Charm Learning Shard (Worm/Exalted) (COMPLETED)

Spoiler: Armsmster-o-vision

"Was there anything else?" I ask.

Dragon hesitates for several seconds before answering. "...I've gone over the prediction logs from the Leviathan fight," she finally says. There's another pause. "I know what you did."

"I failed," I say bitterly.

"Oh?" Dragon asks, perhaps a bit archly. "So the casualty report was wrong, and Kaiser still lives?"

"Checksuit4," I mutter under my breath. chksuit4 is my prototype diagnostic program, a full 20% faster than chksuit3 by forgoing all memory safety. But as I will be startled to discover when I go over the logs later tonight, it also has a bug that spews corrupt memory all over the system, miraculously missing any critical processes but completely trashing the recording buffer. As a result, not only did suitlog7 crash and fail its automatic restart, I also lost the last 28.44 seconds of recorded audio.

Or, that's what I thought would happen. Instead there's a small ping, and a line of text shows up on my visor HUD: 'chksuit4 has been shut down due to memory access violation.'

Dragon helpfully brings up another line of text beneath it: A particular line from the changelog of her latest contribution to my codebase. 'Minor improvements to chksuit4'.

Ah. I suppose that's what happens when you trust someone to the point that you don't even review their code anymore. Given the circumstances, it's surprising how much it hurts that she used that trust to sabotage me. A strange, illogical part of me wants to shout at her for that.

"I suppose there is no use denying anything," I say instead, with forced calm. Since she knows what chksuit4 was meant to do, I may as well have handed her a signed confession when I invoked it.

"Colin... why?"

"Why?" I exclaim incredulously. "Why not!? He was a villain! A vile, irredeemable villain! Better that he-"

"Was Dauntless a villain too?" Her voice is soft, but her question shuts down my tirade like a bucket of cold water to the face.

"Dauntless wasn't part of the plan." Is that what she think of me now? That I would...

"Was he not? Quicksilver said-"

"Quicksilver was full of shit! She was just guessing! She isn't even that kind Thinker!"

"So your ambition is not fame?" she asks mildly. When I don't answer, she continues. "Quicksilver sees powers. Is it so inconceivable that your power might affect your ambition? Influence theory states-"

"Influence theory has never been proven!"

"Sankaramanchi and Hyytiäinen proved quite conclusively that influence is happening."

"The effect they measured was significantly smaller in males," I say, but it's a weak retort and I know it. A terrible seed of doubt is taking root. Did I really..?

"No conscious part of me wanted Dauntless dead," I say firmly. "His death was not part of the plan."

"I believe you, Colin. But I still have to report the matter with Kaiser."

"Do you really?"

"Yes! If I don't, I become an accessory after the fact!"

Oh. No, I suppose I have no right to ask that of her. But I can tell - I hope - that that having to chose between friendship and the law distresses her. Which is something I can solve.

"Don't bother. I'll turn myself in." I open a call to the PRT switchboard. "This is Armsmaster, requesting a secure meeting with Director Piggot."

---

"Dragon?"

"Yes?"

"Do you hate me for what I did?"

"I'm... disappointed."

---

Just looking at Director Piggot, it's easy to forget that the corpulent woman used to be a field agent. But she can certainly swear like a trooper when the situation warrants. I remain stiffly at attention as she screams at me.

"You stupid mother fucker, do you have the faintest fucking idea what would happen if it got out that a member of Protectorate - a god damn Branch Leader - used an Endbringer fight to settle personal grudges?"

It's clearly a rhetorical question, yet she seems to take my continued silence as a provocation.

"Did you think that because it must never leak out, I'd help you get away with it? That I would not destroy you for what you did?" She pauses for breath, then looks me straight in the eye as she says her next sentence. "You're going down for the Laborn dossier."

My eyes go wide. "No! You can't-"

"Silence! There is nothing I cannot do to you! If you had half the wits God gave a fencepost, you'd get down on your knees and thank me that history will remember you as a mere pedophile, and not a traitor to all mankind! By fucking with the Endbringer Truce, you put the world at risk! And for what, a petty grudge?"

"Our failure to take down the Empire 88 has been a blemish on-"

"A blemish? For vanity you threw away all honor and reason, and both our careers?" She evidently sees the confusion on my face, because she explains: "My job is to ride herd on you psychopaths, to stop you from pulling the dumb shit you always do. A task I clearly failed at in an unprecedentedly spectacular fashion. I've seen other directors have capes blow up in their faces, but this is something else. When I bring this to the Chief Director, I will hope and pray that I only end up fired without a pension.

"I honestly expected better from you," she continues softly, now speaking more to herself than me, "which only goes to show that I should trust my instincts more. This is what I get for letting you and your Guantanamo girlfriend work unsupervised."

It takes me a moment to understand the reference. "The Birdcage isn't-"

She fixes me with another glare. "I would not mention the Birdcage too loudly right now if I were you."

You know how they say Rome wasn't built in a day? Neither was Brockton Bay. Leviathan broke innumerable man-years worth of infrastructure, and everyone will have to chip in if that's going to be rectified anytime soon. Including you.

You're officially powerless now, after all, just another member of the rank and file. Consequently you join an imperial work crew like any other, and spend eight to twelve hours each day performing manual labor.

And if your work crew happens to always be guarded by the specific parahuman you want to study? Just a coincidence, goy. It's not as if you're secretly the power behind the throne or anything, having subverted both the boy emperor and the queen regent. Of course not.

The cape in question? Crusader. He makes ghosts. Not in the 'he's really good at killing people' sense, though he is that too. He's a Master who creates multiple translucent, insubstantial clones of himself. A duplication power would of course be excellent for Not Dying, but that's not what you're focused on these days.

No, what you need right now is more ways to Prevent Others From Not Dying. A lot more. You have a List, see. It's short, but nevertheless quite daunting - the top entry says 'Leviathan', which makes any subsequent entries fairly irrelevant in comparison. What makes you interested in Crusader is that his Manton limitation is the opposite of Faultline's: His ghosts can only affect organic matter. Or in other words, they can stab things to death through arbitrary amounts of armor. You want that.

Oh and his ghosts can fly, which also makes him a Mover on par with Rune by way of uncomfortably erotic piggyback rides. Rune is way more popular though, because her method of transportation does not involve pressing your functionally naked body against a strange man. That's not want you want from him either.

Actually even ignoring the whole 'secretly in charge' thing you're not really just another grunt: You're also a living martyr. If you sometimes drift off lost in thought, the other workers are hesitant to reprimand you. They think you're contemplating what you've lost, not what you're in the process of gaining (for the purpose of avenging what you've lost). They're... not always wrong.

You also tend to take your lunches with the foreman rather than the other workers. It's not elitism as such - or maybe it is? People like the two of you can simply afford a better quality of rations, and neither of you want to rub that in their faces. You're not egalitarian enough to share, though.

He probably quite enjoys hanging out with someone famous, too. He strikes you as the type. He is also the most cheerful Endbringer survivor you've ever met. A combination of his job, and his lack of dead relatives.

"I know it's unseemly," he says, refilling his mug with what Lisa called 'fucking awful coffee', "but the construction business is just so nice right now."

"High demand, huh?" you say. Given your heavy hand on the work and patrol schedules, you'll not begrudge him a bit of profiteering.

He waves it away. "Not even that. None of the fat government contracts are going to end up in Empire territory, I can tell you that much. No, it's the lack of government. You have no idea what it took to build something before. Permits. Impact studies. Reviews. Offsets, grants. Lawyers, horse-trading. Bribes and flattery. So many layers of parasites who had to ensure they got their slice of the pie, or who obstructed you just because petty power games made their peepee hard. Years of effort just to get started. All washed away by the big green! It's ama- uh." He's so enthusiastic that he momentarily forgets what the big green washed away from his conversation partner. "I mean..."

"No, do go on," you say, poker faced.

He coughs self-consciously. "Right. Now I can just go to an architect I trust - like my cousin - and tell him 'I want a building that won't fall down.' As long as it's nothing fancy, he can whip it up in no time at all, or just grab something off the rack. You've seen the retarded buttplugs they call skyscrapers these days - with modern steel and computer assistance, architecture isn't hard. Then I go to Aurelius, he says 'yep, that looks like a building all right, here's your budget' and that's it. From planning to construction in like, a week."

"Silver linings, huh."

---

So, manual labor is what you do during the day. At night? You've been staking out a certain patrol route.

"Good evening, Flechette." At your words she spins around, raising her crossbow. For all that you were expecting it, you still get a jolt of adrenaline. Black-clad heroes pointing crossbows at you...

When she sees who it is, she lowers the weapon sheepishly. "Oh. Um, I recognize you. Quicksilver, right?"

"At your service." You perform Quicksilver's usual curtsey.

"So, uh, I guess you want to look at my power?" Well, what have we here? A dutiful girl who paid attention when they briefed her on the local cape scene, that's what.

"Indeed. I saw you in action against Leviathan, it was certainly something else." She draws herself up with pride at your words. You'll have none of that. "I have never in my life seen a bigger waste of potential, and I pray to God I never will."

"Excuse me?"

"You, alone in all the world, have a power that will cut through Endbringer flesh like a hot knife through smoke. And you attack Leviathan with crossbow bolts?" Scorn drips from your every word. "They're what, a quarter inch in cross section? Are you retarded?"

"I- uh-" Apparently yes, because it has clearly never even occurred to her that she might do differently.

"Lucky for you - and perhaps the entire rest of the world - I'm here to fix your shit. I'm going to make an Endbringer killer out of you if it's the last thing I do."

"Okay."

---

Flechette's power works by imbuing (a part of) an object with cut-through-anything-ness. The only thing her power can't cut through is another imbued object. Thus, over the next week the boat graveyard gets a lot more holes in it.

Most of them, unfortunately, are in the ground, because she still cannot consistently extend her power through an entire chain at once. If she doesn't do it just right, an empowered link ends up cutting through its unempowered neighbor somewhere along the way - sending the empowered links plummeting through concrete, soil and bedrock until the charge wears off. When she does get it, though? Endbringer-decapitating bolas. Though of course you warn her, do not actually decapitate Endbringers. Their heads are decoys.

A cutting-edged discus is trivial to make, but nowhere near as good. She isn't actually immune to her own power, she just has a secondary Thinker ability that makes extra sure she doesn't touch anything she shouldn't. Which makes throwing anything but the smallest discus quite awkward. Still a lot better than a crossbow bolt. Mind-hands could do it, if you team up. She also promises to talk to the Protectorate Tinkers about making a giant disc-thrower. No one else ever suggested it, because apparently all heroes are functionally retarded.

The most destructive thing you've found so far is something you call 'the surface of this shield is a weapon'. Just press it against anything you want deleted. With the downside of course being that it puts your single most critical combat asset in melee range of an Endbringer. Vetoed.

Unfortunately 'project landmine' isn't going so well. You can see her power, there's nothing really preventing her from making an arbitrary patch of ground into a death zone just waiting to be stepped on. But something is holding her back. You're determined to keep riding her ass until she gets it.

No, you're not just doing the 'bootcamp as excuse for power study' thing again. This is serious. You would like to kill Leviathan yourself, but you're acutely aware that you do not always get what you want. If you fail/die, your vengeance shall live on through her.

It takes a toll on her, though. Unlike you she does need to sleep, and the schedule of a Ward in the ruins of Brockton Bay is quite punishing. The people in charge are clearly accepting a giant legal mess with the Youth Guard later, in exchange for parahuman manpower now. You can understand their reasoning: It's not as if they don't own the judges.

You had worried about her burning out and giving up initially, when you discovered that her soul price wasn't any good.

Flechette wants somewhere to belong.

It's not that you don't have a gang she could join. But if arbitrary group membership was enough for her, the Wards would already fulfill her desires. She has no reason to switch to a lesser gang. A bit of a Catch 22: She would need to feel at home first, join later.

Still she perseveres, half-assing patrols and losing sleep in order to keep up with your training schedule. It's not really a desire to help that keeps her going, either, or a desire for glory. If she had either of those she might have figured out some way to suck less on her own. No, the secret of her persistence, the motivation that makes her keep showing up? She has a thing for being ordered around by older women.

It was all you could do to hold in an aggrieved 'seriously?' when you realized as much. But, well, any control mechanism is better than none. You will fuck her, if it comes to that. You're both going to come out of this lean, mean, Endbringer-killing machines, no matter what it takes.