herself breathe, surrounded by the popping chunks of creature and building as she shrunk her orb down from three feet in diameter down to the approximate size of a basketball.

Sundancer felt her thoughts clear, and with the added clarity remembered that she probably shouldn’t be so cavalier about her use of pyrotechnics- immune to heat she may be, but she still needed to breathe, and overuse of her orb too close to her could complicate that.

Before she could return to pushing towards Babel, she heard the background rumble of Flashbang’s detonations abruptly stop. Almost without a thought, she pulled her orb to larger sizes and sent it hurtling left, through the already heavily damaged building, and followed it through, trusting in her power’s protection to let her pass through without being burned.

Two alleys over was Flashbang on his back, one broken arm raised up to try and block a blow from one of the creatures while another gnawed on his boot.

“Hey!” shouted Sundancer, scooping up a half a brick that had fallen in the fighting. “Over here!”

The brick smacked into the creature winding up to swing at Flashbang’s head, not hurting it much but definitely drawing its attention. The second one also looked up, teeth baring in presumable fury, and both of them leapt for her.

Just like all their predecessors, they didn’t make it to Sundancer, shattering on the ground as she sidestepped them handily.

“Are you okay?” she asked, much gentler now that the only things around were rubble and a kindred spirit.

Flashbang scrunched his eyes closed. “No,” he said, in a wavering voice. “Concussion, I think.”

Sundancer winced. One way or another, he was out of the fight, and given the situation, he wasn’t likely to be able to make his way out of the area to a medical area.

With the indescribable sound of Hekate’s blasts in the background, the situation she found herself in (helping Flashbang stagger upright, in an alley that was gradually reshaping itself and trying to close off the exits) bore no small similarity to what she remembered of Madison.

Fortunately, she was… more than she had been in Madison, and she didn’t have to resort to stealth here and now.

What obstacles stood between her and an escape from the city were all surmountable, in one way or another, with the aid of her power. Bricks could be shoved aside or smashed in their walls, or even superheated to the point of shattering if she managed the heat of her sun correctly. The minions couldn’t stand up to either her orb or her own defense against her heat, and everything else could be destroyed with almost contemptuous ease by her orb. It gave her an almost heady feeling of power- or it would, at least, had she not been so acutely aware of the circ*mstances that led to her getting her power and those she was using it in now. It was so different from how she normally felt about her power that she almost stopped when she realized how unusual this mode of thought was, but the weight of Flashbang hanging from his one uninjured arm over her shoulders served to keep her head in the game, as it were, and keep moving.

Absently, she wondered how many people she was consigning to death or at least more severe injury because she couldn’t bulldoze through the area before putting the thought out of her mind- as far as she was aware Movers were still being blocked, and she… she just couldn’t let Flashbang die like Noelle could have.

She continued on her path out of the battlefield, not with certainty but with firmer resolve, a concussed man hanging from her shoulders, and two broken communication armbands (Flashbang’s shattered by his own explosions, and Sundancer’s fried by the temperature protection her power granted her), not that either of them would realize that until they arrived at the med tent.

Chapter 32: Skirmishers and Siege Engines

Chapter Text

Taylor’s massive bolt of lightning had entirely shattered the head that she hit and the hood draped over it, sending a spray of shrapnel across the sky. When the Magician moved out of the dust cloud, dodging her next bolt of lightning, Taylor saw the stump of the thing’s neck, still slightly smoking, writhing slightly, almost as if it was trying and failing to regrow its head because of something in her attack.

“Taylor!” She turned just in time to catch Victoria coming in for what would have been a bone-rattling hug on a normal person (or even some Brutes). “I thought- When you just took that blast-”

“I’m here, Vicky,” said Taylor quietly, wrapping her arms around her girlfriend and squeezing gently, raising a barrier around them to prevent the Magician from hitting them while they were vulnerable. “It’s gonna take more than some grimderp Living Tribunal knockoff to put me out.”

Vicky blinked. “What?”

Taylor opened her mouth to respond, then stopped when she realized she had nothing she could say to explain the non sequitur she’d just dropped. “Never mind. How are things going up here?”

Vicky winced. “Not great. Aunt Sarah caught the edge of that blast that hit you, and she’ll survive but she’s lost a leg and she’s out of the fight. She’s lucky, though, we’re having trouble keeping up with the use of both Myrddin’s power and Damsel’s, and it doesn’t help that she’s whittling us down.”

“Let’s see what we can’t do about that.”

Vicky gave Taylor a level look. “Strong words- you sure you can back them up?”

Taylor wasn’t sure where, exactly, she was remembering the line from, but it seemed almost perfect for the situation. “Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.” Then, more quietly: “I’m sure.”

Vicky blinked twice before blushing. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

The shield vanished, and immediately the two of them separated, letting one of Damsel’s energy blasts scream its way between them as they both returned their focus to the Endbringer whose non-ruined faces were both gazing at them.

“You know,” said Victoria, shouting somewhat to be heard over the distance, “she’s not all that much taller than you are!”

“Size matters not,” Taylor returned, flicking out another lightning bolt that vanished into an infinitesimal rift between dimensions mere feet away from its blonde head. “Besides,” she continued, changing tacks away from direct damage towards area control and conjuring a pair of flickering runes, hagalaz and raido, above her left arm, “she’s too edgy. Take off the damn hoods!” This last part was shouted at the Magician, who was at that moment flying through a particularly low-hanging cloud.

It gestured towards Taylor with one hand, and with a crack of displaced air, she was swatted leftwards, managing to stop herself just shy of a screaming cone of wrongness.

Taylor shot directly up and went to click the button on her armband. Hitting nothing but air, the fact that it hadn’t stood up to the Endbringer’s attack registered to her, and in a quick flicker of wunjo, a new one appeared, secured to her arm in just the same place as her old one.

After wasting precious time re-setting it up, Taylor jammed both buttons down. “Hard Override: anyone in the air, I’m trying something that might be able to disrupt its ability to reach out and touch us. Watch out for turbulence- I might not quite be able to keep the air calm as I do so.”

With that said, she pushed her will through the runes, sending them blazing to life. As if in response, the Magician turned to glare at her, but it was too late to do anything, as the wispy clouds it had flown through moments before seemed to explode outwards, turning into stormclouds crackling with lightning as they wrapped themselves around the Endbringer.

The Magician wrenched one of its arms free to point at Taylor, but a bolt of lightning connected from the bindings around its waist to the outstretched limb, battering it aside with the force of a particularly disgruntled deity and sending the attack it had prepared screaming off into emptier skies.

At the same time, the winds around the Endbringer were picking up, giving the less adroit flyers nearby more trouble as they howled around the Endbringer and made its flight unpredictable at best, battering it around like a particularly energetic six year old with a stick would a piñata: with much vigor and enthusiasm, but less lasting damage.

This did, however, let the other flyers take a moment to regroup, with Legend and Eidolon finally appearing (one as a streak of actinic blue-white light and the other fading into view from within a cloud of green sparkles almost but not quite identical to a tube of glitter glue).

They took a moment to coordinate with other flying Blasters before firing, all kinds of attacks both conventional and esoteric converging on the Endbringer. Some of them were captured within small distortions of space that, given what she knew of parahuman powers, were likely a result of Myrddin being able to connect to other universes, but the vast majority impacted the Endbringer to greater or lesser extent. Some, like Laserdream’s, only left what appeared to be scorch marks, but others cracked or pierced the Endbringer’s flowing robes, like a not-quite-crossbow bolt that rose from ground level (probably Flechette’s, thought Taylor, seeing how it penetrated through and through, ascending towards Mani’s sister as if the Endbringer wasn’t even there) or a beam of those same greenish sparkles that Eidolon appeared in.

Unfortunately, while the concentrated onslaught couldn’t slay the Endbringer, it did quite the number on the not-quite-solid shackles of clouds Taylor had wrapped the Endbringer in.

It seized the opportunity, releasing what amounted to essentially an expanding sphere of screaming not-space, and Taylor was forced to abandon the runes she already had running in order to conjure enough defensive barriers to stop the wave from killing anyone with the power she had available.

While Taylor was distracted, it repositioned, a visible glow manifesting around its three remaining hands, before a massive explosion from below gave them all pause. Looking down, the most noticeable thing was the fact that the massive form of the Tower was toppling over, massive chunks blown out of it.

Taylor snapped her attention back to the Magician, cursing herself for her lack of situational awareness, but she needn’t have bothered- it was hurtling away into the skies at a speed far in excess of anything Myrddin had ever been documented using.

With one Endbringer fleeing, and the other probably dead, the fight was over, and Taylor let herself drop to the ground abruptly, arresting her fall with a jolt just feet above the top of a building before she moved, the medical tent growing in the distance- the fight may be over, but the cleanup was just beginning, and she’d have to move quickly in order to actually get the visiting capes to help out at all.

Flechette was glad that she wasn’t being thrown into the fray like she had been last time she’d been in an Endbringer fight.

Don’t get her wrong, she was proud of her contribution to sending the Simurgh packing, even if it was pretty clear that Volur was the major factor there. That said, having the Simurgh turn its blank gaze on you hatefully (could a blank face convey hate? if that wasn’t the case normally, the Simurgh sure as sh*t could), even if it was in retreat, was an experience she was perfectly okay not repeating.

Shooting down any one of the little versions of Bohu that made it out of Vista’s maze of twisted space without falling off of a surprise pitfall and shattering itself all over the parking lot was more than enough for her tastes.

It didn’t last, of course.

The disruption, in this case, took the form of a leather-clad archer stepping out from within a tent that she couldn’t have fit in, not with that big of a bow.

“Quarrel! What happened?” Vista turned and left, leaving the gap within the shields that had formerly been filled by her impossible maze wide open and letting the monsters rush in.

“Killed the Teeth,” is what Flechette heard before she returned her focus to the task in front of her. Absently, she noticed the glasslike shards of the shields nominally to her right drifting into the area formerly covered by Vista, but her focus was mostly dominated by the encroaching minions.

Despite her name, she hadn’t been allowed access to the PRT’s stores of flechette canisters (kept in the event of something like a Slaughterhouse incursion or a Biotinker like Nilbog, not that the former was really possible at this point), and while that was probably the correct move in most cases, this was one situation where she really wished the specialty ammunition was available to her, resource limitations and permissions be damned.

Still, she would make do with what she had, that being her arbalest and a toy version of the foil she used to use from the gift shop (she hated the way it made her feel like March, but in a situation like this, she’d take every weapon she could get).

She quickly stopped trying to line up her shots to take out four or five of the things at a time- the time was better spent putting multiple bolts in the air, and eventually they clustered together so much that even snapshots would pass through as many of the things.

Fortunately, they didn’t get close enough to force her to draw the sword- five projectiles lanced forwards over her shoulders, trailing crackling green light, and slammed to the ground in the middle of the horde, detonating in clouds of superheated gases that left shattered creatures in their wake. In the time that it took the minions that were further back to press forwards, fear apparently unknown to them, the girl in a bloodred scarf bridging the gap between her whole head mask and her red-streaked crop top spread her hands out wide, glassy shards carving their way into existence to protect the medical tent.

“Get your head in the game, kid!” she snapped at Vista, eyes wide with fury and terror behind her mask. “Slacking off like that gets people killed!”

The diminutive Ward (ex-Ward? Flechette wasn’t quite sure, given some of the issues ENE had had of late obstructing normal operations, especially administratively, and now wasn’t the time to ask) made to respond, but she was cut off by Quarrel, whose voice brooked no argument. “Not the time. Flechette, Vista, with me. We’re taking the high ground to see about cutting those things off at the source. Vex… stay safe.” Her voice softened on the last. “We’re all that’s left, I want to have someone who knows what they were like before.”

The now-identified Vex nodded curtly. “Go.” There was pain in that voice, but also resolve, and Flechette found herself taking another look at the girl and how her costume accentuated and highlighted her tanned muscle.

Vista turned, looking up to the top of the PRT building, and it was only her sense of timing that let Flechette close her eyes to avoid the sight of space bending around the three of them like the rules in a playground game of tag. She didn’t open them again until she felt the cool breeze on her face, and then immediately took a step back because they were mere inches away from the edge of the roof.

“Geez, warn me next time!” Flechette spared one last thought for Vex, then put the other girl out of her mind for the time being, running a check on her arbalest out of long-ingrained habit. “What’s the plan here?”

“Hit the Endbringer, don’t get hit. Vista, you’re focusing on the latter. Flechette, pick your targets, but focus more on the big ones than the minions.” Quarrel’s voice seemed to befit a general commanding their troops more than the situation they were in, but it was a sound move.

Quarrel started firing at a rate that almost beggared belief, alternating targets between the creatures on the ground (that had been gradually deviating from the humanoid form as the battle went on, with claws, tails, and quadrupedal body plans becoming more and more common) and Bohu. Flechette, firing at a more restrained rate, was mostly firing at Bohu, with an occasional shot aimed for Tohu.

As they had at the Simurgh fight, Flechette’s attacks passed through the Endbringer, although at this distance it was hard to see if it wasn’t being backlit, letting light pass through the holes to make them more noticeable.

In contrast to Lily’s steady, almost singleminded fire, Quarrel seemed to be all over the place, with arrows covered in all sorts of exotic energy effects from blue plasma to orange shells of something to even one that dissolved into a stream of red… probably light, as it pointed a number of creatures out of existence.

Eventually, she seemed to hit on something she felt confident would work mere moments after Legend and Eidolon made their arrival known, loosing seven arrows within a second. As they passed beyond the bow, they shivered, and in their place appeared pink needles of some kind of crystal, practically humming with danger. All seven pierced the superdurable hide of Bohu, and no sooner did the seventh embed itself within the Endbringer that they all began to glow and hum concerningly.

Within a matter of seconds, they detonated in a flash of pink light and smaller shards of the material, a crack not unlike the sound of a geode being split open accompanying the detonation.

Huge chunks of flesh were blasted off the Endbringer, revealing a no-color-yet-every-color sphere at the base of its neck. Quicker than anyone Flechette had ever seen move, Quarrel had another arrow nocked and fired, seeming more a stretch of outer space than any physical projectile before it slammed into the sphere.

The Endbringer toppled backwards.

Quarrel held an arrow in her hand, ready to nock, but not quite strung yet. “Be ready, in case it gets back up.”

“What do you mean, ‘in case’?” asked Flechette, one last bolt winging skywards to punch a hole through Tohu.

“It should be in Yu Di’s hands now, but the Endbringers are not alive in the same way as something like the Butcher. Still, I doubt it has a powerful enough benefactor to shield it from from the vastness of the universe- ah, there we go.” Flechette turned to the Endbringer to see it flaking away, almost as if it were made of layers being peeled back by a child who was moving too fast to preserve the wrapping paper of this year’s first Christmas present.

“Is that… normal?”

“Normal enough- constructs and spirits given form react differently than mortals do to that arrow, but this is a not entirely unique expression.” Quarrel looked down to Vista. “C’mon, kid. Let’s get down there and see what we can’t do to help with rescue efforts.”

“...and you’re sure it’s dead? All dead, not just mostly dead?” asked Flechette.

“Dead enough that it’s time to start going through its pockets looking for loose change.”

With that, Quarrel stepped off the roof, vanishing before she could fall more than five feet and (probably) appearing outside the medical tent down in the parking lot below.

“Show-off,” grumbled Vista. “Now come on, time’s wasting.”

“R-right,” said Flechette, taking the proffered hand and closing her eyes again to not see sights that would have her throwing up from the inside.

When they arrived on the ground, Flechette kept staring at the flakes of Endbringer rising into the sky until someone nudged her, jumping away and half-drawing the toy sword at her side before she recognized Vex from earlier, hands raised nonthreateningly. “Hey, sorry, not looking to scare you or anything.”

“What’s up?” asked Flechette, still internally reeling at being witness to the killing of an Endbringer but more than able to keep up a good front.

“Wanted to check in with you- you were looking a little overwhelmed there- well. Still are, to be honest.”

“I-” She’d never had anyone she was close enough to care like that before. “Thank you.”

She couldn’t quite see Vex’s eyebrow rise under her mask, but some instinct told her it did. “You’re welcome, then. You want to talk about it while we go and try to clear out what that bitch did to the city?”

“Absolutely I do,” said Flechette, eyes flickering from Vex’s face down to her exposed abs briefly. “Shall we?”

The almost feral smile on Vex’s face was audible in her next words. “Then by all means, lead the way, Flechette. We’ve got monsters to kill.”

Chapter 33: Ding Dong...

Chapter Text

If asked, Taylor would freely admit that she was not, in fact, expecting what happened when she landed after making sure the fleeing Endbringer wasn’t going to try and come back.

Namely, she wasn’t expecting Brandish to get in her face and start screaming, most words lost to incoherence and spittle but the occasional “corrupting” and “unheroic” making their way through.

“Step back,” Taylor barked, perhaps drawing a little power through the ansuz inscribed on her eye patch for kingly command, and Brandish did, albeit begrudgingly.

“Now then,” said Taylor, drawing not on Odin’s power but on his experiences to raise herself with kingly mein, “what is it that you were screaming about that you felt was so necessary that I hear that you would ambush me as I set down?”

“You’re the reason everything’s breaking down!” snarled Brandish, eyes almost seeming to glow behind the odd orange goggles she wore over her eyes. “You’re why it’s here!”

“Mom! What the f*ck are you doing?” Even if Taylor wasn’t directly subject to it, she could still see how Vicky’s aura made everyone flinch back as if she had raised her hand. She was grateful that the blonde had decided to come down between her mother and Taylor- even if Taylor had, strictly speaking, faced worse, and with far more doubts of her safety (getting hit with an Annihilator-level attack and shrugging it off did wonders for the self-confidence, after all), there was something to be said about facing a spitting mad person, especially the parent to her girlfriend, that other circ*mstances simply… lacked.

If not for her newfound powers, she suspected that her first few meetings with Emma after being assaulted would have elicited similar feelings of fear in her.

“She’s a curse on all our lives!” spat Brandish, pointing at Taylor over her daughter’s shoulder and making Vicky reel back from the sheer vitriol in her words. “She’s the reason why the Endbringers came! She’s-”

“If not for Hodr and Strongtower, there would have been another, sooner or later,” came Quarrel’s voice, the unquestioned authority of a general in her voice. “Will be again for me, I suspect. You blame a child for the sin of having too much power and trying to end a thing that should not be. I wonder, would you blame yourself as easily if you were the one to trigger the next Endbringer battle? If you were the one to topple this tower instead of I?”

One part of Taylor rankled at being called a child- while she wasn’t quite sure how exactly to count herself now that she had Odin’s history written inside her skull, even if it wasn’t anywhere close to a part of her the same way that all those years with her mother were, they were still hers, and she was far older than she looked. However, another, more practical part of herself counseled her to hold her tongue, and it was correct- from the outside, she was a child, having only lived fifteen years, even if there was far more writ upon her brain.

“I- you- that’s beside the point!” snapped Brandish, cloaked in the unrighteous fury of those who have had their point flayed and lack a response.

“Not by my reckoning, nor by theirs, but continue,” said Quarrel, gesturing broadly at the gradually growing crowd. “By all means, accuse a child of destroying your life. It shan’t be the first time, I’m sure.”

From the clenching of Brandish’s fists, it was clear that Quarrel had hit her mark (not as if she wasn’t known for doing so).

“That’s beside the point,” Brandish ground out through gritted teeth.

“By all means, Mom,” Victoria said, putting enough emphasis on the title to make it clear that that wasn’t how she thought of the woman before her, not truly. “Tell us what your point actually is, because I’m hearing a lot of whining about your life being ruined and not enough explaining what exactly she has to do with it.”

“She got Amy kidnapped!”

“That was a coincidence at best- we both know that the leverage Coil wanted over me had nothing to do with the cape he wanted your daughter to heal,” said Taylor, making direct eye contact with Carol and, almost on a whim, pulsing magic through her remaining eye to make it glow an eerie gold within her helmet almost as a threat. “Speaking of which, whatever did end up happening to her?”

“Transferred out to a classified location for power testing in the wake of her… abrupt recovery from her Case 53 status,” said a cape in tans and browns that Taylor took a moment to recognize as Clay, a temporary member of the Protectorate ENE on loan from New York. “If it helps, I don’t think anyone this side of Dragon knows where exactly she is.”

That neatly cut Taylor's next question off at the knees.

“Your point is invalid, Aunt Carol,” said Laserdream, tired but alert and hovering beside Taylor in solidarity. “Try again later, maybe.”

“She poached Vista! She broke the unity of the Protectorate, leaving openings for the Teeth to come into Brockton Bay, Teeth that she even now consorts with, all because-” Brandish began, pointing at Quarrel when she brought up the Teeth.

“Yes, by all means,” said Taylor- not loudly, per se, but forcefully and with the weight of authority- “tell them, how when Vista found documentation on my Trigger Event and then took the issue up with Director Piggot, she had her own Second Trigger and fled. Tell them how I locked myself into a box of filth and ruined my own eye, and how I put myself into a coma that I very nearly did not wake from, all for the sake of ruining the Protectorate.” She leaned in, eye practically blazing with golden light. “Tell me how I turned my sister in all but blood against me for two years just for the chance of causing the Protectorate some minor issues with a cannibalistic gang of murderhobos.”

“A dead cannibalistic gang of murderhobos,” said Quarrel firmly. “Dead for violating the Endbringer Truce and attempting to kill me as I came to this battlefield.”

“Good,” said Taylor. Then, realizing how it could be construed, she hurried to continue. “I’m glad they’re out of the way, maybe now we’ll have a chance to put the Empire down.”

“I don’t see how that’s germane to the conversation,” said Laserdream, frowning.

“They attempted to poach me last time, in arguable violation of the Endbringer truce.” Taylor frowned. “Actually… hmm. Brandish, do you recall any… irregularities with that situation?”

“Really? You want to talk about poaching? You, the girl who’s trying to seduce my daughter away from New Wave? You disgust me.”

A sword made out of some sort of energy appeared in her right hand, even as her left hand manifested a shield. That shield slammed into Vicky, sending her hurtling to the side with wide eyes, clearing the way for Brandish to lunge, sword swinging in low.

It never met its target.

A massive, ursine form seemed to unfold from within Taylor’s shadow, superimposing itself between Taylor and Brandish’s blade. It carved partway into the form of Styx before stopping, momentum spent and Brandish unable to push it farther.

“You get one freebie,” she rumbled, eyes flashing with an eerie red light. “Now weapons off before we have to… pacify you.”

Brandish wasn’t fool enough to disobey, not with the sound of Flechette’s arbalest ratcheting a bolt into position to punctuate that sentence.

“Thank you, for your… cooperation,” said Quarrel, who hadn’t drawn her bow again but had an arrow in her half-raised right hand, almost as if she was planning to throw it like a knife.

Brandish visibly bristled at that, but said nothing.

“Now then,” continued Quarrel, slipping her arrow back into its quiver. “Was there a point to all that bluster, or were you just blowing smoke? If it’s the latter, I don’t think it’ll be taken particularly well, especially given what we could be doing instead of standing around and gawking at one woman’s personal grudge.”

She didn’t alter the tone of her voice in any way, but most of the uninvolved capes watching received the distinct impression that they were not wanted here, clearing out in favor of finding something to do that wouldn’t get the cape who put down an Endbringer to pay particular attention to them.

Brandish, seeing any hope of support she might have dry up as the crowd receded, just spat at her daughter’s feet. “You disgust me.”

“You disappoint me,” returned Victoria firmly.

Brandish turned and stalked away to the medical tent, causing raised voices inside that none of the assembled capes cared enough to listen to.

“Sorry about that,” said Vicky, rubbing the back of her head. “Mom is… well, I probably shouldn’t try to excuse her behavior, I really need to get out of that habit.”

“Take your time, Victoria. Habits aren’t broken overnight,” Quarrel responded. “That said, there is a conversation I need to go have, so I’ll leave you to it.”

With that, the archer walked in the direction of the Thinker area, leaving a confused Vista and a visibly disgruntled Teeth cape behind. “She always has to have the last word,” grumbled the member of the Teeth, sighing and then turning to follow her.

With Brandish and Quarrel gone, the focus of the attention (at least, what remains after the other capes took their leave) shifts to Taylor, seeming almost anticipatory.

Taylor, in turn, raised the eyebrow that wasn’t obstructed by her eyepatch. “What’s everyone looking at me for?” She had a suspicion of what was going on, but she wanted confirmation before she actually acted on it.

Laserdream, reticence poking out the edge of her battle-face, is the one to answer. “We, uh, wanted some advice on what to do in the wake of the fight? You, uh, you’re the only one of the command staff present, everyone else is holed up with the Thinkers it looks like.”

Taylor sighed, more resigned than anything else. “Can’t argue with that, I suppose.” She called on the logistical experience of Odin, eyepatch glowing with ansuz, and then nodded. “Alright, then, here’s where we start…”

Quarrel was very much expecting the Triumvirate to show up before she got to the Thinker tent that she was almost disappointed that she made it into the enclosed area without being stopped.

“Ah, don’t get up on my account,” said Quarrel, raising both hands palms-out as multiple of the Thinkers stood. “Just want to sit in and listen to the rest of the room about what you think about the situation both as it stands and going forwards.”

“Is that what you told the Butcher when you killed them and all the Teeth except for Vex?” asked a blonde in a catsuit, seeming to only realize that she was saying that could very easily piss off the newest Butcher, one who had killed an Endbringer to boot.

By that point, though, it was too late, and the Thinkers had all leapt from their seats in a chaotic mess, attempting to flee the tent. As if to add insult to injury, the Triumvirate floated in through the entryway to the tent in a formation that was entirely too smooth for them to not have practiced beforehand.

“What’s going on in here?” snapped Alexandria, glaring at all present until they stopped moving.

“Tattletale,” said Accord irritably, the only one of the Thinkers who hadn’t participated in the chaotic attempted exodus from the tent, “accused Quarrel of killing the Butcher and the rest of the Teeth. Given the lack of the typical hallmarks of a newly inherited Butcher- the twitching, decreased fine motor control and associated tendency towards breaking things, and plodding stride- I find it unlikely.”

“I am not the Butcher,” said Quarrel calmly. “As a matter of fact, the Butcher will not be a factor in terms of parahuman dynamics, going forwards, although that’s more a consequence of attempting to attack Vista and I on our way to respond to this Endbringer attack with the rest of the Teeth save Vex.”

When this failed to lower the tension in the room, Quarrel sighed. “Look, if I were actually the Butcher, I’d be pain blasting Tattletale for being an annoying little sh*t, or Accord for paying too much attention, or someone else for some bullsh*t justification. I’ve been with the Teeth for longer than some of you have been capes, I know how the damn game goes with new Butchers. Call in Vex or Vista if you want- or don’t,” she added when that only caused the room to tense up more, “but I’m not gonna just fly off the f*ckin’ handle and start attacking everyone in the room.”

“Forgive us some caution,” Alexandria responded dryly, “since you have shown heretofore undemonstrated utility in your… efforts against the Endbringers in a way that could, potentially, speak to inheriting the Butcher collective.”

“Alrighty then, little miss subject matter expert,” said Quarrel, managing to keep her irritation mostly out of her tone, “by all means, if you have some kind of device or some secret parahuman who can tell whether I’m actually the Butcher or not, call them in, but if not, then let the Thinkers sit down and worry about if my little cousin’s home city’s gonna get flattened by another Endbringer in a month.”

Annoyingly, the first option was chosen, but it wasn’t more than three minutes before the armored form of Chevalier clanked through the door. As his helmet turned to regard her, Quarrel felt something pressing against her in a direction she couldn’t quite quantify, feeling almost slimy as it seemed to feel her up, but the sensation passed before she could do more than shudder.

“She’s clear, no Butcher here,” he said, nodding to Alexandria. “If you don’t mind, I’m gonna get back to the cleanup effort.”

“By all means,” said Alexandria, inclining her helmeted head, and Chevalier slipped out of the tent with considerably less noise than he entered with.

“Are you satisfied?” asked Quarrel, all but ignoring the rest of the parahumans in the room in favor of making what would have been eye contact with Alexandria if not for her helmet.

“...I suppose we can’t afford to dispute this any more, even for the sake of Vista’s safety,” said Alexandria.

“I would sooner trust the Teeth with her safety than the monster you have running the PRT here in Brockton Bay, Alexandria,” said Quarrel, no longer bothering with the unbothered façade.

Before Alexandria could fire back, Legend cut in. “The situation is… under investigation, and not germane to the situation at hand. We’ll leave you to it.”

A muscle in Alexandria’s jaw jumped, then she turned abruptly and followed Legend out of the tent, Eidolon trailing in their wake like a puppy who’d just been told that dinner was cancelled.

“Alright, now that that’s squared away, let’s get back to business,” said a man with barbed wire on his leather jacket. “Obviously we can’t talk about the results of the battle yet, except in broad strokes, but do we think it likely that Quarrel will be targeted next time?”

As the Thinkers slowly collected themselves into something resembling a collective and started theorizing, Quarrel moved into a poorly lit corner of the tent, observing without being involved.

After all, information was everything in war, and she’d take as much as she could get.

Chapter 34: ...The Status Quo is Dead

Chapter Text

Taylor was almost tempted to compare Brockton Bay to New York City.

Not out of any sense of civic pride, no- not even the proudest and loudest of Brocktonites was willing to go up against the Big Apple on that one, with the potential exception of some of the cape fans or gang members who were touting the presence of one cape group or another as an advantage.

No, the temptation stemmed from the incredible recovery from the Endbringer attacks the cities in question survived.

Admittedly, in this case, it was almost entirely Taylor’s contribution- say what you will about the effort and spirit that the capes she convinced to help devoted to helping rebuild her city, but by the nature of the fact that they’d come for an Endbringer battle, they were much better, on the whole, at destroying the traps that the Endbringers had left behind than actually rebuilding the (thankfully mostly abandoned) area of the city that the tall Endbringer had warped.

Taylor, along with Labyrinth and a Ward named Annex, were the most well-suited to putting some semblance of a building back up in the wake of the abomination that Quarrel had killed. Labyrinth admittedly wasn’t necessarily adhering to the pre-existing architectural style and layouts, although given the condition of the mostly abandoned warehouses and other industrial buildings in the area, no one was going to kick up much of a fuss about that.

Once the first-wave handling of the immediate cleanup and casualty tallying, most of the capes left, with a smattering of non-locals hanging around to watch the lightshow (or, in the case of Myrddin and his posse, to keep Annex company) with the exception of the Thinker tent, which was still keeping Quarrel for something or other.

Even the medical tent had packed up, with Panacea being a major driving force behind the speed of clearing out the injured capes.

“How you feeling, kids?” asked Faultline from where she was standing right next to Labyrinth’s focused form, welding mask not betraying the nerves she was clearly feeling (presumably some combination of the Endbringer and Labyrinth’s spacey state).

“I’m here,” said Annex, tiredness audible in his voice. “Probably not for long, though, I’m starting to get tapped.”

“Don’t worry about it if you do need to cut and run,” said Taylor, three runes hovering above her upturned left hand and slowly turning in a cylinder, presenting a glinting golden othala-eiwaz-fehu each in turn as her outstretched right hand glowed with a spreading gold light that gradually repaired everything it clung to. “If push comes to shove, I could make the place… well, not perfect, but I could handle the rest of the damaged buildings, and given where we are it would probably be a fair sight better than it was before today.” Taylor’s voice turned sardonic at the end of her statement.

Aside from Victoria, who had an understanding of what, exactly, Taylor was capable of, the rest of the capes (and what few noncape bystanders had both the temerity and the even footing to keep up with the uneven terrain left behind by the interaction between preexisting rubble and Labyrinth overwriting parts of the street with things like old cobblestone, hunting trails, or well-worn wagon roads) gave her an incredulous look of one stripe or another.

After that, there was remarkably little talking, even taking into account when a panting Annex dragged himself back to Myrddin and the rest of the Chicago contingent and Labyrinth, whose path was becoming more irregular, was led away by a gently urging Faultline.

“Well,” Taylor said, “they’re here for a show, might as well give them one.”

She rose into the air, trailed at first only by Glory Girl and then by the three runes, growing to almost be as tall as her.

“Hey, if this goes poorly, you might need to catch me,” said Taylor, spinning slowly in place to face her girlfriend (and didn’t that make something inside of her just melt a little bit, the idea that she had a significant other) as she said this.

“Whoa, what do you mean, ‘if this goes badly’?” Vicky asked, eyes widening.

“Nothing that bad, just if, say, I overdo things, I might drop, and while I can handle a little bit of a fall, I’d rather not have to repair the building I land on again,” answered Taylor, a wry smile playing across her lips.

Vicky just sighed fondly, shaking her head. “Only you, Taylor. Only you.”

With that handled, Taylor closed her hand and breathed in.

Describing the way that it felt to draw in energy from the environment to power her own workings was kind of like trying to explain Star Wars to an eighth century Christian monk who’d spent the past month transcribing Beowolf: theoretically possible, if one were a Tolkienesque linguistic scholar, but otherwise it wasn’t linguistically possible for Taylor to verbalize it to anyone (save Odin, since many of the terms she used to conceptualize it herself were pulled from his own understanding of the Runes, which was in a language never heard by mortal ears).

After a timeless instant, Taylor’s lungs hit their full capacity, and as she exhaled, she shunted the energy she’d breathed in (for lack of a better English term) into the runes she was maintaining.

Hagalaz, the one against the small of her back and holding her in the air, she left alone, but one by one, each of the three runes that was slowly revolving around her increased in intensity- not physically, per se, but every observer knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were important.

Then, with no small amount of theatricality, Taylor snapped her fingers.

It was like reality blinked- one moment, Taylor was hovering over a mostly-ruined neighborhood, with patches of other worlds’ buildings or landscapes overwritten in place of destroyed areas and some small spot patching, and the next, the massive runes had vanished and the ruined area of the neighborhood was completely restored.

She wobbled momentarily, and her eyelid drooped somewhat, but she shook herself briefly, then drew herself upright with kingly mien and turned to the gawkers. “The show is over! Go home!”

Slowly, the assembled crowd trickled away in dribs and drabs, until the only one remaining with Taylor was Vicky. While they were leaving, Taylor took the time to look over her handiwork, a smile making its way onto her face as she noticed the trail of various building types that Labyrinth left, breaking up the industrial chic (or lack thereof) of the neighborhood with earthy browns and tans.

“You okay?” asked the blonde, lifting Taylor’s chin to make direct eye contact as she took the taller brunette by her shoulders.

“I’m not running at the game of my top-” Taylor stopped, blinked, and then sighed. “I’m not at the top of my game, but I should be fine to make it home.”

Vicky didn’t say anything, but her upraised eyebrow more than adequately conveyed her skepticism.

“No, really,” said Taylor, breathing deeply for that extra little bit of energy before snapping her figures. As her armored hand made a surprisingly loud sound, two runes appeared hovering over her gauntlet, othala and raido both presenting outwards before they flashed into nonexistence. In their wake, they left a hexagonal panel of what looked to be amber, or perhaps tree sap, which showed Taylor’s room briefly on the other side before it polished itself to a mirror’s sheen. “I’ll be fine getting home on my own,” Taylor continued. “Besides, it’s not like I’m planning on doing anything other than saying hi to Dad and then going to sleep.”

Vicky continued scrutinizing Taylor for a moment longer, perhaps trying to find more exhaustion than Taylor could handle in her remaining eye, before sighing. “Stay safe, okay?”

“Of course.” Taylor took Vicky’s hand in hers and brought it up to her thin lips for a brief kiss before flying through the panel, which shattered in a spray of quickly-vanishing shards of something that resembled, at first glance, stained glass.

The blonde remained there for a moment, as if waiting for Taylor to return through the portal, then visibly set her jaw and flew off, the specter of her own home (and who was in it) looming in front of her.

Contrary to what Victoria was dreading, she was not confronted by Carol immediately upon entering the house. After a moment, she managed to convince herself that no, they wouldn’t just let her get away with attempting to attack another cape less than ten minutes after the death of an Endbringer.

That lasted until she entered the kitchen for a glass of water, at which point Carol bit out a brief “Victoria.”

“Carol,” came Victoria’s equally frosty reply. “I thought you were enjoying the hospitality of the PRT for your actions this morning. Dad asleep>”

“That would be the thought, wouldn’t it? No, fortunately enough, I was cleared to return home with Mark by Alexandria herself. She mentioned that my genuine belief that the apparently well-intentioned cape Volur was attempting to poach a member of a respected independent heroic organization, as is arguably the case for Vista, is enough to warrant my reaction, even if it was… excessive.” Brandish didn’t quite go so far as to sneer, but throughout her response, it was clear that she didn’t exactly hold Victoria’s girlfriend in high regard. Flashbang, of course, went unremarked on.

Victoria blinked, flabbergasted. “You- you can’t possibly be blaming Taylor for having a Trigger event, which the Director responded to in such a way to cause Vista to have a Second Trigger?”

“No, of course not,” said Brandish, raising her hands placatingly. “No, it’s just that the way that PRT policies around Volur are, as it stands, that my reaction to your closeness to her is considered… warranted. Pursuant to that-”

“No! No way am I breaking up with her over some bullsh*t that Piggot set up because she’s sore over how Vista ran away after learning that Piggot wanted to press-gang Taylor over her Trigger event!” Victoria’s aura all but bloomed off of her, seeming to rattle the whole kitchen save for the stoic Brandish, who stood unmoved in the face of her emotions.

“For your own sake,” said Brandish, tone the same calm, almost soothing motherly voice it had been before Victoria’s voice rose, “I must advocate against your continued relationship. The PRT-”

“Oh, hang the damn PRT! They’re an excuse and you know it!” Victoria was already bracing herself for what she suspected was coming from her mother. “What’s the real reason you don’t want me to date Taylor?”

“I just think that you would be better off to still be with Dean,” said Brandish, slowly pushing herself up from her seat at the table and ambling over to the coffee machine, starting the pot with the press of a button. “It would be better for everyone involved-”

“What, were you counting too much on the contributions from the Stansfields to keep New Wave as afloat as it is?” asked Victoria, no small amount of dismissiveness in her voice. “Or is it that your pride can’t take losing the social clout you get from your daughter being in the same circles as Max Anders and the Stansfields thanks to the boyfriend you contrived to set her up with?”

“Victoria Eileen Dallon,” said Carol, some small amount of heat finally creeping into her voice. “I have let you be disrespectful before, but the insinuations you are making now are beyond the bounds of tolerance.”

“So is attacking the woman who saved your daughter’s life in Canberra and here during an Endbringer truce, but evidently everyone else is meant to tolerate it,” Victoria shot back, rising a few inches into the air at the same time. “What’s all this really about, Carol?”

A muscle in the Breaker’s jaw visibly worked for a moment before she responded. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“From what, heartbreak? You can’t just wrap me up in bubble wrap and stick me on a shelf in your office forever! I have to grow on my own at some point, and just because you want me to live my life a certain way-”

“I can’t protect you from the Empire like this!” Carol snapped, sparks of yellowish-orange light playing around her hands.

Victoria’s head snapped up. “Is that what you told Fleur?”

Carol’s eyes hardened. “Young lady, you will not speak to me in such a tone of voice! I will not be disrespected in my own home even by my own blood, and I refuse to allow you to endanger this family any more than you already have!”

Victoria blinked, shocked, and for a moment her aura billowed out into the room before she managed to drag it back in. “Any more than I already have? I’m not the one who decided to go public with our family’s identities! I was a kid! Did you think about how easily the Empire or the Teeth would have killed me, or Crystal, or Amy, or Eric? No, Carol, out of the two of us, I’m not the one you should be pointing at when it comes to endangering our family.”

Carol’s face flushed red. “Get out of my house!”

For a moment, Victoria thought about taking the direct route, but then her more rational mind reasserted itself.

“Goodbye, Carol,” she said, entirely too much to verbalize stuffed into the two words that she left behind.

After the door clicked shut, she rose into the air until the cold started nipping through her force field and costume, then screamed, one long, guttural sound that slowly petered out as she finally ran out of air.

That done, she dove down, splashing into the bay for long enough to wet her face, then emerged in a spray of glimmering droplets.

Now that the venting was out of the way (at least for now), she could focus on her next priority- finding a place to sleep tonight. In the long term, she’d prefer wherever it was that Amy had all but moved out to, but that whole neighborhood had been caught up in the Endbringer’s Shaker effect, and she wasn’t sure if her sister was looking for somewhere new or not.

In the meantime, though, she’d probably be able to crash on Taylor’s couch- while Mr. Hebert reminded her of her own father in too many ways, she was sure that he’d at least let her stay the night.

Course charted, Victoria rose further into the air, then flew off towards her girlfriend’s house.

Chapter 35: You Can't Go Home Again

Chapter Text

“So,” said Taylor, now that they had slept and had breakfast after her girlfriend (and didn’t that still send a little thrill through her mind, the idea that she had someone who cared for her out of something other than familial love) had knocked at her window as she was getting in bed, “tell us what actually happened last night with Carol?”

Partway around the dining room table, Danny looked up at Victoria, while the hovering specter of Odin at Taylor’s shoulder had already been looking at her.

Vicky, hair looking somehow stringier than it had of late despite all of the brushing Taylor had given it that morning, sighed, seeming more seven than teen. “Do I have to?” she asked, not quite to the point of whining but certainly within the same vocal zip code.

“If you want me to go,” said Danny, mouth twitching as if to grimace before he arrested the motion, “I can- if you want this to be a moment with just Taylor and Odin.”

“Either way,” said Taylor, compassion covering an unyielding core of certainty in her voice, “if only for your own sake, you need to externalize this before it starts to… fester.” She frowned briefly. “I speak from experience.”

From her expression, Taylor was fairly sure that Vicky hadn’t caught Danny’s wince, which was on the balance a good thing, she suspected (she didn’t want to get caught up in that whole mess now, if at all). “Well, uh… Taylor, what context do they have on what I told you about me?”

“Odin knows what I know,” said Taylor. “Danny knows what’s public knowledge.”

Again, Danny winced, which Vicky noticed this time. “Right. Well, uh, the public knowledge of my Trigger doesn’t cover everything there. I don’t- I can’t go into all of it, but a lot of it was tied up in Carol. She was- there’s a lot of expectations and pressure that she represents to me, she’s the focal point of the way that I’m supposed to be a hero and falling short, and she’s- that moment, where everything falls apart just before you black out and wake up with powers, I looked at her, and she was on her phone. I wasn’t even worth her time.” A bitter, ironic chuckle forced its way out of her mouth as she said this.

“All I had to do to be worth her time, apparently, is to break up with the rich white heir to a multimillion dollar corporate empire and start dating the daughter of some washed up wharf rat. No offense, Mr. Hebert,” she added hurriedly.

Taylor’s lips thinned, but before she could say anything, the oldest person in the room spoke up. “What exactly did she say, lass?”

To Taylor’s surprise, there was both disappointment and anger in Odin’s voice, although in retrospect she should have expected that- as mercurial as the myths had made him out to be, Odin had always had great respect for the social compacts and responsibilities that hosts and those with power over others held, and it was a natural extension of that to include parents.

“She, ah, implied that me being in a relationship with Taylor was damaging New Wave’s relationship with the PRT and its corporate donors, as well as bringing a threat over our lives from the Empire because… well, they’ve already killed one member of our family in her sleep, what’s another?” She shrugged flippantly, as though her nature being a potential death sentence was something to dismiss with the same amount of ease as being out of ice cream.

“Rank cowardice!” Odin spat, followed by a sequence of words in old Norse comparing Carol to the offal of a frost giant mixed with the ashes of a good boat destroyed for no other reason than the hatred of its owner’s enemies. “She brings shame to herself and her family, if she would refuse to acknowledge how her own actions put you in danger before you knew enough to understand the fight your family had chosen, and your family has already paid the price for that!”

Vicky laughed again, sounding almost more like a bird cawing than a person. “I told her that too, after she kept trying to deflect, and that’s when she told me to get out of her house.”

Odin grumbled some more, with about the same level of nordic profanity, but this time he kept it quiet enough that Danny and Vicky couldn’t hear it, although Taylor still had to hear him comparing Carol Dallon to Ymir’s toenail shavings and other things of similar nature.

“...right,” said Danny, tearing his attention away from the semi-corporeal form of a mostly-dead Norse god swearing enough to make an entire pirate fleet blush and refocusing it on Vicky. “Right, yeah, so, do you have anywhere to stay? We can put you up for at least a little bit, I think, long enough for you to get on your feet, at least-”

“Don’t worry about that,” Vicky replied, waving a hand. “I’ve got a couple options that I think should work out okay, although I do appreciate the willingness to offer. First steps, at least, are to check in with Amy or Styx, see if I can’t move in with wherever Styx and Amy’s girlfriend are staying. Should be pretty schnazzy now, since I think that building’s one of the ones that Labyrinth rebuilt, so hopefully there’ll be enough room for me.”

Danny frowned. “What about contacting people you might need to talk to? Depending on how… poorly Carol takes things, you might have more issues with your family, or legal or logistical things.”

Vicky shrugged. “I mean, maybe, but as far as I’m concerned finding a place to hunker down is more important. I’ll call Aunt Sarah and Crystal after I’ve got that all squared away, and I can’t really think of anyone else I need to let know that Carol kicked me out for being gay immediately.”

“Right-o, then,” said Danny, rubbing at his bloodshot eyes. “Let me know if you want a ride to your sister’s place, otherwise I’m going to go take a shower before I go in to see if anyone needs any help at the DWA.” He grumbled something under his breath about knowing how to do something, but otherwise left for his shower quietly.

“Alrighty then,” said Taylor, standing up and passing her hand in front of her face to conjure her armor and then producing another portal much as she had last night, this one leading to Winslow’s roof. “Shall we?”

Vicky sighed, then pushed her glimmering hair back with one hand and slid her crown in to hold it in place with the other. “Lead the way, my dear.”

With a little joyful shiver down her back, Taylor did, armor perhaps a touch brighter in the sunlight on the other side of the portal than strictly warranted, but given the circ*mstances, a minor show of exuberance was more than forgivable.

“Quarrel looks to have come a long way in such a short time,” said Taylor, hovering over what very convincingly appeared to be an unused building made from an oak tree grown into place, complete with acorn-shaped doorknobs and rustling leaves.

Victoria, floating just behind Taylor, frowned. “I know something’s weird… How can you tell that Quarrel’s involved?”

Taylor turned to her girlfriend, then tapped her cheekbone, just under her eye patch, the stitched rune glowing just enough to be visible through the shadowing that her helmet provided. “Quarrel’s strength is never going to be illusions, and even if it was… well, let’s just say that I’m more than capable of seeing through most forms of obfuscation, if I know to look hard enough.”

“I see. Well then, shall we go knock?”

“We shall,” said Taylor, descending to land gently on the branches of the tree just outside the door.

Before her fist made contact with the door, it swung open, revealing a slender blonde with bags under her blue eyes. “What do you want,” she said more than asked, a baseball-sized orb of plasma inflating into existence over her upraised hand.

“Is that really any way for you to talk to your girlfriend’s favorite sister?” asked Vicky, crossing her arms as she rose up to hover above the blonde, at least a little threateningly.

“Oh good, it’s you.” The orb of plasma winked out, and Sundancer tugged both of them inside, bemused yet complying, before kicking the door closed. “We’ve had a bunch of people showing up to try and take this building, both capes and otherwise, and a lot of them aren’t willing to go away without some persuasion.”

“I might be able to help out with that before I go,” said Taylor, already thinking over the combination of runes that could help reinforce and extend Quarrel’s efforts into something that would keep people away from the building instead of just making it seem unoccupied.

“Good,” came a new voice, and Taylor turned around to see Quarrel in the red-brown leather jacket that she wore with her costume. “I’ve been trying, but… apparently illusions aren’t really my strong suit, and I’m fending off requests from everyone under the sun, plus making sure Vex is okay after the rest of the Teeth stomped all over her Trigger- well. I’m being pulled in too many directions, and even though everyone here is helping, their skillsets don’t handle the issues we need to resolve well enough to get away with things.”

“I can probably at least help with the people making requests,” said Victoria. “I’ve got more than enough experience with handling the PRT and various independent hero groups just from working with Carol, and as far as anyone else is concerned… well, I have been known to be, ah, ‘persuasive’, so to speak, from time to time.”

Quarrel’s shoulders relaxed as her breath puffed out in a relieved sigh. “That’s pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. Styx and I are good at the intimidation thing, not so much at the glad-handing and face to face kind of stuff. I’d ask for your mother’s help, if you think she’ll let me in the door without taking my head, but it’s not crucial.”

“Uh, yeah, about that… she kinda kicked me out over dating Taylor,” said Victoria, rubbing the back of her neck. “She’s not gonna take anything from me, let alone a referral for someone the PRT is still categorizing as a Teeth member. I was hoping there was a room available for me to crash in here?”

Quarrel’s face soured. “That’s a real asshole move. Alright, yeah, Brandish is off the table. You’re in the clear, just grow it yourself.”

Victoria glared. “The f*ck do you mean, grow it yourself?”

Quarrel blinked, clearly taken aback at the blonde’s vehemence. “Huh? You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?” Her eyes flickered over to Taylor. “Either of you?”

Faced with confusion instead of the pushback that she was expecting, Victoria’s anger ebbed away. “Figured what out?”

Taylor, in turn, turned her eye to her girlfriend and focused, seeing beyond the physical with Odin’s centuries of experience, backed with the power of the Runes, then barked out a laugh. “Right under everyone’s nose!”

“What? Am I just doomed to be the only one out of the loop?” asked Victoria, throwing her hands up with more agitation than rage.

“Neither of us have any idea what they’re talking about,” said Bella, having strolled out of Taylor’s shadow to stand next to Sundancer in the time since the door had been closed. Sundancer, in turn, jolted, hand rising in an aborted motion, then parsed what the Breaker had said and started nodding.

“Well then, I don’t see any reason to keep them in the dark,” said Quarrel, turning to Taylor.

She blinked. “Why are you looking at me? I’m not trying to keep it a secret per se, it’s just one of those things that I’m not shouting from the rooftops.”

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Congratulations, Victoria,” said Taylor, turning to her girlfriend. “You’re a literal goddess.”

Chapter 36: As Sun Seeks Day

Chapter Text

After Quarrel all but dragged Victoria into a side room, Odin’s spirit and Amy in tow, to discuss her newfound apotheosis, Taylor was left to stand awkwardly in the foyer of the tree-that-had-been-made-a-house with the blonde that was probably Sundancer (and was apparently dating Amy? She wasn’t quite sure on the details of that one) and Bella- that is, until Sundancer sidled out of the room, leaving just Taylor and Bella alone.

The silence in the foyer grew tense as the two both shot surreptitious glances at each other, some more stealthy than others- for all that Taylor had the decorum that Odin in all his kingly glory could lay claim to, there was only so much she could do when Bella was on the side of her missing eye, and she was wearing chain mail to boot, and by the time she remembered that she could see through what bugs were in the room, it was already too late and she’d been caught out fair and square.

After what was probably too long, Taylor sighed. “Come on, if you want to talk. We can do it while I alter the protections around the building.”

Taylor strode off into a different room than Sundancer had left through, drawing power through the ansuz rune on her eye patch to grant wisdom to guide her to the heartwood of the tree, and a moment later, she heard Bella huff, sounding almost fond, and then the gentle sound of bare feet on hard wood floors as Sophia’s clone followed her.

The building was not particularly large, as far as the number of rooms on every floor, but they were laid out with the whimsical logic, or lack thereof, of nature, and the two of them had many floors (and thus, many rooms) that they had to go through to get to the tree’s heartwood.

On the way down, Bella had breathed in as if to attempt to speak two or three separate times, but each time she aborted the attempt, hair swishing softly as she shook her head each time.

Eventually, Taylor acknowledged that she’d have to be the one to start the conversation, as little as she’d want to do that.

“Bella. I don’t… I don’t hold you responsible for what Sophia did to me,” said Taylor, hearing Bella stumble slightly at the statement. “I just don’t like you making excuses for her. Yes, she was- is- in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean that she didn’t make her own choices in that situation. It might make the choices she did make somewhat easier to understand, but that doesn’t make them any less… any less impactful, for me or those around her, and just saying ‘oh, her passenger made her do it’ isn’t something that really makes it better, not to me.”

“I know that,” said Bella, haltingly, normally-smooth voice quavering a little. “It’s just… Sophia hated so much about herself, that it’s… it’s hard not to love her, at least a little.”

“Is that what you inherited from her? All her hatreds, reconstructed into love?” asked Taylor, sounding more tired than anything else.

“That, and entirely too much baggage.” Taylor saw, through the eyes of a spider in the corner of the room, Bella run her hand through her hair. “Well, at least we’ll match your redhead friend in that respect, eh?” she asked, bitter mirth dripping from her words.

Taylor stopped so abruptly that Bella had to backpedal to not run into her. “Emma? What did Sophia do to her?” There was far more anger in that than Taylor was expecting, given all that Emma had done to her.

“That’s… it’s not my place to say, even if I understood how exactly Sophia changed Emma.”

The edge of fear, buried underneath the compassion in that sentence, gave Taylor pause, realizing that her abruptly-clenched fist had started dripping glowing squiggles that looked, if one squinted, vaguely like runes. Slowly, Taylor forced her hand to open, letting the lighting in the room fade back to the sunbeams entering through the mirror and the faint glow from her eyepatch. “Sorry, Bella. I don’t… I don’t want to take what Sophia did out on you. If I do, please say so.”

“I… I’ll try.”

“That’s all I can reasonably ask,” said Taylor, starting walking again. “I’ll ask Emma, sooner or later, but I-”

“With respect,” interrupted Bella, “make it sooner. Something tells me that things are going to get in the way, and if you don’t do it soon, it’ll happen never.”

Taylor snorted. “I thought wisdom was Odin’s thing,” she said, aiming for teasing but landing somewhat short.

“Yes, well, your Stand isn’t here, so someone had to fill in,” Bella returned, droll tone managing the teasing better than Taylor’s flatter cadence.

“You have my gratitude,” said Taylor.

They came to the end of the last staircase, and immediately Taylor knew she had arrived where she’d need to be to reinforce the protections, both out of what magical knowledge she had and from the faintly glowing Chinese characters painted on the slightly raised area in the center of the room. “We’re here.”

“Do you need anything?” asked Bella.

Taylor flicked her wrist, closing her hand on empty air that promptly revealed itself to be a spear longer than she was tall. “Nothing in particular, I think. I should be able to get away with just the spear to do the carvings, as long as I get the positioning right…” She trailed off, leaping into the air and remaining there in a susurrus of wind and a brief flash of golden runes.

“Hmmm…” said Taylor, the rune on her eye patch glowing brighter. “This goes here,” she continued, carving one rune in the gap between two different characters, “and that goes there,” with another rune all but appearing out of nowhere dead center in the raised area, “and…” the spear flickered out, seeming to be taller than even Bella’s hulking ursine form and with almost treelike branches, leaving nine instances of one rune around the edge of the circle, before Taylor descended once again, landing gently in the center of the raised area. Her hand opened, the spear vanishing before it fell six inches, and Taylor closed her hand again, holding a short blade that resembled a needle more than anything else.

Nine times the needle entered the flesh of her palm, and nine drops of blood fell to the rune in the center of the circle before the wounds sealed themselves over, blood both on her hand and the circle hardening into crystal in the space of heartbeats. “With this seal,” said Taylor, in a language forgotten to all but her, “I bind ye runes to your purpose, in Vár’s name.”

She felt the runes activate with a thrum, intertwining with the protections that Quarrel had constructed in a way that she couldn’t articulate to anyone save Odin, then nodded.

“Alright, that’s that,” she said, feeling as much as seeing the way in which the runes glowed an earthy green to match the Chinese characters, the occasional spark of golden light flickering through the runes or the crystal on the raised area.

Taylor swept up the stairs, Bella seeming almost pulled along in her wake as she strode through the building.

“Have you thought… have you thought about the prospect of starting a hero team? A real, independent hero team?” asked Bella, halfway tempted to make the shift into her ursine form to keep up with the taller girl.

“I can’t say I have, why?” asked Taylor, slowing and turning around to face Bella while continuing to walk backwards.

“Well, ah,” stuttered Bella, a little distracted both by the intensity of Taylor’s gaze and her feet as she glide-stepped backwards, as evidenced by her eyes flickering downwards. “New Wave is having some problems, what with Glory Girl and Amy not being on great terms with their mom and all that, plus the Protectorate is… not somewhere you really would want to be, plus you’ve already got more than enough capes who would- I- If you told me you were going to China to kill the Yàngbǎn, I’d be right there at your side, and I’m not the only one in this building.”

Taylor blinked, the idea not, in fact, having occurred to her, before humming. “I can see how that could be beneficial, in this time, but… maybe not right in the wake of an Endbringer attack. I’d want to talk with anyone who’d want to join this team before, too, so we could make sure everyone’s on the same page.”

“I’m not asking you to make a commitment right now, no, I’m just asking… think about it, please.”

Taylor nodded. “Of course.” Her heel hit a stair, and without missing a beat, she turned a hundred and eighty degrees to climb it facing forwards once again.

After less time than it had taken to walk down- Taylor was much more assured in the path now that she’d followed it herself rather than relying on magic to guide her steps, and she was the one setting the pace they walked at- they arrived back in the foyer, meeting Victoria and Amy there.

“So, uh, Taylor. I think I’m gonna… gonna stay here for a while, see if I can get back on my feet without leaning too hard on you, and so I can try and feel out… whatever it is that being a god gets me,” said Victoria.

Taylor had to push down her first impulse (that being to accuse Victoria of trying to abandon and/or betray her, just like Emma had) with the weight of Odin’s memories and kingly bearing.

“Alright,” said Taylor, nodding firmly. “If you need help, please reach out.”

Taylor walked towards the door, purpose visible in her eye (or so she liked to think). Before she opened said door, Bella spoke up. “What are you up to now?”

“Taking your advice,” said Taylor, closing the door and shooting into the air. It was time she got some closure.

Taylor hadn’t been able to make herself go to the Barnes house in years.

Intellectually, she knew now that she probably would have been able to get through to… well, someone, who would have been able to help Emma and make her stop, if she’d gone.

Emotionally, though, she had already been abandoned by too many people- her father had broken, Emma had stabbed her in the back with the school system’s help, and even her mother had been torn away from her, even if that wasn’t her fault, and she couldn’t bring herself to believe that anyone would (or could) help her.

Now wasn’t the time for self-recrimination, though, and she shook off the thoughts as she walked up to the door of the Barnes house, having already left the armor behind in favor of a ruffled blouse and loose jeans. She didn’t do anything so cliché as pause to take a deep breath, but there was a hitch in her steps before she went all the way up to the door and knocked firmly. Perhaps too firmly- Taylor thought she saw miniscule divots in the wood in the rough shape of her knuckles, but before she got the chance to examine it more closely, the door swung open.

Zoe Barnes’ kindly eyes had always helped her with the more recalcitrant parents in her job as a doctor at the university medical center, and they went ever so slightly soft when she saw Taylor standing at her doorstep. “Taylor!” The petite blonde stepped out of the house and dragged her into a hug. “It’s good to finally see you again. When I heard about-” her voice broke. “When I heard about what Emma did to you, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you to try and apologize, but I’ve never- well, would you like to come in?”

“Sure, Aunt Zoe,” Taylor said, gently patting her mother’s friend on the back.

After following her inside, Taylor sighed, gazing wistfully around the large living room. Yes, there was a different blanket draped over the back of the couch, and the pictures on the wall had expanded to threaten conquest of the hallway, but aside from so many small details, it was like she’d stepped back in time to before Emma had turned on her.

“Do you… want anything to drink?” asked Aunt Zoe, more than likely falling back on an old, familiar routine given her wrongfootedness.

“No, thank you, Aunt Zoe.” Taylor was willing to draw comfort from that old routine as well.

“Alright, well, I am going to make some tea for myself, I think…” Zoe trailed off, bustling around the kitchen for long enough to make a cup of tea for herself before settling herself on the couch, across from Taylor.

Again, Taylor was the one who had to take the initiative in the conversation. “Do you… do you know what happened? With regards to Emma and myself, that is,” she asked.

“...I don’t,” said Zoe, not a little shame in her voice. “I know some of what happened, near the end. I know she’s the one who-” her voice cracked. “I know she helped put you in that thing, and that she tried to break into your house afterwards, but I don’t know why and I don’t know much else.”

Taylor breathed deeply, in then out. This wasn’t particularly unexpected, but some small part of her had hoped that Zoe had known more than she did.

“Those are the big moments. Emma… she did a lot of little things, and she got a lot of other people to do little things, but… well, straws and camels, you know?” Taylor shrugged helplessly. “Honestly, I just want to know why.”

Zoe was silent for a moment. “I’m not sure how much you’ll get out of her, but… she’s here on bail, if you want to try talking to her.”

Taylor nodded, then pushed herself up from the couch. “I think I’ll see what I can’t get from her.”

Zoe nodded. “Good luck.”

Taylor nodded back, then walked up the stairs, the trepidation that had been bubbling in her stomach since she made the decision to come here coming to a head.

Emma’s door had had the sign that Taylor made for her torn down, leaving slightly chipped paint behind, and Taylor closed her eyes for a moment at the physical reminder of how their relationship had failed. Then, she knocked on the door- not nearly as hard as she’d knocked at the entryway.

“G’way,” came the muffled voice from inside the room.

“Not yet,” said Taylor.

There was a moment of silence, then the door creaked open a crack, just enough for Emma to peer out at her.

Taylor made eye contact with the single green eye visible. “Well, Ems,” she said, not above using the childhood nickname to try and elicit a reaction from the redhead. “Can I come in?”

A verbal answer was not forthcoming, but Emma pulled away from the door, which swung open on its own weight.

The room was a mess, with dirty clothes, school supplies, and all manner of other things strewn across both the floor and the desk. In the center of the mess stood Emma, normally-vibrant hair dull and unkempt and her eyes lacking both the cruel sparkle that she had exhibited of late and the earlier, kinder expression that Taylor remembered from when she was still Ems.

“Well,” said Emma, sounding almost accusatory if not for her apathy. “Come to gloat, I suppose?”

“Come for answers,” replied Taylor evenly, internally mourning Ems just a little bit. “We were sisters, Ems, in all but blood. Why… why all this? Why try to tear me down? Why try to kill me with Sophia?”

“Because you’re not strong,” spat Emma, a sneer firmly fixed on her face. “You’re weak, you broke after your mother, and-”

“Just because I fell apart after Mom died,” said Taylor, fury warring for pity now that she understood that Emma’s confidence had been a front for months, if not years, “doesn’t make me weak. Humans are a social species,” she continued, only vaguely recognizing the ideas she was espousing, “and our strength is in our ability to work together, so why would you call me weak when you’re the one who helped put me back together? When that would just call yourself weak?”

Emma’s tears came without warning, and she flopped backwards, only barely making it far enough onto her bed not to break her neck as the air whouffed out of her.

Taylor rushed forwards, already calling on the rune on her eyepatch to guide her to where Emma was injured, and-

Emma wasn’t injured.

The redhead sobbed once she’d managed to refill her lungs, and Taylor, finally realizing why Emma was crying, gathered her once-friend up into a hug. Emma, in turn, clung to Taylor like a dog to a ball they refused to let their owner take.

For a long time, they stayed like that, Taylor rocking Emma back and forth gently.

Then, once Emma’s tears were dry, she began to speak, and Taylor listened.

Chapter 37: Paterfamilias

Chapter Text

Danny Hebert had failed his daughter.

In the beginning, it was… well, not better, but it was manageable- Annette had always been closer to Taylor than he had been, she just understood Taylor better, and so him not being able to really relate to Taylor was something that could be worked around. Even as time went on and she grew from a tot-sized terror into a bigger bookworm and then a gawky teen, Danny let the trouble he had relating and talking to Taylor stay on the back burner. He’d get to it later, he always told himself. There’d be more time for him to think it through down the road, once he managed to start making her proud by fixing up their city. Next time he’d be able to get the ferry funding back from where it had been reassessed after yet another corporate tax cut, and then he could afford to focus on his family.

There wasn’t more time.

By the time Alan and Zoe pulled him out of the bottle that he’d all but fed himself into after Annette’s accident, it was already too late, and he’d destroyed any hope he’d ever had of having a decent relationship with Taylor. She inherited both his temper and his unwillingness to forget a slight, and while he may not have intended to hurt her in his grief, intent was cold comfort to a girl who may as well have lost both her parents instead of just the one, but instead of the closure of a headstone she had the stench of alcohol and bottles all over the living room, with only the Barnes to help hold her up.

After that, well, it was not excusable how Danny had hurled himself into his work to get away from the monument to his failure, the daughter that he’d driven away from him, but Danny liked to think that it was at least understandable, if no less contemptible.

As such, it was no wonder that Danny had missed the signs that Taylor was being bullied- she’d already been withdrawn, taciturn, and almost wary at home, so when he noted those traits being ramped up somewhat, he took it to be a condemnation of him and turned back to his work, hoping somehow that Zoe and Emma would keep an eye on her but too prideful to ask.

Maybe if he had, he could have cut off the situation at the knees somehow, but he hadn’t, and so the first time he heard that Emma hurt Taylor worse than he ever could have was after a week in the hospital, one eye socket visibly empty even through her eyelids, in a coma he didn’t know she would ever wake up from.

At first, he’d thought something was wrong when she was talking to herself and then trying to explain what had happened to him, but after a certain point his disbelief had shattered under the sheer weight of everything she was telling him- it was entirely too fantastical to be a lie, and while it was theoretically possible that someone could have been making all the things she was telling him up, it wouldn’t make sense to, and the appearance of the spirit of Odin had been the tipping point as far as actual proof went. Of all the things to try and make up, a man taller than him and built like one of the bulkier employees of the DWA, old enough to be his father or perhaps even grandfather, was not something that would be on anyone’s top thousand list.

The loss of Alan hurt, but his stalwart refusal to believe that Emma had anything to do with Taylor’s attack was beyond the pale, and while Zoe and Anne were sympathetic, Danny wasn’t willing to risk costing Taylor what support they could offer, not over Alan being an ass.

While the lawsuit was ongoing, and with Mr. Truth keeping them in close proximity, Danny let himself believe that they could start to rebuild their relationship. Indeed, Taylor was much less withdrawn than she had been before, seeming happy like she hadn’t been since before Annette’s death.

But afterwards… well, he fell back into the same damn pattern again. The kidnapping didn’t help, of course, but in the end it all came down to him falling back on old habits that he just couldn’t seem to shake no matter how much they didn’t help him. Taylor’s life as a hero just wasn’t somewhere he could follow, no matter how hard he tried, so he fell back to the same old keeping the lights on at home, just as he had after he’d sobered up.

Now, though…

Danny had been afraid for Taylor when she’d left to help the combat efforts in Canberra, but it was a distant, abstract fear- neither of them had known that she’d end up in direct combat, and it was halfway around the world, so it was hard to view it with the kind of immediacy that something like the Empire or the Slaughterhouse attack back in the day had.

He had, however, been more afraid when the Endbringer sirens had gone off to indicate that there was an attack happening in Brockton Bay. He couldn’t rely on denial to protect him there, not when he knew that Taylor was probably going to go right into fighting the Endbringer, not when he knew that he might die regardless of the fact that he made it into one of the shelters. Less than three months after waking up with her new powers, and he might have to bury her right next to Annette, and Danny knew that there would be no recovery from that, not even what little he’d clawed back after having his attitude adjusted.

Seeing her, tired but triumphant, was a relief, and a shock at the same time. Yes, she was tired… but she was also being far more open, more expressive with Victoria, her girlfriend, than she ever had been with him, almost as open as she had been with Annette, and that… that really got him thinking.

Thinking about what bridges he’d burned or had burned out from under him… and what bridges he could still build.

Taylor didn’t have any particular plans for after returning home.

Well, okay, that wasn’t strictly true. She had intended, truth be told, to make a nice cup of tea and add some honey (or perhaps break out Mom’s old spiced hot chocolate recipe, see if that would let her have a good cry), curl up in a blanket, and just… brood ruminate over the two severely emotionally charged conversations she’d already had. Maybe, if she was feeling up to it, she might have been willing to throw together a sandwich for a late lunch before fixing herself a drink, but she was very much intent on taking the afternoon to herself to just… process.

Reality, unfortunately, was not quite so accommodating to the Chosen of the Runes in this aspect.

“Taylor, can we talk?”

Immediately, her father’s words set her on edge. Even aside from the massive cliché that was the use of those words in the context of a romantic relationship, any kind of conversation where the initiator felt it necessary to get the other party to assent to it was damn sure going to be a big ask, as it were.

Mentally mourning her hypothetical hot chocolate, Taylor sighed and shuffled into the kitchen. “Let me make some tea first.”

All too soon, her honeyed cup was ready, and she found herself opposite her father at the dinner table, him with a mug of coffee that did not, in fact, have any liquor in it (and Taylor mourned the fact that she thought it was necessary to check). “So, Dad,” said Taylor, feeling the warmth of the tea in her hands and hearing the metal tea ball clacking against the porcelain, “what’s on your mind?"

“I’m… I’m confronting some things about myself that I should have admitted earlier,” he said.

Taylor frowned. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was building up to, but based on his tone, it didn’t seem particularly good, at least for her- the last time she remembered this particular tone, it was when he told her that her mom was dead.

“I’ve been a bad father to you, and I need your help to know how I can better support you going forwards.”

He looked like he was expecting some sort of objection, but none came- at first, Taylor was too startled to respond to the unexpected comment, and then, she was entirely too filled with bone-deep weariness to respond verbally.

Wordlessly, Taylor threw back her tea, the entire scalding cup going down in one go, then stood up and walked into the kitchen. One boiled kettle later, she walked back out, a novelty mug that they’d bought for her mom one Mother’s Day years ago big enough to dump the entire kettle into in her hand and visibly steaming.

“Okay, I need this if I’m not going to start screaming in frustration later tonight,” said Taylor, setting the mug down on the table with a sound that struck fear into the hearts of water companies everywhere. “Walk me through it.”

Danny, clearly taken off guard, had to take a moment to reengage his train of thought. “Right. So, you know how I fell apart after your mom died, and you know how I’ve been… I haven’t been able to keep up with your heroism since… well. Since January.” Seeing Taylor nod slowly, taking an exaggerated slurp of her tea, he continued. “And you know how I was… how I left most of the emotional work of raising you to Annette, right?”

Taylor pressed her lips together, blinking rapidly, then nodded once, a short, jerky motion.

“Alright, well, I-”

Odin manifested, holding his hand up. “Stop.” The word reverberated through the room like the inside of a drum, leaving ripples in Taylor’s tea and presumably Danny’s coffee. “This is hurting more than it is helping. Focus less on your failings and more on your daughter, her needs and what she wants from your relationship.”

Danny winced. “Right. Taylor, I haven’t been- no, I will be better, better for you. Please, help me learn how?”

The Taylor of two years ago would have leapt the table and slammed into Danny in a hug, babbling out reassurances and apologies to her father. The Taylor of one year ago would have been more cautious in offering a hug to him, but the hug would have been offered nonetheless, and she would have offered what advice she could have, bringing the two back together in a more measured way. The Taylor of three months ago would have drawn Odin into the hug, and wouldn’t have trusted herself to offer advice where the god’s spirit could instead, bringing the three of them together even slower.

The Taylor of today took a moment to think things over, especially in the context of the morning’s heart-to-hearts, then drained her mug more before standing and walking around the table.

She started to reach out to hug Danny, then froze, head snapping around to glare at an outside wall. Something was coming, something heavy and metal that was squishing the bugs that she had taken to set to patrolling in shells around her home and it wasn’t slowing-

A massive tangle of metal pieces both large and small smashed through the wall, on an almost perfect collision course for Danny.

Fortunately, Taylor was there, and with one punch, she stopped the projectile, hurling shrapnel all over the room but leaving the non-parahuman unharmed in a flash of golden light that halted all of the shrapnel and splinters created from the wall. It dropped to the floor in a harsh scraping of metal on metal, then drew itself back together into a vaguely lupine shape.

“Hookwolf,” said Taylor primly, one hand coming out to grab the construct by the throat and lift it off the ground, blades and hooks blunting themselves on her supernaturally durable flesh. “If my father wasn’t here, then I’d accept your offer to act as a punching bag. As it stands, you will not come back into my house unless you want me to pluck you bare, carve you open, and then stake you out for the ravens.”

The Nazi morphed, shifting in all of his butchershop brutality, tendrils reaching out for Taylor’s remaining eye with a sound like a knife set in a washing machine, but he was too slow, and Taylor hurled him out of the house faster than he’d entered it, managing not to widen the hole he’d already smashed into the wall.

Taylor ran her hand down her face, briefly covering her good eye, then sighed. “Let me take care of this, and then we can get back to the conversation.”

A brief moment of mystic exertion later, and the fragments of wall had pulled themselves together as if magnetized, sealing themselves back up into the shape of a wall and its attendant shelves and photographs to Taylor’s satisfaction.

“Alright, let’s talk family.”

Chapter 38: Interlude 6

Chapter Text

Hookwolf was not a man accustomed to defeat.

Even just off of the back of his power, he was hard to contend with on a physical level- between the sheer mass of metal that was there and how sharp it was, it was hard for anyone except the chink dragon to stand up to him, purely from a standpoint of “who’s tough enough and strong enough to take what he can dish out and dish right back”. Combining that with his experience, both before he Triggered, in the pit fights, and after, and he was one of the largest individual threats in the city, and his reputation and sheer brute power helped discourage every dumbass with a ski mask and a power (or hell, a ski mask and a gun) from making a run at the Empire.

All of this made it all the more galling that some girl could just manhandle him like so much wet lint, even if he knew that that girl had stood up to Endbringers (and him) before- doing it in civvies was just different from coming out the loser against an armored cape like Volur.

Oh, sure, Hookwolf knew in the abstract that there were threats that he didn’t have a hope of standing up to. The Endbringers, the Triumvirate, hell, even that Quarrel bitch were all big names that either he couldn’t touch or could feasibly put him down like the rejects from the dogfights, but at least they had the f*cking balls to present themselves as the actual big names they were- even the new girl, Quarrel, she’d proved her bona fides by putting down the Butcher and then an Endbringer within a matter of hours, and the massive f*cking bow was just an accent on top of that.

But some girl in her civvies chumping him that hard, without even paying enough attention to him to realize that she threw him right into Squealer’s latest truck’s blind spot, that stung. The druggie bint hadn’t managed to kill him with the shot that had thrown him into the house, but she had slowed him down enough to escape, and with the raid on the drug den in one of his warehouses already done, that was all she needed to let the rest of the mooks get off without a scratch.

“So, let me get this straight.” Clausewitz steepled his fingers, his voice carrying the air of authority that was normally Kaiser’s to exert. “You failed to defend your territory against a half-wit, drug-addled whor*, whose only saving grace is that she found a benefactor to hitch her disgusting trailer to in order to afford to put a tank in all but name on the streets of this good city. In fact, in the process of attempting to pursue Squealer, you ran the risk of earning our good people a reputation of being trucebreakers that we only escaped by the good fortune you had to be pursuing a bitch so drug-addled that she violated the recovery period and that our city has a cape capable of undoing the damage dealt by the former Endbringers so comprehensively that the recovery period was shortened to just two days, at which point you found yourself destroying a civilian house- not even any civilian, no, just the cape who repaired the city. The only reason you haven’t found yourself in Allfather’s company is the fact that she has, in all the mercy a person like that can hold in their heart, decided not to pursue your head.”

Hookwolf winced. “Well, when you say it like that, then it sounds bad.”

Clausewitz leaned forwards over the desk that was separating them. “That is the intent, yes- Kaiser has charged me with driving home the magnitude of your choices and their consequences, and these are indeed weighty choices.”

“So what, you’re just gonna beat my ass until I apologize or some sh*t like that?” Hookwolf didn’t really think that would happen, but one way or the other it would get a response from the egghead, and that was the important thing.

“No, I shall be putting your talents to use in a more… appropriate manner as we strive to rectify the problems you have caused our organization. You may go, until I have need of you in a more direct capacity, at which time I will reach out to you myself.” Hookwolf was tempted to take a swing at Clausewitz for his arrogance, like he’d have handled Squealer driving through his wall any better, but he held onto his temper, banking it for another occasion.

“Sure,” he spat, turning and slouching out of the room that the man liked to call his office. He’d done that song and dance before, and he knew that, for as much of an ass as Clausewitz was, he’d find some way to make his petty personal grievance serve the best interests of the Empire.

As long as he served the cause, all could be forgiven.

Hookwolf had very nearly ruined everything.

Not that the situation wasn’t already precarious, but it was precarious in a manner that Clausewitz planned for- something that he wasn’t half bad at, if he did say so himself, especially with his brother to help cover for his blind spots. For as treacherous as the Butcher was, as fraught a plan as applying both his and his brother’s talents against the PRT and New Wave to handicap the fools, those were all things that he’d planned for and could predict the responses to, which opened up the door to his own countermoves that would keep them in the game even if someone thought they could maneuver the Empire into checkmate.

Having such a powerful cape as Volur feel targeted by the Empire by what was essentially random chance, especially when she had enough favors to call in to crush them, was another matter entirely.

He couldn’t entirely fault Hookwolf for the situation- Squealer was a Tinker, yes, but she’d been of such middling performance that neither him nor the rest of the Empire could have predicted such a bold strike from her, let alone that it would be so successful. Indeed, it was only Othala’s aid that prevented them from losing any manpower to go along with the weapons and drugs she’d denied them in the raid, and Taylor Hebert was a personal project, so he hadn’t put her address into the wider Empire awareness as a location of a potential recruitment target.

Still, it was clear that, one way or the other, that could not stand. Too much had changed of late, in the last 48 hours alone, for him to afford to stagnate in his plans.

Taylor Hebert could no longer be recruited in the conventional sense, if that had ever truly been a possibility. Even if he had managed to control the situation well enough to present her with situations that would entangle them more closely together, her dalliance with Victoria Dallon of New Wave made it clear that she would not be someone he could recruit with conventional methods.

Nor could he recruit her through the mechanism of his power. Both Hebert and the Dallon girl were immune to the short-term aspects of his power, and as much as he believed in the effect of the longer-term side of his power to break through even their formidable wills, he needed his shorter-term power to keep them around for long enough for said power to reeducate them, and while he’d managed to ply his trade well at Winslow where he could rely on the rules and regulations of the educational system to bind his conscripts, neither of the girls would be within his reach any time soon with the transfer that Arcadia had offered the Heberts.

Ah, well, he’d be able to at least work with whatever capes Gesellschaft decided to offer in exchange for such a potent ability.

Their brainwashing programs (or, if push came to shove, breeding programs) were far and away superior to anything he’d seen or heard of in America, even when taking factions like the Herren Clans or the Fallen and all their Masters into consideration.

Their masterpieces, like Night and Fog, far outshone what measly work he’d been able to put into the likes of Hookwolf- he’d merely leashed a rabid animal, they had torn apart two degenerate crossdressers and in their place built up respectable members of society who could be trusted to kill their depraved friends with their bare hands as their first acts of repentance for their sins.

Yes, Gesellschaft would be able to rehabilitate the two degenerates far better than he could, and the only obstacle to that was their capture and delivery, which was something he was far more equipped for. With New Wave in shambles and the Protectorate already disrupted by the director’s reaction to Hebert, he only had to contend with their own resistance, with perhaps a token chance of external issues, nothing he hadn’t overcome before. He’d even managed to convince Kaiser to make a strike against the ABB, especially in the wake of their alleged dragon’s refusal to stand against the Endbringers- while they did lose Stormtiger in the Endbringer battle, they were seen standing and fighting in the figurative trenches to defend their city, and had the victory to ride the crest of.

All this to say that, if all went well, he would be able to sweep many obstacles off of the path to the Empire’s conquest of the city.

He raised the phone on his desk, dialing in a number from memory. “Purity, my friend, it is time. Lung is in the shopping mall. Begin your attack run.”

Cleo Gaul wasn’t particularly special, by the standards of Brockton Bay- working single mothers weren’t, unfortunately, that rare in the context of the sociopolitical situation in Brockton Bay.

She had had the good fortune of her husband not dying of violent means (heart failure was, for all the tragedy of the means, not something that was inflicted on her Flavius by anyone who she could put a face to), and being able to live in the house that was paid off by his life insurance, but that didn’t stop little David Dwight Gaul from growing up without ever having seen his father’s face.

Still, life had to go on, and today, that meant going to the mall. David’s clothes weren’t going to buy themselves, unfortunately.

After entirely too much time cajoling a fussing baby into the stroller, she could finally get into the building, and hopefully things would go well.

The store was, unfortunately, busier than she’d hoped, but she made it through, and after a line that she thought was too long for just two days after an Endbringer attack, she decided to go to Baskin-Robbins for a little treat.

There, too, the line was onerously long, and David was starting to fuss far before she got to the register, but by a stroke of luck, the burly man in front of her in line turned around and started letting David play with his finger before she could wrangle the bags into the storage area under the stroller, to the point where after they’d gotten their ice cream (rainbow sherbert for the man, who introduced himself as Kenta Tatsuma, and rocky road for Cleo), they accompanied each other to the same table.

“...thank you so much for the help, Mr. Kenta,” she said, setting her cup down and maneuvering the stroller around to where David could see both of him. “I’ve been trying, but… well, ever since my Flavius passed, I’ve been overwhelmed, and as much as I love little David, having him really hasn’t helped me get back on my feet especially with how much my mother-in-law hates me for ‘stealing away her darling baby boy’ from someone of the ‘right sort’.” She made air quotes around the last.

Kenta snorted, finger still clutched in David’s brown little fist. “Someone like that,” he said, “isn’t worth the title of mother.

“Preaching to the choir on that one,” said Cleo, hands coming up, “but he loved her and wasn’t willing or able to acknowledge how much of a bitch she was. Half the time I’m astounded he was even a functional human being instead of a goose-stepping little-”

She was interrupted by the grinding of metal against metal. Anyone in Brockton Bay knew to get down and look around for a source, and these two were no exception- both of them dropped their ice cream and moved, with Kenta’s head swiveling around to the blades rising up to block off the food court’s exit in contrast to Cleo all but hurling herself to cover David.

There was a deep, thrumming boom, and a flash of blinding light, and part of the roof caved in, spilling rubble all across the foyer of the movie theater appended to the food court and revealing the incandescent form of Purity, hovering in the sky like an avenging angel.

“People of Brockton Bay,” came the hollow, booming voice of Kaiser as he planted himself in front of the blocked-off exit. “For too long has this city been menaced by the so-called ‘community service organization’ that is the Azn Bad Boys. I come here, today, to put an end to this villainous organization myself, by slaying the dragon whose cupidity and avarice demands no less than the complete rule over this fair city.” Disdain fairly dripped off of his voice, somehow harmonizing with the sound of his armor creaking as he took an imperious stance that gave the impression that he was looking down his nose at them like so many disobedient children. “Kenta Tatsuma,” he said, weightily, “come to your death with dignity and spare the people of this city the damage that another of your rampages will cause.

Instead of the dismay that she was expecting to feel at realizing that she’d let Lung within reach of her child, Cleo was filled with fury- not at Kenta, but at Kaiser, for putting her baby’s life in danger.

“Kick his ass,” she snarled, unbuckling David from the stroller so she could take him and run.

Kenta startled, heat rising from his body, almost as if he’d forgotten she was there, then turned to a boy no older than fifteen at another table. “Get her and her child out of here. If the little emperor wishes to court death, I can oblige him.”

The boy nodded, then gestured, sweeping up Cleo in his wake as they melted into the crowd.

The last she saw of Kenta before the boy guided her out of the room was the man glaring at Kaiser, eyes glowing and shirt ripping off of his scale-studded torso.

Chapter 39: Bella Ciao

Chapter Text

Taylor was ready for a nice, calm week.

Not that she was complaining about having the opportunity to contribute to her city so much, and to see an Endbringer dead on the floor, of course, but even for someone with more-than-human endurance, fighting off an Endbringer before rebuilding a sizeable portion of the city as well as having multiple extremely emotionally intensive conversations and punching out Hookwolf was exhausting. Even taking the natural assumption that he wasn’t intending to come barreling into her house and that being in a running battle with Squealer was the reason that he was intruding, and thus not choosing to pursue any kind of retribution, it was still a fraught weekend, the kind that tested even divine stamina.

So, she could be forgiven when, upon sitting down for dinner, she didn’t immediately recognize that the stir-fry that Danny had made for lunch had been poisoned.

She could be further forgiven, upon realizing that, for missing the gas diffuser full of chloroform replacing the salt shaker, and the “sonic subdual system” built into the hastily-replaced chairs, although the dart full of sedatives that bounced off of her neck, tip bent into uselessness, was something that caught her notice.

Kaunaz flared to life above her forehead as all of the poisons burned themselves into nothingness, and a frantic invocation of Gebo made sure that the combination of toxins and sonic attack didn’t kill her father.

At that point, though, she had larger problems to handle, with Hookwolf exploding through the front door, this time entirely on purpose, so she left the two runes to hover in the air, burning merrily, in favor of handling their uninvited guests.

“Bring in the gasoline,” he snarled with a voice like a silverware drawer in a spin cycle, Cricket already swinging towards the dining room for Taylor by the time that the first of the Empire’s rabble masquerading as foot soldiers entered the house, gas cans in hand.

The instant that she had a clear line of effect to Cricket, Taylor struck, a bolt of lightning crackling out from her clenched fist and slamming the scarred cape into the wall across the dining room, twitching and smoking.

“Get,” she said, lone eye burning with fury, “out of my house.”

Spooked, one of the Empire gangers threw his can of gasoline at Taylor, the red plastic of the container contrasting jarringly with both the decor and the hate crime-encrusted clothes of the Nazis in its cheery warning.

Kaunaz flashed above her head once again, and in one massive plume of flame, the container exploded, hurling chunks of plastic all over the room that somehow didn’t damage anything that was supposed to be there.

“I’m going to give you one more chance,” said Taylor, armor shimmering into existence between one slow, menacing step and the next. “Get,” she continued, cracking her knuckles, “the f*ck out of my house.”

The unpowered gang members broke and ran, abandoning their gas cans all over the entryway and living room. Hookwolf, as well as Cricket once she struggled back to her feet, back covered in bruises-to-be and still smoking, both glared at Taylor. “We have orders to bring you in for the betterment of this city, and the world.”

“Nuremburg wasn’t enough of a threat to cow you fools into at least pretending to be respectable, then?” asked Taylor, glaring at the two fools who dared to encroach upon her home. “Very well, allow me to educate you.”

Taylor walked forwards with deliberate slowness, drawing energy into herself with each step.

In contrast, both Hookwolf and Cricket launched themselves forwards, Hookwolf churning like the world’s angriest sink disposal drain and Cricket stiffly, still feeling the effects of being electrocuted and hurled into a wall.

Hookwolf, naturally, hit her first, blades blunting themselves on her armor as he deformed around her unyielding form like water splashing. She had the chance to throw one punch at Cricket, which clipped the woman’s blades before she managed to twist the rest of herself out of the way, before Hookwolf flowed up over her eye and forced her to close it or find out whether the durability of her flesh extended to her squishier parts.

An invocation of raido sent lightning crackling all over her body, grounding out in Hookwolf’s fleshy center rather than the floor thanks to Taylor’s will, and with a sound like a keening dog crossed with overstressed industrial machinery, he sloughed off of her.

Taylor took the chance to leap clear, clearing the couch in one bound, before returning in for another exchange as he dragged himself back into a lupine form.

This punch was substantially stronger than the one she’d hit him with the day before, and sent metal shrapnel hurtling every which way, skittering off of her flesh and not puncturing anything that couldn’t be repaired or replaced. More importantly, it left Hookwolf greatly diminished in size, hulking form reduced to something more along the lines of a full-grown husky than a horse-sized wolf, although misshapen thanks to the veritable explosion it had been forced into.

Opening her hand, Taylor speared through the metallic puddle that remained, closing around the fleshy orb that the burning ansuz on her eye patch guided her to, and yanked. Immediately, the shifting metal collapsed into a puddle of sharp steel, scratching up the floor, and after a moment the orb expanded with a sound like a water balloon being filled into a blonde man, heavily muscled and with a snarling wolf’s mask failing to conceal the fear in his eyes as he felt her hand around his neck.

“Now then,” said Taylor, not bothering to hold back the fury in her voice- this man had decided to attack her in her home, Helheim was going to have its due sooner rather than later- “I would suggest you explain what made you think it was a smart idea to do… this.”

Before he could reply, a strangled yelp came from the kitchen, and a moment later, a battered Cricket shoved Danny out, curved blade ready and waiting at his neck to spill his blood all over his front.

“Put him down,” she rasped, “or I put yours down.”

It was a tremendous application of will to keep from letting the spasm of her fingers crush Hookwolf’s throat like so much dry spaghetti. The motion instead went into tossing the man like a sack of flour, although thankfully not one that burst on the metal fragments that covered the floor. “Now you.”

“No,” came the reply. “You’re going along with us, if you don’t want me to end him.”

The still-flickering kaunaz in the kitchen guttered out, leaving ash behind. “You don’t want to do that.” Taylor’s voice was soft, deceptively so.

“Not particularly,” coughed Hookwolf, joints creaking as he pulled himself back to his feet. “If you play along, he lives. Otherwise, he dies.”

“Your funeral.”

There was no transition between life and death- one moment, Cricket was holding her blades to Danny’s throat, the next, she was ash blowing away in the wind, all the way to Helheim.

“Now then,” said Taylor, looming over Hookwolf with the glow of her power shining out from her good eye, the kind of gold that Scion used to scour flesh from the Endbringers. “Where were we?”

Hookwolf kept his mouth shut, despite the fear she could all but smell on him- disintegrating Cricket like that must have rattled him even more than she already had.

“You want to keep your secrets to yourself, then? Admirable, I suppose, but you came into my house and tried to kill both me and my dad. The sooner you tell me, the sooner you can be… free. The longer you hold out, the more… unpleasant things get for you.” Despite the lightning crackling along her fingers, Taylor knew very well that torture was useless as a means of extracting information even if she bent the Runes to tell truth from falsehood, even if she had been willing to perform the acts. That was clear to anyone who could think about it rationally.

Hookwolf could not think about it rationally.

She had just beaten him out of his power and then, with as much seeming effort as it took him to swat a fly, killed Cricket. Taylor was more than willing to roll the dice on him being afraid enough to fold before calling her bluff- comparing him to some of the warriors in Odin’s memories, he was nothing special, and far less fear had broken them before. Even through the fury choking her vision, she could force the pragmatic action over the impulsive one, so she fixed the Nazi with all the glare her lone eye could muster up and waited.

“Clausewitz insisted that we had to remove you from the board before you took reprisal for yesterday, he wanted to take you and send you off to Gesellschaft for reconditioning to make you a useful asset. The gasoline was to make it seem like you were dead- we have enough sway in the police force and PRT to make any investigation disappear.” Taylor looked at the man for a moment after he spoke, but saw nothing more than a broken spirit- he was resigned to his death, one way or another, and was showing his figurative belly to Taylor.

“So be it.” Kaunaz flickered into existence again, briefly, and once the black shape scattered into ash, so did Hookwolf.

After a moment of silence, Danny spoke up. “So… what now?”

Taylor closed her fist, armor appearing between one heartbeat and the next. “I disabuse them of any notion of controlling me they may have. That might take some doing, so, uh…” She frowned, brain flickering through options. “Do you have anywhere you can crash on a couch for a couple of days? I wouldn’t want you to be here when they try and come back for me and me to be gone.”

He nodded without much hesitation. “I can ask Alexander or maybe Kurt to lend me a spare room.”

Taylor nodded. “Wait ten minutes, then drive over. I should have handled the riffraff by then.”

“Okay.” Danny turned to go up the stairs, then paused. “Be safe, Taylor, please?”

She could see the unsaid words on his tongue, unable to make it across the newly-smaller distance between them.

“One way or another, I’m making it home alive,” she said, making eye contact with him and dipping her head into a brief nod.

He sighed. “That’s the best I’m going to get. Good hunting.” He trudged upstairs, and Taylor stayed in place until he was out of view.

Then, she turned and strode out of the house, handily disrupting the Nazis’ efforts to whip themselves into a frenzy and charge back in.

“I believe the common term is ‘get off my lawn.’”

They did not, charging in to try and swing weapons or fists at Taylor, and she bared her teeth.

This would be over quickly.

Hades was not one to spend time in the world of the living.

Aside from his hobby, providing legal aid for lucky mortals, he had much better more important things to do in his domain, so he tended to remain in the underworld where he was needed when he wasn’t actively trying to escape from his duties.

An omen from the spirits of Pythia, still bearing his departed nephew’s blessing all these centuries later, was more than enough for him to make an exception.

At first, he was not sure where he should go, manifesting himself in the law firm he’d helped Odin’s heir in out of habit as much as anything else. He strode out onto the street, casting about for some reason that would justify his presence in the city with senses both mundane and mystic, finding nothing save for the specter of Thanatos’ mark, hovering over the city, and the traces of the nascent Protogenoi’s workings. For most, bending the universe’s raw nature to one’s will was foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst, but evidently the girl had the universe’s favor, just as Thoth had, and it showed in the unnatural improvements she was making- to the point where, had he not been seeking it out, he would have missed the traces for the improvements in precision and efficiency she’d achieved.

Hades found himself impressed, at least a little.

Then, he found himself staring into the barrel of a massive handgun, his other eye showing a man the kind of white that he would have expected from some of the lesser offenders serving sentences within his domain, the denizens of Asphodel. More importantly, the man bore Thanatos’ mark many dozens of times over, far more than any he could remember.

“Young man,” said Hades, pausing briefly to ensure he was not cut off by a not-so-distant explosion and roar as a dragon bellowed its challenge to a doomed emperor and his chained light. “What do you intend to accomplish by this?”

“You stand for the deviant, the inferior, and all kinds of degenerates,” snarled the boy. “That’s all the reason I need to remove you in the name of the Empire, Mr. Truth.” His name was said with the kind of disdain that he associated with Sisyphus’ feelings towards Xenia.

“Ah. I see.” Hades nodded in faux understanding. “You seek to make yourself known to the people of your city, in the hopes of being remembered beyond the fall of your empire.”

“No, you arrogant bastard,” he spat. “I’m here in its service!”

“Then you shall die for your doomed cause.” Hades’ hand rose to brush the boy’s gun away from his face, pushing the barrel up to face the building behind him, before he tore the life from his body. Then, when something tried to flood the collapsing body with life anew, swimming against the flow of time, he tore the life from that too, although not all of it as it severed its connection with the boy before he could fully claim it for his own.

No matter.

“You have my gratitude,” said Thanatos, bowing from the waist. “He was… frustrating my efforts to collect him.

“I see why. His unnatural life was… beyond your power to end, but not beyond mine.” Hades turned to face the dragon, then back to the reaper of men. “I release you back to your duties. Tarry not- the false emperor’s judgment awaits both of us.”

Both of them vanished, leaving behind a body that would not- could not- rot and a growing crowd.

Elsewhere, a child-that-wasn’t stopped mid-conversation, fear flashing in her eyes before something dark swelled into being behind them.

“The little raven wants to perch in my domain, then? No, we can’t have that, no we can’t, dear Ciara.”

A cloak of black feathers swelled into existence on the girl’s shoulders before she vanished, leaving the man who had covered himself in bone as she changed behind.

Chapter 40: Render Unto Caesar

Chapter Text

Taylor took one look at the fight between Lung and Purity and turned from it- it was already a foregone conclusion who was going to walk away from that fight even if the Oni hadn’t made a showing, with Hookwolf and Stormtiger already dead, and Brockton Bay’s resident dragon could fight his own fights.

She rose higher, taking in the city as a whole as she tried to orient herself and find where Clausewitz had hidden himself away, and gazed down upon the chaos that ran rampant in the streets.

Here, Amy and her girlfriend fought a wave of street toughs making trouble too close to the hospital, flashes of a too-hot orb and bloodied claws piercing flesh. There, Vista and her cousin stood outside a school, shoulder to shoulder with those in red and green, glaring down shaven heads in leather jackets. Out near Captain’s Hill, Laserdream was moving around like a pinball, bouncing off of trouble spots with a handful of blasts of red light before she turned her attention elsewhere, while her father and brother followed in her wake as best they could, binding Nazis as they went, and it was only the fact that she couldn’t see Lady Photon with them that let her notice her jerking open the door to Brandish’s house.

She heard as much as saw the Protectorate in their ivory tower, arguing with someone over telepresence about not being allowed to go out for fear of “exacerbating a gang conflict”, and Taylor scoffed. The nominal rulers of the city had always benefited more from the Empire’s presence than its absence, and the lack of police cars was yet another nail in that coffin. Maybe one or two of the heroes would stand and fight, uphold the values they claimed to stand for, but they weren’t anything she could afford to count on, aside from Flechette and Clay, who had already commandeered a vehicle to take them to join the fighting.

“Volur!” shouted Victoria, and she turned just in time for the blonde to barrel into her for a hug. “I saw your door was broken down, and I was worried-”

“I’m fine, Victoria,” said Taylor, pressing her lips to the blonde’s forehead briefly. “Nothing that I couldn’t handle, and I sent Danny off to- to a friend’s house.”

Victoria looked undeniably, almost unbearably sad, for a moment, before she shook it off. “Alright, so, what’s the game plan? I’m assuming you had something in mind for the situation, if you were willing to come up this high.” She pulled away from the hug almost reluctantly, but the warmth that filled Taylor’s chest at her concern lingered.

“I need a moment, but it’s Clausewitz’s plan that started all… all this,” she said, gesturing at the chaos. “He’s had enough skulking about in the shadows, it’s time I- we dragged him out into the light of day, what say you?”

Victoria made a show of cracking her knuckles. “Count me in.”

“Alright, now if you’ll just give me a moment…” Taylor closed her eye, then reached up and flicked the rune on her eye patch under her helmet, setting it ablaze with golden light. She spun, golden light playing over the entire city too dimly for anyone without enhanced senses to see, and a moment later, a nondescript house not too far from Captain’s Hill lit up gold, a wisp of black smoke forming briefly into a kaunaz over the house before blowing away.

“There we go,” said Taylor, letting the glow fade out. “Shall we?”

“After you.” Victoria gestured at the house and, chuckling, Taylor turned towards the house and flew, Victoria in her wake.

It looked fairly standard, as far as houses went, the kind of cookie-cutter two-story that Taylor’d seen in just about every movie made this side of 1975, just like the rest of the neighborhood, and if she hadn’t known with absolute certainty that Clausewitz was here, she would have ignored it.

“Knock knock,” she said, rapping smartly on the door.

“Really?” asked Victoria. “You said knock knock out loud?”

“Force of habit,” she replied.

Victoria gave Taylor a fond look, but before she could reply, the door opened, revealing a mousy brunette with an eye patch of her own concealed by a lank fringe. “Can I… can I help you?”

“No, I don’t believe you can, Othala,” said Taylor, eye flicking to the rune marked on the woman’s eye patch. Part of her wanted to kill the woman for her impertinence, for taking something that didn’t belong to her, but something stayed her hand, and a moment later, she saw it.

The woman was full of more compulsions and brainwashing than Taylor cared to shake a stick at, and while she wasn’t sure how she knew, she could somehow tell that it was old, stretching back far beyond she ever got her powers.

“Go to sleep,” she said, flicking eiwaz at Othala and catching her as she collapsed forwards onto her.

“What the hell?” asked Victoria, blinking with no small amount of confusion.

“Long story, but she’s… there’s barely a person under there, and I feel bad for her.” Taylor sighed. “She’s a weapon first, a wife second, and a person a distant third.” A thought struck her, and suddenly her anger was rising again. “If this is what Gesellschaft has in mind for me, then I’m inclined to get some salt for the earth they sow in.”

“I’ll be waiting for it,” said Bella, and Taylor did a double take.

“When did you get here?”

“Right after you put Othala to sleep. Should I…” She gestured sharply to the unconscious Empire cape, just the barest hint of a shadowy claw following in her hand’s wake. “It would be a mercy, in some ways.”

“Maybe if we can’t figure out a better way,” said Taylor, fury banking somewhat as she looked down at the girl who hadn’t known anything resembling a choice of her own. “For now, though, we’re letting her live, and here she’d just be in the way.” She flicked her fingers and a hole in space opened, the couch inside of the massive tree that Bella had been living in on the other side, and she lowered the slumbering Othala onto it, before summoning a blanket from somewhere else in the building and covering her in it.

When she extricated herself from the portal, Victoria was giving her a fond look, while Bella’s face was inscrutable. “Is there something on my face?” Taylor asked.

“Nah, you’re just a f*ckin’ sap,” said Bella, brushing past Taylor as she transformed into her hulking bear form. “Now come on, we got us some f*cking Nazis to exterminate.”

“Can’t argue with that,” said Taylor, cracking her knuckles with a sound like gunshots as she strode in through the door.

Most of the house was just as cookie-cutter as the exterior, to the point where Taylor would have half expected a film crew to be in one of the rooms- aggressively beige furniture, painfully bland wallpaper, and the only splashes of color in the white marble kitchen was the wood the table and chairs were made out of, inasmuch as brown counted as color when it came to internal design matters.

One room, though, was less orthodox, looking like a cross of a corporate boardroom and a military bunker, all hard edges on genteel elegance. In the center was a massive table, and it took a moment for Taylor to register the man standing at the table, in a full military uniform from two centuries ago, tassels and all, with enough iron crosses dangling from his breast to put an entire mob of Empire foot soldiers to shame and a mask that vaguely resembled a man’s scowling visage, if that scowling visage was made of swords twisted and half-melted together.

“I hadn’t taken you for the kind of cape to execute an unarmed woman,” said Clausewitz, in a maddeningly familiar voice, “let alone with a gun.”

“Sometimes, all we can offer is mercy,” said Taylor, echoing Bella’s earlier sentiment without technically lying. “Now then, Clausewitz…” She paused, tasting the name. “Ah, yes, name yourself after one of the pioneers of realpolitik. I take it you fancy yourself a hard man making hard choices?”

“Indeed,” he said, inclining his head to her stiffly. “Not that I would have expected a deviant like yourself to understand the finer intricacies of pragmatism.”

Taylor snorted. “I think you can dispense with the pretense. We both know that you know who I am, and have for far longer than I’d prefer.” Taylor lifted her helmet off, revealing her face and the anger in her visible eye. “Use my name.”

Clausewitz sighed, hands coming up to the sides of his mask. “I suppose it is only fair I return the courtesy, then, Miss Hebert.” His hands came down, mask falling with them, and-

The screech of tortured metal had Taylor blinking, and it took a moment longer for her to look away from Victor Gladly’s face towards the source of the sound. As it turned out, it was right in her hand, which had sheared through the enchanted metal of her helmet in a moment of unbridled rage. Distantly, she could feel her hand clenched into a fist, and she had to devote a great deal of mental effort towards opening said fist so she could drop the helmet on the table, golden runes playing over it for a moment before it flowed like quicksilver back into its proper shape.

“So that’s why you never did anything for me,” she said, head feeling as though it was light enough to lift her whole body off the ground. “You just needed a f*cking propaganda piece out of the big bad black Ward bullying an innocent white girl.”

“A regrettable necessity, yes,” said Gladly.

“Regret-” Taylor’s teeth clicked shut with the kind of force that most people associated with automobile collisions. “It was not a necessity in any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t know whether your wholehearted belief in the idea is more foolish or arrogant.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Clausewitz, face perfectly neutral but an ineffably smug aura still surrounding him. “I did what I thought was-”

Clausewitz flinched back, biting off his words as the table splintered under Victoria’s fist. “Shut the f*ck up about regrettable necessities and greater goods, we all know you don’t buy it. It’s all about power, you sick f*ck. Tell me, did you have my aunt murdered in her home to break the back of New Wave, or was she just a target of opportunity?”

The hesitation was answer enough for Taylor.

“All of this…” Taylor wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was feeling- all she knew was that it was bubbling within her, the almost hollow sensation she’d felt when her mother died combined with fury beyond what she could have dreamed of, forever and five months ago. “All of this to glut your own arrogance, satiate your ego.”

Taylor could hear him trying to deny it, honeyed words dripping from her ears just as his power tried to reach into her heart and make her agree, and she turned her focus to his passenger and its attempts to influence her mind.

It was hard to look at, resembling less a living organism and more like what she imagined someone smashing a watermelon into a beehive and then dropping the resulting jumbled mess of organic material into a butcher’s pile of offal. It was all but dead, slowly draining the fluids that would have once been used internally to drip-feed Gladly the kind of persuasive power that would turn- had turned- mother against daughter, twisted an officer of the law to serve cruel prejudice instead of the duty that they’d carved into their bones.

Deal with the host, partner mine, said the Administrator, scuttling over to the mostly-dead thing and prodding at it with one spindly leg. I will handle the Broadcast Apparatus.

Taylor’s focus returned to the world she was born into, seeing Victoria’s aura lash out at Gladly with all the power of a wrecking ball, and she grudgingly gave the man credit for only taking a single step backwards under the full force of her power, although part of that could probably be chalked up to him noticing the blades that Styx had surrounded the man with.

There was a moment in which Taylor was tempted to just shove the man backwards onto one of Styx’s blades, or summon a spear and strike him down herself, but she mastered the urge, eye flicking up to the slowly-pulsing kaunaz rune over his head, black as night and inevitable as the death that was creeping closer to Gladly. Then, a thought struck her, a punishment that Odin would have inflicted upon him, and she bared her teeth in what only a great fool would call a smile.

“Let him up,” said Taylor, raising a hand, and Styx lowered her raised hand, allowing the shadowy blades recede into the corners they’d sprouted from.

“Thank you for your mercy,” said Gladly.

“Mercy?” asked Taylor, a cruel smile on her face. “No, not mercy. Consequence.”

She snapped her fingers as she manifested the runes that would presage his downfall- a purely theatrical gesture, but an effective one- and strode forwards to loom over the man. Absently, one part of her marveled at the raw power that she could summon up at a moment’s notice, especially since a mere two months ago she would have had to spend minutes drawing in natural energy for an effect half as grand.

“Victor Gladly,” boomed Taylor, “I hereby strip your power and the slaves it has made from you and bid you flee. Flee, as long as you can. Flee the consequences of your actions, until you can flee no longer and your arrogance catches up with you.”

He didn’t flee immediately, and Taylor could see the instant he realized that she wasn’t bluffing as the sense of self-assured invincibility that he carried around with him, the kind she’d seen out of children on the playground and athletes who were about to encounter their first debilitating injury, dried up like so much blood on concrete.

“Run, run, run, as fast as you can,” she singsonged, lips pulling back into a cruel smirk. “It won’t help you, but you still can.”

He dove out the window, leaving bloodied shards of glass in his wake.

Victoria sighed. “Did you really have to do that? He’s going to get away!”

“Patience, my dear,” said Taylor, watching Victoria shiver at the way her voice curled around her words. “He will die as ignominiously as he deserves, more so than the king he professes to serve. Besides,” she said, turning towards the door to the rest of the house as she picked up her helmet, settling it back in place on her head, “the night isn’t over yet, and we’re about to have company.”

Chapter 41: V-E Day

Chapter Text

As if on cue, a man and a woman walked into view.

On first glance, they appeared relatively normal- the man’s sandy hair was slicked back with too much mousse, and he was dressed in a full three-piece suit, if one in a cut that was a couple of decades out of style, complete with a rich purple tie and cufflinks (which, upon closer inspection, had the Iron Cross inscribed on them). The woman was, likewise, dressed up beyond what most people would expect, wearing the kind of floral print dress that Taylor would have expected to be all the rage at rich people dinner parties and covered with enough jewelry to put a disco ball to shame.

Their eyes, though… those were what put paid to the impression of normality.

Neither of their eyes were focused, gazing fixatedly into the distance beyond Taylor and even the window that Gladly had broken in his mad scramble to escape.

The way they moved also sent a shiver running down Taylor’s back, despite Odin’s experience with the uncanny and eerie, moving like some unholy combination of stop-motion animation and puppets, seeming halfway dragged into position by unseen strings.

“Young lady,” said the man, in a voice that was the wrong side of the uncanny valley to be properly reproachful, “didn’t your mother teach you to be a more courteous guest than that?”

Taylor mastered her immediate urge to immolate the two, removing the things that looked like people but didn’t act like them from reality, in favor of verbal rebuke. “Courtesy is something I only extend to the people who aren’t intending to sell me overseas to be broken into a Nazi slave soldier, so forgive me if I’m a tad indecorous when making a house call to… dissuade such a foolish course of action.” The flash of actinic golden light from her one intact eye was entirely intended as an intimidating gesture and not an accidental loss of control borne of anger, if anyone were to ask Taylor.

Something about the two of them shifts- not physically, they’re just as moving-mannequin as they were before, shifting with jerking, unsteady motions, but as Taylor allowed herself to look beyond the physical, she could see their spirits roiling inside flesh whose control has been stripped from them.

“Hold on, are-” Taylor opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a spectral spear attempting to run her through from behind.

Taylor turned to glower at the echo of a man dressed in a mockup of a knight Templar’s armor. “That was rude! Do you always interrupt people when they’re talking? No, don’t answer that.” She flicked the shimmering gray apparition, sending it slamming backwards through a window and onto the man’s actual spear where it burst in a bloodred flash, causing the man to stagger-drift backwards from where he was hovering outside the window, one hand flying up from his spear to hold his presumably pained head. “I don’t take suggestions from someone who stole his whole gimmick from the last f*cking Crusade.”

“Such a shame, fraulein,” came an electronically altered voice, one where the sheer sliminess bled through the modulation. “My friend Crusader always has the best suggestions.”

Taylor turned a glare onto the man who spoke, no less ferocious for being one-eyed, and found herself no less unimpressed by the gray coat and gas mask that Krieg wore than she was the first time. “Ah, goody, the traitor’s arrived too. All we need now is the wannabe god or the king whose mandate is far from heavenly, and your arrogance will be in the best company as it comes crashing down.”

Despite the gas mask covering his face, Taylor could see Krieg glower. “Child, hold your tongue!”

“Nah, go f*ck yourself,” drawled Bella, already sinking into the shadows of her ursine form. “You clowns don’t get to just come in here all dick swinging and say that we’re full of sh*t for not wanting you to pull us out of our head and cram something else in and taking issue with the guy who was running the plan. You and your f*cking sugar daddies in Germany can go f*ck yourselves- well. Guzzle shaft can, I don’t think you’ll get the chance.”

Krieg sighed, tutting in fake disappointment. “So uncivilized.”

Taylor saw as much as felt both Bella and Victoria hurl themselves into action, but her attention was quickly taken up by Fog expanding beyond the confines of his flesh, corrosive mist already nibbling at the edges of the house, followed shortly by Night slamming into her in a blur of teeth, tentacles, and talons that, while not harmful, was distracting.

Taylor smashed her elbow into Night, sending her through a wall, and turned back to Fog. Again, the urge to destroy the cape rose up in her, and again, she shoved the urge down, some instinct nagging at her that there was more to the situation than met the eye.

Focusing her will, she blew out a mighty breath, and the misty form of Fog was compressed into a corner of the house, still causing damage but out of the way for the moment. That done, she drew on the wisdom of Odin, “seeing” through the layers of deception and hidden circ*mstances in this situation.

She stilled, lone eye glowing with raw fury, and it took Night slamming into her like a particularly angry chihuahua to draw her back into the physical world.

Taylor turned, feeling the tension in her muscles come up against the motion and be stretched to nothing, and grabbed Night firmly.

The grip was not nearly so fierce as the grasp she had had on Hookwolf less than an hour ago, chiefly because while they were both somewhat formless Nazi Brutes, Hookwolf was fully committed to his path and attacking her father, whereas Night (and Fog, to boot) was in the same boat as Othala, if much worse off.

Taylor gazed into Night’s eyes, an uncanny calm present in them even as she tried to rip Taylor’s remaining eye out with her nails, and breathed out again.

This time, instead of invoking hagalaz to send a mighty gust out, her breath was marked with gebo, and the gold flecks of the runes quickly painted Night’s face in that same color before vanishing in a blue-white flash.

Immediately, the woman’s face lost its terrifying blankness. In its place came some unidentifiable mishmash of emotions- fury, disgust, self-loathing, despair, terror, and more that even Taylor’s divine judgment couldn’t discern from the rest, before gratitude came to the fore. “Thank you,” she said, in a voice that sounded much less like the uncanny tones of Fog’s voice in favor of a smooth, deep baritone that would have been more along the lines of what she expected from a radio host.

Taylor set Night down gently, watching as they brushed off their dress and then wince at the garment.

“Don’t thank me yet,” replied Taylor, turning back to Fog with diminished but still fierce fury in her eyes. The expanding cloud of corrosive mist vanished in a flare of mannaz, the too-clean suit and pale face of Fog’s human form taking its place.

Before Fog could activate their power again, Taylor hurled a stream of gebo at them as well, covering their skin with the same golden light that had covered Night’s.

Like Night, the eerie posture vanished in a flash, and Fog’s posture shifted, the broad lines of their form shifting into something far more demure. Also like Night, gratitude emerged triumphant from the scrum of emotions that warred on her face, although its victory was short lived as concern swept over his face a moment later.

Hearing Night wheezing, Taylor turned back, and the world felt… odd. It took her a moment to realize that the air felt thick, like moving through water- not something that she was hindered by, but the incredible strength that had crept up on her was head and shoulders above what Night or Fog could bring to bear, at least without their powers coming into play.

“Ignorant CHILD!” roared Krieg, followed shortly by the sounds of a large body being hurled through a wall. Taylor turned back to him, taking in the shallow gashes covering his coat and the massive, almost bear-shaped hole in the wall behind him as he stomped towards her. “Don’t you know what you’ve ruined?”

“A crime against humanity,” said Taylor, nudging Night back behind her as she turned more completely to face the bleeding man as he approached.

“I will ensure I leave enough of you for Gesellschaft to change, but with their healers, I can afford to teach you the error of your ways!” He charged forward with all the grace of a bull charging a matador.

Unfortunately, Taylor was more than a mere matador, and as her hand flashed out and clenched, a snarl on her face, she felt as much as heard Krieg’s ribs shatter within his flesh, sending the man stumbling to the ground with a wheeze.

Only Krieg’s power kept him upright, one hand clutching at a table and the other at his chest as the gas mask turned his pained wheezing into a hollow, metallic sound.

“Any last words?” asked Taylor, glaring down at the Nazi at her mercy.

He fell backwards, tearing the table’s leg loose, and though he winced as his back met the floor, he still raised the length of wood like a spear above his head, other hand leaving his chest to hold it despite the coughing fit he’d gone into.

“So be it.” Taylor snapped her fingers, and a small orb of flames punched into his chest. He screamed briefly, then flames erupted from his eyes like wings, shattering the glass of the mask’s lenses as the table leg fell from limp fingers.

Taylor looked up out the window to see Victoria harrying a retreating Crusader, driving him towards the waiting form of Bella, surrounded with a veritable forest of blades of shadow pointing towards Crusader, resembling nothing so much as a horde of hungry piranha, and left him to them, turning back to the formerly brainwashed capes behind her.

“Okay, so, how are you feeling?”

Victor Gladly was not enjoying his day.

It had started well, between sending out the various groups of capes to their tasks and the anticipation of both having leverage to negotiate with Gesellschaft and having Lung removed from the city before things started… falling apart.

The first sign of things having gone awry was when the van that Fenja and Menja were taking to fight Lung swerved directly into a telephone pole. The driver died instantly, and while the Biermanns survived the impact, they hadn’t managed to activate their power in time to protect them from being thrown around, so he’d had to lean on some sympathetic EMTs to retrieve the two of them and divert them to a safe house, where Victor could take Othala after the rest of the diversion operations closed out.

The failure of Krieg and Crusader to hunt down Panacea now that she was out from the protection of New Wave was a lesser failure, and they had almost returned to his house when Taylor Hebert had beaten them there.

Taylor Hebert, now that was a real waste of time. Months of manipulations, over a year of repurposed scheming, all down the drain, because one child gained powers beyond what even his vast networks of agents, sympathizers, and informants, and Victor’s powers of observations, could ferret out.

It almost made sense, that Volur would be able to tear through Hookwolf and Cricket- she’d been growing stronger far faster than any normal cape, if the line from “skirmishing with the small fry” to “shrugging off Endbringer attacks” was any indication, so even if the waste rankled, he understood on a purely rational level how his plotting had all fallen apart.

It didn’t make the sight of Kaiser being hurled through Purity by Lung any better, though.

No, the fall of the cause he had devoted his life to in the wake of having to buy himself and his brother powers was something that would leave ash in anyone’s mouth, let alone if they’d caused it themselves, however indirectly and inadvertently it was. The loss of his power, that extra muscle in the back of his head, paled in the face of that.

Still, he and his brother were still alive, and while they hadn’t managed to grab Othala on their way out, she was always a low priority for protection when captured, and the Herren safe house they were speeding towards would have plenty of resources and contacts to leverage Victor’s power to free her, no matter what gypsy curse that dy-

The car CRUNCHed to an abrupt halt with a brief buzz grating against his ears, the whump of the air bags being the only thing that prevented him from flying out through the windshield.

Unfortunately, he could feel the splattering of unnervingly hot liquid against the left side of his body, and when he looked over to see his brother, he was already prepared to find a corpse there. Indeed, he saw the steering wheel having punched through the breastplate he wore into his chest, the jagged edges of his shattered ribs protruding from the sides of his torso.

That… shouldn’t have happened.

Say what you will about him and his brother being cowards fighting from the back lines, but their costumes were as armored as they could afford, and with Medhall’s backing that was a rather high bar. It shouldn’t have just folded in the face of a mere air bag failure, so therefore…

His train of thought was preempted by the radioactive green glow that abruptly began radiating from every inch of his body.

He was abruptly jerked up, and then forwards, as if someone was pulling him out of the car by a fish hook embedded behind his sternum, and the windshield broke around him like so much rice paper. His eyes flickered around him, searching for the cape who had decided to kill his brother, before the force dangling him aloft jerked him around, and he felt the blood drain from his face as he recognized the two capes glaring down at him like angry gods.

“So,” said Eidolon, glowing with the same actinic green light that radiated from his own body, “you’re the one who Rebecca asked us to end. Ordinarily, we’d make sure to squeeze every piece of information we can get out of you, but given how dangerous your power is…”

Gladly opened his mouth- to object, to threaten, to bluster, to something- but before he could do more than register the lack of a mask that he’d forgotten on his table, Legend raised one fist and a beam of blue-white light punched through his chest like day-old Taco Bell through one of the Empire’s foot soldiers’ colons.

Victor Gladly did not remain alive long enough to hear Eidolon grumbling about the amount of clean up they would have to do now that they knew about the need, but if he had, he would have taken exception to the reduction of his magnum opus to a mess in need of cleaning.

Chapter 42: The Lost Lenore

Chapter Text

“Taylor,” said Victoria, eyeing the former Night and Fog warily. “Who are your new friends?”

“My name is Joanna,” said Fog, scratching at their jaw irritably. “I’m what happens when you give a Nazi a cookie as a trans person.”

“Same boat,” is all that Night said, clenching and relaxing their fists rhythmically.

“Right, yeah, that would do it,” said Victoria. “Alright, let’s get out of here before someone decides to take issue with us being here.”

“You can say that again,” said Bella, frowning as she wiped the blood off her fingers on Krieg’s shirt. “Did Clausewitz piss off f*ckin’ Felix Swoop or something? The whole neighborhood is absolutely covered with crows, and it’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

A chill ran down Taylor’s spine. Something was wrong, here, and while she wasn’t sure what was going on, she did know that they had to get the innocents out.

“Styx,” she said, “can you take Night and Fog with you when you teleport?”

She snorted. “I wish. No, it’s just me.”

“Right, okay. I-”

“Hey, we can fight!” objected Night, flesh rippling with her agitation.

“I’m not saying you can’t,” said Taylor. “What I am saying is that you’re not the one who can make an Endbringer hurt, and you’re not used to fighting with me like Styx and Glory Girl are, so it would be a good idea to make sure you can disengage and escape if the need arises.”

Night looked mutinous, but she backed down, so Taylor was willing to count that as a win. “Right, stay behind me,” said Taylor, calling her helmet back from where she left it on the table and planting it firmly on her own head. “I can’t promise that I’d be able to fully negate any attack that might come our way, but I should be able to slow it down enough that you could do something about it.”

With that, Taylor hopped out the window, landing lightly on her toes and then slamming her heels down firmly, sending a shockwave radiating out from her, ruffling the feathers of the birds all around her as she drew a spear out of thin air and raised it into a high guard.

The other four capes followed her out of the house with less theatricality but no less wariness, forming a wedge with the two formerly brainwashed capes at the back.

Taylor strode forwards, barely paying attention to the chunks of Crusader that had been hastily hidden in a bush or the bloodstains they left behind.

The instant that her foot hit the asphalt, she felt something change, and it took a moment to realize that all of the crows perched all over the neighborhood had all turned beady gazes to Taylor.

They all rose from the houses at once, wings flapping in eerie unison, and converged, forming a writhing, almost hateful ball of flapping wings before vanishing in a burst of not-light.

In their place stood a girl.

She was petite, almost gaunt, her yellow hair lank and stringy and framing an unhealthily pale face. She stood unnaturally, appearing half an inch from tipping over backwards and smashing her head on the blacktop, and her limbs were stiff, too-thin fingers twitching at irregular intervals as her head tilted to the side in a curiously birdlike motion inside the cowl of her dark, ragged cloak.

She opened her mouth, spilling out fog, and though it didn’t move, she still spoke, voice coming out in a broken chorus of disharmonic voices. “So,” came the discordant sound, “this is the child who believes that she can bend the will of the interlopers to serve us.”

Taylor noticed the divine pressure radiating off of the girl immediately, but it took her a tad bit longer to place her face. After all, Glaistig Uaine had gone to the Birdcage before she was really old enough to understand who she was and what the situation around her entailed, so she’d not had much cause to look her up, but she had found one picture when she was doing research a while back, just after Myrddin had sought her aid in the matter.

“Morrigan, I presume,” said Taylor, gesturing for the others to stay behind her. “Is there something I might do for you?”

“So courteous,” she echoed, lips stretching so far that the skin splits and blood seeps out to coat her teeth. “Unfortunately, polite child, all I can- all I must ask from you is your life, yours and that of your companions.”

The other capes bristled, with Bella’s form shrinking into a single point before expanding into a hulking mass of shadow in the rough shape of a bear and Fog already starting to drift apart, sulfurous smoke on the wind. “I’m afraid I cannot allow that, my lady,” said Taylor, breathing in both physically and mystically.

The Morrigan’s (and she was the Morrigan, now, no hint of the child whose body she wears or the whimsical cape who spread fear like butter on bread, just war and death) eyes leached black as Taylor drew in magic from the world, a chill spreading from the Morrigan as she tutted theatrically. “Children these days,” she said, dismissively. “Did not the old one-eyed spirit teach you to obey your elders?”

“What can I say,” Taylor replied, her very voice crackling with the weight of the phenomenal cosmic power that permeated every inch of her flesh. “Last time I offered blind obedience to authority, I lost an eye.”

Then, she moved, and battle commenced.

The first and most important thing that Taylor needed to do in this fight, she thought, allowing the conjured spear to return to wherever it existed before she called it, was prevent the Fairy Queen’s power from simply reaching out and tearing the life from the other combatants.

The crows were a problem, yes, and so were the ghosts of parahumans and warriors past, but they weren’t the kind of problems that the other parahumans couldn’t handle. Already, Taylor could hear the heavy pawsteps of Styx’s ursine form and the deforming of flesh that Night brings to bear as she took her own battle form, Victoria’s blows causing thunderclaps in both the material and the spiritual foes she strikes and the sizzle of caustic gases eating away at feathers.

But those were problems that the others could solve, and this was not.

A moment of thought had Taylor inscribing berkanan into the air, power bound into the shape of the symbol of birth, the creation of life in face of its cessation.

Morrigan flinched back, a hint of green glimmering in her eyes for a moment before she snarled and straightened her body, unnaturally rigid. She screamed, a sound far beyond any mortal’s ken, and through her scream her power resonated.

It washed over Taylor harmlessly, nowhere close to the power of the Damsel of Distress’ power, but the other four capes fighting with her were all staggered somewhat. Fog ceased their expansion and Night froze in human flesh, staggering back with blood trickling from her ears. Victoria was the least affected, her power’s protections not insurmountable but able to blunt what the divine mantle she bore could not withstand. Styx, though, her reaction was odd- she froze for a moment, head pulsating, before roaring her own defiance in turn and rending a spirit of an old Frankish swordsman in twain, something about her seeming to drink in the dissipating power contained within the specter.

Taylor was jolted back to the battle at hand by an impact against her armored torso, and turned to see an echo of the departed Crusader attempting to run her through.

One punch was enough to dispel the apparition, but the message that he brought with him was taken to heart- distraction was death on a battlefield like this, even with divine fortitude, and with a momentary exercise of will, sowilo flashes briefly into existence before detonating in an orb of sunlight, doing nothing to the physically incarnated but eroding the tenuous hold that the summoned dead had upon this world.

“What,” sneered Morrigan with a too-small mouth, “do you resent the loss of your einherjaren so much that you cannot allow me the use of my sworn servitors?” Without waiting for an answer, she lunged forwards, claws grasping, and unlike Hookwolf, her clawing hurt.

Not a lot, mind, Taylor had been hurt worse both in this body and in Odin’s memories, but enough that she could not afford to dismiss this foe as she had others.

“I have never known the servitude of the fallen,” said Taylor, shoving the blonde that Morrigan was inhabiting back outside the reach of her shorter arms.

For a moment, they circled one another and Taylor attempted to understand what the situation was with the Morrigan- the exact way that the dying goddess had latched onto a child bearing a shard of Parahuman might, the way in which their spirits intertwined in horrible pain, the raw pain of god and child and shard, all bound together- but she barely understood her own situation with the power of the Runes bolstering and reinforcing her beyond her spellcasting, and before she could ask the underpinnings of the universe to lay bare their secrets in this case, the Morrigan lunged forwards again, claws grasping at Taylor’s face.

The talons that the girl’s flesh had been twisted at sparked as they sheared through her helm, but the enchanted metal gave her enough time to grasp the grasping limb before it could inflict more than scratches on her.

Taylor bore down, feeling as bone splintered and broke under her grip, but the girl’s flesh went gray for an instant and her arm restored itself to wholeness in Taylor’s grasp.

“Like it?” she asked, bloodstained smile once again too wide and weeping droplets of blood. “This is the power that you could have had were you not so foolish, had you bound the unquiet dead to your service against their master.”

“I see no need,” said Taylor, lifting one leg to kick backwards and shatter a former Alexandria Package that Taylor vaguely knew had been one of many heroes who had failed to stop the Fairy Queen from exerting her will, “to rely on the unquiet dead. The living are capable are more than unswerving service- they can be true friends, and it is that power more than any other that will bring about the downfall of the Golden Man,” she continued, a flicker of unbreakable will leaking through into her voice at the prospect of fighting the first superhero.

“Foolish girl,” Morrigan sneered. “You lack the tools to stand against the Adversary. Only through the Sting of his mightiest weapon can he be slain, and only under the utmost secrecy to prevent his mighty Eye from scrying the truth ere my design comes to fruition.”

Taylor allows herself a moment of theatricality, speaking in the lowered register of the man who originally said the like she borrowed: “I find your lack of faith… disturbing.”

“Arrogant child! You cannot hope to understand a design decades in the making, not one of this complexity!” Morrigan drove her leg up between Taylor’s legs, weakening her grip enough to slip away and drive Taylor further back with a spray of hardened, bladed crow’s feathers.

“I am no less capable of understanding your designs than I am Loki’s,” she said, feeling Odin’s disappointment at how far the Phantom Queen had fallen in the back of her head swelling until she wasn’t sure where her pity ended and his sentiment began, “and more to the point, I have the power to stand up to him that you lack! You cannot survive the baleful power of an Endbringer turned to your destruction, as I can! You lack the will to persevere through thick and thin without anything anchoring you to life save spite and disdain!” Taylor wasn’t sure how she knew what she was saying to be true, some aspect of Odin’s power perhaps, but she wouldn’t look this particular gift horse in the mouth now, when she was already fighting off an ancient being who had lost themselves. “You are fallen from what you once were, and by clawing your way up by destroying a mortal mind, fallen even further!”

“Speak not to me of falls,” Morrigan spat, “ye who could have stopped the Golden Man before he even landed were you not playing at retirement! I will take no counsel from the hoary Hangi, whose time upon the noose has not brought him nearly the wisdom he thought it had!”

With that, she shrunk and twisted with the sound of popping bones, taking the form of a crow and vanishing into the circling flock with another spray of razor-sharp feathers.

Chapter 43: Quaff This Kind Nepenthe

Chapter Text

Now that Taylor wasn’t panicking about the possibility of Glaistig Uaine (Morrigan? She wasn’t quite sure what the situation there was, just that it was a lot more complicated than being solely one or the other) tearing the life from the other parahumans fighting with her, she could afford to actually think through her reactions instead of just-

Taylor paused as first a forest of steel blades and then a helix of actinic light sought purchase in her flesh. Neither found so much as a foothold, and as she turned to face the two capes who hurled them at her, metal squealed as she forced her way through to face the two, hovering there in all their spectral glory.

“How the mighty have fallen,” said Taylor, not granting Kaiser the indignity of even a sneer. “Tell me, was it Lung or the Fairy Queen who took your head?”

“The jap bastard will get what is coming to him,” said Kaiser, oddly toneless despite talking about the man he all-but-confirmed killed him. “For now, we will have to satiate ourselves with wiping a degenerate like yourself off the face of the planet. It is a shame that Hookwolf failed in his attempt, but you will find us a far more capable foe.”

Taylor snorted. “For a given definition of capable, perhaps.” She walked up the stream of energy that Purity’s shade was attempting to strike her down with like it was nothing so much as a summer breeze. She drew on Odin’s depth of experience and regal tongue to express her disdain. “Do you honestly think that you can do what an Endbringer wielding the power to rend space and time asunder couldn’t, what the Simurgh failed to do before her, and claim a true victory over me, ye king of a fallen Empire and his discarded consort?”

“Even you are not immune to the power of the dead,” sneered Kaiser, something like triumph in his echoing voice. “But no, we are not the true answer to one such as you.”

Before Taylor could turn around, she saw as the world around her was drained of color, and she became aware of a tremendous metaphysical weight pressing down on her from every direction at once. The Administrator’s connection to her grew faint and distant as Purity’s energy blast petered out, and she felt a distant pressure at the small of her back, as if someone were trying to use a felt-tip marker on her.

She turned to see another shade, this one of a boy perhaps ten or twelve years old. He looked far less human than Kaiser and Purity, even despite the way their powers obscured their faces, with eyes resembling yawning voids, a gaping mouth full of half-rotted teeth, and taloned fingers that looked like someone had flensed the flesh away from bone before sharpening what remained to a point.

“Die,” the shade snarled, and without hesitating Taylor reached out one hand, settled it on its head, and squeezed.

It only took a moment for the shade’s skull to shatter under her strength, causing it to fade into nothingness. For a moment, the weight of the external force pressing down on her doubled and redoubled, trying to drag her back into the position she had been at its inception, but it was nowhere near as strong as the blast that the three-headed Endbringer had hit her with earlier that week. In response, Taylor flicked a kaunaz at the border of the monochromatic area. It flickered once before the colors reappeared in a manner not dissimilar to what she would expect of a painting pulled from the sea.

“Valhalla bars its doors to you,” snapped Taylor, slashing a hand through both of the shades who had distracted her. Once they had discorporated, Taylor clapped her hands once.

The sound boomed out for hundred of feet as a shockwave slammed outwards, splattering some of the closer crows and knocking others out of the air. With the birds out of the way, Taylor could now see how well the other capes fighting with her were holding up.

Victoria seemed to be doing the best, surrounded by a faint nimbus of golden light that deflected birds and power attacks alike as she swooped, leaving a trail of that same golden light in her wake, and driving punches at the shades who were circling her. As Taylor watched, one of the motes connected with a shade who didn’t quite manage to dodge in time, and in a flash of brilliant light, the top half of it vanished, leaving a couple of fingers and its legs behind for a moment before they vanished in a puff of feathers that were scattered in the wind of her passage.

Styx was less overtly threatening, but every few seconds she threw out a shadowy blade to carve through another shade, and whichever shade had their spectral flesh parted was forced to retreat out of sight to recover. Various specters hurled attacks, both with the weapons of a bygone age and with the powers of parahumans she vaguely remembered discussing in World Events class, but none of them did more than smudge her form, a sign of damage that didn’t last.

In comparison, Night and Fog were less oppressive forces, but so far they were drawing their fair share of attacks from where they were lurking in an alley, sending specters fleeing every now and again looking ragged with claw and teeth marks.

Seeing that everyone else was doing tolerably, Taylor took a moment, punctuated by the sound of crackling lightning, and just focused on perceiving the way that the shades were connected back to the Morrigan, still concealed within the whirling storm of birds. It took multiple tries, and even her catching another shade and tearing it apart to find the link more directly, but eventually she traced the link back to the spiritual form of the Morrigan.

It was not a pretty sight.

Three bodies were lashed together at the torso with crude ropes that looked to be made of human hair and caught within a pit full of grasping limbs coming up to their knees, all of them deeply injured and bleeding from multiple places. All three of them looked like they would have been striking if not conventionally beautiful, in other circ*mstances, with black hair silkier than her own despite patches having been torn out (presumably to bind the three of them together), almost jadelike smoothness to their well-muscled skin, and three differently colored sets of eyes, each striking in their intensities, but the visible pain they were in put paid to that. One of them was simply staring into nothingness, her heavily bruised face slack as her feet still marched onwards while getting nowhere, and another screamed in endless agony, all of her limbs covered in horrific burns and weeping fluids. The third was the least injured, glaring hatefully at Taylor with the head of a spear driven through her side in such a way that it could have only missed her heart by a matter of inches.

“Coward!” howled the glaring one hoarsely, one hand still held to her still-bleeding wound and the other extended in a claw.

Immediately, the crows changed their flight pattern. Instead of wheeling around the battlefield aimlessly, devouring insects and otherwise blocking visibility, thousands of corvid eyes snapped to Taylor, and they all dove towards her with reckless abandon, deathly power gathering around their beaks and claws as raw hatred expanded from their bodies.

Taylor almost lost focus on the spiritual form of the Morrigan as she raised one hand, a barrier expanding from the algiz glowing on her palm, but Odin’s heir did not lightly forget what she had learned.

Gebo peeled itself off of Taylor’s other hand, flapping like a butterfly if butterflies glowed golden, and left the physical world behind.

She lost track of the rune as the murder of crows slammed into her barrier, cracking under the weight of so many fragments of death’s power eroding through the energy she’d imbued it with, but it served its purpose, and she let it dissolve into glimmering fragments.

Before the crows could close the distance to her body, she manifested kaunaz to assert control over the energy of death that the crows carried with them. The rune turned from golden light to black, flaky solid as it became more fully a channel of what energies the Morrigan could call upon, resembling charcoal if charcoal flakes corroded away at asphalt. Taylor waited just long enough for the color to stop changing, then swiped her hand through it, feeling a chill as she shattered the physical representation of the Morrigan’s power, but seeing the crows dissolve into an aimless mass of feathers and bodies, no longer driven by the deathly power of a half-dead goddess, was well worth such a minor inconvenience.

“Impossible!” snapped the one lucid aspect of the Morrigan, glaring at Taylor like… well, like she’d just usurped her power over death. “You will die for that!”

“I cannot allow that, Anand,” said Odin, one blue eye meeting the Morrigan’s glare with the kind of serenity that shed her hatred like water off the back of a duck. “Your agony cannot stand in the way of the greatest champion this planet can muster, not when we stand under such threat.”

She sneered. “Like you would know. Earth’s greatest defender, vanquished in Ragnarök without passing on the power you bore for the good of all. Tell me, has your hypocrisy blinded your remaining eye yet?”

“Even the power of the Runes could only do so much,” he replied heavily. “My power to act was all but destroyed by Fenrir, and even the power of my benefactor could only do so much to avert that.”

Morrigan- Anand?- opened her mouth to reply, but before she did, the butterfly-like rune alit upon the forehead of the screaming, burned body.

In a flash of golden light, and an accompanying drain on Taylor’s strength, it vanished, and though both other bodies of the Morrigan flinched back from the flash, her goal had already been achieved.

Before her eyes, the weeping fluids stopped dropping, and the uncanny expanse of exposed, charred flesh and bone seemed to almost liquefy and flow together. After a moment, it had fully sealed itself, and from there, the gaunt figure of the woman filled out once again, the healthy muscle of a spear-wielder inflating into existence through the power of Taylor’s will.

The screaming petered out a mere moment later, and bloodred eyes blinked down at newly restored flesh. “I am… healed?”

The black-eyed, glaring head, only intensified her hateful stare. “How dare you use his power against us!”

“His power?” asked Odin, not quite thunderous but louder than strictly necessary. “No, Anand, the Runes are more than even one such as the Golden Man could dare to bind to his will, even if they weren’t aware and capable of holding a grudge that would put an Olympian’s to shame.”

Taylor snapped her fingers, another instance of gebo appearing for a moment before bursting into a flare of golden light. As the light faded, the battered woman stopped marching, then blinked before turning eerie yellow eyes on her, rotating her head to the side in a birdlike gesture. “Galdrafǫðr?” she asked, and some part of Taylor understood the name, a title Odin had earned centuries before Ragnarök through skill at weaving magical songs.

“Not quite,” said Odin. “My heir is the one who has repaired your flesh, Macha.”

The eyes grew less eerie as the woman inclined her head to Taylor, blinking twice before crinkling in a smile. “You have our gratitude, child.”

Anand sneered. “She is still complicit in the death of Dagda, of Scathach, of-”

“Enough, sister,” said both of the other bodies at once.

The red-eyed one reached over and flicked Anand on the forehead. “You know as well as I the constraints Odin was working under to so much as offer us what information he could. It is not his fault that we were… too proud to be cautious, in the face of incomplete information. Now, offer apologies to the girl.”

“And to your host,” hissed the Administrator, raising one leg and slashing a claw through the ropes of human hair binding the three of them together. Anand staggered, but both of the other two took one step and crossed the distance to offer their support to their sister as she fell out of the pit of grasping hands.

Obscured by the three of them was a girl, insubstantial and waifish in more than just build. Her blonde hair was lank and ragged, her green eyes were dull, and the pit of hands were slowly but surely dragging her down.

The Administrator hissed out a rebuke in a language beyond human comprehension, but one that Taylor understood as a rebuke to the Keeper of the Dead. The pit burbled back, whining about some form of restrictions, but the Administrator replied with a command, and the pit shrank into a bangle that attached itself to the girl’s wrist, giving off the aura of a six-year-old sulking about not being allowed to have the entire cookie jar.

While everyone else save Odin were still goggling at the girl, Taylor strode over, seized the spearhead sticking out of Anand’s side and tore it out, taking with it a substantial chunk of flesh.

Anand howled, but before she could really start bleeding, Taylor flashed gebo again, and the hole healed over. Another flash of gebo repaired the half inch of ragged, torn-off wood that had been the haft, and she presented the spear to the one Odin had called Macha. “Hold on to this, I don’t trust Anand not to try and stab me with it.”

Macha inclined her head. “I am in your debt, child,” she said, taking the weapon. “I will care for Gae Bolg until it finds its new wielder.”

“Right. Now then, we should get out of here before the cops start showing up.” Taylor tore open a portal to the tree house. “Victoria! Styx! Night and Fog! Pack it up, we’re leaving!”

The named capes came, albeit a little warily at the figure of Glaistig Uaine, who had taken to hugging herself and shivering while on a less physical plane the Administrator had taken to stroking her hair, but they went through the portal with no argument, and once Odin had ushered the triple goddess and their host through, Taylor followed, closing the portal just as the sirens became audible over the sounds of very confused crows.