You feel a lot better the next morning, at least physically/spiritually. You're not dying of soul hemorrhage, you mean. Your soul still hurts... but less so than last night, and you're able to turn sorcerer's sight back on without issue. Mentally you're still lamenting Uber's death (and everyone else who died you guess, but you didn't know any of them personally). The few pieces of unsafe-to-use tinkertech you were able to salvage from their lair is scant consolation.
You debate dragging yourself out of bed, but settle for browsing the internet on your phone instead, to see how people are reacting to last night's events. You don't really know why you bothered. It's exactly the mix of awed, horrified and celebratory you'd expect. Though you imagine the heroes must be quietly shitting enough bricks to build another headquarters, because there's basically no way the amethyst bomb wasn't intended to be set off next to their current one.
The PRT have been working overnight, using live mice and very long poles to determine the exact shape of the effect (perfectly circular - or rather, as some rodent-dangling drone flights demonstrated, spherical) and cordon off the area. No timetable for any solution, or even recovery of the bodies, because unmanned vehicles that enter the area stop working as surely as the streetlights did.
You could maybe help analyze the effect - if you were ever going close to that area ever again, which you're not. Instead you make a throwaway account and describe how you felt really sick after being close to the boundary - there must be all sorts of horrible radiation going on that they're not telling you about, best keep your distance. It sets off a minor panic among everyone who doesn't call you a hypochondriac conspiracy theorist, which is the intended effect. The fewer people who expose themselves to whatever-it-is the better.
But the world doesn't stop moving just because a huge tragedy happens, and you've got powers to steal. Luke is very understanding of your low spirits - a lot of people died, some of whom you knew personally. You do your best to ensure it doesn't affect his enjoyment of your time together.
The thought occurs to you that you could perhaps ask about some of the things you're curious about now. You do know each other quite well now, so to speak.
Tomorrow, you decide. You'll bring the matter of his origins up tomorrow.
---
"Luke?"
"Yeah?"
"You know I'm a Thinker."
"Boy do I." He reaches over and affectionately gropes your butt.
"Stop that. No, it's fine, you can continue. I mean, I'm a bit of a regular Thinker as well. I can sort of tell when someone has a big secret."
His groping hand freezes in place. "Oh."
"I don't get... details. I'm just asking... Do you want to talk about it?"
He sighs, lets go of you and sits up in bed, hugging his knees. "I don't know."
"That's alright."
"I suppose I'd have to tell you sooner or later, if I didn't want to be the worst scumbag on earth." He sighs again. "Yeah, I'll talk about it. I was in Madison during the attack, way past the safe limits. I had to escape the containment zone afterwards."
What!?
He closes his eyes and turns away after seeing you recoil in surprise, only to startle in turn when he feels you cuddling up to him from behind, resting your head on his shoulder.
"Poor boy." You know exactly how he feels. You'd like to pretend that you don't hesitate before offering him the truth about Simurgh victims, but you do, just a little bit. It would be very dangerous if the wrong people found out that Quicksilver knows it. "Do you want to know a terrible secret that almost no one knows? It will make you feel a little bit better, and a whole lot worse."
He considers that for a while. "So overall, it will make me feel worse?"
"Almost certainly."
"Then no." You just nod, and keep hugging him. "Out of curiosity though, when you say that almost no one knows..?"
"You'd have been the third person on earth to find out."
After another period of silence he starts telling his story - incidentally revealing his interdimensional origins. "See, that's the secret I thought I was talking about!" you say, with somewhat strained levity. When he describes the scream, you hang on to every word. You need to know just how abnormal your own experience was.
"You start to have- not quite hallucinations, but really vivid mental images, that you can't stop thinking about."
"What were they? If you don't mind talking about it."
"A lot of what you would expect. Being trapped in a cave, hunger, loneliness... My friends abandoning me... My father spanking me..." He feels you tensing up, because he hastens to add "He never did that in real life! He was a perfectly fine dad, never raised his hand to his kids. Just something she put in my mind." You try to relax and let him believe that was what upset you. "In the vision he kept shouting 'what's in store for the tailor?' and for some reason it completely terrified me at the time. In retrospect it just seems absurd."
You completely fail at relaxing. As you do, when an Endbringer addresses you personally.
"I don't want to talk about this anymore," you say.
"Okay."
"I'd like it if you turned around and hugged me back, though." At least her plans include playing matchmaker. Silver fucking linings.
He does. "Does it have something to do with the terrible secret?" he asks.
"Yeah. It's making me feel a whole lot worse."
---
But life keeps going on, eventually bringing you to your Friday patrol shift with the Empire. As you enter the bar, you hear a familiar voice. A loud, familiar voice.
"Of course I have empathy for them!" Mike is shouting. "Their situation sucks! If my country sank I would want to go somewhere else too, and displace the native population to continue my line! That doesn't mean that it's morally wrong for the natives to fight back against invasion! I'm a native, of course I'm fighting back!"
"Someone accused Mike of hating japs," Sven explains to you, sotto voce.
"I don't hate anyone!" Mike shouts, having overheard. "I'm not a hateful person!"
"You hate people who accuse you of being hateful," Alex quips.
"Shut up!"
"You hate people who interrupt your rants," Johnny offers.
"Shut the fuck up!"
"You hate jews and their shabbos goys," Sven says.
"Okay, that's fair," Mike admits calmly, before instantly regaining his volume on the next sentence. "But I don't hate anyone else! I don't even hate niggers! I don't want to live around them, because they fucking suck! But I don't hate them!" Several people nod along with that.
"What?" you demand, causing the collective listener of the Empire 88 to turn towards you. "I suppose it's easy enough for you fuckers with a cushy inner patrol beat, huh? 'It's just a little race war, no big. We're winning, right? They show up with their little war parties, and the brass sends them packing for us.'"
"Her trigger event-" Sven leans over to Johnny and starts adding commentary your own rant.
"Never fucking mind my trigger event! That shit was personal! This isn't about me, this is about him!" You point an accusing finger. "This is about Serious Policeman Mike never having to put faces on the numbers! This is about him never having to arrive too late! Maybe he'd begin to hate if he saw the hate crimes that will never get prosecuted, huh?"
No one really has anything to say to that. You, too, get nods of agreement from the audience. Some brave soul pats your shoulder.
"The whole 'hate crime' thing is just jewish bullshit made up to attack white people," Otto tells you. "You should trying hating jews instead."
No one has anything helpful to say.
With no more shouting forthcoming, people turn away and conversations resume as they judge the show to be over. Mike beckons you to come sit as his table.
"No hard feelings," he says. "I get where you're coming from."
"I'd fucking hope so, or you'd be a pretty shitty nazi," you say, but your heart isn't really in the banter.
"You can hate niggers all you want," Sven agrees. "It's fine. Otto's right though, it's not productive. If you want to change anything, you have to realize who brought them here in the first place, and turned them loose on us. Who was behind civil rights and forced integration. That's who you need to attack."
"Hey," Alex says, "cool it with the antisemitic remarks. She's down with the 14, the 88 will happen on its own eventually. You don't have to force it. She's not in the mood." Part of you wants to bristle at how he's speaking on your behalf, but he's right. About that last sentence, you mean, you do not share his conviction re: the inevitability of antisemitism.
"Yeah, okay." Sven offers you an apologetic shrug.
"You gotta read the room," Alex continues. "You don't just show up at a party and start denying the holocaust."
"I denied the holocaust at a party once," Mike says. "It was great, I made a jew cry."
Something about his straight-faced, matter-of-fact delivery of that line just completely destroys your somber mood and forces an unladylike snort out of you.
"So what's up with the rank and file now that the crisis is over?" you ask.
"I heard blockbusting might start up again, with ABB's gone," Sven says. "Weren't you gonna sign up for that, Alex?"
"Nah. Wife wouldn't go for it anymore, not with a kid on the way," Alex says.
"Blockbusting?" you ask. Apparently loudly enough for Big Brain to overhear, because he jumps into the conversation before anyone at your table can open their mouths.
"Well you see Low Key," said worthy begins, "about a hundred years ago - a better time - people used to enter into gentlemen's agreements with their neighbors, that they would not sell their house to a black person. As a countermeasure, blacks would hire white lawyers-"
"'''White,'''" Sven interrupts, pronouncing more quotation marks around a single syllable than you thought was physically possible.
"-yes, thank you, ''white'' laywers to represent them-" He's not quite the verbal virtuoso that Sven is, but you get the gist. White skin, but perhaps also prominent noses and elevated risk of Tay-Sachs disease? "-and in so doing obfuscate who the ultimate buyer of the property was, sometimes through multiple layers of intermediaries. Once one such gambit succeeded, the block was 'busted open' for further encroachment, as the remaining white population would want to move out, no longer caring who they sold their property to."
"Because once a neighborhood is full of niggers it has this mysterious tendency to turn into a shitty slum," Alex finishes for him.
"Indeed. And since no one wants to live in a slum, not even blacks, this process would repeat over and over, gradually destroying large sections of our previously fair cities as they sought to escape the inevitable results of their own dysfunction. What we do when seeking to expand our territory is simply the reverse. A handful of our own people moving into a block is enough for people to get the hint."
You nod. He could have used a lot fewer words to explain that, because it's pretty obvious once you think about it. Another gang might gleefully annex the territory of a fallen rival, but what the hell would the Empire want with a neighborhood full of asians? It has to gentrified first, in a technically legal manner so as to not invite direct retaliation from law enforcement.
"All right you fucking nerds, break it up!" Rune shouts from the door. "I'm here to save my girl before her ears fall off!"
