No More Ghosts Left to Bury

Taylor Hebert
December 1st, 2010

The wrench slips in my hand as the doorbell rings. I curse as my thumb keeps going, banging harshly against the Queen and flushing red in pain. The sharp sting and warm ache distract me for a moment, letting me soothe the pained digit in my mouth when I realize something.

The doorbell shouldn't be ringing.

I scramble for the other end of the basement, hastily flicking on my visor before wrapping the makeshift apparatus around my eyes.

This shouldn't be happening, I knew going into this just how vulnerable I'd be at the start. I know my hexbugs have complete surveillance over the neighborhood, they're all well hidden and cloaked, the shift change isn't for another two hours so why wasn't I pinged?!

The view I get from the porch is equally perplexing, there's two… blobs standing in front of my front door. They're vaguely human shaped but they're composed entirely out of a messy blur of gray pixels, like little self-contained digital sandstorms.

The view is different when I switch to the camera below them, silently moving the bug to zoom through the cracks of the wooden planks. Comparing the view from below to the one nestled in the empty beehive, I can tell it's a camera trick. The 'sand' in one lens doesn't match with the other.

That's actually far more concerning, it means someone hacked my drones!

My mind cycles through a hundred different plans in the span of a second, unfortunately, all of them die by step one.

Reallocating my army would take time I can't spare, printing more would take twice as long, and even then I can't guarantee these hackers aren't already embedded into the whole network.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Just as I'm about to give my drones the order to return home, the thinner of the two blobs stretches. The pixels of its arms cease to interlap with its chest and its gray hand raises up to wave at my hidden drone. Or, more accurately, the drone I'd thought was hidden.

"HeLLo tAYlOR", the voice is a garbled mix of tones, some low but most high-pitched. "WE'd LiKE tO tALk, MAy we PLeaSE cOME In?"

I swallow thickly, scared out of my mind. It might be worded as a request, but everything else about the blobs screams confrontation. This hexbug doesn't have an external speaker, they want me to open the door but my feet refuse to move.

I haven't even had my powers for a week, how do they know about me?!

The second blob whispers into the first's ear, or rather, where the ear would be if it were more distinct. The first smacks its head, sighing out an unintelligible mess of dial up sounds.

"SORRy." It says, reaching for its wrist and flickering to resemble a normal person.

The thinner blob reveals itself to be a scarred boy, about my height, vaguely Hispanic and with a harsh burn covering the left side of his face.

The second of the two is a much older white man, maybe mid 20's with a wide set of shoulders and a completely hairless head.

The younger man looks up at the camera, giving me a sheepish smile and asking to be let in one more time. I take a photo, this is good, if I have their faces, I have something.

The churning in my gut gets worse when I remember they have my name and place of residence.

"We just wanna talk," the boy says again, "we're not affiliated with any of the gangs, you have my word."

For a moment, I'm taken back by the absolute stupidity of such a statement. His word? The word of someone who shows up, hacks my drones, and calls me out at my own home?

That word means shit, if I had a speaker I'd tell him so. This is… okay, it's not unwinnable exactly, they don't have costumes so one of the two of them being a cape isn't guaranteed.

It's just… mostly guaranteed.

Regardless, I'm going up the stairs anyway, directing a drone to head to the land line and setting my visor down on the handrail when it makes it there.

I'll play dumb for now, the kitchen is out of sight from the main rooms and I have code words in place, someone will come if I tell it to dial 911. I have to tell myself I'll be okay.

I open the door slowly, wishing to any and all deities that I'd gotten my next Hexbug design finalized before now.

"Yes?" I ask, trying not to wince at the boy's burns. They're even harsher when I can see them with my own eyes, angry and pocked like crinkled leather.

"Taylor?" he asks me rhetorically, he's already called me out. I nod anyway, opening the door sullenly and letting the duo inside.

The smile adorning his face gets sadder as he steps past me, I open the door wider for his bigger friend and the second I close it, I know the fate that's befallen me.

The same fate that dozens of tinkers have tripped into, caught when my output was negligible. As I said, these two's 'word' means nothing.

Given they don't fit either of the racially focused gang's demographic, I'm guessing Merchants and that terrifies me even more than if it were the Empire.

The Merchants already have a tinker, a woman that I bet was probably a lot like me. An innocent forced into crime through a needle shoved into her arm.

The two turn back to look at me, trapping me in my foyer. Fuck, time to test the precautions.

"So, is this some kind of prot-"

"Protocol's the code phrase isn't it?" The Hispanic's question floors me. They're much deeper in my systems than I thought was possible.

The dread in my chest threatens to bubble up into something worse, something angry, raw, and panicking.

"It's okay!" the boy tells me, hands out to placate me before groaning. "I wanted to do this in a showier way but it's not a big deal if we can't."

He lets one hand stay out in front of himself but brings the other to the edge of his jaw, knuckles bent like he's searching for a seam.

I feel my jaw loosen in shock as the boy begins to peel back his face.

Not literally I mean, there's no spurts of blood or snapping tendons but the effect is still nauseating to witness.

The skin at the base of his jaw stretches like a twisted texture in a video game, losing detail through volume as he pulls his hand up past his lips.

There's a breaking point somewhere over his nose and in a flash of light and a swirl of pixels, the boy in front me starts to change.

For a moment, I think his head is shrinking but actually as the false body over the top begins to disintegrate and shrink, it reveals someone else. Like a Russian nesting doll.

The actual face beneath is far shorter than the illusion would suggest, I'd thought the boy was about my height but as the remnants of the light show fade away, I have to tilt my head down to meet the new person's eyes.

I take a step back as she blinks, the black hair, the skin tone, the distinctive scarring, it was all a lie compared to the girl beneath.

Her bottle glass green eyes light up for a moment before she blinks them harshly, bringing her free hand to pinch the bridge of her nose as she looks away.

"Ouch," she whines, "I know you and Alec don't mind the lights, but some of us have regular eyes most of the time."

I tilt my head in confusion, lips moving before the man to her right speaks up, shaking his head. He reaches for his jaw, for his own mask as he replies.

"It's not exactly high on my list—" his voice warbles into a digital hum as his disguise deactivates, "—when you can just keep your eyes closed."

I'm again struck dumb by the face beneath the face, the still unnamed duo could not be further apart from their disguises. The larger teen, a black boy with long dreads and a physique a little more muscular than his disguise, shakes his head, whipping his hair around when he turns to face me fully.

"Sorry about the cloak and dagger stuff but for tinkers… you know how it is." I nod slowly, my mind clicking puzzle pieces together as my muscles drift further and further away from me.

I look away from his warm brown eyes and lock my gaze on the metallic mask held in his right hand. It's a slim off gray steel, meant to resemble a neutral and featureless face with an even thinner mane of rubber coating its edges.

The design is surprisingly elegant although I don't have much to compare it to. The only other pieces of tinker tech I've seen in person are…well, my own drones and their assembler.

The boy steps forward, free hand outstretched to shake and speaking.

"I'm sure you've got a lot of questions but to start, I'm Brian and the shortass here is Lisa." The newly christened Lisa flips Brian the bird as I limply shake his hand.

"What the hell is going on?" My voice comes out softer than I meant it to but I don't have the energy to try again. All my focus right now is to keep from fainting.

The blonde sighs at my question, turning away from me to stare at my living room.

"Why don't we sit down for this? We've got a lot to talk about." Without another word, Lisa heads for the kitchen and I'm led to my own couch by a complete stranger.

Am I being press ganged, is this what being press ganged is like? My breathing is shallow but getting steadier, enough so that I remember to get a good look at Brian.

He's tall, handsome, and the kind of fit that just steps into bulky without going overboard. Above that though, I notice two things.

He's wearing black pressed slacks, dress shoes, a maroon t-shirt, and, most damning of all, a stylish gold-plated watch. His skin is healthy with no clear signs of scarring or injection.

They're not Merchants.

Brian and I sit there in silence while my thoughts race, who the hell are these people, how do they know about me, what do they know about me, what do they need me for?

Lisa returns with a glass of water and in the hysteria, I laugh as she hands it to me. They invite themselves in, threaten me with their presence, and now they just want to talk.

"Okay." Lisa takes the seat to my left, giving Brian the armchair and speaking slowly and lightly, like I were a deer about to bolt. "We're gonna do this a little differently, you ask the questions and Brian and I will answer to the best of our abiliti—"

"How'd you find me?" I ask, there's probably better questions to start with but this one's hurting me the most. I thought I was playing it safe, I wasn't even gonna go out for another few months, how did they find me?

"Alec," Brian answers, voice smooth and calming. "He's a friend of ours, another tinker, specialized in biological signals."

Biological signals? As in brainwaves? Can he tell someone's a tinker just by scanning them?

"He's got a…" Lisa grimaces as she trails off. "Thing about Masters, I helped him set up a few beacons around town, scanning for abnormal neurology."

Abnorm—

"My helmet," I say it just as the epiphany comes. Controlling all of my drones got to be too difficult by the time the fifth one came off the line, the headband was my third creation.

A small neurolink that would let me control my army with just my own thoughts. At the time, I hadn't seen the harm in it, drones were the only option my power fed me and I needed some way to manage them all.

Fuck, I— there's other ways to manage my army but the visor was the most efficient solution I could afford making. Cost aside though, the other ways, building drones to order the drones beneath them and so on and so forth just felt… too clunky.

The bottom line is that my helmet is integral to how I work, I needed to make it… and it cost me my anonymity.

"Hey." Brian grabs my attention again, "We're not here to threaten, blackmail, or extort you okay?"

"Then why are you here?" There's a lot more heat to this question than my last but I'm getting sick of being jerked around. Any second I feel like they're gonna drop the bombshell and 'explain where things go from here'.

Brian's shoulders sag with the exhale, he gets up out of the chair and paces for a moment.

"You're really new to this, aren't you?" he asks with a tone that tells me this is just a preamble. "Built your first bit of tech maybe a month ago?"

"A week ago actually." I wince and look away, I really shouldn't be interrupting them.

"Really?" He walks out of my field of vision, going to the kitchen and continuing his speech. "A week ago…" His voice sounds astonished and light, like when you open a fridge and find the thing you thought you were out of is still there.

He returns after a brief second, the drone I had stationed by the phone in his hand.

"A week ago and you've already made close to three dozen of these little guys. That's incredible." His smile is warm and his eyes are bright as he turns my first Hexbug around in his hands.

I try to keep my emotions under control, ignoring a different kind of fluttering in my chest as he rotates the little drone. He gives a hum of interest when he flips it over, watching the legs bend the other way to ensure it can walk at all angles

I don't see what he finds all that impressive.

My first drone design is an ugly hexagonal thing, with a brutalist style dark metal,and one leg on each side. They have a camera in the center that can rotate in any direction and while they do have a cloaking generator, it only works if a drone is perfectly still.

It has no weaponry and its armor is cheap and easy to break, a strong throw to the ground would probably do the trick.

"I didn't—" I bite my tongue for a moment but my pride wins out. "I didn't make all of them by hand."

Brian looks away from my drone, setting the little thing on the counter when I add.

"The drones are assembled, I modified a few to have a cloaking field but the rest were made by the queen?"

"Assembled?" Lisa asks at the same time Brian mumbles "Queen?"

Their eyes are wide and that strange anxiety in my gut churns harsher.

"It's the first thing I made, a machine I built the day I got my powers." The light in Brian and Lisa eyes is doused for just a second when I add, "Right now it can only make the hexbugs but… well I was gonna try upgrading it today when…"

"When we showed up." Lisa finishes for me.

"Yeah… we're sorry about the visit of course, but that's why we're here." Getting back on track, he sits across from me starts to explain.

"Being a cape is…" the confidence he had earlier drains away gesturing for his partner to take over as he leans back in his chair.

"It's very different than how PHO and TV portray it." Lisa's hand settles on my knee, squeezing lightly. "I'm gonna guess when you saw Bri and I at your door, you thought a lot about what we knew, that we know where you live, your name, maybe even your face. You thought a lot about all those things, right?"

I nod as that icy dread climbs up my spine again. They know everything about me and I'm not even sure if the faces I see are real.

"This is always a hard thing to explain, it broke my he— it hurt when I found out too. But it's all bullshit."

"What?" I tilt my head, dread forgotten in the face of such a 'left field' statement.

"Sp—" Brian stutters "Lisa's right, it sucks, it really really fucking sucks but capes and the games we play are all bullshit."

The taller teen sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose like he's trying to prevent a migraine.

"What sucks the most," he clarifies, "Is that most folk can figure it out if they think about it for long enough, hell, ever since that Golden man blipped in and blipped away, I bet everyone's made the conclusion once in their life."

Before I can say anything the blonde picks up the rest.

"'Why don't the heroes ever investigate the bad guys?' Every child with exposure to capes wonders that exact question but over the years, that question is soothed by the lack of first hand experience." Brian picks up the explanation again, having it tossed back his way like a frisbee.

"People calm themselves down, saying that 'the good guys are looking into it, that's what the thinktank's for'. They see a blank on how the cape system works and they make something up to fill the whole."

"What are you saying?" I ask even though the answer to my own question is on the tip of my mind, begging to be made if I turn my focus to it.

"We're saying the 'good guys' either already know or that they don't and won't look into it." He picks up the drone and plays with one of its legs. "You decide which one is worse."

"Even if… If the good guys know, it's better for everyone if they don't act," I speak, and the words taste ashen. "Cornered animals are at their most dangerous."

"Very true." The blonde, Lisa, agrees with me, nodding lightly, and looking somewhat pleased. "The system, for now, works. Keeps civilization, or whatever remains of it, going with a semblance of normality, even though it's more than gone. Keeps everything from devolving into mass production of Bonesaws and Butchers, and allows villains like us some leeway, some time to dream."

"Dreams are great. It's what you feed off when you've got nothing else." Brian agrees, his hand held parallel to the floor as he lets the drone take tentative steps according to its programming, unbothered by the blonde's admission of their villainy. "There's no real point in hitting banks or robbing liquor stores, outside mindless hedonism that is. But what if you really want to rage against the machine? To fight against the system that broke you and made you incomplete…?"

His question is open-ended, and for the first time his eyes, dark and of a shade of brown tinted gold, lock into mine, causing me to turn away from the intensity of the gaze. That, however, places me in Lisa's crosshairs, as she speaks next, her hand rising to my shoulder. I feel compelled to listen, if only to appease my burning curiosity.

"... Well, then that makes you a different kind of villain entirely. A supervillain, you might say." Her voice is tinged by amusement, and her smile is that of a cat that got the canary that it had been chasing for so long.

These people are insane. There was a line to be crossed between the normal and abnormal, and these two are clearly far beyond it. But… I can't deny being fascinated by their words. Rage… I am filled with it, of course. Every time I look at the city. Every time I walk it. Every time I look at the gates of Winslow High School. I understand rage.

"I like that look," Brian chuckles, halting my train of thought and making me flinch, "you know what we're talking about. There's four of us right now. You ever hear of Ghostlab?"

I shake my head, still somewhat reeling. I've not had time yet to research more than common knowledge - and I admit to being somewhat sheltered on that, too. But there were hundreds of minor villains and villain groups in New England, rising and fading every week.

"No surprise there. The PRT doesn't want us known, and it's convenient for us too." Lisa interjects, rising a finger to the hair and twirling it. "But you've heard of Coil, haven't you?"

"I did. He's the guy that holds part of Downtown and a fraction of the docks. I know he's in the protection business, and he's got laser guns. Thought about getting them, but…"

Brian snorts at my words, but before I can feel offended he explains himself. "Sorry, just the thought of a fresh Tinker, talented as you may be, against Coil's merry band of mercenaries… well, I do have to wonder who'd actually come on top."

"I refrained, still." I defend myself, crossing my arms in front of my chest. "I'm not that reckless."

"Well," Brian smiles at that, "it's unfortunate that you won't be able to face them in the future. Coil thought himself a smart fellow, you see. Bought his Tinkertech from Toybox, independent Tinker think-tank off in the north, but it wasn't enough for him, so why not assemble his own little group? Four Tinkers together, working for him. That's what Ghostlab was to him. It was his undoing, too."

"Pro-tip: never leave your Tinkers unattended, no matter how good of a pre-cog you are. Sooner or later, they'll build a brain-scrambler." Lisa laughs, and yet the words make me shiver. "Oh, don't look at me like that. Fairly sure the bastard would have started drugging and blackmailing us otherwise."

"Yes, this brings us back to the topic at hand: your situation." The young man's tone is once again somber at that, and Lisa pats me on the shoulder with a gesture I'm sure is meant to reassure me, as my stomach churns. "There's no talking around it: you're in danger. You've heard of Squealer, now you've heard about us. For a Tinker, one that doesn't have a combat specialty especially, these are dark days. You either go to the Protectorate…"

Lisa rolls her eyes at that. "They'll hamstring you for the promise of financial support, pushing you into the field or to work under orders only, and c'mon. They're cops."

My lips draw into a smile involuntarily. Yeah, I was raised in a household were the word "cop" was almost an insult. And maybe I'd avoided thinking about them that way with all their cool powers and flashy suits. Just the same, though, this Ghostlab is a group of criminals.

"Or there's us. Or maybe the Elite if you feel like moving, or Toybox if you can find them and like living like a hermit." Brian lists, counting each on the fingers of his one free hand. "Not many options. Just want you to know about them. Call it professional courtesy."

"Or to rope me into your scheme," I say, words laced with acid and a sudden tiredness, compounding a morning working, bad sleep, and no breakfast, assails me, making me stumble as I step up and away from the two, who look to me with apprehension. It's… I don't even know why that makes me so uncomfortable.

Eventually though, the silence is broken.

"Or we're roping you into a scheme. So, maybe we should do something to prove our good intentions…" Lisa smiles a wide smile for a second, before clapping Brian on a bicep. "Put on your veil, we're taking Taylor lair-hunting!"

""Huh!?"" Is the shocked sound me and Brian both utter at the non-sequitur.

-

"Döner kebab is a strange dish," Lisa says, once again looking (and speaking in the deeper voice of) a boy. "It's mainly of Turkish origin, but because of immigration, and various other factors, it's a far more popular dish in the West than even in Turkey itself. It's said there are more kebab restaurants in Berlin than Istanbul."

She studies the fast food wrapped in aluminum foil in front of her, now missing a large bite out of it. For such a dainty figure, the way she eats is hurried and voracious, as if she's afraid of the food vanishing before her eyes.

"It's not like fortune cookies — created wholesale to appeal to the American's hunger for Orientalism. If anything, it's more similar to pizza, however it has not seen a drift in its core recipes as pizza did."

"Let me interrupt you. Is this going anywhere?" Brian interjects, once more in his older caucasian mask. "Not that it isn't interesting, but we do still have two places to look at."

I nod, still feeling somewhat unsettled by the mask I am now wearing. It's not stiff, but somewhat heavy, like the feeling of adjusting to a new pair of glasses. I still shirked from looking at any reflective surface, even if I looked "like a generic 20-something alt-girl", whatever it meant.

"Of course it does. You see, the kebab is this city. Sure, it's got ketchup and tomatoes and a kind of salad you wouldn't find that often in that part of the world, but otherwise? Completely unchanged. The city's the same. Nazi bullshit, pan-Asian ambitions, megalomania, those don't really matter. They're just minor spice on the fact that a city is made of people, people used to a certain level of comfort, of routine."

"That doesn't treat the people as individuals, though. It's disingenuous." I find myself saying, clutching at my bag of fries, hot and salty. "A city isn't necessarily big enough to generalize so much, especially something like Brockton. We've seen how desolate it is."

And we did. The hideouts the two had me go through were all abandoned buildings, warehouses held by companies with headquarters on other continents,and even the start of a now-abandoned metro project.

I followed like a led puppy, by the leash. Invisible though it was, the power the two held over me was nothing to scoff at. The situation might've appeared balanced, what with them showing their faces to me, but they've proven that names and faces are nowhere as reliable as I thought of until today. I can only smile with gritted teeth.

"Okay, that's a good point. But people are people, right? Hierarchy of needs, and all that."

"I thought that was wildly inaccurate." Brian chimes in, stopping in the middle of some surprisingly small bites on his rather large burger.

"Inaccurate does not mean false. If it did, my life's work would have to be trashed." Lisa grunts into her… sandwich? Let's call it that. "The point is that information gathering applied to a large dataset will need to be about the things people have in common, not what divides them. And after all this collapses, equity's all that's gonna remain, yeah? Well, that, and powers."

"That your manifesto?"

"Call it powerpunk. Civilization after the death of the Protectorate."

My lips purse. It's a bit in bad taste, coming up on the anniversary of the original Protectorate members' sacrifice against the Endbringer they called Israfel in Lausanne. But it doesn't feel as if she's saying it in disparagement, with how grim she feels.

"Sorry, bad taste is kind of my brand."

"Not lying," Brian grunts. Well, at least she's sincere? Overwhelmed with the sheer… nihilism, Lisa and Brian have shared all morning, I search desperately for something to break up the dread.

I open my bag of fries, lightly burning the tip of my finger in the nest of fried potato and popping one in my mouth. It stings and either side of my mouth plays hot potato with it when I realize something.

My mask, the face-veil I think they called it, sits perfectly on my face despite our conversation and feasting. I suppose it's as good enough a conversation point as any.

"Wondering how your disguise works?" Lisa asks me, speeding up just a little until she can start walking backwards. My brow furrows.

"Yes actually, ho—"

"How do I know what you wanna ask?" Okay that's crossed the line from spooky into obnoxious. "Sorry." She says without the littlest bit of shame. Even with the false face atop her own, the smug smirk she gives stays the same, transcending skin tone and scarring. "I got the new feature worked out three days ago and have been using it every chance I get."

"She's been—" Brian comments, tugging Lisa away from colliding with a lamppost "insufferable."

He looks over his shoulder to lock eyes with me. Speaking calmly despite the family of three walking towards us.

"Don't worry, the 'feature' she's so excited about is a very simple algorithm that feeds data from your veil's movements to the optics in hers. Little twitches and microexpressions mostly, that her little baby VI can interpret."

I gape at the stupidity unfolding in front of me. It was one thing to speak so brazenly about the fall of modern society when we couldn't see anyone but to talk about Tinkertech within clear earshot of non-capes?!

I'm about to feign ignorance and distance myself when the family just… keeps on walking.

Brian trails off as my head turns to follow the family, the mom even looks over her shoulder to stare at me. But in that awkward way adults do when someone is being weird but social conventions tell them to be as politely unbothered as possible.

"They can't hear us Tay, do you mind if I call ya Tay?" Lisa asks me. I look away from the interlopers and balk.

"It's the veils, isn't it?" I feel like I'm getting a better handle on what's what with their specialities.

"Duh," Lisa answers, spinning until she's back in step between me and Brian. "Do you really think we'd really go through all the trouble to create real-to-life illusionary proxies, voice modulators, and cram them into an easy to carry format…Just to have it ruined by some eavesdroppers?"

Well… I suppose objectively that wouldn't make sense but… a lot of today hasn't made any sense to me. I shake my head, annoyed that I can't feel the illusionary hair smack my face.

"If the masks bug you so much." I'm nearly blinded as the world falls apart in a mess of flaring white pixels. As I squint and try to blink the shadows away, Lisa speaks up again, this time in her own voice. "We could filter the illusions for us."

I'm unsurprised by the two figures walking with me, Brian and Lisa, back in their own skin.

"So…" I try to pinch the bridge of my nose but stop at the kind of spongy ceramic on my face. "Any more potential labs for me or are we moving on to… the pitch?"

Brian's face lights up in slight surprise, his lips quirking into a smile around the straw of his drink. He and Lisa sandwiched the offer to join Ghostlab between being a Protectorate tinker or a Toybox hermit, but the truth is they wouldn't be offering me places to tinker if they didn't want me.

Always know what you offer to a negotiation. My dad taught me that yesterday, when I awkwardly tried to ask for an allowance. At the time I thought it was just a long-winded way to say no with some advice thrown on top, but now I'm wishing he'd given me more.

"Both, actually," Lisa says, grabbing for me and Brian's wrists and twirling us to walk back the way we came. "The places we've shown you so far were all just potential, spacious and out of the way but ultimately we were just throwing you the bare minimum."

I'm sure that's some salesman's trick, showing the alternative before offering something better. I'm ashamed to say knowing the trick doesn't make me any less giddy for what they'll show me.

Brian tells me their next stop isn't too far from the restaurant we just snagged food from Apparently the little hole-in-the-wall eatery is one of their favorite places.

Hearing that does take some of the wind out of my sails. Did they plan for all of this? Brian seemed surprised when Lisa announced the plan to show me potential hideout spots but was that just him acting? Did they come up with some plan on the spot or have I been dancing to their tune the whole time?

Dancing to someone else's tune… isn't that all I've been doing these past few years. The thought comes out of nowhere and hits like a freight train, the bag I'm holding strains under my grip and my breath gets faster.

I can't stop thinking about it, years of watching her fade away, years of excuses and flaking, and then last week, a stolen flute and a broken friend and I-

"I can hold the bag." I jolt at the voice, looking over Lisa's head to the teen on her left.

"What?" I ask him. He looks down and gestures to the bag gripped white knuckles in my left hand.

"My drink's done." He shows it by throwing it into a trashcan on our left, "I don't mind."

He reaches out for it and with her hand still around my left wrist, Lisa guides my arm across her and to Brian. He takes the bag quietly and with my hand free, Lisa slides hers down my wrist to lace our fingers together.

The touch is alien, soft, and above all, solid. The grip is firm and I welcome the steady distraction as we make our way a block or two down to a dilapidated warehouse.

"Um…" I utter, staring at the half caved in roof and scorched brickwork. "It's… pretty?"

"Shouldn't be." Brian speaks as he breaks away from the formation, turning around so his back faces the rusted metal doors and the heavy chain binding them closed. "It's meant to be ugly enough that even the homeless don't want to squat in it."

He smiles fully as he takes a step back, walking through the doors. My response dies on my lips when his hand pokes through the doors, digits outstretched to pull Lisa and I in.

"Another illusion?" I ask "How are you keeping this one hidden, shouldn't people see-"

A whistle sounds from behind me and I turn. A woman stands there, straight hair half shaved on one side and the tips dyed a neon blue. She's got a short leather jacket, dark skinny jeans, a ripped crop top and more piercings than I can count.

It's me, the fake me that my veil projects. The illusion points a thumb in either direction and across the street I see two other familiar bodies.

The scarred Hispanic boy and the taller bald white guy, Lisa and Brian's disguises. They both move in sync to flash me peace signs and then walk in opposite directions.

The 'generic 20-something alt girl' smirks as she puts both hands in her back pockets. She flickers away into nothing with a single step back.

"We've got all of this street and most of the surrounding ones wired in me and Bri's tech, no one sees us unless we want them to." Lisa says before pulling me back to the not-doors. "Now, c'mon! The cool shit's in here."

Even knowing there's nothing actually blocking my path, I still flinch and close my eyes when my face meets the fake steel.

The inside of the warehouse is just as damp and decrepit as you would expect on the outside, right now I'm itching for my drones and headband. They'd tell me what's real, they'd… no actually, they probably wouldn't.

Brian walks towards a small pile of rubble before clapping his hands, making another light show and blinking the debris from existence.

With the obstruction gone, a small metal hatch is revealed. It's a black iron door set into the ground and with a pull, Brian shows us a stone carved staircase and just a few steps past that, another door upright and leading further in.

"If Alec were here," Brian huffs, throws the hatch door to one side, quickly moves down the steps, and fishes for a key in his pocket, "he'd probably say something stupid like 'welcome to my parlor'."

"Would it be stupid if I said it?" Lisa asks, free hand on her cocked hip.

"Marginally less so," Brian answers, unlocking a heavy metal padlock and stuffing both it and the key into his pocket. He continues his statement as he leads us into the labyrinth "but I don't have a small enough gap to show you how much."

"Oh my poor heart," Lisa says, voice dripping with sarcasm as she pulls me down to follow her and Brian. "How will I ever recover?"

"You'll probably work on the perception enhancer with Rachel and get too into it to even remember this." He answers her rhetorical question as he leads us into the dark.

The hallway doesn't feel like a hallway after only a few steps, the walls of it get wider and wider until there's nothing left for me to hold on to… except Lisa's hand.

I thought about pulling away from her when we first stepped down here but now, without any lights to guide me, I hold it in a death grip.

"Why's it so… dark?" I ask, pausing to keep my voice steady.

"A few reasons." Brian's voice echoes in what has to be a massive chamber. "It could ward someone off if they tried exploring, it confuses people's sense of direction, but mostly it's because Ghostlab is completely off the grid and electricity ain't cheap."

"O-ok." I grip Lisa's hand tighter and find enough of my voice to ask another question. "Do the veils have like, night vision or something?"

"They do," Lisa answers me, "but not for dark like this, you've probably figured it out already but Brian's specialty is fixed on the EM spectrum, with a pretty big leaning towards visible light."

"A bit of an oversimplification," Brian grouses. "But yes, and because I deal a lot with light, I also do plenty with the dark."

The ominous statement is the last thing anyone says as we continue our trek. There haven't been any stairs for a while and even though my footing feels normal, I'm sure we're heading down, deeper and deeper and yet deeper into the blackness.

And then, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After walking for who knows how long it's so relieving to see anything different, especially something so bright compared to all this emptiness.

That relief turns to dread as the light speeds towards us, changing from distant to close in less than a second. The light gets blinding and I bury my face in the back of Lisa's neck, screaming when the environment shifts.

Lisa giggles and Brian chuckles when no train comes to hit us. I open my eyes slowly, lifting my head to peak around Lisa's blonde hair.

"We should probably do something about that," Lisa says, mirth in her voice as I free my hand from hers.

"Another thing the hallway does." Brian starts, turning to gesture at the infinite void we just came from. "It gets pretty hard to tell distances without any markers to judge them."

I nod mutely as I take in the new environment.

The villains' front room is... weird, to say the least if this place even is a room. First of all, my idea of a villainous lair does not include a massive indoor greenhouse right after a dark hallway/chasm of despair. Sure, I can understand the heavy doors with the padlock and the many, many other bizarre security measures they'd taken but this place is ridiculous.

Like the space before, this room doesn't seem to have walls or a ceiling. All around us, for twenty or so meters is a delicate but clearly cared-for garden.

Humble cobblestone paths lay perpendicular in the room, each of the four sections they create are home to a tree sporting ripe fruit, flowers of all kinds, and a few bushes and shrubs with nuts and berries.

I step away from the duo and take a deep breath, the air in here smells like the outdoors, like pine and dirt and fruit. I turn my head and stare at the vegetables littering the ground to my left, potatoes and carrots growing fresh from the soil.

I look at the yew tree to my left, stunned at the fruits that definitely shouldn't be sharing a branch. This place is… honestly it's miraculous.

"Two, sometimes three of us need fresh biomass." Brian startles me out of my stupor and plucks a blackberry from the bush closest to him. "Flesh is preferable, but not always easy to source in the right quantities, at least, not without alerting the authorities. So, we came up with this Ghost Garden."

"I even researched garden decorating for it!" Lisa says, some extra pep in her step as she walks down the short path. "Brian insisted on a practical design, but there was no way I was gonna come in every day to a farmer's field." Lisa snickers, pointing at a gazebo in the middle of the garden, a place I could see small English women having tea at. "'Sides, at least in here we get sunlight… it's artificial of course but still!"

"Sunlight?" I look up and really take in the bright blue sky above us, it might be as illusionary as all the tricks I've seen today but the warmth of the sun above feels real enough.

"It's fake," Brian says, "The UV light's way too thin in here to cause a sunburn but the shading for it is easy enough to mimic, Lisa and I fine tuned the holoprojectors to feel like the real deal though. That was a pretty damn boring Saturday"

"So." Lisa asks me, grinning like a fox. "You wanna go meet the others?"

My eyes widen, I know they're trying to sell me on the pitch but I've already been made privy to so much. Do they really wanna risk their teammate's identities if I say no?

I may have forgotten that I've been holding onto Lisa all along, because she clearly recognizes what is running through my head.

Fuck, now that I think about it, I can't say no. They've got me in their lab, the number one place you don't disagree with, let alone fight another tinker. I gulp but nod at Lisa's offer, trying to psyche myself up as she takes us down an adjacent hallway, and in the middle of it, she twirls and looks me in the eye.

"As it stands, you're the only person with a secret identity worth a damn. I don't exist. Rachel and Alec are both runaways from homes that aren't going to denounce their disappearances for one reason or another, and Brian…"

"Let's just say," he interrupts her, looking around with a bit of disquiet, "that me and the authorities do not see eye-to-eye. I would be unlikely to gain anything for engaging with my own civilian life, and most of that was burned anyway, for one reason or another."

"And when you don't need to actually come out of your lab, well…" Lisa chuckles darkly, though the mirth feels somehow good-natured. As if the joke is more on her expense than anything, and she gestures to everything surrounding us.

The walls of this place, or at least the ones coming from the garden, are layered thick in a soft ivy. It fills the damp hall with a kinda of soft, planty but not floral scent.

It's… strange, I honestly thought most labs, or at least mine eventually, would smell like rust and iron and oil, but this is… kinda nice.

Different than I expected but not unwelcome. "I can see it. But… I have people I care about."

Lisa nods mutely, before pulling me further in. Brian follows on our heels, hands in his pockets and gait relaxed.

At the end of the hall we're met with two large oaken doors, the engravings and styling so different from what we last saw you'd think they would belong more in some opulent palace than an underground base.

With the sound of gears clicking and heavy balances falling, the doors open wide to prove my theory was not far off. If the garden was meant to awe me, it's not even a tenth as impressive as the next room.

My jaw falls as I step past my two guides, eyes flicking every which way, unsure what to take in first. The room is decadent to an almost comical degree, with polished wooden floors and antique wall fixtures, the warm lighting feels like it should be on a victorian movie set.

The room splits vertically, with a grand staircase taking up a fair bit of the ground floor, it splits in twain halfway up with one set of steps going left and the other right. And yet, for all that atmosphere, the ceiling's what keeps my focus.

I bring my hand up to cover my mouth as I watch the display. The roof doesn't feel like it belongs here, I suppose that's par for the course for Ghostlab but the incongruity is especially noticeable when it's done in the same space.

The roof is a large glass dome, faceted and angular like a gem with bright silver and gold supporting the creases. And above that isn't the sky, but the ocean itself.

Sunlight streaks in through thick glass and suddenly the lights of the main room switch off, bathing the room in the soft, blueish light of the water. It forms streaky patterns over every surface and I gasp when a shark swims over us, skin rough and scarred.

"That's…" I swallow past the frog in my throat. "That's another illusion, right?"

"Yes and no," Brian answers me, walking over and pointing at the center of the atrium's roof. "The room's not actually shaped like this, I'd turn off the projector but it's a bitch to get that thing to start twice in the same day."

"So… it's not actually the ocean." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, it's not like the garden actually showed the sky. I've got to keep my head, no matter how real everything looks and feels, it can all be fake.

"Well, no. it is the ocean but it's just a live feed from a camera above us. We are underwater, just not obviously." I balk at that. I was willing to buy we were in some kind of sub basement for a major manufacturer but an actual underwater base is too far fetched for me to believe.

Lisa's lips curl as she tries to hold in her mirth as Brian speaks, shaking his head with his own kind of incredulity.

"I didn't believe it either, but our former boss had a penchant for big, costly James Bond-esque evil lairs." He takes a few steps in front of me, both arms raised like a showman and gesturing to everything here. "We did all of the renovations of course but he had maybe six or seven of these things scattered around the bay."

"That many?" I ask, trying to wrap my head around how much money that would take, how much manpower, and above all just how and why would anyone sink that much into something so dangerous.

A base like this says money, and the more money goes into something, the more of a trail there is. Coil sank tens of millions into what could be, at any point, a liability that would expose him at best and trap him at worst.

"Yep," Lisa answers, "he tried to scrub his files but…" she points both index fingers at her face, "info gathering specialty." Her hands slap against her sides as she grins. "This satellite base was meant to serve as a possible way to launch assaults on the Rig in case he was ever captured but as you can probably guess, he never got a chance to try that."

Her grin gets toothy as we hear another door open, this one behind the staircase. Despite myself, my shoulders tighten and that frog in my throat pops back up, I wish Ghostlab had been more public in the past, at least so I'd know who's coming to greet us.

I tilt my head at the sound that echoes around the stairs, an odd clicking against the hardwood that doesn't sound like any kind of shoe I can think of. I relax a little as the sound slows, it's definitely a kind of footstep but it sounds hesitant to me.

"Awww." I can't help but coo as an older labrador pokes his head around the corner, slightly milky eyes stare at Lisa and Brian as the dog trots out.

"Hey Acki," Lisa says, voice dipping into 'dog talk', "you know where Rachel is?"

The dog pants in place and leans into Lisa's hand but doesn't make a sound otherwise. A bit of my heart dies when I step forward and Acki stops panting, eyes fearful and focused on me completely. He whimpers and his tail ducks between his legs when I step back.

"Oh it's okay boy," Lisa gently whispers, turning the dog's head until it stares into her eyes, "it's okay, Taylor's a friend alright?"

"Don't take it personally," Brian tells me, stepping away from the dog "Rachel collects strays, Achilles here used to be an Empire dog until she got him, he just… new people are a sore spot for him."

"Yeah." A voice booms from the hall Achilles came down from. "They are."

The voice doesn't sound human in the slightest, it's gruff and gravelly, and sounds more like if a tiger or gorilla had the urge to speak. Deep, menacing, and with only those three words I find myself terrified.

The fear becomes paralyzing when the owner of the voice comes towards us, it sounds enormous but I can barely hear its footfalls. After a brief pause, it turns the corner too.

The creature is bipedal, lean, hairless, and maybe eight feet tall but it's hard to tell with how it has to hunch under the little inlet of the second story. It's two enormous eyes slit sharply as it stares at me.

I'm thankful I'm still processing my drink from earlier as one of the four arms wrapped around it's midsection unfolds, pointing a single claw at me.

"What…" the monster's voice drones like an angry wasp, "is she doing here?"

"Rachel," Brian starts, voice harder. "This is Taylor, the tinker Alec and Lisa picked up on the synaptic sweep. We told you this might be a possibility."

That thing is Rachel?!

The crea— she tilts her head, curling up a lip to show sharp teeth larger than my fingers.

"Was tinkerin', don't think I heard that." She says. She looks at me for a second before the rest of her arms unwind around her. I do my best from reacting as they all move independently, some scratching different spots on her skin, a pair popping their knuckles, and the uppermost rubbing the back of her head while the other points back down the hall.

It strikes me again how not human she is, I keep finding myself saying 'it' over and over again before I correct myself. I don't think anyone could blame me given the strange doglike ears and three arms on either side of the long torso.

"I should probably change back…" she says, voice softer and sheepish despite the harsh cadence. Lisa steps forward and grabs the lowest arm on Rachel's right side, holding the wrist of the alien claw gently.

"We'd appreciate it but I know getting in and out of your tinkering body takes a second."

"S'not that big a deal," Rachel replies, turning back around and slinking away, revealing a long whip-like tail that looks like a cross between a lizard's and a hairless monkey.

Her walk is alien and proves that while she can stand like a human, she prefers moving more animalisticly, lower arms wrapping back around like a belt while her front two act as another pair of legs.

Once she walks back out of sight, I release a breath I didn't know I was holding and Brian puts a hand on my shoulder, steadying me.

"Sorry," he apologizes. "Hyde, or Rachel out of… costume, can be a bit… well, you saw how she is." I nod stiffly, sucking in cold gasps as I try to calm my racing heart.

"What…" I look Brian in the eyes and swallow, "what's her specialty?"

"Which one?" A voice hollers from above us. My heart picks back up but to my surprise, the person looking down at us seems normal enough. She err, he(?) must be Alec.

He's… ridiculously pretty, more on the feminine side of androgyny, and with a shortish mop of black curls. He tilts his head as his eyes rack over me, pausing to smirk as he puts both hands on the railing.

He lifts himself up delicately, flipping upside down and holding the pose erect and with his back facing us. He turns his head enough to look at us and with a wink he pushes himself nearly two feet off the stonework.

He twirls in the air once, landing back on his hands with his front facing us, t-shirt falling over his face and showing off his physique.

Slowly, enough so that for a second I think he's fucked up, he starts to tilt forward over the rail, flipping three or so times until he lands daintly on both feet.

"Are you alright?!" I ask him, acrobat or not, that's gotta be at least ten feet and he didn't even bend his knees much. The thinner boy's face rises into a grin.

"I'm cool, you shoulda seen the shit I did back home. That was the kind of stuff that made gymnasts swoon."

"This, as you've probably guessed, is Alec," Lisa steps to our sides, "Alec, this is Taylor, she's the tinker you and I found and no, she's not mastered, I scanned her myself."

My greeting is cut off by my own shock.

"You scanned me?" I ask, anger tingeing my voice. They never said anything about scanning me, when did the- how did they-

"It's a built-in function with our veils." Lisa puts her arms up in a 'don't shoot' motion. "We're tinkers, after you get done protecting yourself physically, the second thing you should try to prevent is any Master looking to have a pet tinker."

"Trust me," Alec says, grabbing my attention again. His voice has switched to something unnaturally hollow. "You really don't want that sort've thing to happen." He turns around and gestures for the three of us to follow. "A lot of master powers can spread from those mastered and with a group like us, privacy's just another price we're willing to pay. Anything is worth that cost."

And like that, I'm conflicted. While Alec's tone was somehow perfectly monotone, I could tell this was a sore subject for him. At some point, I'd bet he was in the exact situation he's describing.

Still, I really don't like that they did something so… invasive. Even if I didn't notice it, they took a peek inside my head, the reason doesn't matter, they didn't tell me.

Alec complains with his body language, feet shuffling and face upturned to the ceiling as he speaks.

"Look, I know you'd have liked if we told you what the veil's do, but it takes a second to scan for abnormalities. Master powers are varied as hell and I'm sorry, but we're not in the business of tipping one of those cunts off."

I grit my teeth at the condescension, trying to run my head through the breathing exercises Emma forced me to do.

It doesn't work, those stupid lessons were just to keep me docile and complacent, quiet and unquestioning while she treated me like a fucking stooge.

I force my jaw to unclench and nod painfully, regardless of the condescension, this isn't my house, and I need to remember what game I'm playing.

Emma taught you that too, a traitorous voice whispers to me. A voice that sounds painfully like my sister- ex- former best friend.

"Okay." I tell him, my voice as steady as I can make it. "I can see your point."

"Whatever." Alec replies, brushing a hand my way as he turns to another set of doors. "If we're trying to get the new girl on board, should we start with the labs or the 'home away from home' schtick?"

"Labs," Brian answers for me. "Taylor's home seemed steady enough, in a neighborhood far from potential cape fights, it all seemed fine."

He brings a hand up to either side of his face, making his form flutter into pixels as he removes the veil.

"Lord, these are stuffy. I know they're supposed to be permeable, but I can't help but feel like I've got a pillow and a madman over me for the whole time." The young man laughs, and it hits me how young they all are. For all that Alec looks more like a doll than a boy and their wonder-land-like secret base at the bottom of the bay, these people are teenagers.

Hurt ones, by the acid words Lisa has for that villain, Coil, or from how Alec acted when Master influence was called into question, how it had to be addressed first thing with him.

"So," a new voice says, and I find myself twirling to see someone who must be Rachel, clad in nothing much than a bathrobe concealing her figure, not much than her hazel glare and stony expression leaking through, her figure still carrying some of the menace her previous monstrous shape held, "this the new Tinker? The metal type, I guess. Don't look like someone who gets dirty."

"Guess you don't feel like actually dressing today?" Lisa sighs loudly, her veil now in her hands. At that, Rachel merely grunts, before walking away, the slap of her naked feet on the white floors of the hall, disappearing in one of the many doors in front of us.

"And this was Ghostlab, everybody!" Alec loudly laughs, his voice mismatched with his body language in a jarring manner, much like a puppet with a sound chip hidden inside.

… Maybe this is less Pinocchio and more Lord of the Flies.

Author's Note:
Eyyy, another new story by yours truly.

And it's another idea I've had kicking around for a while. Gonna be honest though, updates are gonna be irregular at best, the start of this story was decided by votes in the Gaylor Convention Center Discord, if you don't know what that is, go to Inheritance.

Votes are irregular by nature, maybe I'll never pick up Webs we Weave again, maybe Lost in Each Other will win five times in a row, all I know is that Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes will update monthly and Stronger Together will update biweekly.

Next time On No Ghosts Left to Bury: Taylor mulls over her options and truly wonders if siding with a new team is for the best.

 

Alec Merceau/ Regent
December 3rd, 2010

Being careful, I slowly respool my intestines back inside myself, making sure to keep the muscles in my eyes locked lest I miss an imperfection in a blink. It’s time-consuming but important, your body relies on your gastrointestinal system as much as it relies on every other, if you think you can afford being lazy with the reintegration, you’re a damn idiot and will probably succumb to toxic shock right after your victory burrito.

Certain I’ve got my large intestines fitted in right, I let them settle and reacclimate as I reach my hands further up, resisting a groan as I pull out my liver. Damn thing takes up so much fucking space, nearly as big as a fucking football.

I suppose the size is warranted at least, it does do a lot. It makes our bile, our hormones and cholesterol, metabolizes plenty, activates our enzymes, and it stores plenty of essentials. Still, I could shrink the son of a bitch by half and do twice as many jobs.

Just looking at it makes me sick, the texture, the smell, the urge to throw it against the wall is overwhelming. But then we’d have to spend the night looking for a donor to bribe and honestly, doing that with the pancreas once was enough of a lesson.

Still, I wish I could go all out with it, there’s still so much of me that’s woefully organic. Most of my internal organs are original, barring the exception of my heart and lungs. Well, those two and my diaphragm I guess, but I didn’t really need that thing when the bellow system fired up.

The truth is, I’m grateful for Ghostlab, they gave me the tools I needed to really hack away at myself, ripping out my bones and installing fiberglass improvements, flaying my integumentary system and getting the nemean subdermal plates fused in, and of course, pulling out my muscles, ligaments, and tendons like cotton from a pillow and replacing them with my first neofiber design.

I’m grateful but… fuck, so much of me is human and I fucking hate it! A fair bit of my skin, all of my hair, and too many internal bits are all churning and spewing and excreting and it makes me want to take this scalpel in my hand and stab, stab, sta—

For a second, I let myself soak in the anger, the burning buzzing in my head still as ever clear as it first was. Dad can go fuck himself because he could never make me love this ugly flesh, but damn if he didn’t try.

But then my first implant takes hold, locking up all my voluntary movements and slowly instilling a forceful calm. No, not calm, calm could be manipulated, could be altered into something else, my first implant ushers in a wave of nothing, a hollow, aching numbness that would offer my father or my siblings nothing to alter.

I never gave the mesh of wire and circuitry in my limbic system a name, nothing clever or referential, it’s simply my first implant. The one I used to make myself silent to Cherie, without a scent to Samuel, but most importantly, invisible to father.

Just as slowly, my muscles unlock, my hand nearly dropping the scalpel as my fingers unfurl. I grab it quickly and set it back in its place by the operating table, not at all surprised that I apparently grabbed at it in my brief frenzy.

Deciding my liver looks healthy enough, I place it back in it’s spot, reaching for some biogel and liberally coating the thing before I lay back, as flat as I can be.

With just a thought, a whir sounds from my torso, two louder sounds around my armpits as my pectorals rise from their spots between my arms and chest, and several smaller almost chirping buzzes from my abdomen.

For a very brief second, looking up at the mirror above me, I look like a corpse in a mortician's office, the Y-shaped scar on my chest looking like the beginnings of an autopsy. And then, with a satisfying click, I seal up entirely, the lines that were once so prevalent now just another set of invisible seams over my skin.

Certain that I’m sealed up, my legs rise up with my head still flat on the table, eventually getting my own knees to press against my face before the momentum lets me flip over backwards. Getting my feet under me, I stretch my arms up to the ceiling, stretching until I feel every single vertebrae in my back pop like bubble wrap.

Not quite done with my stretch, I twist until I’ve got a solid view of the back of my legs and then, after righting myself, I bend over, my feet flat on the floor but my spine bending like a parabola until the base of my skull grazes my heels.

While a lot of me still fills me with disgust, in moments like these, when I’m double checking if everything’s optimal, I feel… something at how far along I’ve come.

I’m a hundred percent more flexible than the average person, putting me on par with the greatest contortionists on earth. I'm five hundred percent faster than most people, able to run at a solid forty miles per hour for at least three minutes but most importantly:

I crack my knuckles as I stand up, getting my fingers to grip the underside of the operating table and—

The metal groans as I lift it up over my head, my lips quirking up just enough that I bet my teammates could call it a smile. This thing’s gotta weigh at least eleven hundred pounds and if I felt like straining myself, I could probably do this one handed.

I set it down with a thunderous thud, the alloy of the table making my lab echo as I try to remember that stupid joke Gill always made: Better, Faster… eh, I’m sure it’ll come to me.

Pulling my hands off it, I sigh, fuck I hate this part. Holding it off for a few more minutes, I start to stretch all my limbs, popping everything that can pop (I kept the synovial fluid specifically because I liked the noise) and taking my sweet time doing it. With my final distractions done, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

It doesn’t take me more than a moment to find the switches in my head, and with the turn of a mental key… everything falls away. The hum of the ventilation, the sharp stench of antiseptics, even the feel of the stone beneath my feet, it all falls away.

Habituation, one of my greatest enemies, the tendency for people to ignore or become accustomed to repeated sensations or stimuli. Brian and Lisa think it’s stupid of me to get rid of it but they don’t know how vital your senses are until they’re strung along like taffy every. Single. Fucking. Day.

But worse than that… I put my hands back under the table and… the damn thing doesn’t budge an inch. I step forward, trying to get my knees under the table to get me more leverage and… nope, and now my hands hurt.

Stepping back, my shoulders lift and fall with heavy exhales, making me lean against the table as I catch my breath. When I finally get it under control, I stretch up again, knowing instinctively not to try my bendy trick again, I’m still plenty flexible but I’m not gonna be doing anything so uncanny again for a while,

I look around the room, the buzzy energy in my calves begs me to run but I know I’m gonna end up disappointed. Even if I had the room in here, I’m gonna be slow as fuck. Yep, my limiter’s in place and it sucks ass.

I turn to the extended door, the airlock we built into the barracks sticks out from the entrance maybe ten feet or so, enough room for all of us to fit, get decontaminated, and come and go in relative ease. I start walking to it and can’t help but notice the drag of my limbs, the once negligible effort becoming a pain in the ass.

Maybe I can go without the limiter for once? Show the bay that Regent is every bit the tinker his teammates are, maybe by catching Aegis’ punch and giving the kool aid drinker an uppercut to match?

The idea falls apart as soon as I think about it. As fun as that one moment might be, it’s not worth revealing the ace in the hole. We’ve spent a shit load of time and money, not to mention the fuck ton of programming Lisa and I have done to orchestrate my actions, to play the ace up our sleeve.

Maybe I should be happy with what I’ve let myself get away with, used to be, when Coil first scooped me up, that I had the limiter modify my behavior. The thing would pilot my body for me, make me laugh when it detected a joke, make me smile when I saw something traditionally joyful or cute, make me turn away when something was designated morbid, all that shit that most people do automatically.

Okay, maybe pilot is a bit too much of a stretch, but it might’ve well been piloting with how much it was fucking me up. You never know how difficult an appendectomy is until you have to do it blindfolded and retching against your will.

Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with that shit anymore, and I prefer it that way. Besides, it never really fooled my teammates anyway, maybe the reactions were too exaggerated? I’m not sure, sociology isn’t my strong point.

Whatever the reason they were able to see through it, I’m… pretty sure they prefer me like this. The airlock hisses open and I step inside, wondering not for the first time if I’m right about my fellow tinkers dispositions.

Maybe I’m imagining it, after all I see them less now that the limiter is slack, the ‘socialization’ protocol having gone dead with the behavioral modules. But on the other hand, the times I do see them now feel more… cordial I suppose.

Like all the times before, I don’t come up with a satisfying conclusion before the lock hisses closed behind me. With the doors closed behind me, I put my arms out to the side and let my sterilizers mist over my skin.

After a few seconds, when I’m sure it’s scrubbed me clean of all the bacteria and microorganisms roosting in my flesh, I let my arms fall as I head to a covered shelf laid into the wall.

The metal doors of it slide open to reveal my mostly black formal wear.

I slip on the finely stitched black trousers first, then the white button up shirt, the midnight velvet vest, an equally dark opera cloak and leather gloves, and finally, my dress shoes and top hat. With all those fitting on me nice and snug, I reach further into the shelf and grab the last bits of my ensemble.

A white "Phantom of The Opera"-style half mask, a bandolier of my spasm grenades, and a long ‘wooden’ cane. These three pieces of my costume are the only bits of tinkertech we’ve decided to let me bring out in the field.

Well, these pieces and my own body of course. Regent’s gotta look low-tech for the masses after all and what I’ve got on me does that job well enough. I can’t help but snort as the door into the rest of our base opens up.

What do the Protectorate files say about me again? Something long winded and stupid I’m sure, “capable of disrupting and halting nervous systems using a manton limited but adjacent injection of a trump effect on/in inanimate objects, used offensively by ejecting this effect in blah blah yada yada.”

Okay, that’s probably not the report exactly but I’m not that far off. Eh, I’ll ask Lisa about it if I can remember, she’s practically got the whole PRT database memorized.

Spending the walk to the atrium snickering about long winded bureaucracy, I make it to the atrium in good time. I don’t need my limiter off to hear the commotion down the hall though, judging off the base… yep, that’s definitely Brian but who’s he arguing with?

I even stop slapping my cane against the floor as I slow down, craning an ear to better eavesdrop.

“—-For fuck’s sake, would you just listen to me?!” Brian shouts, his Night Father voice modulator off. “Go home, it’s not safe here!”

Ah, that checks out. Aisha is here.

“I’ve dicked around in here loads of times bro, now’s not gonna be any different.”

I wait behind the corner, leaning against the wall as I wait for things to heat up. They always do. I don’t know what it is about her that gets the leader’s glow in the dark panties in a twist, but it’s pretty damn funny to hear our normally stoic friend blow his fucking top at his sister’s nonchalance.

“You haven’t been here alone Aisha and if you expect me to give you full reign of this place then you couldn’t be more wrong!”

Oh boy, things are getting good, fuck, can I sneak into the kitchen from here? Get some popcorn and—

“Brian,” Lisa interrupts, definitely about to ruin the fun. “The labs are locked—” she lies, “she’s not an infant—” she might as well be, “and we’re on a pretty stiff timetable, we need to get going before Alec tries to sneak into the kitchen.”

I let my head fall back against the concrete wall for a moment, my top hat thudding hollowly as I flash double fingers to the air.

“Fuck you Lise!” I shout down the hall, grabbing at my cane and actually turning down the hall, making sure my hat is in place as I thumb the brim. “Fucking ruining my fun, where do you get off?”

“Never,” the information tinker answers sarcastically, “You’ve got your shit?”

I answer her by shaking my cane and belt, the perfectly spherical grenades clinking against each other like pots and pans.

Lisa doesn't look impressed and I count it as a job well done. She's dressed in her usual sleep clothes, fuzzy pajama pants and a black camisole.

To her right is Night Father, the big man himself done up in his full costume, cyberpunk-Nazgul chic. And to his right is Aisha, sitting on the floor and looking up at him like a particularly petulant toddler.

"We're not leaving until she gets up and I lock the door behind her!" Brian finishes the point by pointing down at his sister, the finger curling back to form a clenched fist when she just falls flat against the floor, scrolling through her phone.

He looks like he's about to go on another tirade but then the black of his visor pulses a deep purple and he straightens up, a growl working its way up his throat before he strangles it.

"We've got to go," he says, heading for the garden and shouting over his shoulder. "This isn't over Aisha, we'll be talking about this when we get back!"

Lisa and I follow our leader out the door and with a quick look behind me, I spy Aisha's nonverbal answer, a stiff middle finger waving proudly.

"Y'know," I start, falling into step with my fellow tinkers. "You saying that just ensures she's not going to be here when we get back, right?"

Brian doesn't answer me and that confirms several things, one, he's way too angry to verbally spar, two, he definitely knows what his words are doing, and three, I'm gonna have to rely on Lisa to get me up to speed.

Probably knowing because of the fart her sensors listen in on, the girl picks up on my thoughts and starts to speak.

"Rachel's already on scene, I'm not positive on what she's bringing in the field this time. She didn't tell me, again" she says and I tilt my head in thought. Our wettest tinker's (I should probably keep that nickname to myself) meat mechas need a lot more set up than the rest of our shit.

“It’s gotta be the Packmaster suit right? She’s got the most riding on this score, it would make sense she take her best shit with her.” I offer, remembering the only other time we got to see that suit in action.

A hulking mass of muscle and bone, sharpened claws and lashing tongues, Rachel wasn’t all that big in that thing, maybe the size of a minivan but she cut quite an imposing figure, prowling like a monster in a folktale. The Packmaster is a formidable foe one on one but that’s not the point of it, we wouldn’t call it that if it was.

When she’s plugged into that thing, her lungs produce a powerful mutagenic that infects all living canines in a close vicinity. Sounds dangerous as hell but she’s pretty fucking smart about it, the mutagen only activates if a genetic marker is present in the dog.

A marker that’s only in her hounds specifically.

“Unlikely,” Lisa rebukes, “Packmaster’s good for a long fight but this is a heist, not a raid. Rachel’s probably going with the Jackal.”

“The Jackal?” I ask, incredulous. “Thought Rachel said she was going to melt that thing down after last time.”

The thing was fast as hell of course but it lacked stopping power, which is kind've a big fucking deal when that's really all Rachel cares about.

"I talked her out of it," Lisa explains, "she put a lot of effort into it and I'm sure with a few tweaks it'll be just as good as any of her other suits. Besides the Jackal's strong enough to—"

“You’re both wrong,” Brian says, the swish of the garden’s doors opening up in front of him. “Rachel’s going in light this time.”

“How light?” Lisa tries her best to keep the cringe out of her voice but she doesn’t quite manage it, a wince on her face as the artificial sun of the gardens beams down on us. Brian sighs before answering, obviously hearing the same worrying I am.

“A bandolier of light mutations and a single transmogrification vial.”

And that actually gets me to wince, that’s not light, that’s fucking nothing. Sure, the mutations are good, they’ll boost her up to Aegis strength and that transmogrifier will boost the fuck out of those enhancements but that only does so much.

Hyde’s no Labrat, without her flesh mechs, those mutations will slough off and leave her defenseless in under ten minutes. Ten minutes… fuck, that’s cutting things really fucking close. What’s worse is I’m pretty sure The Protectorate knows Hyde has a hard limitation, and if she’s not already transformed when a fight begins, they'll just draw it out.

I put my cane over my shoulders, holding on to either end of it as we start to head up to the surface, the dark abyss of an entryway carrying our steps like we’re in a mine.

Getting a new, very shaky variable to the plan makes us fall silent, the veil-tech in me and Night Father’s visor activates the second we breach the hatch, fake bodies of light overlaying our costumes as we stand in the dilapidated structure around us.

Brian closes the hatch behind us, hesitating for a moment before he decides to leave it unlocked. I suppose that's good for safety; wouldn't want Aisha to be stuck down there in case of a fire.

I mean, I doubt we'd find another nerd poker anytime soon.

That done, Brian leads us around the warehouse's side, temporarily breaking the illusion of his avatar by hitting a few hidden buttons on his sleeve. With a dazzling shimmer, I squint against the harsh light, our van revealed.

“We need to get a better ride,” I say, heading over to the passenger side.

“It moves the shroud well enough, that’s all it needs to do.” Brian answers, hopping in the front. His belt almost snags on the steering wheel, an old, mottled piece of leather poking out from the main circle. I don’t know why he bothers with that thing, one of the first bits of leisure Lisa made was a self driving car. Wheel’s fucking pointless now.

As I throw open the passenger side door, Lisa beats me to it, using the front seat as a stepping stone on her way to the back. I roll my eyes, for something that ‘moves the shroud well enough’ I don’t see why it had to take up the whole back to do that. Okay, not the whole back, there’s enough room for two back there with the thing, three if they squeezed.

Watching Lisa climb over the seat, I snort, watching the odd hesitation in her hands and feet as she finds footholds.

“Y’know,” I tell her, “The veil’s pretty fucking good, could fool just about anyone. The illusion breaks if you're focusing so much on not stepping on your stupid cloak."

Lisa finds her seat just as I finish speaking, turning to me with a withering glare as she replies.

"It's not—" she's interrupted as her form swirls away, the skin of her face replaced with the faceted bubble helmet of her costume. She continues in the same instant, girlish voice dropping into a modulated androgynous growl. “—stupid!”

It used to be weird hearing Spyglass’ intimidating tone, the slight echoing din of her voice building in on itself in a pitched-shifted snarl. What can I say? Lisa did a damn good job making her cape persona.

Underneath the bubble helm is a large… I don’t know what to call it, cape maybe? Well, it’s sort've like a cape I suppose, it covers most of her back but also loops around to shield her neck. That, and where a normal cape stays on the back, this one extends in two long strips down her front, starting at her shoulders and billowing down in large purple lines.

The suit beneath her cape is a mixture of green and black, a heavy chestpiece both protects her and hides the array of computational tech on her person. The armor looks alright for what it is, steel and kevlar over a loose metal frame but there’s a bit too many imperfections for me to love the design.

I just don’t like the segmented look of her torso, I know that’s for maneuverability and comfort and all but everytime I see a flash of gold circuitry, I feel an overpowering urge to push it back under the metal.

The rest of the costume is fine I suppose, black gauntlets and boots with a green hazmat style bodysuit covering her completely. It looks fine from a design standpoint but as a tinker… I better not say anything.

Purple and green with a bubble helm… something about the design’s always made a memory itch in my brain but I’ve never been able to find out why.

“Whatever you say,” I tell her, getting in on the passenger side and buckling in swiftly. “Just saying, ‘tween you, me, boss, and Hyde, we might as well be calling ourselves the trenchcoat thieves.”

My jab gets both of my teammates to react, Brian groaning as he puts us in reverse and Lisa kicking the back of my seat.

“Do not,” Brian stresses, his own voice modulation booting up “call us that in the field.”

I brush him off with a gesture and use my other hand to rest my chin on, staring out the window as Brian pulls us on to the main road.

“Alright, alright,” I say, “trench coats have bad connotations nowadays, I getcha, how bout ‘the duster fella’s?’”

“You shouldn’t throw stones,” Spyglass says, “when you live in a glass house.”

“I don’t live in a glass house,” I say, putting as much confusion into my voice as possible. “I live in a hole in the ground.”

The deliberate misinterpretation gets her to growl at me, the sound coming out as a loud and garbled whine high enough that Rachel’s dogs would start whimpering. I’m about to move on to her pistols, just another thing for me to poke fun at, when I think better of it.

I’ve only known Ghostlab for the better part of a year but I’ve picked a sort’ve sixth sense when it comes to annoying my team. I can just feel that if I say one more thing, Brian will turn his head and tell me to knock it off.

And without me to add some variables, our usual pattern of banter picks up, that is to say, the long stretch of silence where neither of them talk to me. The silence sucks ass but I know it’s probably because both of these dorkasses are getting into their personas. I withhold a groan as I lean back in my seat, my neck lulling bonelessly to face the window. I understand the whole cloak and dagger stuff is important, especially for tinkers, but I swear, that stick is so far up their ass it could help them floss.

Usually the quiet isn’t that annoying but that’s mainly because our jobs tend to be further away but I’ve got the heist practically tattooed in my brain. There’s not gonna be enough time for them to really sink into it before we’re there.

And, sure as clockwork, I find Brian parking us in an alley much too soon.

Cars go down the street in front of us, people dodge each other on the sidewalks and before I can get a good look at possible vantage points, Brian bumps his knuckles against my shoulder. In his hands are two metal disks, his obuls.

I sigh and take one of them, clipping the damn thing on the inside of my collar as I take off my top hat, running a hand through my hair as my heart rate quickens. I fucking hate teleporting, all my tech needs to recalibrate after and I feel sick like a dog when it’s happening.

Still, I suppose the literal get of jail free card is worth it. Besides, we’ve only had to run from fights a handful of times and I can’t see the pep squad realistically being the reason shit goes wrong.

With the device in place, I don my hat and look across the street into the alley on the other side. Rachel stands there, dressed in her full Hyde get up, which isn’t as much as it used to be.

Her once duster is more of a vest now, the thing used to reach the floor but I think one of her tailed forms ripped that bit off when she was too happy. Other than that, the rest of her ‘costume’ isn’t that well defined. It’s just her nature as a Changer Tinker I guess, clothes have to be disposable and this time is no different.

Some skinny jeans she’ll tear through and a shirt she probably bought on the way here are her only other clothes, she’s not even wearing shoes right now.

The only thing on her that screams ‘tinker’, is the leather bandolier serving as a belt, with half a dozen small vials hanging on it and one big flask clipped to her side. She catches us staring and after a moment, she lifts up her own obul.

Night Father gives her a nod and the grin she shoots back is downright feral, her teeth having sharpened from so many transformations that I doubt they’d be identified as human. She can’t move her hands fast enough, one goes up to her ear and clips the obul into her piercing, the other goes down to her belt and somehow manages to grab all the vials.

With her obul in, she uncorks each vial quickly, downing the multicolored liquids as fast as possible. I know she has some kind of color system for it but right now I just see four red as blood, one that looks like glittery gold, and a final that might be blue or green but I can’t tell.

She’s not halfway done with the red vials before I start to see their effects.

Her pupils grow until there isn’t any sclera left, the amber darkens into something golden and the blacks of them split down the middle, splitting like tigers’. Her nails extend, the skin surrounding the nail bed retreats, becoming rough and leathery as she flexes the fingers, the bones in her distals make the flats of her nails pop as the claws become a part of her skeletal network.

Her shoulders broaden as her whole body starts to grow, the seams in her jeans split along the sides when the muscles refuse to be contained. The muscles in her face contort strangely, becoming harsher as her nose extends outward. Her eyebrows connect as the bone beneath her forehead becomes thicker, veins visible and pulsing down.

She downs the next two vials as one and I don’t even see what they do before she grabs at the big flask, uncaring that plenty of people walking by have stopped ignoring her. She uncorks it and a green liquid splatters along her arms, glowing like radioactive neon before she brings the flask to her lips.

She holsters it and wipes at her mouth just as we start to hear some heavy trucks come our way.

With the transmogrifier empty, Hyde starts to make her appearance in earnest, fur sprouts all along her arms and legs, her bloody red hair flying backwards as it suddenly grows a foot in length. I swear I can hear her spine pop from here as it grows, her whole body turning into a grotesquely muscled hunchback.

That’s her specialties in action, her first: the harvesting and addition of foreign DNA and her second: the expansion and augmentation of latent DNA. I’ve never heard of a tinker with two before but I’m not Night Father, I won’t deny Spyglass’ tech and predictions. If the know-it-all blonde says Rachel has two specialities then I’m not gonna deny it.

Still, I don’t know what kind of DNA could produce the creature she’s become. She’s about twice the size of a gorilla, with red hair over the whole of her body and a long, whip-like tail extends from the base of her spine, heading far behind her into the alley.

But then, as her concoctions really take hold, I start to see something else.

She grows a little bit more, maybe half the size of a bus before she lands flat on all fours, her spine too long to support being bipedal. Her face elongates into a snout and maw, her teeth extending until they’re far too big for her mouth.

Now, instead of a hodgepodge of random animal traits, I clearly see a bloodied wolf.

And just in time too as Night Father raises his hand up, his thumb holding down his pinkie finger, leaving three digits up. He silently counts them down until there’s nothing left and with a pump of his fist, a wall of light erupts from my right.

The wall is nearly transparent, with nothing but a slight lilac shimmer lighting it up. The glow is dim enough that I doubt it can be seen out here and within a split second, the wall advances forward.

The razor thin edges of it slice into the sidewalk and road, only stopping when they reach Rachel’s left. And almost as soon as the roadblock finishes forming, our convoy screeches to a halt, the front of it nearly slamming into the wall of light and then bumping against it when the truck in back rear ends the first.

The sound is cacophonous but it doesn’t seem to bother either of my teammates, with Brian already shouting orders as he opens his door, Lisa following after him.

“Okay,” he says, not even looking over his shoulder as I hop out, slamming the door behind me. “That wall will fizzle in less than a minute, we need to disable the drivers, check the backs for trackers, and get the fuck out of dodge, got it?”

We wait by the alley for just a moment, not quite stepping into the road as Night Father turns to his breaker state, the shimmering twilight of his form only interrupted by a burst of indigo. The light fades and I fumble to catch the black .38 revolver he’s handed me. With the gun in my hand, Night Father darts into the air, his form halting for a tenth of a second before he vanishes behind the second truck.

“Regent?” Spyglass repeats, impatience in her voice.

“I’m on it,” I reply, my ears still ringing as I turn off the gun’s safety. Stepping out on to the sidewalk, I take aim at the elderly truck driver shaking his head, both of his hands pushing down an airbag as I stare down the sights.

I fire and he must feel the bullet lightly graze the back of his neck, my shot threading the needle perfectly between his seat and nape. He leans back, his pupils almost look like pin pricks his eyes are so wide, staring at me like I’m the reaper himself. I’ve limited myself a lot when it comes to the field, but I’d have to be a fucking idiot to dial my aim any further back than olympian. As long as I don’t make too many shots, Protectorate should file it under reckless luck.

I rush towards the truck, using the tire as a step as I hop up on to the hood, leveling my gun at him a second time before speaking.

“Get the fuck out of the car!” I shout, repeating myself when all he does is flinch. “Do it! Right fucking now!”

Rachell lumbers out of her hiding spot, her enormous form scraping the sides of the alley as she bolts for the back of the furthest truck.

I hop on the other side of the engine just as the driver gives into my demands, opening the door and letting me grab at the collar of his shirt. I use it to throw him to the road, he bolts the second my back is to him but, I don’t care. It’s probably better that he leaves, unwanted civilians seem to have a knack for making themselves hostages.

With him gone, I start my search for any trackers in the cockpit, looking under the seats first, back of the headrest next, and then moving on to the glovebox and sun visors. It takes me too damn long, maybe a minute in and of itself and true to his word, Night Father’s roadblock fizzles out into nothing.

My paranoia doesn’t let me out of there until I’ve checked everything three times, even the bag of beef jerky the driver probably got from a rest stop. But once I’m done, I hop out, my ankles stinging from the drop as I immediately hoof it to the back.

Spyglass has already got the door slid up, her helmet bathing the interior with a bright blue light, a single darker line cuts through the light, swiping past all the crates and various packed loot horizontally then vertically.

She doesn’t spare me a glance, only pointing at the far back right as she shouts.

“We’ve got one,” she tells me, “It’s hidden inside the hollow tube of an IV stand, get to it already. It’s the only IV on that side.”

I take a moment to ‘catch my breath’ (pretend my lungs need to do that) and that finally gets the information tinker to look at me, the facets in her helmet turning an angry red as she speaks.

“Get to it, now!” Her voice warbles into a harsher pitch, playing back on itself and repeating the now in an echoey interval. Externally, I flinch and hop to it, nearly stumbling over my own feet as I push myself into the back of the truck, internally, I’m rolling my eyes.

I fucking hate pretending to be the lackey, the one who’s gotta go here, do this, and all the while looking like anyone of my teammates could shove a bomb down my throat. But, needs must I guess, Night Father’s the quiet but stern leader, Hyde’s the barely controlled feral muscle, Spyglass is the no nonsense second in command, and Regent is their lackey with a circumstantial but oddly useful power.

It’s annoying as hell in the moment but the afterparty of a job well done is always worth the light verbal abuse. My half mask’s eye glows the softest blue for an instant as Spyglass sends me her info, making the single IV stand in the corner glow through it’s packaging.

The edge of my cloak catches on a crate and the limiter makes me too weak to just yank it off, forcing me to step back and continue onwards. Once I squeeze through the boxes and saran wrapped equipment, I stand in front of the IV I’m locking for.

I grab the top of it and start twisting, slowly unthreading it from the base until I hear something start to slink down the interior.

The tracker falls into my awaiting palms, a little black cylinder with a switch and small antenna sticking out of the top. I’m about to switch it off when I pause, would a non-tinker know how this thing works? Would it look suspicious if I asked for help?

“Yo Glass?” I shout back, turning to the front of the truck and stepping out behind a crate. “How do I—”

My heart beats a bit faster as I stare at Lisa, now in the truck with one of her pistols unholstered and aimed right at me. Even knowing that thing doesn’t do anything to my shit (or organics in general for that matter) the human thing to do is flinch, which Lisa gives me just enough time to do before she pulls the trigger.

The tracker in my hands fizzles and sparks before abruptly catching fire, the components within fried into a mess of useless silicon. I drop it and whip my hand back and forth, trying to shake away a pain I don’t feel.

“Fucking hell Glass,” I whine, “Next time do you think you could warn a guy?”

Lisa doesn’t sound the least bit apologetic as she looks over the truck’s interior.

“You’re too slow, Night Father already got his tracker disabled and I swear if—”

“Ghostlab!” Someone shouts outside of the truck and both me and Lisa slide ourselves near the edge of it to spy who’s calling us out.

At first, we don't see anyone and for a moment I'm worried whoever it is has some kind of cloaking tech or ability when two fliers swoop in.

Or rather, one flier swoops in, the other guy is being held by his armpits when he crests over the roof of the next truck.

Aegis lets Triumph go and the leader of the Wards rolls with the fall, elegantly coming to a halt in the gap between us and the back truck.

He stands to his full height, his lion headed helmet catching the sunlight and gleaming in a way that would probably give a PR shooter a fit of ecstasy. Me, I barely restrain a laugh - how can someone not look ridiculous when carried like that?

"Come along quietly and I promise, you will not be—"

His order is cut off when Rachel prowls forward from our left, a lamppost held within her teeth to bash the Wards with.

Triumph leaps over the sweeping blow but Aegis is left unprepared as the sign arcs upward, narrowly missing the hood of the truck and hitting him square on his probably-square chin.

The Wards' flying Brute takes it as best he can, soaring backwards from the blow as Rachel chases after him, her makeshift club still in her maw.

And then the red brick reorients himself faster than I would've expected, grabbing Hyde's weapon the next time she swings.

The two of them take their fight further down the street and me and Lisa are met with the rapidly adapting captain of the local little league.

Triumph gets into a fighting stance, his arms out but bent at his sides. I remember Lisa said something about it improving air flow, that his power is almost entirely dependent by how much oxygen he can force in his lungs.

I remember thinking that I could improve it, that I could shrink his heart and ribs, give him something like an organic forge blower but then I remembered I'd have to replace his nervous system to do it. People tend to be prickly about that.

"Spyglass," he addresses, voice stern and authoritative, "I am order—"

"Oh save it," Lisa tells him, stepping out of the truck and bending her knees just a little as she starts to approach him. "Do you really think we give a shit?"

She flips her cape back and puts her hand on her holster when Triumph shouts.

The sound is cacophonous and if it weren't for the tympanum I replaced months ago, I'm sure my eardrums would've ruptured. Irritatingly, it does more damage to my haircut.

Lisa just walks forward, her costume barely ruffled by the sound wave as Triumph takes a step back.

"No wonder you got held back," Lisa mocks, her whole body starts to twitch like an overwound tin soldier as her helmet displays a playback of the scream from her point of view. "Shoot first, ask questions later, that might work for the cops but aren't you supposed to be a hero?"

Triumph doesn't respond to the verbal jab, instead he just sucks in another breath and I clamp my hands over my ears, unsure if my tech can take a second louder shriek. I find quickly that my action was warranted as the truck itself begins to shake with the noise, the tiny bits of glass ware within threatening to crack with their resonance.

Chancing a look past my cover, I see that Triumph is backing away, doing a pretty impressive hop up onto the truck’s roof with his middling superstrength. I just barely manage to hide my snort as I lean back down, eyes fixed in front of me.

The trick Lisa’s pulled is pretty dirty, but I doubt anyone could blame her if they were in the same position. The actual Lisa is prone behind the crate opposite me, and a small antennae-like device pokes out of her right wrist and angles a flashing light out of the truck’s entrance. Her bubble helm flashes bright blue and purple, her eyes probably bouncing through her hud to keep the illusion nice and sellable.

Of course, somehow she can do all that, and according to my mask, send us a message. A bright blue text flashes inside my vision: WARDS CHANNEL DECRYPTED

Instantly, a voice crackles to life in my ear, the same voice I heard trying to be tough a few seconds ago.

“This is Triumph requesting immediate reinforcement, Aegis, myself, Clockblocker, and Vista are all engaged with Ghostlab on Ray White Road, Spyglass has proven herself completely resistant to my powers, I need support.”

Before anyone competent can take the horn, Clockblocker feels the need to speak up.

“I’ve got eyes on him,” he says, contradicting the pronouns Triumph laid out, “Vista can get me in and out.”

“Clockblocker,” Triumph stresses, “Focus on Hyde, Aegis and I can—”

“I’ve got this man,” I shake my head and grip my cane looser, letting it slide down my palm until I can hold it nearly by the base. This is the exact dream scenario Lisa came up with in projections and I’ll be damned if I don’t take it.

The space to the left of the false Spyglass twists and I’m sure if the latest Ward had bothered to get confirmation from his leader, he’d see that his target’s left arm twists into an Escher painting. Maybe he does realize it, realize that something’s wrong, that the pint sized Shaker on the rooftops wouldn’t be able to stretch and twist something if it wasn’t inorganic.

But whether he realizes it or not, his arm is already pushing forward and through the hologram and I’m already stepping off the truck and jabbing him with my cane.

Instantaneously, his nervous system locks him out, all of his muscles left flexing as he’s paralyzed in the middle of the street. Lucky for him, his footing was stable enough that he doesn’t fall over as I twirl my cane, sure that his eyes are locked on me through the faceplate.

“Not so fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?”

“Goddamnit!” I hear Triumph both on top of the truck and in my ear piece as he turns away from us, probably going to help Aegis in his two on one. “Clockblocker’s down, I need support now or I'm going to pull us out.”

The threat to his superior officer makes me feel all warm inside but then whoever’s on console has to come in and screw it up.

“Acknowledged,” someone says on the other end of the channel, “Kid Win and Adonis are on route and will be there in twenty seconds.”

Fuck.

I look over at Spyglass and though she doesn’t nod, the facets on her helmet light up in a bright green checkmark, the display made odd by my one unmasked eye not seeing the wavelengths. Hooray for us, our timetable just moved up.

Another textbox comes up in my face as I look up to the roof above me, just barely catching Vista’s arm before she warps a water tower to hide her.

‘HELP NIGHT FATHER, GIVE HIM YOUR CANE’

While not a bad idea, I question it internally. On the one hand, I’m 90% sure PRT files say I can only do my paralysis trick when I’m holding the cane and while breaking from that mold might add a bit of mystery to my persona, it’s also one hell of a breadcrumb. I might as well be screaming that I’m secretly a Tinker.

Of course, I keep those thoughts to myself, Regent doesn’t argue after all.

I duck to the truck’s left, hiding myself as best I can from Vista’s sightline. Of course, such a thought is horrendously stupid when you actually know who the fuck Vista is. For an eleven year old, the Shaker has more power than most capes would ever know what to do with.

Luckily for us though, the PR(T) seems more content with forcing her into reading stories for kindergartners than letting the girl actually flex her power. It’s a real bonehead decision when you remember the girl in question can make a single step into a lethal fall or twist a gun’s barrel so that she never misses.

Thankfully, the world doesn’t stretch before me and I’m able to get to the back of the second truck mostly unhampered.

My leader zips around the air, his skeletal form closing in every few seconds and trying to get some hits in on the flying Brute. I guess his guns turned out to be useless, I can’t imagine they’d ever be a good option with Vista on overwatch.

Rachel is right above me, her front paws doing their best not to step on me as she bites at the air, her lamppost nowhere to be found. Her body provides me the perfect cover and with their shit for brains leader leaving me and Glass unchecked, no one should know I’m here.

I reach into my coat and pull out the .38.

Aegis should be fine, I doubt this could kill him, even if I used the five remaining shots right up against his temple. My finger wraps around the trigger and I take careful aim—

Right when a bolt of lightning zaps through Night Father, past Aegis, and into me.

I just barely catch a flash of red and gold before my eyes close shut against my will, my whole body teetering over and the gun falling from my hand as I seize on the road.

Kid's laser guns are not light based, is the thought that hits me, they're more like Brandish' power, the one outlier. The lightning, it’s staying with me somehow, it isn’t going to ground like it should, instead, it keeps— it keeps—

“Confirmed hit,” I can hear Kid Win in the comms before he abruptly turns into static. Lisa screams something in my earpiece but I only catch the latter half.

“—a trick, they’ve locked me out!”

I can barely get my eyes open when something lands beside me. It’s hard to look at, even in the clear light of day but it’s a mostly transparent blob, a mucus like membrane with something foamy on the inside.

“I’vE gOT ReGEN—T” It gurgles before two slimy pseudopods reach out for me. I swing my cane at it and watch in disgust as the slimeball grabs onto it with another new limb. My grip on the weapon is weak and Adonis yanks it out of my hands before I can switch any activator on it.

A heat gnaws at me as I watch the tinkertech get absorbed into his main mass, I might have half a dozen more of them back home but no Tinker likes to see their work taken apart. It dissolves in his body like an amoeba, first turning a silvery mirror white and then cracking into dust and debris.

Three arms seems to be too much for the Ward to handle and with his focus split for the moment, I kick him as hard as I can and scramble for the gun. It isn’t easy reaching for it, even with it only a few feet away, my body jolts and spasms uncontrollably, almost all of my internals send my brain warnings, arrhythmia, gastrointestinal murmurs, one lung is breathing out of sync with the other, and all of the neofiber muscles are lighting up in so much pain, my limiter had to pull back just to keep me conscious.

But I make it to the gun all the same.

My fingers wrap around it just as one of Adonis’ ‘hands’ slithers up my foot. I roll over and fire the whole clip into his face, or whatever the fuck passes for his face. For an instant, I think I’ve done something, he shrinks down more and more but it’s only when I’m out of shots that I realize I wasn’t doing anything.

I can’t reach my earpiece, my hand jolts away from it whenever I try so I just scream as loud as I can, hoping that Rachel and the others can hear me.

“He’s in the fucking road!”

The second the words are out of my mouth, a hand about the size and width of the truck takes up the whole right side of the road, the fingers of it outstretched and wrapping themselves around Rachel’s upper body.

My monstrous teammate is stuck, the newest Ward having enough forethought to lift her up a bit further than her legs can reach. Rachel scratches at the hand of asphalt but her claws barely leave gauges in it before Adonis shoots himself out of it, his globulous form combining with a streetlight.

The light bulges and ripples with the new addition and suddenly, an arm sprouts out of it, no longer than a normal human's. But then another arm forms out of the palm of the first hand, and so on and so forth, as it tries to grab for Night Father.

The attack doesn’t work obviously and as the electricity finally vacates itself from my body, I shake my head, Lisa’s data wasn’t complete.

“Fuck…” I reach for my earpiece and head underneath the truck. “I think we’re scrubbed, Hyde’s down and whatever Kid hit me with isn’t doing me any favors.”

“Damnit…” Night Father growls, the photons in the air making his voice come out as a shrill excited pitch. “‘Glass, are there any alternatives?”

“One,” Lisa answers, the sound of her pistol firing overlaying her voice. “A new arrival, she says she saw the Posse closing in. I lent her some tech, everyone, get ready to bounce on her signal.”

“The fuck is the signal supposed to be?” I ask as I poke my head out from cover, watching as parts of Hyde slough off and fall on to the road in steaming gunks. The wet Tinker is shrinking but most of the biomass she generated is just falling off instead of being reabsorbed into her body. What I can see of her is a twitching, shaking mess.

The only good part of losing our muscle is that she’ll be small enough to get out of Adonis’ grip.

“You’ll know it when it happens,” Lisa tells me just as I watch the manhole cover between the trucks shudder and spin. My eyes go wide as a mechanical spider lifts itself out of the sewers, maybe three dozen more of them crawling up and over each other as the cover’s pushed to the side.

The bot is simplistic but I recognize the thing immediately, it looks like what Lise sent me after our latest pitch, the little drone that Taylor girl made to keep surveillance over her house. Only, this thing isn’t little by any means. I bet it’s closer in size to me than a beehive.

And the swarm just keeps coming, dozens at first but then the alleyways and storm drains start to leak them out too, hundreds, maybe even thousands of them flood the street and the Wards start to disengage, the sheer numbers of their new opponents must make someone from on high order them out.

Aegis grabs for Triumph just as I’m getting myself out from under the truck. Rachel lands beside me, enough mess on her that she doesn’t look too indecent as she bolts for the truck. Night Father heads for the truck in front of us, the one Lisa’s getting out the back of, when my mask flashes with new info.

The drones aren’t real, I mean, a few of them are but there’s maybe only half a dozen of those and each one is holding a holoprojector on its back. The ruse makes me snort, man, the Wards are gonna look like idiots for this.

I buckle myself into the passenger seat just as Rachel gets the truck moving, a feral grin on her face as we start heading out. Clockblocker must’ve been picked up at some point because I don’t hear or feel a thunk, a squash, or a pop as we start heading down the road.

Brian’s van pulls out of the alleyway behind us and The Wards must realize they’re being had as we drive right on through the swarm of mechanical mayhem, the metal illusion falling into a pixelated maelstrom as we glide in.

But, by the time they’re mobilizing in the mirror, Brian’s tech flashes and we’re at the end of the road. My stomach does flips and the next half a dozen teleports don’t make the nausea any easier, even when the trucks finally stop.

I find myself the first of the group to stumble out, having my body out of my control and so… offline… for the first time in ages is making me extremely uncomfortable, enough that I nearly fall flat on my face – that is, before I'm caught.

"H-hey there…" the voice has a certain tremble to it, but it's deeper than I remember it being, "... are you okay?"

Taylor Hebert, the maybe-member, holds me (with surprising strength given how wiry her arms feel) up, looking like a wounded deer behind her large aviators. Oh yeah, aviators and scarf combo beneath a gray hoodie and leathers. I wonder if she's going for the boss if she's playing his buttons so much.

"I'm fine, ma mignonne," I sigh, slipping a bit and balancing myself on my feet again. "Don't sweat it."

And I must say – as she smiles, I cannot help but smile back, just as Lisa sprints out and tackle-hugs the both of us.

"We did iiiiiiit!!"

Boy does it sound weird with that filter on.

~
SleepyBird’s Note: Hey hey guys, I hope you like the new chapter. I know there’s a bit of confusion with the Taylot but there is a reason happening under the hood. Also, this story is updated randomly, through a voting system on the Gaylor Discord (If ya want an invite, idk, go look at the latest chapter of Inheritance [And also, just like, read Inheritance, it’s good shit])

I hope you enjoyed the accompanying art as much as I enjoyed drawing it.

Atlasofremembrance: Atlas here. I'm the guy whose wild and implausible ideas make up some of the details of this story, and sometime writes when the SleepyBirb is too sleepy. You'll know me mostly from quests that tried to go somewhere but never got there and a couple fics on Ao3, but I've mostly been Sleepy's beta reader and editor.

This chapter was mostly Sleepy - and it shows, it's great, I can't write Jean-Paul like she does. We have many more Tinkersiders tales to tell, and this is the proper start of their epic tale of being gay and doing crimes (laugh). Thankful for every reader, I'm signing out!