Upon This Star (Worm Semi-SI CYOA-based)

[Dariusz]

So I was thinking that her redirecting was what was killing her cloths but the new suite thing kind threw that out the water.

 

[Swordchucks]

"What? How?" Flashbang asked, startled.

"It doesn't matter, I have a spider on all four people inside and they are moving around like crazy." It was annoying that they had been tipped off somehow. Had someone in law enforcement made a call? Had the simple fact that the Protectorate was scrambling been enough to get them moving?

Everyone was on their feet in seconds as Lady Photon grabbed the board with the layout on it in one hand. "Alright, Manpower, you're going through the front. Flashbang, once the door is open, saturation bomb the inside. The hostages should be far enough away that your concussive bombs won't hurt them and if you can blind Lockdown, that would be for the best. Brandish and I will come in the opposite door approximately five seconds after we hear the explosions. Panacea, you will wait outside the building behind the next corner. Shielder, Weaver, you're to protect her at all costs."

"I should go in," I interjected. "There's a sealed off ventilation grate right above the cage and I can get through it with no trouble."

Lady Photon hesitated. "You're an independent, so I can't exactly order you around, but I'm warning you that we aren't used to you. We might catch you in the crossfire."

"I'm good at avoiding stuff like that, plus you've seen me heal," I rebutted. I wasn't too worried about an accident and one more person looking out for the hostages had to help.

She looked like she was going to say no once more.

"Let her help," Brandish declared. "Just get my daughter back."

That seemed to be all it took and there were nods as the whole team piled out the door. No sooner was I out than I took the lead. Most of the New Wave capes couldn't fly, which set their pace. I hadn't really had a chance to test out my full speed, but running all out and using walls and rooftops for a boost was exhilarating. The buildings weren't suitable for web swinging, but that hardly mattered.

No sooner had I reached the building and raised myself up to vault onto the roof than I had my danger sense go off. There, just in front of where I would have landed was a trip wire leading back to a gray-green block against the wall. For a moment, I hung in mid-air as I relied on my arm to hold me in place in a kind of handstand before reversing my momentum and flipping back to the ground.

The New Wave team was only reaching the spot where Panacea was supposed to wait - though said cape was lagging behind, no doubt because of her foul smoker ways which I would have to lecture her about later.

I got in front of them. "Traps. Almost stepped into a boobytrap on the roof. Tripwire leading to something nasty, I think."

There was a scatter of cursing and exchanged looks. "We don't have a choice, but we will be careful. Thanks for the warning." That was Manpower, who was going to be leading the charge.

I nodded. "Just wanted you to know," I finished lamely before turning around and rushing back to the rooftop. Spider-sense made it trivial to locate tripwires like that, though they seemed to only be around the edge of the roof and an old skylight that was boarded up. I'd seen the skylight and dismissed it during my scouting since it dropped into an area that was pretty much walled off with boxes and getting through that way would be loud.

The ventilation duct wasn't a great entry, but I could carefully break the heads off the screws that had been used to put the plate over it to keep it closed and get it open with only minimal noise. As I did, I heard voices drifting from below.

"Maybe it's a false alarm?" a deep voice asked.

"Maybe, maybe not. We are moving either way. The drone showed half the Protectorate moving out, but the police scanner is quiet. What else could it be?" The second voice was higher pitched, but confident.

There was some swearing.

The high pitched voice continued. "Go help Ryan load up the truck. I'll get the hostages ready to move. We are moving as soon as we get loaded. Best estimate is that we need to be rolling twenty five minutes after they move and we've already used fifteen."

Yet more swearing came from the other guy. "And New Wave?"

"They aren't going to act as long as we have the girl. Last I heard, they were driving all over town and looking in all of the wrong places, but they drive around in a couple of beat up old minivans. Do you have any idea how common those are in this city?"

There was some more discussion, but it was lower in volume and I was busy trying to crawl through the ventilation duct. Once upon a time, it had carried toxic fumes out of a forge or the like, so it was fairly large. It was also a long time disused so it was filthy. Getting past the fan without making a huge amount of noise was the worst part. I ended up prying the blades back and thinking really thin thoughts as I pushed past it. Finally, I was at a mesh grate in the ceiling and got my first 'live' view of the place.

As I had already gathered through the scattered views from the spiders, the center part of the old workshop had been cleared out and replaced with a cage and two cots. Each one held an unmoving figure and had an IV stand next to it. That part wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't a man in military fatigues moving between them.

I hesitated because I didn't know if I was looking at the cape or not. If I tried to jump the cape and he shut my powers off, then I'd be in real trouble. Fortunately, I knew a distraction was coming.

It was only seconds between when I had that thought and when I felt the whole building vibrate with a resounding boom. Manpower had arrived.

//\\o//\\

Down below, the man drew a big black handgun out of a holster on his waist. I'd seen guns before - even had them fired at me - but for some reason, that gun seemed bigger. More deadly.

It was probably because he was looming over two helpless hostages when he drew it.

"Sorry kid. Girl's still useful to keep her moronic family off us, but your dad fucked up. Should have paid us when he had the chance." There was another bang from the direction of the front door, but the man ignored it as he started to level the gun at the unconscious form of Dean.

In a bit of a panic, I punched the mesh grate, sending it falling to the floor, and launched a glob of webbing at his hand, hoping to take the gun out of action. I mentally cursed the fact that I hadn't had a chance to practice with my web-shooters before using them in a real fight as the web narrowly missed its target.

The man didn't even hesitate. He pivoted smoothly, putting his body half behind the hostage-holding cot and brought his weapon up, steading it with both hands before firing two rounds in my direction. My danger sense was the only thing that saved me from gaining some new holes as I did what I should have done all along - trust in my spider sense and reflexes to get me to safety. Without even consciously thinking about it, I launched myself out of the duct toward the ground, twisting in mid-air to land in a crouch as another pair of bullets whizzed by.

"Watch where you're shooting!" I yelled, though I didn't think he cared. Was I wasting breath on banter? Was that part of the whole Spider-man thing? It didn't really matter, but if I could get him talking, that would stall for time. Time was definitely more on my side than his.

"Who are you working for?" the man asked. "I can make you a deal. Help me get out of here, and I'll give you the hostages."

"You know you're not getting out of here. The whole place is surrounded," I retorted and tried to creep my way around to the side to get a clear shot at him, but there wasn't a lot of cover.

There was a second crash as the rest of New Wave poured in from the back entrance.

"Fuck," he growled and suddenly moved. I sprang to my feet just in time to see him hoist Victoria over his shoulder. "No time to play, then." He turned his attention to me and I felt something skate across my mental perception. It was like fingertips gripping at slippery glass and not quite finding purchase.

His gun turned in my direction and he fired one more shot. Again, I let my spider senses kick in and evaded the shot easily.

"Where did they fucking get you?" he asked loudly as he backed away. "Bring you in specifically to counter me? Fuckers should have just paid the ransom."

It was slowly dawning on me what was happening. I was apparently immune to his power nullification ability, which had probably just saved my life.

"Go ahead and put the girl down, then. I'll be the one to capture you. I won't let that one's mom turn you into a Jack O'Lantern." With more confidence, I stalked a bit closer, but not too close. He still had a human shield.

"Got a different idea," he raised the gun in my direction again and I tensed in preparation for a dodge. His arm tensed and waited for my spider senses to kick in, but they never did. With horror, I realized that I hadn't been his target. "Why don't you hurry and get your little payday to the hospital? Gutshots can be fixed if you're fast enough."

Indeed, red was blossoming across the thin sheet over Dean's still form. "Oh, you bastard," I ground out, but realized I didn't have a ton of choices. Even taking Dean to Amy - Panacea - meant I'd be out of this fight.

"Same goes for you two," he yelled and brought his gun to bear in a different direction. I glanced that way to see Brandish and Lady Photon trying to creep close while remaining in a bit of cover. Given that Lockdown seemed to take 'nullify powers, fill with lead' as a battle strategy, I couldn't say it was a bad plan. "I'll let the girl go as soon as I'm good and far away from here. Unless you want to see what her insides look like, I suggest that you just let me walk out of here."

There was another boom as something big went sailing past us into the far wall. It was Stockton, who had apparently just lost his Brute brawl with Manpower.

"No, how about you put her down and we don't have to hurt you," Flashbang declared as he too also entered the scene.

"Well, isn't this a standoff, then." Lockdown waved the gun around some more, trying to keep everyone in view. "Let's just talk-"

Then he screamed in pain. His finger convlused on the trigger and a bullet bounced off a piece of rusty old machinery as he collapsed to the ground, Victoria's body rolling off of him as he did. "Swhat y' get, asshole," she mumbled clearly in the sudden silence which was then broken by Lockdown's pained whimpers. I walked forward to kick the gun away and saw that his legs were bending in the wrong directions. Apparently, Victoria had regained enough consciousness that her newly returned powers let her punch him. Carrying a Brute was probably a terrible idea.

"Fuck, Dean!" I exclaimed as I remembered the other thing I was worried about. Dean had regained enough consciousness, as well, that he was whimpering softly in pain. There was so much blood and I actually doubted that we had enough time to get him back to Amy, but I had to try.

Snatching him up, I ran toward the front, taking idle note of the two unmoving heaps that were the other mercenaries and the wrecked SUV that they'd intended to escape in. Two long leaps had me where I needed to be.

"Is Vicky okay?" were the first words out of Amy's mouth and I resisted the urge to shake her.

"She's fine, just half-awake. Dean got shot," I announced as I placed him on the ground.

To her credit, she didn't hesitate to reach out and start stabilizing him. "That was unlucky, went right through a major artery," she declared as her attention seemed to drift far away. "I can… get him stable, but it's going to take a few minutes to fix this."

I sighed in relief that she could fix him at all. A part of me was also very glad that I didn't have to try raising him from the dead. Being naked in front of Amy's entire family would have been mortifying.

//\\o//\\

By the time the Protectorate was on-site, both Dean and Victoria were lucid and ambulatory, though weakened from having Amy mess with their systems so much. Dean was definitely feeling the worst of it because he had needed healing in addition to having his system flushed of the sedative which had been in the IV. The kidnappers had at least been smart enough to procure some Tinkertech drug that wasn't likely to kill someone because they did the math on dosage wrong.

The bad guys had been stabilized by Panacea who made sure that they would remain unconscious for the next twelve hours or so. Given the reason we had been trying to capture them in the first place, no one objected when she declined to do more than the bare minimum to keep them alive. Odds were that Lockdown wouldn't walk for a very long time, if ever, but I was alright with that. He'd tried to shoot me several times, and he did shoot Dean.

After the crime scene was secured, one of the New Wave adults called in the situation to the Protectorate to fill them in on the current state of things. Five minutes later, Velocity was the first to show up, his red blur zipping around the building and vanishing back up the street a few moments before Armsmaster's characteristic motorcycle came into view.

The rest of the Protectorate team rolled into view after that in an armored personnel carrier. I knew about them from the other-memories, but I'll admit that I was struck with a bit of hero worship to see them all in the flesh. The only one missing was Triumph, but I wasn't entirely sure if he was still in the Wards or not.

Velocity performed some additional reconnaissance of the site while Miss Militia used their vehicle's communication system to coordinate the PRT response. Armsmaster had apparently already set it in motion after getting the all-clear from New Wave. Assault and Battery took over sitting on the prisoners while Armsmaster took statements from everyone involved.

I was a little nervous when it was my turn, but Brandish stayed firmly beside me. She had been almost nice to me ever since Victoria's rescue, and as Armsmaster dismounted his motorcycle, she leaned over to whisper to me. "Just try to relax. Don't give more information than you need to, but remember that the Protectorate are our allies. Do you mind if I reveal some aspects of your powers?"

I looked between her and the approaching man in powered armor. He really was tall, though I wasn't sure how much of that was him and how much was the armor. "I guess not," I whispered back. Brandish didn't actually know about my odder powers, just the Brute package and the spider control, so it was safe enough to let that out. Probably.

"Brandish, good evening. You, I don't think I have met," Armsmaster noted as he approached the pair of us with a little nod. I got the feeling that he was sizing me up. "I'm Armsmaster, head of the Protectorate ENE. Your costume is very nice."

My costume did look nice, and that probably threw off assumptions. As a rule, capes that were just starting out had really shitty costumes unless they had a power-based way to make them like I did. It was a compliment, but also a bit of an opening question.

"Thank you," I said, somehow keeping my voice even. My other-memories were so scattered on Armsmaster that I had no idea what to expect, but it was kind of a big deal to have the undivided attention of the man who led the local Protectorate. "I'm Weaver. I'm new."

"Nice to meet you." Armsmaster was more friendly than I'd expected. He wasn't robotic at all, really, so I was probably just as full of questions as he was.

Armsmaster turned his head slightly to look at Brandish. "She was working with New Wave on this case. She has a shaker ability that is good for information collection."

I looked from one to the other. Shaker ability? I remembered, vaguely, that Glory Girl's aura was considered a Shaker ability instead of a Master power. Its effects were kind of in a gray area between the classifications and politics pretty much determined how those kinds of powers got rated. Calling my spider control power a Shaker ability was a bit of a stretch, but probably a harmless one.

"Y-yes, I wanted to help," I added lamely, wishing my mouth didn't keep moving on its own.

Armsmaster gave a small smile. "It's always good to meet new heroes. You sound young, but I've never been the best judge of that kind of thing. Are you a minor?"

I glanced to Brandish who gave me a small nod.

"Yes, I am. My f-family knows where I am, though." I almost said father, but caught myself at the last moment. There was no need to out myself, even a little bit.

"That's good, at least. If you have issues, I would highly recommend coming to us for help. The Wards program exists to give young heroes the assistance they need to grow and stay safe." He sounded genuine and I took the business card he offered me. It had a few phone numbers with neat little labels describing each. "If you need help, we're just a phone call away. You should also call the non-emergency number listed there and provide them with your contact information so that they can alert you to important events."

"I don't have a cape phone right now, but once I get one, I will." I agreed. He was giving the soft sell on the Wards, though whether that was because Brandish was standing right there or for some other reason, I had no idea. Then I realized that there were a number of things I needed to tell him about the maybe-future. Oh, and to put him on Sophia's case. "I… actually, there's some stuff I want to talk to you about, but off the record. Could we maybe set up a meeting for that kind of thing?"

He seemed to think about that for a minute. "I'm sure we can arrange something. Either call my direct line on the card - it goes to an automated system which will most likely route you to my voice mail - or ask a member of New Wave to do so."

I nodded and then I was kind of out of the spotlight as he asked Brandish questions about what had happened that evening. It seemed a little odd that she was doing the talking and not Lady Photon, but she was also the lawyer out of the two of them. From the way she precisely explained facts and added in key phrases like 'we believed that the only way to avoid harm to human life' made it clear that she knew how to phrase things for police reports to best keep everyone out of trouble.

Eventually, the PRT and BBPD arrived to process the scene, the Protectorate cleared us to leave, and the paramedics cleared both Dean and Vicky to return home. Dean left with the police while I piled into the Dallon family van to go back to their house. The Pelhams had their own battered minivan and headed out to their own home.

Vicky had the back bench to herself and was promptly asleep. Her body had been on a rollercoaster, even with miraculous healing. That left Amy and I in the individual seats in the middle.

"Thank you," she said softly as we rode back. "I know I was bitchy earlier, but you came through in the end."

"You're welcome," I said back, just as softly. It felt good to be appreciated.

 

[ArbC2]

Nice chapter,loved the not fanon armsy

 

[Swordchucks]

The inside of the parked minivan was hot enough that the few snowflakes that fell onto the windshield turned to water immediately, forming big drops that made the lights of passing cars distort until it looked like we were inside a kaleidoscope.

"Do you know what you're going to tell Armsmaster?" Amy asked. I could detect a bit of an edge in her voice.

"Nothing about you, if that's what you're worried about." I didn't know if she was or not, but I wouldn't do that to her. Other-her's crimes were not hers. "Other than that and Shadow Stalker being a murderous bitch, I'm not sure yet. I'm starting to doubt that my visions are all they're cracked up to be. This whole thing - these last two days - weren't part of what I expected to happen, but I don't know what that means."

"Do you think it's because you changed things?" she asked.

"Maybe. Maybe the kidnapping was going to happen in the visions and it just happened differently. Maybe it didn't happen at all. I really have no way of knowing, but what if the future parts of my visions are all wrong?" I was confident that at least part of the 'past' of those memories was accurate, but that was all.

"Then you're no worse off than every other precog in the world," Amy said as she rolled her eyes. "Armsmaster's been in the Protectorate for a long time. I'm sure he's used to dealing with precognition and how unreliable it is. You could just tell him more stuff and let him assess it like he would any other tip."

"I guess that's fair. I'm just… what if I try to avoid a bad thing but end up making a worse thing happen? Like… you would have died the other day if I hadn't been there, but at the same time, if I hadn't been there, you might not have been in that situation at all."

Amy bopped me on the arm. "Well, I'm not dead. Unless you somehow caused those assholes to plot to kidnap Dean, then it's not your fault. If you managed to change things for the worse that time, maybe you'll change other stuff for the better? Unless you're going to hide in a bunker somewhere, you are going to end up changing things, and even if you did that, your absence might just change things. You can't know, and you might never know."

I sighed. "You're right, I'm just… I'm beating myself up because you nearly died."

It was Amy's turn to sigh. "Look, I know I'm… I'm still in the middle of stuff right now, but I think it was better - I mean, I think you've done an overall good thing for me. Even aside from the part where you literally raised me from the dead."

I snorted at the way she dismissed that little thing. "I don't think you were technically dead at that point. Given how hard it was to fix you, I don't think I could bring someone back from being really dead." I remembered the words I'd said as part of the thing where I fixed her. They'd been in that strange language and had referenced souls. How long did a soul stick around after the body died? I really had no idea, but I suspected it wasn't very long.

"Oh, no. You can only bring the recently deceased back to life. What a pathetic power. How will you ever get a date for the cape prom now?" Her deadpan tone got me to snort again.

"Fine, point made. I guess it's a bad idea to worry about what I can't do. What I can do is pretty cool." I felt lame saying it, but it was true. Other-me could have found the hostages faster by utilizing more kinds of bugs, but other-me probably couldn't have done more for the actual rescue effect. Not during the coldest part of the year when there were barely any bugs to call on, no matter their type.

"If you want to, we could get together and talk through exactly what you want to tell Armsmaster about. You're also on the hook for giving the police a statement about the accident, though it's mostly a formality at this point."

That was a detail I had almost forgotten about. Amy had managed to whisk me away before I woke up, which was probably for the best. "I was hoping we could just skip that?"

She shook her head. "Those jerks are going to go to trial, hopefully, and it'll probably be part of the evidence. If they don't question you, someone's lawyer will start asking why and… well, it's just better that your statement be in there. We can go over how to word things so you're not technically lying." She must have caught the slightly surprised look I was giving her. "What? Carol might not be a good mom, but she is a good lawyer. She gave us all a crash course as soon as we got our powers. She may want to do the same thing for you."

"I was under the impression that she didn't like me that much."

Amy rolled her eyes again. "She doesn't like anyone that much." She paused and seemed to think better of it. "Except maybe Vicky. Anyway, you saved the life of one of her daughters while crawling across actual broken glass and helped save the life of the other one. You've earned some points with her - with the whole team, really."

"That's good, I guess?" I said, still trying to process the concept. Carol Dallon hadn't exactly been mean to me, but she'd certainly been gruff. Then again, Amy was a prickly bear, too, and we got along.

"And that actually brings me to another thing. If you're going to hang out with my family a lot, you're going to need a cover story." She took my hand in hers awkwardly. "So, I think we should date."

"Uh," I answered intelligently as I tried to process that concept, as well. "I didn't think - you know."

"I'm still working on it, so it's just for the cover story. We don't have to confirm it or anything, but if we just don't deny it, the rumors will take care of the rest."

While it did make logical sense, a tiny part of me was disappointed while a bigger part was relieved.

"Okay, then. Dating." I then did the most romantic thing possible and reached over and shook her hand.

//\\o//\\

"... and, uh, that's when I got here," I ended lamely, having only edited the story somewhat to remove the worst bits - like the crawling over broken glass part. Dad had been waiting for me when I got home, though it was fairly late on Saturday night when I finally got there. Amy and I had spent a few more minutes in the parked van chatting awkwardly before she'd brought me the rest of the way.

As my story finished, dad was silent for a long minute before letting out a long sigh.

"I'm just glad you're alright." I relaxed a little when the first words out of his mouth didn't involve calling me an idiot. Then he surprised me even more by pulling a plastic shopping bag off the counter and dropping it on the table.

"What's that?" I asked curiously.

"Something I should have done sooner, I think." He pulled two of those plastic clamshell things out of the bag, the kind that hang on store shelves with items in them. When he placed them on the table, I could see what they were. Cell phones.

"Oh." I glanced from dad to the phones and back.

"Yeah."

The silence hung in the air heavily as both of us thought dark thoughts. Cell phones had been a topic neither of us had brought up since mom died. The fact that dad had gone out and bought two of them was a big thing. I wasn't quite sure why he'd done it, yet, but I suspected.

"Friend of mine at work knows a thing or two about prepaid cell phones. Pay in cash somewhere away from your house, preferably the kind of place that sees a lot of traffic and doesn't have good cameras and it's almost impossible to associate your name with them. It isn't an absolute defense, since there are other ways to track them, but it's a good start." He slid one of them towards me.

I could tell it was one of those prepaid flip phones that were known for being cheap. Disposable. I took the thing in my hands nervously and found that someone had already opened it. I pulled the phone out.

"I programmed the numbers into each other. This one," he tapped the other phone, "Is in yours under 'base'. If you're home, it should probably stay off. In fact, you should take the battery out of it when you're not using it."

"Your friend?" I asked as I looked it over some more.

He nodded. "Yeah. We'll probably need to trade them out every so often. I want you to carry it when you're out and might be doing cape things. It'll keep mine on when you're out like that, too. I just… I need you to be able to reach me."

I wiped my damp eyes. It was a big gesture and it made me sad that I'd worried him so much. "I will," I agreed.

He nodded. "And we can see about getting you a personal cell phone for when you're not out fighting the good fight or whatever you call it. I thought you'd rather pick your own out than have me do it for you."

I hugged him. Not with all I had - that would have killed him - but with probably a little more force than I should have, given his grunt. I relaxed and we stayed that way for a while.

"Taylor, I appreciate the gesture, but are you about done? It's late and I'm exhausted."

I laughed and let him go.

That night, I dreamed about fairy dust and flying but I forgot most of the details when I woke up. I was somewhat relieved that I hadn't turned all of my furniture into giant gumdrops or something equally embarrassing.

By the time I woke up, there wasn't a whole lot left of Sunday. I saw dad for a few minutes before he headed out to meet someone about some project or other and had the rest of the day with the house to myself. I considered calling Amy, but it seemed like a bad idea. We were 'dating' for a given value of dating, but I still wasn't sure I liked her much. It seemed like that was mutual, though there was a bit of physical attraction there. Probably.

We would see each other on Monday, anyway.

Instead, I decided to stay in the house and experiment. I had been pretty busy and distracted for most of the week and hadn't really sat and examined the whole 'create things while in a trance' aspect of my powers. I knew that they were related to memories, but I didn't understand much more than that. Well, except for the part where I lost my clothes while doing them.

Though even that seemed like it was odd. I didn't sleep naked and my first rounds of sleep-crafting hadn't resulted in me waking up naked. When I tried using the crafting consciously, though, I lost my clothes. There had to be some sort of trick to it that I wasn't getting.

Regardless, there were some things I could figure out.

First of all, the crafting was tied to memories, but definitely not my memories. After I had experienced each of the crafting bouts, I had been left with some new skills, but those were entirely mundane. Those new skills seemed to be restricted to performing tasks with only the most basic of tools, too. For instance, I could sew by hand but that didn't extend to the sewing machine. I could also work with metal - files, hammers, basic forging, and the like - but I didn't seem to have any weird knowledge of running industrial machines.

That all led to a second discovery. There had been two bouts of sleep crafting, but there were actually three sets of skills. Sewing was obvious, but the other two were metalworking and chemistry. That last one was even stranger because it didn't come with any additional knowledge about chemistry, only the mechanical processes of mixing and refining chemicals using fairly basic tools.

Then there was the fugue state itself. That's when I focused on those memories that weren't mine - and not in the same way that the other-memories were mine but not mine. These were something else entirely. I didn't remember much from the fugue, but while in that state I was clearly capable of doing something weird to matter. I needed something to work with that vaguely resembled my final product in terms of composition, but that seemed to be the only restriction.

More annoyingly, I needed a very good idea of what I was making before the fugue state would help me with it. I could make a new set of kitchen knives - the old ones had needed to be replaced for years, anyway - but I couldn't make a car engine.

By the end of the day, I'd conducted a number of experiments, losing several scarves and gloves in attempts to retain my clothing while in a fugue. I managed to transform the remainder of my closet into well fitted, high quality clothing - though it wasn't particularly fashionable since I didn't know fashion - and produced a few other small items like those kitchen knives.

What I didn't have was a solid idea as to what was actually going on.

Or why I kept ending up naked.

//\\o//\\

"So, how was your weekend?" Chris asked softly as he closed down his workstation in math class. We had a substitute teacher for the day, so once we were done with our work, we were allowed to talk quietly which, surprisingly, was actually what was going on. Arcadia and Winslow were wildly different sometimes.

I looked up from the novel I had been killing time with. I didn't really have many friends and that was fine with me. "Not too bad. I didn't learn how to magically turn lead into gold or I wouldn't be here today." I had actually tried that one, but even the fugue didn't seem to be able to pull that one off. Or I hadn't wanted it enough or I hadn't asked it right or… who knew? "Well, except for the fact that I was in a car accident on Friday."

Chris winced sympathetically. He was actually fairly empathic, which was a trait I wouldn't have ascribed to a Tinker, but there you went. "That sucks. Was everyone okay?"

Amy and I had discussed the matter a little. I was going to have to give the cops a statement which was going to appear in an official report, so denying I had been there entirely would be silly. Acknowledging it and playing it down so that if it did hit the rumor mill, it wouldn't be obvious that I had been hiding it seemed like the best choice. If it became a big deal later, I could always claim to have been traumatized and didn't want to talk about it. Which I didn't, so that was even the truth. "In the end, yeah, but only thanks to Panacea. How was your weekend?"

Chris chuckled. "Annoying. My part time job wasn't so part time. There was a big thing and everyone had to come in and work pretty much the whole weekend."

It took a second before I connected the dots. Chris was a Ward, so he was probably sidestepping the truth just like I was. That the Wards had been called in and put on standby after one of them had been kidnapped made sense. Dean had been rescued by lunch on Saturday but there had to be some worry that it might be part of a larger plot. Given how dumb and convoluted cape plans could be, they weren't entirely wrong to worry about that, either.

"That also sucks. Dad is always going in at weird hours for weird stuff, so I get it. You would think it would be against union rules or something, but he works directly for the union so it's a weird gray space." A mischievous thought hit me. "Say, are you guys unionized at your shop? If not, I can get you some literature on it. Might stop them from calling you all up like that."

Chris's eyes went wide in a brief moment of panic before he smothered it. If I had to guess, he'd just pictured himself trying to dictate terms to the PRT Director who both rumor and other-memories said was a hardass that didn't like capes that much. "Oh, that would be hilarious. I mean, watching the person that told management about that. I'm sure we could bury them in a shoebox afterwards." He chuckled to cover for the fact that he wasn't entirely joking.

"Offer still stands," I declared and changed the subject, or at least tried to. Chris and I didn't have a whole lot in common. He was more into video games and Internet culture than I was. He also wasn't much of a reader. It was really unfair to him, but he reminded me of Greg Veder in a very vague way. It wasn't in a bad way, though. Not really. Greg, for all that he was an idiot and a bit of a creep, did try to do the right thing every now and again. He was just a coward that backed down at the first sign of personal danger so his follow-through sucked.

"Uh, so, I wanted to ask… some friends and I get together on Thursday evenings to play games and I was wondering if you would be interested in joining us?" he asked nervously toward the end of the period.

"Games?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Y-yeah, dungeons and dragons, mostly," he said and hurriedly continued on. "I mean, I noticed you were reading a fantasy novel and thought you might be interested."

I glanced down at my novel which did, indeed, have a dragon on the cover. My other-memories insisted that I say yes, if only to see what it would be like. Of all of the memories to be mostly intact, why did they have to be the turbo-nerd memories? The rest of me was more reluctant, but I had to admit that I was interested in seeing what kind of trainwreck it would turn out to be. Would it be an all-Wards game? Would it be like one Ward and someone from each of the major gangs with Coil running it? Would it be a front for opium smuggling? The possibilities were endless.

"Maybe? Where do you meet?" I asked after a bit of a pause to think.

"Oh, the big public library a couple of blocks from here? We met in one of the meeting rooms there. Evan's mom - he's one of the other players - she works there and lets us hang out after hours if we promise to clean up after ourselves."

I ran the name Evan through my brain and didn't come up with a memory of a cape with that name. Opium smuggling, then?

"I suppose, just let me know the details. I'll have to ask my dad."

Chris seemed more than a little surprised that I'd agreed. "Oh, that's great! I mean, I'm glad you said yes."

That's about the time I realized that Chris might have a bit of a crush on me. It seemed obvious in retrospect, but in my defense, I wasn't really used to that. Maybe that was why he'd reminded me of Veder? Ew.

I almost asked if my girlfriend was invited, but calling Amy my girlfriend seemed a bit much for our actual relationship. I'd just have to find a way to let him down easily later.

 

[Swordchucks]

Talking to the police was unsettling but ultimately uneventful. I said true things, didn't add extra details, and it was over in about five minutes. The fact that the culprits were already caught and hostages rescued probably helped a lot with that. I still wasn't certain that the entire plot had been uncovered but it wasn't like the Protectorate was going to tell me what was going on with their investigation without a good reason.

That was a thought that reminded me that I needed to call Armsmaster and set up a meeting. I wasn't entirely sure about everything I was going to tell him, but I was sure enough about parts of it that I wanted to meet sooner rather than later.

Later that evening, I let dad know I was going out and left the house dressed as a cape for the first time. Well, mostly. I had a heavy winter coat over top of the rest with the hood pulled up which made me look like just a random person. A few quick alleys and some climbing and I was well away from the house and halfway across the docks much faster than I would have thought possible.

I put the battery back in the phone and waited for it to power up as I fished Armsmaster's card out of my pocket.

First, I called the PRT non-emergency number and registered my cell as contact information for Weaver, but let them know it wouldn't be available that often. They didn't seem to care - or maybe that was just normal for solo independents?

After that call was done, I called Armsmaster's number and navigated my way through his surprisingly robust menu system until it asked me to leave a voicemail. I did so and stuffed my phone into my pocket as I decided that maybe I should kill a couple of hours before going home in case Armsmaster called me back quickly. I didn't have any real hope of stumbling across a crime to thwart - it was too cold for most street crime - but I did need to get used to moving around the city in my costume. I stuffed my winter coat into a dry spot under a piece of air conditioning equipment on a rooftop and took off.

Again, I was faced with the reality that most of Brockton Bay just didn't have the building height necessary for web-swinging, but it did have plenty of things to climb and jump off of. My jump distance, especially with a running start, was very long and clearing a city street was almost trivial. Something about the power made for soft landings, too, which meant that my running around was almost entirely silent and much less destructive than I would have expected.

I eventually ended up at the boat graveyard, one of the Bay's most infamous landmarks. The rusting hulks of the graveyard - some still floating, some not - had been a silent memorial to the collapse of the Bay's shipping industry and the violence that had come out of it. Some of the boats were derelict remnants of shipping companies that folded. Some were left to rot after the protests made moving them too difficult. A few had been intentionally sunk during the protests.

Whatever the reason, the remaining ships were arrayed along the beach and near the shore of the northern part of the docks. There were forty or fifty of the things, some of them massive in size, and all of them abandoned.

I had been there a few times, but now I was looking at the hulks with new eyes. There was a reason that some of that fiction from my other-memories used them for power testing or hideouts. The area was desolate. With shipping reduced to much lower levels, the working docks were farther south or north and the area near the graveyard itself was abandoned. There weren't even many squatters in the area because of the lack of access to food and pretty much everything else.

"Well, when in Rome," I mumbled to myself as I dropped off a partially collapsed warehouse and walked toward the shore. I'd been curious about my strength and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to test it out.

Half an hour later, I knew some things. For one, I couldn't pick up an entire ship. That had seemed a little silly in retrospect, but it had been the first thing I tried. For another, I could pick up an empty shipping container with both hands. It wasn't a massive strain, but I also wouldn't be throwing it very far. According to the lettering on the side of one of the ones that still had lettering, that meant I could lift a ton or two, and because I could do it with just human-shaped hands, I had to have some sort of secondary power that let me keep objects together. Otherwise I would have just torn off the edge or the things would have snapped in half due to the way I was supporting them.

I definitely couldn't lift one filled with water, though, so I had an upper limit that was somewhere between two and ten tons. Probably. I wasn't sure if the maximum payload on the side of the thing would apply to having it full of water or not.

I also discovered that web swinging around the rigging of the old boats was a fun but somewhat useless exercise. No wonder Spider-man always loved doing that, though. It was the next best thing to flying.

Around that time, I saw the headlights of a car approaching and decided it was probably better to not be there in case they were gang members looking for the source of the strange noises I had been making.

I was feeling pretty good about the fact that I had managed to go out in costume without running into trouble as I did extreme parkour on my way back to where I'd hidden my coat. That was, of course, when fate had me notice a figure crouched on a nearby rooftop. The figure was wearing a heavy leather jacket with a fur collar and a cheap dog mask as it - she - stared at a nearby warehouse over the edge of her current hiding place.

It only took a second to realize who I was looking at and put together possible reasons for her to be there. The question was… what was I going to do with that information?

//\\o//\\

"What are we watching?" I whispered as I peered over the edge of the building.

"Empire," came the low, forceful reply.

There was a long beat of silence before her mind seemed to catch up to the fact that someone had just snuck up beside her and asked her a question. Rachel Lindt, better known as Hellhound or Bitch, jumped backwards, almost stumbling over her own feet in the process.

"I figured Empire. Dog fighting ring? Going to trash it?" I pushed on like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn't even turn around to watch her, though I was keeping tabs on her out of the corner of my eye.

"Who are you?" she growled back at me.

"Weaver," I supplied, still not quite looking in her direction though turning a bit. I remembered some of the details of her trigger and how it had affected her brain - leaving her with poor human empathy and stuck on canine social skills. I didn't have an exposed mouth, so worrying about showing my teeth wasn't a thing, but eye contact was.

"You're new." Simple, direct. Bitch was kind of refreshing like that.

"And you're not, but you care about dogs. I like dogs. Empire assholes hurt dogs. Empire assholes need a smashing. We're in agreement on that."

Something about that calmed her down pretty quickly. She came back to the edge of the building and squatted down, though out of arm's reach of where I was this time. "Saw them moving cages. No dogs yet."

It was a freezing cold Monday night. No one was going to a dog fighting ring on a Monday night. "Thursday? Friday?" I asked.

"Dogs will be here Thursday." Then the event would probably start on Friday at my best guess.

It wasn't ideal, given my other commitments, but this seemed worth ditching dungeons and dragons over. "When were you going in?"

"Thursday night. Late."

I watched the warehouse a bit more, but the inside was still cold. They hadn't bothered to keep it warm and all of the spiders inside were babies still hiding in their egg sacs. If I wanted to use eight-legged scouts, I'd have to bring some in from outside and preferably once they had heaters running. There was no chance they were going to leave the place freezing cold while they were holding an event, at least.

"Middle of the night?" I asked and got a grunt. "Can I help?" That got me another grunt, which I took as agreement. "You have a way to move the dogs once we get them out?"

"Friend with a truck."

That seemed insufficient for a bunch of dogs that had been conditioned to fight, but she was the canine expert. I wasn't going to question her judgment on that front. "Alright, I'll see you then. Take care."

I crawled back two steps before getting to my feet and nonchalantly walking off the other side of the roof. After that, I took a round-about path toward my coat and then home. I couldn't recall if she could track by scent or not, but I was leaning toward 'not'. I did make some amateurish attempts to throw off my trail, anyway, just in case they would help.

I also remembered to take the battery out of my cape phone a few blocks away.

Dad was waiting up when I got home, though it wasn't that late - just past eleven.

"How did it go?"

"Not bad. I talked to the PRT dispatch and left a message for Armsmaster. Then I went poking around the Boat Graveyard for a while. Figured out I can lift at least two tons, maybe more but not a lot more."

Dad whistled. "That's still a lot."

I nodded. It did seem like a lot from a normal perspective, but it was kind of on the bottom rung for comic book superheroes. Then again, I didn't exactly live in a world full of comic book superheroes. A couple of tons was probably somewhere in the mid-tier for Brutes.

"Then on my way home, I ran into a supervillain and we decided to team up."

There was a moment of silence before dad let out a big breath through his nose. He pulled his glasses off with one hand and rubbed at his eyes with the other. "Explain." He sounded tired of my shit.

"There's a girl and she was in a really bad situation as a kid. Someone was going to kill her dog and she got the power to make dogs grow big and mean, but she can't control them. She saved the dog, it killed some people, she's been on the run ever since. I don't think she's killed anyone else, but I'll probably ask Armsmaster about it if I talk to him first." I really was blurry on some of the details. "Anyway, I saw her casing a warehouse and dropped by to ask why. Some goons were setting up an Empire dog fighting. She's planning to hit the place Thursday night - which reminds me, someone from school invited me to go play dungeons and dragons Thursday after school. Do you mind if I go?"

"Dungeons and dragons? People still play that?" he asked then realized I'd distracted him. "Sure, you can go do that. Now back to the Empire thing. You're going to break up a dog fighting ring on Thursday night with the help of a known villain, even if she didn't really mean to be a villain?"

"I would like to. I'll probably bring it up to Armsmaster, too, assuming I see him beforehand. She's on the list of people that deserve a second chance, I think, and who doesn't want to save a bunch of doggos from bloody deaths?"

"You make it hard to say 'no' to you, sometimes." He made it sound like that was a bad thing. "I'm just glad you're not running off without telling me. Again."

I didn't wince. I hadn't been in any real place to inform him when I was in the car accident. Afterwards, I hadn't exactly given him an option when I went off to help New Wave because I hadn't wanted to give him a chance to make the wrong choice, but I did tell him. "I don't intend to get hurt, but you know how these things go. At least I'm not out punching muggers, right?"

I left unsaid the fact that muggers were in short supply due to the weather. They were probably pretty rare in the summer, too, but I had a feeling that my luck meant I'd stumble across any mugger that wanted to mug if they were out and about. Which they currently weren't.

//\\o//\\

Tuesday morning passed without much incident, but at lunch, Vicky was back.

"Mom got tired of her moping around the house and made her come back to school," Amy informed me as we shared the same side of a lunch table a bit away from where Vicky was crowded by well wishers and those with questions about what had happened. "Dean is still on house arrest, as far as I can tell. According to Vicky, his dad's really shaken up about the whole thing though Dean says that he's fine."

"I think I'd be shaken up, too," I admitted as I watched the crowd come and go. Vicky did look a bit worn but the attention seemed to be a net positive for her. With her absent on Monday, Amy and I had eaten together, and we'd just kind of done it again even with Vicky back.

Amy pushed a few of her peas around with her fork. Arcadia's cafeteria food was pretty good, but it was still cafeteria food. The peas had not been a great choice. "Yeah, I would, too."

I put a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched just a little before she apparently decided that it was okay. I gave her a reassuring pat. "Going to the hospital this afternoon?" I asked by way of changing the topic.

"Yeah, probably. I'm… I'm trying to have set hours," she grumbled bitterly and let out a long breath through her nose. "You're right about boundaries. It's just hard. Every hour I'm not there is an hour I could be helping people."

"I know." I did know. I had an ability that let me raise the dead within some limited timeframe. How many lives could I save if I hung around the hospital all day and used it when it would work? It was more than zero. On the other hand, even if there wasn't the whole 'end up naked' bit, that would probably drive me crazy. "Do you mind if I come over tonight? After you're back, I mean?"

Amy raised an eyebrow at that, but nodded. "Yeah, around eight? Mom's made a big deal out of family dinners since, you know."

That afternoon, I wasted some of my study hall time researching the particular brand of dungeons and dragons played on Earth Bet. Chris had sent me some links and a login for some sort of online character creator. I followed them and found the differences between what I found and what my other-memories expected to be fascinating.

The original company had sold the license to a Seattle-based company in the late 90s. They'd published a third edition. That's where things diverged. In the other-memories, that same company went on to publish a 'half edition' in mid-2003 and yet another edition a few years later.

On Bet? Leviathan smashed Seattle in early 2003. That didn't kill the game, but it did kill that company. What would have been the 'half edition' got released but without the company around to support it, it didn't go very far. After a few years in legal limbo, the license landed with an entirely different company who then published their own version. It was wildly different from the 'fourth edition' of my other-memories. For one thing, there was a definite cape vibe with the abilities available to the different character classes. They were called different things, but pretty much every type of cape was represented by its own 'ability tree' that different character classes had access to to different degrees.

For instance, a barbarian could pick up anything in the Brute tree but only low level stuff elsewhere. Fighters had Mover and Striker abilities while Rogues had full access to Stranger abilities. Wizards were, as always, broken with access to spells that imitated pretty much everything and then did unique things on top of it.

I had no idea what character I wanted to play by the time the day was open, but it did give me something to think about when I wasn't busy worrying about other, real-life stuff. I was thinking about it enough to head downtown after school and pick up some dice and a nice little leather bound journal at a comic shop.

After dinner, I took the bus over to Amy's house and put the battery in my cell phone once I was far enough from the house to check my messages. Armsmaster had gotten back to me with a voice mail. I was to be in a particular parking garage downtime at nine o'clock the following night - Wednesday. Having a time set for the meeting was both a relief and another source of anxiety.

It was also a lot of why I wanted to spend time with Amy that evening.

I was thinking about how that conversation would go when I rang the bell and it was probably why I barely registered a faint tingle of spider-sense which was my only warning before Victoria Dallon grabbed me in a big hug almost as soon as she opened the door. I made a very articulate squawking noise in my confusion.

"Thank you," she said as she sat me back down on the ground. When had she picked me up? "Thank you for saving my sister."

My brain caught up with the scenario and I fell back on our practiced story. It wasn't like I wanted people to know about my powers, after all. "She wasn't actually that hurt, I just got her out of the car."

"You got all cut up and ruined your dress," she rebutted. "That was a great dress, by the way. Where did you find it? I'm going to insist on replacing it."

"It was a thrift store find," I improvised. "That's actually where I met Amy. Saturday before last? You were there."

Vicky's forehead creased in thought for a moment, and then she winced. "Oh, you were in that store. I was fighting with Dean about- you know what? Not important. I was in a mood. Amy bitched me out already because I was kind of being a jerk that day. I'm sorry if I was mean to you or anything."

I'd done my best to stay out of Vicky's way that day. I wouldn't even have interacted with Amy if she hadn't been in danger of being squished by a toppling rack of clothes. "It's fine. I'm sorry you had to go through the whole kidnapping thing."

Vicky's lips twisted into a grimace. "Yeah, it wasn't fun. Not at all. Even if things worked out in the end, it's still… a lot, you know?"

I nodded, though I wasn't entirely sure where her head was at. "Not exactly, but yeah."

She took a steadying breath and then smiled again. "Anyway, Amy's upstairs. You have my blessing, by the way."

Blessing? I realized what she was implying and felt my cheeks heating up a little. "Uh, thanks?"

 

[yuthirin]

"-of course, the other one didn't-"

"-paltry trick, but I suppose it is a start-"

"-even without a shred of that troublesome-"

Click to shrink...

is it weird that I can absolutely hear this in his voice?

 

[BreezyWheeze]

Another fantastic one from Swordchucks!

Thanks so much for sharing this with us.

Look forward to more!

 

[Swordchucks]

"Are you… okay?" I asked. I'd told Amy about what her sister said, and she'd buried her face in her arms and not moved for a few minutes.

"Yeah," she mumbled, but it was muffled. After another moment, she raised her head and just looked tired. "I know… I know that part of the point of all of this," she gestured between the two of us, "is to get past it, but it's just hard. I'm… Every day is a struggle."

I sank onto the bed beside her and cautiously put my arm around her shoulders. She didn't flinch that time. "I'm sorry. I know it's hard." I took a deep breath and let it out. "In my visions, other-me shot a baby once."

Amy suddenly sat up a little straighter and looked at me with a furrowed brow. "Explain."

"I… The baby was being kidnapped by some very bad people. They were going to do… well, I don't know exactly what, but I'm sure it would have been horrible. Other-me saw shooting the baby as the merciful option. I-I think I have that in me, somewhere. I could do really, really horrible things if I thought it was for the best." There it was. A confession. I'd danced around other-Amy's crimes and it had been enough to start her down a better path, but I'd never really told her what other-me had done.

Amy held my gaze for a long moment and I looked away when the eye contact started to make me feel really uncomfortable. "That's not the only thing other-me did - it almost doesn't rank with the really bad stuff - but somehow it stands out because it was just such a stark example of what I'm capable of."

I looked back when Amy laughed a moment later. "Maybe we do deserve each other," she grumbled bitterly. I tried not to be offended.

The absurdity of it was a bit amusing and it caused me to crack half a smile. "Yeah, maybe." I gave her shoulders a bit more of a squeeze and then moved away to give her space.

A few minutes of silence let some of the tension dissipate and I decided to dig into what I wanted to talk about.

"I ran into Bitch the other day," at her look, I realized that it sounded bad and backtracked, "that's her cape name. The PRT calls her Hellhound. She's wanted for murder, but it wasn't really her fault. Anyway, she's planning a raid on an Empire dogfighting ring on Thursday night and I agreed to help out."

Amy frowned slightly at the thought. "Vicky would be all over that, but there is no way that mom would go for it so soon after the kidnapping thing."

I nodded. "I kind of figured. It's probably better to not spring more capes on Bitch, anyway. Her power has her messed up, and she doesn't understand human interactions very well. I'm going to at least mention her to Armsmaster as a villain he could subvert - actually, is that subvert? When you get a villain to go good?"

Amy thought about it for a moment. "I… have no idea. Convert, maybe? Reform?"

"Convince her to reform, I guess. She's a member of the Undersiders right now, but they're pretty much all reformable given the right incentives."

"More of your visions?" Amy asked.

"Yeah." I chuckled again. "Dumb-ass other-me decided she was going to infiltrate their team and take them down from the inside. Ended up just becoming a villain."

"Dumbass," Amy snickered and banged her shoulder into mine.

I chuckled again. "Yeah, definitely. Oh, that reminds me… we should probably have a talk with Vicky about excessive force. Has she been calling you to put criminals back together after she almost murders them?"

"No… but that definitely sounds like something she would do. And it sounds like something I would do, too." She thought about it for a moment. "I'm not sure how we'd actually approach the subject, though. Not and have her take it seriously."

"We might have to wait till she does it for the first time. In the worst case scenario, if she does something you can't fix, I can probably raise them from the dead."

Amy laughed again, putting her head in her hands. "That is the most surreal thing I've ever heard."

"A little bit, yeah." I resisted telling her something even more absurd just to prove the point. She had already seen my magical sewing while naked routine, which I kind of thought was worse. "Anyway, back on subject, I'm going to help her with the raid after my dungeons and dragons game on Thursday night-"

"Wait, your what?" Amy broke in with a strange look on her face.

"Oh, ah, yeah, one of the guys in class invited me to play with his group on Thursday evening?"

"H-how? How am I the cool one in this relationship? I mean, this fake relationship?" Amy burst out into laughter. It didn't sound as bitter or forced as before.

"I'm plenty cool," I protested lamely. I was definitely lying. "Do you want me to see if they have a spot for you, too? I'm sure you would have a good time."

"No, I'm good." Amy snorted again. "I can be the cool one, and you can be the dork."

I stuck my tongue out at her. "Fine. Anyway, that's my plan for Thursday, but I am going to talk to Armsmaster tomorrow night."

"Have you figured out what you're going to say?" she asked curiously. She didn't seem nervous about it, which was good since I'd already promised not to talk about other-her's crimes.

"Not entirely. I'm going to start with some stuff he can verify, and then go to Shadow Stalker. I'm… I think I need to unmask to him. He's going to figure it out pretty fast if he actually investigates her, and if I can talk him into keeping it a secret, then maybe he can do the investigation in such a way that it doesn't point back to me?"

"Are you sure about that? Unmasking is a big deal. I mean, people say it's a big deal, and I can guess why. Being a public cape is kind of exhausting."

I nodded. "I know. I'm just-I think my identity is pretty thin if you know what you're looking for, anyway. Shadow Stalker has definitely tried to murder more than one person, but how many of them have the same body type as Weaver? Add to that the fact that I kind of vanished from school after my trigger and there are kind of maybe some reports of me streaking around town on Wednesday night and being at Empire rallies-"

"Stop. Explain." Amy demanded again, though she was starting to sound tired. I really was dropping all of the bombs tonight.

I laughed nervously and began to explain the entire thing on Wednesday night. It was something I had glossed over during our initial talk.

"That is the most absurd story I have ever heard, but somehow, I believe every word of it." Amy shook her head in exasperation.

I could only shrug. "I'm not absolutely sure it wasn't a dream, but with my luck, it was very real and Dauntless has photographic proof."

Amy sighed. "Yeah, maybe unmasking is the best course of action."

//\\o//\\

"You're on time," was the only response as the window to the unmarked white van rolled down enough for me to see that Armsmaster, armor and all, was seated inside. "Do you want to do this here?"

I looked around the abandoned parking structure which certainly looked empty. My spider-sense also seemed to point out when people were watching or listening in if I was trying to avoid notice, but I wasn't quite ready to rely on it fully. "Is the van clean? You swept it for listening devices?"

That got me a curt nod. "I took precautions. You indicated that the conversation needed to be private."

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves. I was sure that he had backup nearby, but if he was willing to have a private talk, that would have to be good enough. I'd been over the possibilities for this conversation several times, and it seemed like the best course of action. However, knowing that didn't stop my stomach from twisting itself into knots.

"Yeah, it has to be private. Very private." I steeled myself and opened the door before climbing in. "Everything I say is strictly off the record, right?"

Armsmaster paused for a moment, his bearded chin giving away little of his thought process. "Depending on what it is, yes. There are some things you might say that I won't be able to keep quiet about, of course."

I closed my eyes. "Yeah, okay. I understand that. You're going to want to do stuff, and you kind of have to. This… Most of this isn't personal. I'm not going to tell you I've got an abusive home life that I need the Protectorate to help me get away from it or something like that. I'm a grab-bag cape and one of my powers is that I get visions of the future and the past. I know… I know a lot of stuff. Secret stuff."

"A bold claim," he agreed neutrally. He wasn't expressing overt doubt, but he also wasn't expressing belief.

"Yeah, and that's why I'm going to give you something right off. Something that no one knows but can be verified pretty fast." It had taken a while to settle on an opening gambit, but I was pretty confident in the one I had picked. "Kid Win doesn't know his Tinker speciality, right? Well, it's modular design. The stuff he makes is meant to come apart and go back together like building blocks. He's also working on something he calls an Alternator Cannon - or he will be soon - and is likely to deploy it when he shouldn't."

He stilled and I could almost see him thinking. "I will have to verify, but… yes, it seems possible. Likely, even. And you saw this in a vision?"

I nodded. It was the way I'd been referring to my other-memories and it was as close an explanation as I could give without seeming insane. "Y-yeah. After I got my powers, I got a bunch all at once. Now, I still get them occasionally when I come into contact with someone, but it seems to be both rare and random."

"Okay, then what else did you see?"

I shifted nervously. This was it. "No recordings, right? Not in your armor or the van or anything?" I thought my senses might warn me, but I didn't want to risk it.

"None, as you requested."

"Alright," I reached up behind my head, ignoring how Armsmaster shifted into a slightly more defensive position when I moved. A quick tug of the fastenings that were normally protected by the hood of my costume and I pulled my mask forward and down. "My name is Taylor Hebert. I'm unmasking to you because if you act on what I'm about to tell you, you will figure it out in short order, anyway. I don't want to join the Wards because a Ward tried to kill me, which is why I gained powers in the first place."

That certainly had his attention. "Explain everything." It was a firm command, almost demanding. I had no intention of doing anything else and over the next five minutes, I explained in some detail exactly how I'd been bullied for over a year by Sophia Hess and Emma Barnes before their final act of shoving me into a locker and leaving me there until I triggered.

By the time I was finished, Armsmaster's lips were pursed into a hard line. "If this is true - and I'm sure I'll be able to verify at least part of it very quickly - then she will be dealt with."

"I don't," I started but had to pause to collect myself further. This had been another item I had thought long and hard about. "I don't really care what happens to her, as long as she isn't here to attempt to kill me again. Transferring her out of town would be fine. Put her on a quarantine zone in the middle of nowhere or something. I do think it is imperative that she be separated from Emma Barnes. They both have issues and they feed on each other in the worst ways, but I really just want them to stop hurting people."

Armsmaster seemed to take that well. "A noble sentiment, but if this were to become public and we didn't prosecute her fully, it would be an even bigger scandal."

"Yeah, about that…" I put my mask back on. I had debated on the next item a lot, both in my own head and with Amy. "In my visions, there is a cape that goes by the name of Coil that is trying to subtly undermine the local Protectorate and PRT. He may not have started moving fully yet, but he will within the next few months and it will be bad for everyone. His power is precognition of a sort - he is able to simulate two timelines, gather the data from both, and then choose the one he wants to keep. He has used it to thoroughly compromise the local PRT, both people and systems, and he probably has more limited ways to tap the Protectorate stuff as well."

"To what end?" Armsmaster asked and I found it encouraging that he would ask that instead of trying to poke holes in my claim.

"He is a PRT veteran currently working as a consultant by the name of Thomas Calvert. He wants to wreck things so that he can get himself installed as the next Director in order to fix them. At the same time, he intends to push the gangs out of the city so that he has control of both the criminal and legitimate sides of the cape scene in town. It would effectively make the Bay his own personal kingdom." I wasn't going to name names for the most part, but Coil could get fucked.

"That would be… very bad." Armsmaster seemed to have a talent for understatement.

"It's complicated, too. In the visions, he has been collecting the identities of the Empire. I think he intended to use them to remove them as a threat, but he also had something set up so that after he died, they got released. The Empire didn't take it well. They went berserk and tore the city the rest of the way apart. That was - actually, I kind of skipped it, but in the visions, Lung recruited a cape named Bakuda. She's a bomb tinker that did something at Cornell, I think? Anyway, she can make bombs that emulate powers, like Gray Boy bubbles. After Lung got captured, she went on a bombing spree that almost destroyed the city. Between that and the Empire going nuts, Leviathan attacked the city and everything just kept getting worse." I felt like the words were just spilling out of me by that point. I realized I'd left out quite a few important items but decided it would just be too much to give him at one time.

"You can see the Endbringers in your visions?" he asked. Of course he would know about the blindspots most powers had. Without Zion around, I hadn't been sure it was a thing, but apparently so.

"Yes, at least the initial vision could. The next attack will be the Simurgh and it will target Canberra, Australia. Unless it changes targets, anyway - the Simurgh is a powerful precognitive and attempts to preempt its attack might cause it to alter its plans. If I wanted to get more up-to-date predictions, I would probably have to get into close contact with one of them, and that seems like a terrible plan."

That earned me a soft snicker and a deep exhale. I could almost feel the nervous energy. "I agree with that assessment."

"That's the most immediate stuff. There's a lot more, but I'm sure you need to verify some things. Oh, the other thing. The Undersiders are working for Coil though most of them don't know it. I think you can subvert pretty much all of them with the right approaches. I ran into Bit-Hellhoud the other night and I'm going to support her in taking down an Empire dogfighting ring tomorrow night."

That earned me a frown. "I would have to advise against that. I'm aware of her history, and she's dangerous."

I shrugged. "Part of my grab bag is a Brute package. I think I can take her if it comes down to it, but I doubt I'll need to. She's very canine focused and if I'm helping her rescue dogs, I don't see us having any conflicts."

For a moment, I thought he was going to protest more, but it passed. "You have all of the contact numbers. Call it in, if nothing else."

"Sure," I said with a nod. "I think that's enough for one night. Once you get everything verified, leave me a message and we can meet again. Just… try to keep my name out of any reports. I think I have a degree of Thinker immunity, but I'm not sure how far it goes."

"I'll do what I can," he agreed, already lost in thought. "I'd still like for you to consider joining the Wards. Maybe not today, but once I've finished looking into your claims."

"After Shadow Stalker has been taken care of, I'll consider it. I suggest you start with checking the text message history on all of her phones - she has multiple. She's kind of an idiot about covering her tracks, and I'm sure there's something in the terms of her probation that would let you do that. I really don't think I could keep from twisting her head off if I had to work with her." I wasn't sure what I would do once Sophia was out of the way, really. The Wards were a safe space, in theory, but that would also mean taking orders. I wasn't sure I was a 'take orders' kind of gal.

I would have considered the Wards an issue because of the whole 'teenage drama' angle, but it seemed like I was hanging out with half of them on a regular basis anyway.

"I'll be in touch," Armsmaster said and offered me his hand.

Without really thinking about it, I reached out to shake it. Our palms touched - well, my palm touched the gauntlet of his suit - and that's when the world faded away.

//\\o//\\

Sometimes, I was a bit of an idiot. I had mentioned to Armsmaster not ten minutes before that I randomly got visions when I came into contact with people - and then I went and touched him. My only defense was that I had only had it happen one time, almost two weeks before, so I wasn't necessarily expecting it. I had let my guard down.

Unlike the animated scene I had been thrust into with Amy, what appeared before me was more of a frozen diorama. It was outside and on a city street, though submerged in a considerable amount of water. The buildings to either side were shattered, but the most striking thing about the scene was the collapsed bulk of Leviathan, the distinctive end of one of Armsmaster's halberds protruding less than a foot out of its back, very close to the center of its torso.

There were a number of capes around, though they were not really in-focus of the vision. The only two that stood out were the ones closest to Leviathan.

One was Armsmaster, his armor damaged and one of his arms hanging limply with blood dripping from it. The other was me, standing with her hands over her face and completely naked.

"Why do I always end up naked?" I whined, but the fact that Leviathan was dead seemed to make that a secondary concern. Public nudity to murder an Endbringer? It seemed like a fair trade.

The surrounding street definitely looked like the Bay, but it was difficult to tell with all of the destruction.

I moved through the area as a ghostly watcher. Viewing the scene from different angles didn't tell me much more, though as I got closer, I could see that Armsmaster was smiling with blood-stained teeth.

Even unmoving on the ground and apparently dead, the body of Leviathan was intimidating. Photos and videos of the Endbringers were less common than you might think, and very little of it was close-up. They struck without warning and tended to wipe out most of the devices which might have captured recordings of them. What did survive was mostly relegated to the dark corners of the Internet, though the Protectorate probably had better stuff. No one really wanted to see images of the things that could decide to level your city at the drop of a hat.

Even if I had sought out more videos of the thing, I don't know that I would have been any better prepared for how big it looked in person - for a given value of 'in person'. It was sleek, yes, but no amount of sleekness could make a thirty foot monster any less massive. The fact that the halberd in its back had managed to reach its core - which I had expected to be closer to its tail for some reason - was impressive.

Before I was finished gawking, the scene dissolved and I was back in the van.

"Are you okay?" Armsmaster asked.

I pulled my hand away from his. "Yes. Random visions are annoyingly random."

"Ah." There was a beat of silence. "I had expected my gauntlets to be a sufficient barrier. What did you see?"

"I…" I hesitated. Would telling him cause an issue? I still wasn't entirely certain of what I saw and the fact that it was proof that I was getting more 'visions' that didn't line up with my other-memories was disconcerting. Also the whole naked thing. Again. "Visions are changeable. Even simple differences between now and when the vision comes to pass could change things entirely."

"I know that," Armsmaster stated. Of course he did. He had to deal with precognitive Thinkers all the time.

"I'm not going to tell you exactly what I saw, because of that. I don't-You're working on nano-thorns, right? For your halberd? For use on Endbringers?"

Armsmaster inhaled sharply. He'd taken most of what I'd said stoically and seriously, but this one seemed to shock him a little. "You couldn't know that. I've only just started sketching designs."

I nodded. "I shouldn't know that, but I do," I corrected. I tried to shake off the mix of emotions the vision had let me with. Terror and mortification were kind of fighting it out, though there was also a sliver of hope. "My visions said it might work. I think… I think there's more to it than that - maybe a lot more - but your halberd is definitely a part of it. The rest-Too much could change for it to be of value."

That got me a gruff nod and a serious look. "I think we'll be talking again sooner rather than later."

I nodded. "Y-yeah. I'm just going to… I'm going to go and take a walk and try to forget about what I just saw a little bit."

I had trouble sleeping that night. What had it meant that I'd gotten a vision from touching Armsmaster but hadn't from so many other contacts with people over the last couple of weeks? Why had I seen the future instead of just the past? Why had it been a moment frozen in time instead of a full scene playing out? Again, why was I naked?

Even with all of that weighing on my mind, I managed to soldier through my day. At lunch, Amy teased me a little about how much of a nerd I was, but I didn't mind. I was starting to develop a sense of when Amy was being a bitch for real and when she was just teasing. I was sure that the fact that I was kind of starting to like it a little probably didn't say good things about me as a person.

By that evening, I was starting to feel more myself, which was good because I had a game to play. The dungeons and dragons session started out a little awkwardly but things relaxed pretty quickly after the initial bumps.

I kept forgetting that my powers had given me a makeover and even when 'dressed down', I was still a pretty girl instead of the vaguely female mass than I had been before. In some ways, the stark change made it easier to deal with. It sometimes felt a bit dissociative - like the 'new me' was someone else I was inhabiting or a costume that I was wearing - but it did help to push my old body issues to the side.

Intellectually, I knew that new-me was attractive, but I also kept forgetting that fact at the weirdest times. When I wasn't expecting the looks I got, it could be a bit startling, and I think I intimidated people a little. That same thing happened when I showed up to play one of the nerdiest games imaginable.

Fortunately, Chris's gaming group - Brandon, Evan, and Mei - seemed nice enough after they got over their initial surprise. Brandon was the DM and went to Arcadia while Evan and Mei went to Immaculata. The four of them all went to the same middle school, which was how they knew each other, so I felt a little like an outsider. Mei was the other girl in the group, and I got the feeling that she and Evan might have a thing though I wasn't certain. She gave me some sharp looks, but when I showed no interest in Evan, they gradually cooled down.

By the end of the night, I was also pretty sure that none of them were secretly capes. They didn't have the bearing - the attitude - I associated with capes. Chris didn't either so maybe I was fooling myself about that being a reliable tell, though. For all I really knew, I was hanging out with Lung's children or something.

The session was pretty light, all things considered. It was mostly a chance for the others to recap what had come before and for me to introduce my new character, a rogue I'd named Skitter because I was terrible at coming up with names for things in either timeline. The group was protecting a village from some recent threats and it turned into a roleplaying heavy game where I was introduced as a freelancer that the village had hired on before the party had arrived on the scene.

The three hours or so the game was set for almost flew by. When everything wrapped up, Brandon was sure to remind me that the next session was the following Thursday as we said our goodbyes. Chris walked me out after.

"So, did you have a good time?" he asked shyly. He didn't seem to have a lot of friends from what I'd see, though part of that was probably because he had to keep distance from his fellow Wards to avoid giving away secret identities.

"Yeah, it was fun," I said and then asked the question that had been on my mind all night. "Are Mei and Evan…"

"I don't think so? I think Mei is into him, but I'm pretty sure that Evan is gay. He can't really admit to it what with his parents being so religious, but…" Chris seemed a bit out of his depth on the topic.

"Ah, yeah, that sucks. You'd think after Legend lasered through so much of the bigotry, it would be better, but here we are." I gestured expansively as we walked out the front door. "The city of Nazis and people that secretly agree with them."

"I-I don't know if i would go that far," Chris protested weakly.

"I'm being hyperbolic," I admitted with a grin. "I know there are lots of good people here, but sometimes… sometimes people suck. It makes you want to punch a Nazi."

Chris chuckled. "I guess that's always the morally acceptable thing to do. Do you maybe want to go get something to eat?"

I checked my watch. "No, actually. I've got something I have to go do. I'll see you at school tomorrow, right?"

He nodded, "Uh, yeah, tomorrow then."

He sounded a little sad, but I still turned and walked away. I had a Nazi-face-punching appointment to get to, though if everything went according to plan, there wouldn't be all that much punching to do.

 

[Darkepyon]

I don't know the beginning with Amy kinda through me a little. Her being incredible vague during that chat was kinda annoying hey I killed a child because of what some group might do to her in the future is completely different then the slaughterhouse 9 kidnapped a kid and planned to do horrible things to her.

 

[Swordchucks]

Her being incredible vague

Click to shrink...

Keep in mind that Taylor doesn't have future memories. She has the spotty memories of the author about reading a story almost a decade ago. Until I looked it up, I didn't remember any of the details of her killing Aster other than the fact that she did it because there was some bad thing.

Sometimes, she's vague because she simply doesn't know the details.

 

[Kuriboh1233]

Again, why was I naked?

Click to shrink...

Why are you naked?

THIS IS QQ! *Sparta Kick to the chest causes Taylor's clothes to explode from her body*

Also the whole come back to life naked thing is part of the spider totem deal. I'm not 100% sure if it's been retconed but it happened to Spider-Man. He even got nifty stingers to shank people with.

Keep in mind that Taylor doesn't have future memories. She has the spotty memories of the author about reading a story almost a decade ago. Until I looked it up, I didn't remember any of the details of her killing Aster other than the fact that she did it because there was some bad thing.

Click to shrink...

I always thought that was a fannon thing for the longest time. Something people came up with to make grimdark Taylor even more grimdark.

 

[Swordchucks]

I always thought that was a fannon thing for the longest time.

Click to shrink...

Unfortunately, it is not. In context... she probably made the right call. On the other hand, being able to make that call doesn't necessarily say good things about you as a person.

 

[DIT_grue]

I stalled on the Empire rally scenes (I often have very low tolerance for sympathetic embarrassment and various nearby sensations) and it took me quite a while to catch up. A few typos etc. that jumped out at me in this last stretch:

Spoiler: Suggestions

I had no idea what character I wanted to play by the time the day was open, but it did give me something to think about when I wasn't busy worrying about other, real-life stuff.

Click to shrink...

over

I was to be in a particular parking garage downtime at nine o'clock the following night - Wednesday.

Click to shrink...

downtown

I ran into Bit-Hellhoud the other night and I'm going to support her in taking down an Empire dogfighting ring tomorrow night."

Click to shrink...

Hellhound

When everything wrapped up, Brandon was sure to remind me that the next session was the following Thursday as we said our goodbyes.

Click to shrink...

Personally, I'd use made here. 'Was' seems more... anticipatory, maybe?

 

[Swordchucks]

"Protectorate emergency, who am I speaking with and how can I help?" the calm, cool voice on the other side of the line answered.

"This is Weaver, indepen-" I was interrupted by the need to throw myself out of the way of an incoming chunk of asphalt bigger than my head. "Independent hero. I'm on Elm and-" I sprang back to my feet and started moving again before another projectile could tag me. "Elm and Fifth."

"Stand still and let me kill you!"

"There's kind of a cape fight going on." I almost fumbled my phone as I did a one-handed cartwheel to get out of the way of a blade of condensed wind that carved a gash in the road where I had just been.

"Who are the combatants?" the voice asked, just as calm as ever, but I could hear typing in the background.

"Stormtiger and Rune." I bounced off a wall and kicked an incoming steel trash can back at the female of the pair. Stormtiger's blade of air cut it in half before it got close, but the trash that exploded out of it gave me a little visual cover. "I saw Hookwolf and Cricket earlier, but I think they're chasing Bit-Hellhound."

The actual takedown of the dog fighting ring had gone well. There had only been a small number of guards and once the dust settled, Grue had showed up with a moving truck for the doggos. We'd piled as many of the cages inside as possible and Bitch had loaded them up with dogs that weren't likely to eat each other.

Unfortunately, we'd apparently missed some sort of alarm, because before we could get moving, a bunch of capes had come out of nowhere. I'd done my best to distract the more mobile ones while the truck made its escape.

"Hookwolf and Cricket are not with you?" the dispatcher asked.

"Gotcha!" I yelled as I managed to line up a shot and nailed Stormtiger with a big glob of webbing. I gave it a yank and he lost his footing, sailing in my general direction. "N-Oh, come on!"

Stormtiger righted himself in mid-air using his wind power and hurled more blades of wind in my direction. My webs were strong, but something cutting at them from the side was probably the best way to get through them and I dropped the now useless strand of synthetic silk as I dodged. The blades gouged more deep furrows into the side of the building I'd been hanging on to before I jumped to safety.

"Can you repeat that?"

"Sorry. Trying to not die." Why was I apologizing? Habit, I guessed. "No, just the two-and we're on Elm and Sixth now."

Rune had apparently taken advantage of my distraction to send an entire dumpster hurtling toward me. I jumped on top of it and then leapt upward, using a strand of webbing and a telephone pole to send myself arcing up and away from the fight.

Down below me, I spotted a red blur go past and start harassing Stormtiger. "I see Velocity now. Thanks for the help!" I ended the call and stuffed the phone back into my pocket before reversing my flight with another web and rocketing back toward the fight.

My fighting retreat had been, at least in part, to draw capes away from the moving truck. I had only partially succeeded, but Rune and Stormtiger were the most mobile of that quartet and thus the best ones to bait away from a retreating truck. None of them were exactly slow, but those two would certainly have been the hardest to evade.

Velocity blurred away from Stormtiger just as I got close enough to fire a double web shot at him. I was getting better at making the webbing do what I wanted it to, but it was deceptively complicated. Real spider silk wasn't actually sticky, instead relying on a separate substance spiders secreted at the same time they spun the silk in order to get that effect. Synthetic spider silk had both properties baked into one package, more or less, but it depended on how you fired it from the web-shooter as to how sticky it actually was.

The balls I launched at Stormtiger's face? Super sticky, and he was just dazed enough from Velocity's barrage of punches to get hit by them. He staggered back, his arms wrapped to his sides by the webbing but not quite out of the fight as he propelled himself away with a barely controlled gust of wind.

As he stumbled back, Rune apparently saw that the fight was going against them and swooped lower on the big chunk of plywood that she was using as a mount. As she did so, she launched the protective shroud of debris which she had been relying on to keep my webs at bay in my direction. I dodged and by the time I was able to focus on them again, the two of them were making their own retreat.

I almost chased after them for a moment, but hesitated. That moment was long enough for the blur that was Velocity to reappear from wherever it had vanished to. "I'd let them go. Hookwolf apparently gave up on catching your friends and is headed back toward them. Taking them all on at once sounds like a bad idea."

I let out a deep breath and pushed down the dog-like instinct to chase something that was running away. I really hoped he couldn't recognize me as the girl that had kicked away one of his grenades, though I was kind of curious why he hadn't used one of those on Stormtiger or Rune. Maybe it was a special occasion kind of thing? "Alright, yeah, bad idea."

"So, I know this isn't your first night out… but care to make a statement on what exactly happened?" he asked, his tone a little more serious than before.

"I think I said most of it on the phone. I happened to run across Hellhound a few nights ago while she was casing a warehouse that the Empire had been scouting out. Tonight, they were full up with dogs and just a few guards, so I agreed to help her get the dogs out. We tied up the five or six guys inside, and loaded up the animals. Apparently we missed an alarm of some sort because before we could get away, Hookwolf, Cricket, Stormtiger, and Rune showed up. I managed to get those two to follow me while the van and dogs hopefully got away." I shrugged at the end. I had a bad feeling about talking to the cops, in general, but I wasn't going to lie, either. "That's when you showed up."

Velocity took that in for a moment. "You really should consider joining the Wards. That kind of operation isn't something you should do without backup - real backup, not just a couple of small-time villains that are going to cut and run at the first sign of trouble."

I winced, though it was hopefully hidden by my mask. It was an uncharitable way of looking at things, but annoyingly true. "We both know that the Wards aren't really allowed to pick fights, and that dog-fighting rings aren't high on the Protectorate to-do list." There were other factors, of course, but those were good reasons, too. No amount of ruining dog fighting rings would change the world, but it couldn't hurt to try.

"You should still think about it. It's entirely too easy to end up in a really bad situation while you're trying to do the right thing." He nodded in the general direction to some of the destruction that had been left behind by our chase. My other-memories were in wholehearted agreement with that. "I doubt the Empire at large is going to come after you for that, but Hookwolf will remember it. He's a murderer several times over with a Birdcage order, so don't think he'll go easy on you just because you're a hero or a teenager or something."

I gave him a nod back. "Warning noted. I really didn't go out tonight with the intention of getting in a cape fight, but I don't have the best luck with avoiding trouble."

"If it can go wrong, it will," he agreed. I recalled, vaguely, that he had a military background. "At the very least, you should call in your operations before they go sideways. As an independent, we might not be able to help you directly, but we may be able to offer other kinds of support. At the least, we could have assets moved closer in case of a sudden surprise like that."

I almost objected that I had meant to call them beforehand, but I'd been a bit late and when I arrived, Bitch had wanted to start immediately and I'd kind of had to pick between helping her or stopping to call it in. Then the operation had gone fine and I was going to call it in after, but that's when Hookwolf arrived. Hindsight and all of that.

The sound of distant sirens underscored what he was saying and I took it as a warning for the next one, because there would certainly be a 'next one'. Response times weren't instant and being caught out without backup could be really bad. "I'll remember that."

//\\o//\\

"I believe I told you to call it in before you stirred up half of the Empire," Armsmaster admonished, more gently than I would have expected. This time, I'd joined him in an unmarked sedan sitting in a small lot near Captain's Hill late on Saturday night after I left Amy's house. We'd mostly just hung out in her family's home theater and watched a couple of movies, but it had been a good time. After she was done calling me an idiot for the whole Empire thing, of course.

"I don't think it was quite half," I defended lamely. I'd already been dressed down by Velocity, dad, and Amy for the debacle, so I wasn't really up for offering much pushback. "I realize that I made a mistake, and I think I told Velocity as much."

He gave me a gruff nod. "I will spare you the lecture, then." He pulled a few items from the console between the seats, handing them to me.

I took them and found a flat leather square just a little bigger than a phone and a fairly thick book about the size of my palm. "What's this?" I asked curiously as I tried to get a good look at the book in the dim light.

"Affiliated cape starter pack. More or less." The leather item turned out to be a holder containing a sort of identification card with Weaver on it, a bunch of official looking stuff, and identification numbers. The cover of the book had something about 'affiliates' in the title, but it was too dark to read much more. "You're in the Protectorate system formally. The identification should help with the police until you're better known. The handbook is a primer on proper procedures for making an 'enhanced citizens arrest' and where your liability starts. It would be a good idea to study it before you go poking any more gangs."

"Does this mean my visions panned out?" I asked. "Oh, and why didn't I know about the affiliate option?"

His lips twisted in distaste. "Yes, your information was correct. At least, it was correct enough for me to extend to you some trust. I'm not at liberty to discuss ongoing investigations, but they are very ongoing." He emphasized the 'very' part and I had a feeling that a lot of heads were going to roll. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. Being vindicated, even if only a little, was good. "As for the affiliate program, you are in a special situation where it's actually a decent choice - at least for the moment. Normally, I'd never advise someone to remain independent. This city is a meat grinder for independents, heroes and villains alike."

"Okay," I said, accepting the judgment. I'd done some research and there did seem to be a lot of independent capes in the Bay that popped up, were active for a short while, and then were never heard from again. I was sure that some of them ended up moving away or joining a team and rebranding, but there were more that just vanished. Given how my first outing had gone, I was pretty sure that I knew why. "Oh, I forgot to mention some stuff about Coil during our last meeting. The big thing is that he has a bunch of bases around town, but the big one is an Endbringer shelter - officially not finished or off the records or something - under a big part of downtown. It's also wired with a self destruct which will do a lot of damage if it goes off. Oh, and the thing that releases the Empire identities, though I'm not sure if he has that ready to go yet or not."

I hesitated for just a moment before picking my next topic. "Undersiders. Right. They work for him. Tattletail is their link to Coil and he's forcing her to work for him at gunpoint. She's a bitch, but her Thinker power is strong. Strong enough to at least partially analyze Endbringers. It's basically super-charged deduction and inference. The main weakness is that if it's provided with garbage data, it can reach entirely incorrect conclusions. She'd be easy enough to subvert by guaranteeing her safety."

"Grue is next. He's got an abusive family and he's turned to crime to protect his little sister. He isn't a bad guy aside from that." I didn't say anything about how he was apparently my type, though. "He generates darkness that can also block sound and maybe electrical signals. If you can provide him with safety for his sister, he'd almost certainly work for you."

"Then there's Hellhound, though she calls herself Bitch. Doesn't understand people, but does understand dogs. Get her friends to join up and then bury her in dogs to train and protect and she'll turn in a heartbeat. She's very pack oriented, though, and slow to trust outsiders. I'm sure that if you have looked into it, you're aware that the murders she committed were accidents." I was actually not sure how it would be possible to get that resolved, but it wasn't my problem.

"Last is Regent." This one was tough, I realized, because Armsmaster might decide he was better off dead than alive. "He's one of Heartbreaker's kids and might also have been called Hijack." Armsmaster apparently knew the name because he stiffened. "Powerful human master, though it takes a fairly long time for him to get control of his targets. He's a sociopath and a hedonist but not a complete monster. If you get his friends to turn and provide him with a comfortable place to live and video games, he'll stay out of the way, at least."

"I see," he said, his goatee almost but not hiding the look of distaste on his face. If my other-memories were right, the Protectorate had known barely anything about the Undersiders even after the bank robbery. Having a full rundown could only help. "That is all very good information to have."

"Oh, yeah, another urgent thing. Do you know if Miss Militia has contact information for Mouse Protector? Or, I mean, does anyone? In my visions, one of her enemies… Ratter? Raver? Something like that. Anyway, she tries to get the S9 to kill her and they basically make the pair of them into a conjoined monster thing. She should probably get out of town before that happens. If not, we'll have to deal with it whenever the nine show up here."

"The nine are coming here?" he asked hollowly.

I hesitated. I wanted to leave Amy out of this one. "There are people here they would try to recruit. Hookwolf is one of them. However, in the visions, they didn't show up until the city had descended into chaos for other reasons. Bakuda was the start of that."

"That was something else that checked out. There was a credible bomb threat at Cornell two days ago that was dealt with by the New York Protectorate. I reviewed the report and sent them a suggestion that she be given a high priority for capture because of her potential for mass destruction." Inside, I realized I'd made the right call in going to Armsmaster. He was well respected in the Protectorate and his warnings would carry more weight than mine.

"She's only going to get worse," I added.

"Is that everything?" he asked after a moment.

"Everything urgent, I think. Oh, while we're talking about the nine, the Siberian's a projection belonging to a guy that follows them around in a van and Jack Slash's real power is communication which he uses to basically ruin people psychologically. The rest of them are pretty much what you'd expect, though Bonesaw has the potential to be reformed if you can get rid of Jack Slash." I wasn't clear on all of the details on the nine, but I did remember van-guy.

There was another long moment of silence. "I did ask." He let out a heavy sigh. "That's all?"

I hesitated. I needed to drop the Dragon bomb at some point, but this didn't feel like the best time to bring that up. "Everything for now."

"Good. I'll be in touch. If you remember anything urgent, leave me a voicemail. I have the system set to route your messages for high priority review."

"Can do," I said as I slipped out of the car and into the night.

//\\o//\\

"So, you and my sister, huh?" Victoria - no, Glory Girl - asked as we both crouched on a rooftop. It was a few hours past dark on Sunday evening, which really wasn't all that late since it was the middle of January.

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess." Amy and I weren't really dating, but also weren't not-dating. We did hang out together once or twice a week, though there hadn't been any double dates since the kidnapping. My understanding was that Dean was still on house arrest when not at school even if Vicky seemed to have recovered for the most part.

"Aw, don't be shy. I think it's adorable," she declared and then stopped herself from saying anything else. "Oh wait, there they go."

Down below us, a beat up brown sedan pulled out of a warehouse without its lights on. Someone pulled the building's doors closed behind it as it rolled down the wide alleyway. It paused at the cross street for a moment before pulling out with its lights on. Vicky scribbled something down in a little notebook she normally kept in her pocket.

"What's that about?" I asked as I watched it go.

"The lights? I think it's something to do with hiding from flying capes. I think some stupid cape show convinced people it worked." She rolled her eyes.

I snickered softly. "Obviously not, then."

"Nope. You get a read on how many are still inside?" Vicky asked as she looked back over the edge.

"Two I can find, maybe more." I was again reminded that other-me waiting three months to go out had been for practical reasons as much as anything else. Not even cockroaches could stand going outside in the Bay in January, so I was limited to what was already inside a building or could somehow get from inside my costume to the building without having them freeze to death along the way. Fortunately, if people were present somewhere for any length of time, they kept it warm enough for there to be at least a few present.

"And the drugs?"

"No clue. All I have are a few house spiders and they don't have the best vision." Give me a jumping spider for scouting any day. The scary spiders like black widows were cool and all, but their vision wasn't the best. In some situations, their vibration sensitivity was better than seeing, but spotting a stash of illegal chemicals wasn't one of those situations.

"Ah, well. With my luck, it's just a couple of guards and like an ounce of weed. Not worth the risk. Want to go follow that car? I'm pretty sure we can catch up."

I looked after it and shrugged. "Nah, I think I'm good. Got school tomorrow… actually, you do, too. You should probably get some sleep. This new drug ring will still be there tomorrow."

Vicky chuckled darkly. "Did you let mom corner you? You sound just like her."

I fidgeted. Being compared to Brandish wasn't the best thing in the world, but I supposed it was acceptable in this context. I just felt like I'd rather spend some time with dad than running around in the cold. "I'm just a responsible person."

"Gah, I think I'm starting to see why Amy likes you. You're as boring as she is," she teased.

Of the things I would call Amy, 'boring' wasn't very high on the list, though I supposed she was pretty quiet. "I guess," I hedged. It wasn't so much that I was quiet, but the reality of engaging in a real crime fighting operation - not the 'go in and punch a guy' kind, but stakeouts and tailing cars and freezing half to death in the process - did not live up to how cool the movies made it look. "Beats being in trouble, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. We can meet up later, and I still want to replace that dress. We can drag Amy along and play dress-up."

I hesitated. As annoyed as that would make Amy - and I found that thought very amusing - it sounded like exactly the kind of thing she didn't need while she was trying to get some space from her sister. "I'll go, but we should probably leave her out of it. She'll be grumpy."

Vicky nodded solemnly. "I'm afraid that your case of 'being boring' is terminal."

I rolled my eyes, though she couldn't see it under my mask. "Catch you later."

"Later!"

Parkouring my way across town was always fun. It was almost like meditation and it certainly warmed me up enough to ignore the cold. It also gave me time to think.

There were three big gangs in town - if you didn't count the government funded ones, anyway. The ABB were scary because their limited roster of capes were high end and had few qualms about killing people that crossed them. The Empire also had some fairly strong capes on their side and a great deal of teamwork. They were always poking at each other, but it never got that serious. The ABB didn't really have the manpower to expand and the Empire didn't really want to hold territory full of non-white people.

The third group in town was Coil and his shadowy mercs. What I'd given Armsmaster had probably increased what was known about the man by at least tenfold, if not more. Their crimes tended to be more sophisticated and their territory was the largely commercial district downtown. It wasn't really prime real estate for either of the other gangs and the one thing people did know about Coil was that trying to assault his men was like grasping at shadows. They faded away and any gains the other gangs made were snatched back later with surgical precision.

There were dozens of smaller gangs, too, ranging from just a handful of people to a few dozen. They were often non-white and non-Asian - though not always - so they slipped through the cracks and held little patches of turf or ran small hustles that the big gangs ignored for one reason or another. It was those groups that eventually got pulled together by Skidmark to form his Merchants.

The new drug ring that Vicky was tracking was probably an early sign of that consolidation. Squealer had a propensity for invisible vehicles, and such things made moving drugs much easier. It also made it easier to run over idiots that stopped to gawk in the middle of the road, but I wasn't bitter about that or anything.

I realized I hadn't mentioned Squealer and Skidmark to Armsmaster. I also hadn't mentioned the Travellers. None of them were exactly 'urgent', though, so it was probably fine.

I took a round-about way to get home and dropped into the back yard, hopefully unseen. Inside, I knocked the snow off my shoes. It was mercifully warm and I could smell dinner which, judging by the oven light being on, was waiting on me.

"Dad, I'm home!"

 

[XZR-2]

Tftc

 

[Jao]

Tattletail is their link to Coil and he's forcing her to work for him

Click to shrink...

Tattletale*

 

[Swordchucks]

Tattletale*

Click to shrink...

I said what I said

 

[DIT_grue]

No amount of knocking ruining dog fighting rings would change the world, but it couldn't hurt to try.

Click to shrink...

Delete this word, probably?

 

[Swordchucks]

Delete this word, probably?

Click to shrink...

Thanks! Fixed it.

 

[Swordchucks]

"In here, honey!" I heard from the other room as I walked toward the living room. "I have a guest over, if you want to go get cleaned up first."

"Ah, gotcha!" I called back and glanced down at myself. My heavy winter coat pretty much turned my costume into street clothes, but if I took it off, that deniability vanished fast. Fortunately, my habit was to leave the coat in my room which meant the odds of accidental exposure would have been low, but I was still mildly annoyed that dad hadn't messaged me.

I turned and went upstairs to change. I also took a minute to wash my face and brush my hair since being in and out of the cold had left me a bit sweaty and rumpled.

I assumed that dad had some of his work friends over. Kurt or Alexander stopped by fairly often for a beer, even on a Sunday night, and sometimes Kurt brought his wife Lacey with him. They were all familiar to me, periodic presences throughout my youth, though less so since mom died.

The person sitting on the couch was none of those people. For one thing, she was probably younger than any of them, looking to be around thirty, give or take. Her blond hair was stuffed into a messy ponytail, and despite wearing a bit too much makeup, she wasn't unattractive. She also wasn't terribly attractive, either, but I had been hanging out with Vicky's family too much lately to have a good barometer for that.

"Taylor, this is Sherrel," dad said from his spot in his armchair. There were a few beer bottles on the coffee table.

"Hi," she greeted, her voice more high pitched than I would have assumed. The poor woman probably couldn't get taken seriously with a voice like that. "Ya must be Taylor. Danny told me all about ya."

"Hey. Nice to meet you." I fidget a little. I had no idea why this woman was in my house this late on a Sunday evening.

"Your mom used to tutor Sherrel while she was in college. She was at our wedding."

I felt a pang at the mention of mom, but that fact still explained nothing.

"Yeah, then I… well, life can take a bad turn, ya know? I wuz… well, God sent me a second chance and I wanna take it." She sounded like she really believed that and I had no idea what to do with that information. "I called up ya dad cuz I was looking for ya mom - which I'm real sorry about, by tha way, she was a badass - cuz I needed advice. That was a week ago? Two?"

Dad nodded. "About that, yeah. Anyway, Sherrel's a mechanic. I had her come by the office and she fixed up that old generator we had in the closet since I started working there in no time. We don't exactly hire mechanics very often, but unions stick together - it's kind of our thing. I made some calls and got her an interview with Bruce Flynn. He's over the shop that keeps the city buses running."

"An' I got tha job!" Sherrel chimed in happily, raising one of the beer bottles in the air in a mock toast. "So I brought some beer ova to celebrate."

"Wow, that's great," I said, forcing myself to smile. The hamster wheel between my ears was already turning and I had a bad feeling I knew exactly what new wrench was being thrown into the gears of my life. Overall, it seemed to be a good wrench, at least. "I'm happy for you."

"I ain't worked a legit job in years, so I'm real happy!" Sherrel chirped again, downing beer like a pro. "Wan' a beer? There's still a few left."

Dad coughed and I shot him a grin. "Nah, got school tomorrow, but thank you." I looked between the two of them again. "You said that God sent you a second chance… how did that work?"

Sherrel sat up straighter, almost proudly. "Alright, so, you have to understan' that I've been in a bad place for tha last few years. I done some stuff I ain't proud of an' all. Anyway, I was on something… I don' even know what it wuz, really. Anyway, I was drivin' and all of a sudden, there was a guy all in gray in front of my truck. I don't know where they came from or nothin'. Anyway, I wuz too fu-err, too messed up to tell until it was too late and I hit 'em."

Suspicions confirmed, I still couldn't stop myself from asking a question. "Were they okay?"

"That's tha thing! I got my truck stopped and got out to look, and they wuzn't nowhere around! I looked at my truck and there was a big dent, but nothin' else! I thought I killed someone, but no matter where I looked, nothin'! I even called up the cops tha next day, but they hadn't seen nothin' neither." Her voice got softer. "I think it was an angel. Swear to God, I think it was one a them angels sent to give me a message. After that? I ain't touched nothin' harder'n beer, and I ain't gonna. Got a straight job and everything now."

"Wow," I said, nodding. "That's amazing. I'm glad you're turning things around. It must be hard for you."

"First few days, I felt like real shit, but it's gettin' better. Every time I think about goin' back, I remember that thump. What if tha next time, it ain't an angel but a person? What if I get some poor asshole - er, I mean, person - killed because I ain't watchin' what I'm doin'?" The genuine distress in her high voice would have been comical if this wasn't a real thing that was happening right in front of my face. As it was, I had no idea how to feel.

I made a gentle noise of agreement and a few minutes later, Sherrel declared that she needed to get home so she could be at her new job in the morning. Dad insisted on walking her out.

I busied myself with cleaning up the beer bottles and finally getting to eat my dinner out of the oven.

"So, you like her, don't you?" I asked when dad came into the kitchen a few minutes later. He was smiling.

"Ah," he sounded guilty. "She's nice. I mean, she's too young for me, obviously."

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. "No, by all means. I mean, she's nothing like mom, so it's not like you're trying to replace her or anything. It's… it's good that you're making new… friends."

Dad actually blushed a little. "Well, nothing will probably come of it, but I'm glad you're alright with it."

"Yeah," I said. Dad dating a reformed Squealer that had killed me and thought I was an angel was not anything I had foreseen, but it was actually not that bad. If nothing else, I didn't think the Merchants were going to go very far without their Tinker. "I think it'll be okay."

//\\o//\\

"Who?" Amy asked, confusion on her face. We were back in her family's home theater on Monday night.

"Squealer. The Tinker for the Merchants?" I tried again.

Her brow wrinkled as she thought about it. "That doesn't help. I have no idea what that is, either. Are the Merchants a gang or something?"

I sighed. I hadn't realized how much of a non-entity the Merchants actually were before Bakuda started tearing the city apart. In retrospect, it made sense. They were drug dealers that got high on their own supply, so their decision making was suspect at best. If they hadn't had a large opportunity served to them on a platter in the form of a gang war, they probably would have fizzled out like all of the other small gangs eventually did.

"Drug dealing gang. Not that important," I admitted. "Squealer's a vehicle-based Tinker. Big ones that can turn invisible and other stuff."

"I just… I mean, that sounds like it's neat, but I just can't get past the name."

I snickered. "I know. I suspect it's a double entendre. A reference to tire sounds and also, you know."

Amy made another face. "I don't, but if she and your dad keep dating, you might find out for sure."

That ruined my mirth, and I gagged. "Oh, gah. Do not - just no. Do not say that."

Amy grinned viciously. "Oh, the thought of your dad and some woman getting-"

"Stop!" I declared and shoved my hand in between us so I didn't have to look at her. I thought I was going to be sick. Well, not really, but metaphorically.

"I'm sure he has needs-"

"Nope!" I declared and put my fingers in my ears like a reasonable adult.

That just made Amy laugh harder and after a few minutes she declared a truce.

"If she is going to stick around, I might give her a once-over," Amy declared. "Long-term addiction can leave you with all sorts of nasty issues. Probably be a good thing to clean those up."

I stared at her for a long moment. "You really are a good person, Amy."

She looked away, a guilty look flashing across her face. "I don't… I'm just being selfish. Your dad is cool, and if I can stop him from getting herpes or worse, it seems like something I should do."

I rolled my eyes, though she couldn't see it. "Thank you, anyway. It's a nice thing to offer."

"I guess." She didn't sound like she meant that. "Anyway, let's pick a movie."

I almost ruined the moment by blurting out something else, but instead let the subject change and had a pleasant evening.

The next day, things went normally until after lunch when one of the office assistants pulled me out of study hall to go to Mister Nguyen's office. I wasn't exactly sure what his job was, but his title was 'Academics and Extracurriculars Coordinator'. I hadn't seen the man since the first day of classes, but he was the one that had given me my schedule and assigned the 'assessment modules' I had been working through when I wasn't working on homework in the afternoons.

His door was closed, but I didn't have to wait long.

"Taylor, please come in," he called from inside the office a little while after I arrived. I shuffled in and took one of the offered seats. The older Asian man put down a folder he had been reading and gave me a friendly smile. "How are you today? Everything at Arcadia is up to your expectations?"

"Uh, yeah?" I offered. I hadn't had any problems at school. I had a couple of people I would call friends, a double handful of friendly acquaintances, and everyone else pretty much left me alone. It was actually kind of great.

"Good, good. I've been looking over your academic module scores, and I have to say that they're much higher than I was expecting based on your scores from Winslow. You're really tearing your way through them, too."

I fidgeted nervously. I'd never liked praise that much, and I couldn't quite shake my dislike for school administrators. It wasn't Mister Nguyen's fault, though.

"I did see that you haven't submitted a request for an alternate afternoon program, though. Do you just not see any that appeal to you or are you having that much fun in study hall?" he chuckled lightly at his own joke. It wasn't especially funny, but I chuckled along just to be polite.

"None of them really appealed to me, and I kind of like the quiet." It was true enough. A few hours of uninterrupted time to do homework, read, or putter around on the admittedly restricted Internet was very nice, really.

"That's fine. You're not the only student that feels that way, I'm sure." He shuffled through manila file folders on his desk. "It's a bit early to tell, but if you keep burning through those modules, we'll have to see about giving you something meatier at the end of the month. There's an opportunity to get some class credits, and you might even end up skipping a year if you work at it."

I made a vaguely positive noise. A month ago, I had been facing the reality that I might be held back a year, but now I might skip one forward? Things had certainly changed.

"Ah, here it is," he declared as he pulled a folder out from amongst the rest. From where I was sitting, they all looked the same. "As nice as it is to talk about your progress, that's not why I wanted to see you today. In fact, I need to ask you for a bit of a favor."

He put down the folder again and kept talking. "One of the work-study programs we have is to work in the local school district, mostly the elementary and middle schools. One of the young ladies working at Arcadia Intermediate had an unfortunate meeting with a patch of ice and will be on crutches for the next several months. For most of her duties it's not that big a deal, but there is one thing that's a little beyond her right now. In the afternoon, she is one of the crossing guards, which is mostly just twirling a sign and directing traffic so the kids can be a bit safer. I've gotten a couple of other students to cover three of her shifts, but I have two more days to fill."

"You want me to be a crossing guard?" I asked curiously. I wasn't inherently opposed to it, but I felt like this was the hand of fate at play again. It felt like I was being set up and I wasn't sure if I should follow the rabbit to Wonderland or not.

"Just two afternoons a week - Tuesdays and Thursdays. You'd need to leave here by a quarter to three and you'd be done a bit before four." He glanced inside the file again. "Unfortunately, it's only two hours of work a week, and at minimum wage. Normally, it's part of the work-study which is more worthwhile, but I am in a bit of a bind here - both in terms of schedule and budget."

I considered it. Two hours a week wasn't much of a commitment, but it also wasn't much money. Did crossing guards really get paid so poorly? Never mind, of course they did. Then a thought hit me, from my very first day of school. "Would it count as my volunteer hours?"

"Normally, no, but an exception can be made since you really would be helping us all out. Does that mean you'll do it?" He looked rather relieved and I wondered if I was the first one he'd asked or if he had already been through a bunch of people and was getting desperate. There weren't that many kids that did study hall, which was one of the reasons it was so peaceful and quiet.

I did some quick mental math. Dennis had told me I'd need twenty volunteer hours, and two hours a week for three months would probably cover it. Also, if this was my weird luck pushing me into yet another spot, it was bound to be interesting. Probably weird, but interesting.

"I guess I'll do it."

//\\o//\\

"... I'm sure I'll remember more stuff, but that's everything that is local," I finished. My third clandestine meeting with Armsmaster had covered the other big players in town. I'd hinted that I knew identities, but he hadn't been interested. It was probably just as well since knowing identities would lead to escalation.

This time, I had also given him everything I could remember about the Travellers, which wasn't that much. I did remember a fair bit about Echidna and Trickster, but that was about it. It would have been easier if I could write everything down, but I wasn't sure things I wrote down would be immune to Thinkers like I appeared to be. Having Contessa find a report in my room titled 'here's how Cauldron is behind everything' would probably make my life really hard and possibly brief.

"Thank you for the information." He took a breath. "Now, I still can't talk about internal matters, but I would suggest that you and your father take a weekend trip, preferably out of state."

"What part of the weekend?" I asked. If he was telling me to get out of town, they were probably about to move on Sophia. It was a sensible precaution since I was one of her known victims.

"Being gone by Friday afternoon would be best. Depending on how things go, it might be safe to come back Saturday night, but I'd plan on waiting till Sunday afternoon to be sure. I'll leave you a voicemail when it's all clear."

I nodded. "Yeah, I think I can swing that. Uh, do you suppose I could drop in on the Protectorate base in New York? We've got family down that way and a tour might be fun."

His lips pursed for a moment as he considered it. "I can get you a number to call. It's a different division, but Legend is an excellent leader and I'm sure he'll be happy to have someone show a new cape around even if he isn't available to do so personally. Just don't let him talk you into signing up too easily."

I chuckled. "Don't worry. If I'm going to end up on the team, it'll be here in the Bay. It's going to be hard enough to get my dad to leave town for two days, much less get him to actually move."

Armsmaster relaxed, just a fraction. "You really should consider joining up. Strongly. I would hate for you to end up trapped in a situation you can't escape."

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Armsmaster sounded genuinely concerned, though I was sure it was at least a little selfish. Having me forced to work for a gang would be bad for everyone. I had no intention of doing that, but the gangs didn't exactly play fair. Being in the Wards wouldn't be the best, but it would certainly be better than some of the ways I could get trapped. "I have been considering it. I've also been keeping my head down."

"You've only been a cape for two weeks and you've already been in two major cape fights."

"It's been a bit more than three weeks," I defended lamely.

"That's still a lot for a new cape. Many don't even go out as a cape for their first month."

"In my defense, I didn't go looking for either of those fights." It was impossible to escape the fact that he had a point. "I'm being more careful."

"Good," he stated with emphasis. "If your precognition continues to be as accurate as it has so far, you can do more good with that than by punching any number of capes."

I didn't mention that the last vision I'd received - the one about stabbing Leviathan - had involved me doing something directly, though I didn't know exactly what that was. Because I had been naked in the vision, I had left that part out.

"Point taken. I'll try to keep out of trouble." From a purely pragmatic point of view, it was a good point. No amount of punching muggers would fix a broken system, but precognition was the kind of power that might be able to help with that. On the other hand and from a more personal point of view, getting the cape equivalent of a desk job where I only got to use my precognition sounded terribly boring.

"And when that inevitably doesn't work, please call it in as soon as possible."

I was starting to pick up on Armsmaster's sense of humor. It was very dry and a bit jaded, but it was there. I chuckled. "Fair enough."

With that, we were done and I slipped away into the night. I hadn't gotten far before I got a text from dad that let me know I needed to 'change' before I came home.

"This is your fault. She's going to be there, isn't she?" I asked the universe at large. As usual, I got no answer.

Indeed, when I got home - changed out of my costume on the way - I found an oversized, beat up pickup truck with a tarp covering a bunch of stuff in the back sitting in our driveway. It made dad's perfectly normal car look like a toy in comparison.

Dad looked a little guilty when I came in the front door. "Sherrel needs a place to stay for a few days. I offered our couch."

I took a deep breath. "Did she say why she needed a place to stay?" I was pretty sure I knew. Since she was going legit, she couldn't exactly crash with the other Merchants. I was surprised that they hadn't run her off sooner, but maybe her workshop had offered her some insulation from that.

Dad shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. "I didn't ask. I… your mother would have told me not to ask. I just asked her if she was safe and if she needed any help. Well, and offered the couch."

I found myself nodding. Mom really wouldn't have wanted him to press the matter. She was very sensitive to domestic violence issues. My other-memories supplied that she'd run with Lustrum for a while, and I nearly stopped dead in talking to dad as that revelation slotted into place. It made a lot of sense, but was still surprising. "Alright, it's fine, but I'm afraid I have to make it complicated. My…" I looked for a word, "advisor suggested we take off Friday afternoon and not come back till he calls, which might be Saturday but could be Sunday."

That made dad frown. "Is something happening?"

I was the one shuffling my feet. "I think they're going to address the school issue. The one at Winslow."

Dad nodded with dawning understanding. I'd told him all about Sophia and Shadow Stalker. "Ah. Well, I suppose we could-"

"I was kind of hoping we could go visit Gram. After that, I was hoping I could take a train into the city and take a tour of the local Protectorate, too."

He traded his frown in for a wince. "You don't ask for easy stuff, huh?" Dad and Gram had never gotten along. Gram wasn't the easiest to get along with in the best of times, and dad had committed the unforgivable sin of marrying her only daughter. The last time I had seen her was at mom's funeral. "If you make the call, we can go, but I want to stay in a hotel. It's the off season so it shouldn't be that bad."

I had expected as much. Dad wouldn't want to accept anything from Gram and she probably wouldn't even offer.

"As long as we can afford it." I was being a bit selfish since there were obviously other options that were a bit more affordable, but there must have been something about dying that made me want to reconnect with distant family.

"If your… advisor thinks it is necessary, we will make it work."

 

[Kuriboh1233]

I'm loving all the surprise curveball confusing Taylor from being in a AU. He mental da fuqs when things don't match up makes me chuckle every time.

 

[Gpp]

This whole fic is " I know stuff like lots of secret stuff" and making those secret stuff not so secret .. everybody is forgetting the fedora lady.. in truth Taylor is already dead and we r just reading hope for the best version !!

 

[Swordchucks]

"Alright, so here's the plan. We're going to set up a meeting with their leader, right?" I said as I looked at the rest of my team. "And I'm going to walk in, right? And I'm going to say hi and say I found a really nice knife. Then I'm going to take it out and show it off, like this." I made the gesture of holding up a knife in one hand. "Then I'm going to say 'oh, let me show it to you' and I'm going to walk toward him, but then I'm going to stumble, but I'm not really going to stumble. That's a trick. When I 'fall', I'm actually going to stab him. Right in the eye. And then I'll be all like 'oh no, it is a terrible accident'."

Four sets of eyes stared at me for a long moment.

"That's the dumbest plan I've ever heard," Mei grumbled and the rest let out a collective chuckle.

"No, no, it'll work. I've never seen it fail," I declared, pushing what I knew was a terrible idea because I found it amusing.

"Have you ever seen it succeed?" Chris asked curiously.

"Well, no, but it has never failed!" I flipped through the pages of my character sheet. I knew it was absurd, but if you couldn't have absurd plans, why even play? It was just a game, after all. "Besides, I have 'Impractical Planner'. It makes my plans more likely to succeed."

"That's… a fair point," Evan said as he genuinely considered it. "That'd make the odds a little less impossible, but it's still really unlikely to work."

"Well, why don't you guys think about it for the week? We're close to time and I think we should call it," Brandon interjected, and I glanced at the clock. I hadn't realized it was getting so late, which was really the best sign that I'd been having fun.

Everyone said their goodbyes and I walked out with Chris.

"Mom is working late and I need to bring her something. It's like a block from here." Chris said as we hit the street. "Want to walk with me?"

I checked the time again. It was late, but I had some time before dad started to worry. Not having the teenager Tinker wandering around the streets of downtown alone was also probably a good idea. "As long as it's not too far, sure," I agreed.

"It's not," he assured me and we headed back toward the center of town a little. The buildings got taller and I realized that this was one of the areas where I actually could get some web-swinging going. It would just be over a small area, but it still looked fun.

Eventually, we ended up at one of the mid-sized office buildings. The main doors were locked up tight, but there was a smaller door that Chris got us buzzed through. Inside, there was a short corridor to another door and a wide glass window with a slot at the bottom that looked into a security office. There was someone inside there.

"Hey, Bob," he greeted the older security guard behind the glass.

"If it isn't little Christopher Woods," he greeted amicably. He looked like he was about sixty with a scattered head of white hair and a pot belly. "Going up to see your mom?"

"She forgot her lunch," Chris declared and pulled out a smaller bag from his backpack. "Again."

Bob chuckled. "She does seem to make a habit of that. Who is your friend?"

"Taylor," Chris said and I nodded.

"Taylor Hebert," I supplied.

Bob nodded and punched some stuff into the computer terminal in front of him by pecking at the keys with his index fingers. "They changed the rules again, so I need to see your IDs."

Chris had his out in a second but it took me a minute of digging through my bag to find my Arcadia ID. I hadn't exactly expected to need it.

He checked them over and a few minutes later, we had our pictures taken and he passed a couple of badges on lanyards through the hole. They were bright orange and just had 'visitor' written on them. "You're clear to go up to fifteen. These don't work anywhere else, of course."

With another buzz, we were on our way. The elevator required a badge swipe to get in and then another to pick our floor.

"Seems pretty high security," I commented as the floors ticked by.

"They added a bunch of stuff in the last year or two. There's some big data science thing up on the top few floors now and they apparently handle a lot of sensitive stuff." Chris fidgeted with the badge a bit. "Just a week ago, getting through security was a lot simpler, but now they have Bob logging everyone into the system."

I nodded. I vaguely recalled that the Undersiders had done a bunch of espionage missions before Skitter came onto the scene, so maybe the businesses in the Bay were getting more security conscious? It would make a degree of sense.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened, letting us out onto a fairly small, nondescript waiting area. There were some chairs to one side and a curved desk with a computer - currently off - behind it. There was an empty feeling to the area, though all of the lights were on.

Chris was apparently accustomed to the setup, however, since he walked around behind the desk and picked up a phone, punching in a four digit number. There was a quick conversation that amounted to 'we're here' and then he hung it up.

"So, ah," Chris started as we waited. The silence was apparently getting to him. "What do you do for fun? I mean, aside from D&D?"

I considered that for a moment. What did I like to do for fun? Running around the city as a cape was certainly fun when you could move like Spider-man, but it wasn't really a hobby kind of thing. "I read a lot," I admitted. It seemed like a safe thing to say, though kind of boring.

"That's cool," Chris said, fidgeting. "Anything in particular-"

I was saved from more awkward small talk by the door opening and a short, slim woman in her late thirties walking through the door. "Thank goodness," she declared and gave Chris a big hug, deftly snatching the lunch bag out of his hand as she did so. "I swear I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on."

"Mom," Chris said pleadingly and I immediately recognized the tone. No one likes it when their family embarrasses them in front of their friends.

His mother seemed to notice me for the first time. "Oh, sorry! Don't mind me. Just very happy to see my lunch." It was a little strange to have a grown woman babbling at me, but she was. "I'm Melanie, Chris's mother. You must be one of his friends?"

"I'm Taylor," I supplied. "I go to school with Chris."

"That's nice," she said and then seemed to run out of steam. "Anyway, I have to get back to what I was doing, but thank you for bringing my lunch - well, I guess technically a late dinner, but they still call it a lunch break, so maybe it's both."

"You're welcome, mom," Chris said and started backing away. "Taylor has to get home, so we're going to go. See you in the morning."

"Okay, have a good time, you two. But not too good a time, right?" Melanie declared and I felt myself heating up in secondhand embarrassment for Chris.

"Bye, mom!" Chris declared as he ran to the elevator.

I couldn't help but chuckle. "Bye, Melanie. It was nice to meet you."

She laughed too. "Nice to meet you. Make sure Chris behaves, will you?"

"I don't think I can promise anything," I said as I, too, headed for the elevator.

We were half-way through the elevator ride when Chris finally spoke again. "I'm sorry about my mom."

"It's fine." It really was. She'd reminded me in the vaguest ways of my own mom, but not enough to make me sad. "She obviously really cares about you."

That just seemed to make him more embarrassed. "Y-yeah, I guess."

We returned the badges to Bob and walked outside.

"So, ah, are you doing anything this weekend?" Chris asked as we made our way to the bus stop.

"I'm going to New York to visit my grandmother," I said. I'd been thinking about the trip a bit and I was actually getting a bit excited. As much as Gram didn't like dad, she did like me in her own, rather stiff way. I'd just have to make sure that Sherrel was never mentioned in her presence - which was another conundrum. I wasn't entirely sure that leaving Sherrel in our house alone for a weekend wouldn't result in a smoking crater on our return.

"Oh, uh, that's cool. Maybe we could do something next weekend or something? I mean, aside from D&D?" he suggested.

"Maybe," I waffled. I did need to get a personal cell phone and a Tinker would be a good person to have along on that kind of shopping trip, right? Maybe I could bring both Vicky and Chris? That seemed like the closest thing I'd have to a group of experts.

Still, I had to survive the trip to New York first.

My bus pulled up at that moment. "We can figure it out next week?" I offered.

"Sure, have a safe trip home!"

"You, too!" I declared and got on the bus.

//\\o//\\

I was once again prepared for the black void. The only silver lining was that this time, I would focus on what happened as I died so that I could better understand what was actually happening to me. Hopefully.

I just hated that dad was going to die with me.

"Taylor, are you alright?" I could still hear dad's voice, even from the other side.

"Taylor?" I could still hear him, and I finally gave in to temptation and cracked one of my eyes open. Despite all of my expectations, the truck had not crashed yet. We were still zipping along entirely too fast and Squea-Sherrel was weaving in and out of traffic like she was driving a sports car and not an oversized behemoth of a pickup truck.

"I'm fine," I gasped out, closing my eyes again as we very nearly scraped the paint off the side of a family sedan. The look of horror on the driver's face would be with me forever.

Things had been fine all the way up to the freeway, then she'd hit the gas and I'd felt my soul leaving my body. For a moment, I had dared to hope that Sherrel was going to be an ironically safe and sane driver. Those hopes were dashed as soon as she revved the engine and we rocketed forward. She wasn't just laying into my expectations but positively wallowing in them.

The woman in question, meanwhile, was cackling with glee. "Hang on to ya horses!" She whooped as she got out ahead of the traffic line and punched it even harder.

"Are you sure you're okay? You look a little pale?" dad prodded, amusement thick in his voice.

"How are you so calm?" I said. I didn't whimper.

"You only remember your mom's driving from when you were a kid. Having you really caused her to mellow out. Well, that and the street racing tickets were really destroying our insurance premiums." Suddenly, we were going at a normal rate of speed and I dared to glance out the window to see a police officer sitting beside the road, no doubt trying to catch speeders. As soon as we were safely out of his sight, I was sure we would be back to top speed again. "You get used to it. It's almost… nostalgic in a way."

"What if I don't want to get used to it?" I asked. I could handle hurtling through the air under my own power at speeds that would probably kill a normal person if they crashed, but Sherrel's driving was something else.

"Don't worry, I ain't never wrecked!" Sherrel laughed again. "I'm an amazin' driver!"

"I thought you hit someone?" I couldn't stop myself from saying. I didn't mention that it had been me.

"That was an angel! Besides, aside from a little dent, I wuz fine!"

Somehow, we arrived - alive - at the hotel on Long Island. We were a full hour earlier than we should have been, which was made even more ridiculous by the fact that there had been a pretty long ferry ride in the middle. I passed out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

"You sure you're okay, kiddo?" Dad seemed like he was in entirely too good of a mood for the experience we had been through the previous day.

"I'm fine," I grumbled as I picked at one of the slices of the orange that was making up the majority of my breakfast. The hotel's idea of a 'continental breakfast' was a couple of boxes of half-stale donuts and a fruit basket. It wasn't the worst, but it wasn't great, either.

"We'll go see your Gram when you're ready."

"Yeah, I just have to go back to the room to finish getting ready." I was dressed enough for breakfast, but Gram was very particular. I was going to put on a nice, modest dress that I'd Tinkered up just for the occasion and put on just a bit of makeup. I'd spent several hours on the Internet watching makeup tutorials to brush up on my dusty, rarely used skills. "Sherrel isn't coming with us, right?"

That got a laugh out of dad. "Taylor, I'm too young to die. Especially not like that. It would be slow and messy."

I laughed, too. The idea of Gram and Squealer hanging out was kind of hilarious.

"I'm pretty sure your Gram thought that I was the corrupting influence on your mother and not the other way around."

"Sure, blame it all on mom," I agreed in a dry tone.

"Well, I did look good in a leather jacket, but I never got up to half of the stuff she did. It's a miracle she graduated without getting convicted of anything. She only got out of Lustrum's gang because she was busy running away from property damage charges. She was just lucky that she did before things started to get bad."

My other-memories had filled in a few items about mom's past, but this was new. I wanted to doubt it… but it kind of fit. "Please tell me she didn't kill anyone."

"She didn't kill anyone," dad agreed with a flat tone. Then he laughed. "I'm pretty sure she actually didn't kill anyone. At least, I'm sure she never did on purpose."

I sighed as I realized that Amy and I had a bit more in common than she knew. She still hadn't asked me about her father, but it would come out some day. "Yeah, I'm going to go get ready before you decide to tell me that Legend is my real mother or something."

"Well, I did spend a semester in coll-"

"Nope!" I beat a hasty retreat from the breakfast area before my father could assault my sensibilities with more lies. Definitely lies and not true things. Not at all.

Two hours, a bus ride, and a mile-long hike later, I was standing at Gram's front door with dad behind me. The house was large but narrow, built on a narrow lot only slightly wider than it was because some developer had been intent on squeezing in as many houses along the shore as possible. I remember seeing pictures of Gram and Gramp living in a little row house much closer to the city, but after Behemoth, they'd moved farther out and gotten a tiny bit of coastline in the process.

With one last moment to steel my nerves, I raised my hand to ring the bell.

//\\o//\\

Gram was old. That was the first thing to hit me when I saw her again after so long.

When I was a kid, I remembered her as a quiet older woman. She didn't smile a lot, but she was always nice to me. She never quite matched up with the way mom and dad talked about her, but that's probably because I was her grandchild and not her child. In those memories, she was kind of an austere counterpoint to Gramp, who had been loud and affectionate.

We hadn't visited them that often. A sane driver took four or five hours to make the trip from the Bay to their house, so it had been a 'special occasions' kind of thing, at best. The fact that mom and Gram had fought so much in her youth meant that the bar for a sufficiently 'special' occasion was pretty high, too.

The most recent memory I had of Gram was at mom's funeral. She'd been wearing all black and the thing I remembered most was that I never saw her cry. She'd looked sad and hollow, but she'd never collapsed into tears like I had. At least, she hadn't let me see it.

Now, a couple of years later, she just looked old. She had to be in her late sixties, which would make anyone look a bit old, but it seemed to be more than that. I supposed that with Gramp gone, she was alone most of the time, which couldn't help anything. What did old people even do for fun? Did they have fun?

That impression changed somewhat when she realized who I was and her face lit up into a broad grin. "Taylor, you look lovely!"

Then she did something I never would have expected. She stepped forward and hugged me. Over her shoulder, I shot dad a helpless look, but he was just as confused as I was.

The next few hours were awkward, but kind of pleasant. Gram really was lonely and happy to see me. I got the impression that she had wanted to reconnect for a while, but she didn't know how to reach out to my father. Given how rocky their relationship had apparently been, I could understand that. In the end, I was left feeling a little guilty that I hadn't insisted on reaching out to her before, but mostly happy that we had made the trip.

She insisted on taking us out for lunch at a little seafood place and that's when we parted ways.

"Going into the city?" dad asked, still in a bit of a daze from the strangely nice version of my Gram. Personally, I was just relieved that she hadn't turned out to be a supervillain or something, though it was really too early to write that possibility off entirely.

"Yeah, I brought my stuff," I said and patted my backpack. It was one I had modified myself to have a cunningly concealed compartment on the back which I could use to stash my costume and web shooters. I could even reverse the whole thing and it mostly blended in with my costume, though I had to take anything out of the main pocket before I did that. It was a generally superior option to stashing my stuff under a vent, at least.

"Just… try not to get into too much trouble?" He didn't exactly tell me not to get into trouble, because that would have been nearly impossible given my luck.

"I'll try to keep it down to minor trouble," I agreed. "Actually, maybe it's you I should worry about. Where did Sherrel disappear to?"

Dad shrugged. "She said she had some business to take care of and she'd be back tomorrow morning for the return trip. I… didn't ask for details."

I winced. Squealer doing business in New York City didn't sound like a good thing.

Dad must have mistaken my wince for something else because he laughed. "It won't be that bad. You just aren't used to freeway driving. She's actually remarkably good at it."

I bit back the reply that it was no doubt part of her Tinker power since that would just be rude. I was letting dad make his own mistakes with Sherrel, though I hoped he wasn't trying to date her in any serious capacity. She was in recovery and probably on the rebound, neither of which made for a great relationship partner - at least, that is what my other-memories indicated. Personally, I was in no place to talk since I was fake dating a girl that only kind of liked me. We were barely even friends.

I should probably have told him that she was a cape, but as long as she was genuinely trying to get her life together, I figured I would let it ride for a bit.

A bit later, I called the number that Armsmaster had provided and talked to someone at the local Protectorate. To my surprise, I was directed to the Jamaica transit station instead of in the city. My other-memories were pretty scant on the New York Protectorate in general, though their website had been pretty helpful. I knew a few secrets about a handful of them, but for the rest, I was limited to what the PR team had released on them.

That's why I wasn't sure what to expect when I walked into the train station and found a young man in blue and black power armor leaning against the railing casually signing autographs. As he spotted me, he said his goodbyes to the handful of people, mostly older kids with annoyed parents in tow, that were gathered around asking questions.

"Weaver?" he asked as he came closer. At my nod, he offered his hand. Without thinking about it, I reached out to shake it, and as if to prove why I kept forgetting not to do that, absolutely nothing happened. His armor covered him completely from head to toe, though his chin and mouth were free. "I'm Hardback. Current commander of NYC Wards Team Three."

"Which one is Team Three?" I asked curiously. In my research, I'd seen mention that the NYC Wards operated in a number of smaller teams based around their specialties, but the details had been light.

"We're the heavy hitters. Older Wards with combat-oriented powers of some sort," he said with a small smirk on his face, obviously proud of his status.

"That's cool," I said as I looked him over. My first glance said 'Tinker', but a second look said that wasn't quite right. His armor looked too perfect - too precisely fitted. He could have been an extremely specific Tinker, but my guess was something else. "Shaker or Breaker?"

That got a little laugh out of him. "Good eye, but I can neither confirm nor deny any theories about the specifics of Ward powers." He recited the last part, which I strongly suspected came from a training manual of some sort. "Want to see the HQ?"

I nodded and he gestured for me to follow him. We didn't head for the street or even for the passenger section of the station, but rather to a 'Police Use Only' door off to the side of the platform. He waved his hand at a sensor and it opened for us. Beyond that door was a staircase which led to a sheltered part of the rail platform.

"A… motorcycle? With metal wheels?" I asked as I looked over the machine parked there. It looked like a regular bike, but oversized and with wide metal wheels where it should have had tires.

"More or less. There's a Tinker that works with us named Rush Hour. He's a genius with anything related to mass transit, and he built these bikes specifically for Team Three. They are designed to run on the railroad and subway rails to let us get around the city as quickly as possible."

"How do you keep from running into trains?" I asked as I looked it over some more. After riding with Sherrel, I assumed the bike could handle a little detail like that.

"There's a computer system built in that handles all of that. It's actually the most complicated part of the bikes." Hardback pulled a helmet out of a compartment at the back of the bike and held it out toward me. "Want to go for a ride?"

Memories of my last trip on the freeway almost made me say 'no', but this looked like it would be a very different experience. Almost in spite of myself, I nodded. "Yeah, let's go."

 

[ArbC2]

"And so they rode onto the sunset..and immediately got hit by a train!"

 

[ulkapind]

Stop! No one is allowed to mess with the trains. Especially you, pesky kid heroes!

Whenever possible, a train must be grade separated. If not, the train must have priority. You meddlesome kid heroes riding the rails on your unreliable tinker bikes mess with the scheduling. Unacceptable.

 

[Swordchucks]

You meddlesome kid heroes riding the rails on your unreliable tinker bikes mess with the scheduling.

Click to shrink...

Is it silly? Yes.

Is it canon? Also yes.

 

[Swordchucks]

I whooped in pure joy as the RailCycle did yet another rail change to avoid an oncoming subway car. We were blazing through the subway system at incredible speeds with me riding behind Hardback. If I couldn't cling to things, it would have been a bit awkward, but as it was, I found the ride exhilarating.

Whereas being trapped in a tin can while Squealer hurtled through the streets had been terrifying, riding on the open back of the cycle was just fun! I supposed it had to do with the fact that I was pretty confident I could jump clear of any real danger on the cycle. The fact that we were zipping through the 'exotic' scenery of subway tunnels was just an added bonus.

Eventually, however, the trip was over and we pulled into a very small station that didn't look much like the others we had passed through. In fact, the station looked armored and brightly lit, with cameras everywhere.

"This is the Protectorate HQ station. There are a couple of special trains that run here from the big hubs, but you need to have authorization to use those," he declared as he parked the cycle next to two others just like it. "It's one of the perks of the job."

"Yeah, I can see why," I declared, trying to look as dignified as possible as I straightened out my costume a little. I had a feeling that I was completely failing.

"I won't lie, part of the reason I wanted to be on Team Three was because we get access to the bikes," he said with a grin that made the fact that he was still a teenager quite clear.

"It was pretty cool," I agreed neutrally. If it hadn't required me to move to New York, an offer that included getting to ride those RailCycles often would have been pretty tempting.

From the station, it was a short elevator ride to a manned security station where we got checked out by a couple of guards. After that, we boarded a slow-moving tram to get to the building itself. Of course the Protectorate HQ wouldn't be built directly over a vulnerability as obvious as a subway station.

"So, what's Brockton Bay like?" Hardback asked as we watched a short section of tunnel moving past at about the speed of a slow jog. The tram tunnel was much smaller than the subway tunnels had been, though it was a lot nicer to look at with bright paint and Protectorate logos everywhere.

"Well, I haven't really spent much time at the Protectorate base, so I can't comment much. They've got an old oil rig with a big glowing shield which seems pretty cool, but I doubt it's as polished as this," I gestured out the tram's window. "Outside of that… I haven't had much time to check out the streets here, but I assume you have fewer Nazis. Probably fewer dragons, too."

"Can't say I've seen much of either." Hardback chuckled dryly. "But you can probably just wait a while and we'll get some of each. There's pretty much always something new going on in this city. It seems like there's always a new villain or gang popping up, only to disappear a week later. Sometimes they pop back up later in another part of the city and sometimes they're just gone. The only groups that seem to stick around for long are the cultists and the capitalists."

"Capitalists?" I asked curiously.

He nodded. "The Elite. They're…" he paused as he looked for a way to describe them. "They tend to focus on selling their powers more than street crime. The PRT has contracted with them on a few things, like the force field you have in your city. What they do is still technically illegal, so I can't exactly endorse them, but they aren't the worst. I hear that we're lucky that way, though. Apparently, the Elite groups in other cities aren't as well behaved."

That did sound vaguely familiar. The tram arrived at the other end of the tunnel and we boarded another elevator. "I see. And the cultists?"

He snorted at that one. "They call themselves the Adepts. They believe that parahuman powers are magic and they have all of this mystical stuff about getting and making them stronger with rituals and stuff. It's creepy and dumb, but they suck in a lot of people that desperately want to be capes or want to make their powers better. They even pull in some former Wards and Protectorate members that should know better."

I didn't really have anything to say to that, other than to make yet another mental note not to mention shards to anyone. If powers even came from shards in a world with no Scion, anyway.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened.

"Welcome to the New York City Wards!" Hardback declared as he stepped out ahead of me and gestured expansively. "Well, the lobby thereof, anyway."

I followed him and I had to admit that the lobby was pretty impressive. Posters covered most of the walls showcasing the twenty or so local Wards in their glossy, PR best. I'd already seen many of the same photos on the web when I'd gone looking earlier.

The vast majority of them didn't register with my other-memories at all, though a few stood out.

"To be honest, most of us operate out of the Protectorate substations scattered around the city. HQ is where we go for big meetings, PR functions, and the like. That said… There are usually a few people here at any given time. Most of the Protectorate works out of this building if they don't have a specific reason not to, and Saturdays are a good day to meet up with your cape mentor so it's likely to be busier than usual. The mentor thing is a big deal for our newer or younger members, or ones with specific kinds of powers," he lectured as he led me to a set of double doors at the back of the room. They opened to the side automatically at his approach to reveal a big open room with lots of seating and a few tables. It looked kind of like a cafeteria crossed with a lounge crossed with a conference room.

Indeed, there were a few of the Wards present, looking considerably less glossy than the posters in the room we had just left. I found myself slightly surprised that there had been no delay at the door to allow everyone to mask up, but I supposed that the rules in NYC must have been different. The overall team was probably too big for them to allow Wards to unmask to each other, though I bet there was a lot of that in smaller subgroups.

"Weaver, right?" asked a particularly deep voice for a teenager. He was fairly tall, though not as broad as Hardback. He was just as armored, though where Hardback's armor looked like it was forged in place, his was much more medieval. He had some sort of spear - broken into halves - on his back.

"Yes, and you're…" I tried to remember names I had read on the Internet. There hadn't been that many wearing heavy armor and I had already met Hardback. "Jouster, right?"

He nodded. "Got it in one."

"Hey, hey, hey, no trying to poach the prospect," Hardback butted in. He tried to make it sound jovial, but I immediately caught on to the tension between them. Whether that was because of me or not, I had no idea.

"There is no dibs in Ward team recruitment," Jouster rebutted. "It's all power suitability and personal preference. Plus, who wants to be a tunnel rat if they don't have to be?"

"Tunnel rat? I'll-"

A soft, fake cough interrupted the brewing argument before it could get started. I recognized the deep purple, skintight outfit and visor immediately. I didn't even have to see the quiver on her back or the oversized monster of an arbalest sitting on the table beside her to know who she was.

What was it with the Protectorate's PR team and putting teenage girls into the tightest outfits possible while giving the boys more armor? They had even done it to Sophia to some extent, and she had the sex appeal of a rusty screen door.

"You both read the same brief that I did. Weaver is just taking the tour today. She isn't signing up, and if she was, she would probably be doing it back where she actually lives." Both boys had the good grace to look sheepish at the reminder, which made me pretty sure that they hadn't been fighting over me so much as they had been fighting with each other. She stood up and moved to shake my hand.

"Flechette," she offered. I reached to take her hand but stopped myself at the last minute. This was exactly the kind of event that led to me getting sucked into another vision, I realized. Instead, I turned the attempted handshake into an awkward fist bump.

Much to my chagrin, that did nothing to stop the vision from happening.

//\\o//\\

Despite my momentary brush with idiocy, I had been at least a little prepared to have a vision before I touched Flechette's hand. That seemed to make a difference - or I was somehow getting better at having visions - because there was a moment of vertigo followed by several images that flickered by in a rush.

A young girl, maybe seven or eight, crying as she watched someone walking away.

Myself, massive sword in both hands, standing over something white and unmoving. I was naked, of course, because why wouldn't I be?

A slightly younger Flechette wearing a purple leotard that was much less skin-tight and much more covered with white arrow shapes than her current costume. Visor on, she had a hopeful expression on her face as she walked into the Wards lobby.

Flechette - older - in a very compromising position with a person with dark hair.

There were more, as well, but they fuzzed out before I could make sense of them and the display settled on a single sequence to show me.

"Lily, meet your new sisters, Mary and Alice." It was an older woman speaking as she introduced a younger woman - just barely a teenager - to two girls a little older than her.

There were some awkward hellos before the woman left the room and the older girls dropped their smiles.

"Listen up, you do what we say and we'll get along." That was Mary, I thought. The other one nodded. "No one sticks around here for long, though, so don't get too comfortable. If you make trouble, they'll get rid of you in a heartbeat."

"I won't be any trouble," Lily promised, the sincerity and pain in her voice making my heart hurt.

For a moment, I felt what Lily felt. A desperate need for acceptance. Fear of being rejected. Resignation to being cast aside yet again.

No wonder she'd slotted herself into place as Parian's lieutenant so easily. If future-Lily was anything like past-Lily, she would have latched on to the first person to show her real love and held on with both hands, no matter the consequences.

As quickly as it started, the vision faded away and I was back in the room, still giving a fist bump. I put my hand down awkwardly.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Weaver." I did my best to keep my voice even. I had a feeling that few people would appreciate me peering into their past and future as much as Armsmaster had. Then again, I'd more or less told him that his project could kill an Endbringer, which was the kind of news almost any Tinker would be happy to have.

"Want to see more of the Wards area while our noble team leaders have their… discussion?" She made it clear what she thought of the posturing going on between Hardback and Jouster, both of whom made indignant noises.

"Sure," I agreed. "Later, gentlemen."

Apparently sensing the way the wind was blowing, Hardback cleared his throat and nodded his head toward a corner of the lounge area with several computer terminals. "I'll just be over there if you need anything."

Jouster didn't even say that much, just gave us both a curt nod before wandering off on his own.

When both of them were gone, I snickered. "Thanks for the rescue."

Flechette grinned, which was very visible as her only head covering was a tinted one-way visor. "No problem. I think it's something that just comes with being the team leader of a combat team. Before Hardback, Adamant was the leader of Team Three, and he got along with Jouster about the same." She led us over to a table a bit farther into the big room.

"Are those the only two combat teams, then?" I asked, still not sure how all of this worked.

Flechette held up a hand and pointed to each finger as she named a team. "Team one is the lancer team, and they are the combat-focused ones with high mobility. Team two is the sidekick group, and that's mostly the new members or the ones whose powers benefit the most from working alongside the established heroes. Team three are the heavies, and they're combat-focused like team one but without the mobility. Team four are the younger capes that don't want to be sidekicks, and they do foot patrols in the safer parts of town. Finally, there is team five, who are the desk jockeys."

"We are not!" That was proclaimed by a girl with a pair of oversized goggles and a tool belt as she sat herself down at the table beside us. "Some of us are grease monkeys. Kitbash, by the way."

"Weaver," I replied, with a nod.

"Fine, yes, Team five is made up of Thinkers and Tinkers that are more inclined to work out of their labs here or inside one of the Protectorate bases instead of going out on patrol." Flechette was probably rolling her eyes, though I couldn't tell due to the visor.

"We're the smart ones," Kitbash agreed smugly. "We get to be heroes at a nice temperature year round instead of sweating or freezing." She turned her head to the side and fixed her gaze on me. "Pop quiz. If you were a NYC Ward, which team would you be on, Weaver?"

I thought about it for a second. "Probably team one," I admitted. "If I could resist punting Jouster off a building, anyway."

Kitbash laughed. "I like you. We should be friends."

"Easy as that?" I asked, laughing lightly but pulling out my cell phone. "Trade numbers?"

Kitbash's phone appeared in her hand, and Flechette pulled hers out as well. "Cape phone, right?" Flechette asked, suddenly struck by a bit of indecision.

"Yep," I agreed, which made her relax a little.

"Good. Your costume doesn't really scream 'newbie', but it's better to ask. Capes out themselves in the dumbest ways sometimes."

Like by having their powers spontaneously make them naked, I didn't say. "Yeah, that'd be silly," I covered, instead.

We traded numbers and then chatted for a while. Kitbash was loud and a Tinker. Her specialty was taking existing items, even Tinkertech, and making them into something new. It wasn't reverse engineering like Dragon since the result was still standard Tinkertech, but it did mean that she was able to maintain the stuff instead of the original Tinkers. Apparently, it was a huge asset when it came to repurposing equipment seized from villainous Tinkers.

"Weaver, did you want to see the rest of the building?" Hardback asked a bit later, and I was surprised to see that we had been talking for an hour. I couldn't even really remember what we'd been talking about.

"Wow, I should probably do that," I agreed. "That was the whole point of coming in for a tour, wasn't it?"

That got polite chuckles from everyone.

"I can show her around, if you have something else to do," Flechette offered.

"As long as you don't go poaching her for Team One," he grumbled, but he was still grinning.

"No danger there, I live five hours away and don't plan to move," I declared, which seemed to be good enough.

"I'm going to get back to my workshop, too." That was Kitbash, who was making a bit of a show of getting up and stretching. "If I'm outside it too long, I might turn to stone."

"Nice meeting you - both of you," I offered.

Flechette stood up and then offered me her hand with a grin. "Shall we?"

I grinned back. "Sure," I said and took her hand again. This time, I wasn't barraged with visions.

//\\o//\\

The NYC Protectorate was huge, and not just in terms of manpower.

I had seen the roster on the internet and known that there really were a lot of capes involved in the organization - both in the regular Protectorate and the Wards - but it was more than just that. On some level, I had expected the wide, thirty story building the Protectorate occupied to be shared with the PRT or other agencies, but no. The PRT had their own building across town.

The building was all Protectorate from top to bottom. In fairness, some of the groups within the NYC Protectorate were national in scope - like the Image division - but a lot of it was needed just to directly support the capes in a city the size of New York.

"Most of the rest is just the same. Lots of boring offices and bunk rooms and labs," Flechette said as we finished our walkthrough. I hadn't seen many Protectorate members, though I did get to meet Prism and Astrologer. I didn't run across Legend, the one my other-memories actually knew a bit about, but that wasn't too surprising.

"So, uh," I didn't know how to say it and it was bugging me. I'd only just realized something, and I was dying to know. "Do you think Kitbash was flirting with me?"

I was embarrassed before the words even left my mouth.

Flechette paused for a moment as though considering the question. "Probably not. She's… well, she doesn't do social skills too well. It's a pretty common thing with Tinkers, I think. She comes across as flirty a lot, but it doesn't seem to mean anything. At least, I've never known her to actually make a move on anyone."

"Oh, okay," I said, letting out a deep breath. I'd realized that, from a certain perspective, she might have been hitting on me.

"Me, on the other hand, I was definitely flirting," she said as she turned to lead the way to the elevator.

I stumbled over my own feet and sputtered, which just made Flechette laugh.

"Very funny," I grumbled as I caught up to her.

"I thought so, yes," she agreed, grinning really big. "I mean, unless you're interested…"

It was my turn to laugh, though mine was considerably more nervous. "I'm not," I said before I could think better of it. While I was pretty sure Flechette would be fun to go out with, I was equally sure that she'd get really serious really fast. "At least, not right now. I'm kind of seeing someone, though it's not really serious."

That just made Flechette's grin a bit broader - more relaxed. She pushed the button for the rooftop level. "That's cool, too. I'm always looking for new friends, especially cape friends."

"Well, good. Cape friends," I agreed.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened to another security station, this one more compact than the one I had originally come in through and also more high-tech.

"Tinkertech scanners," my guide supplied as I looked at all of the equipment. "Looks for explosives and a few other things, as well as confirming identities and authorization. They have the same setup on all of the entrances, but there's not enough space up here to hide it all in the walls."

"Why do you need space on a rooftop?" I wondered, half to myself.

My question was soon answered as we stepped outside and found that the rest of the roof was taken up by hangars, landing pads for helicopters, and an area that was marked off for teleporters.

"So you said you'd fit on Team One, right? Think you can make it across Manhattan on the rooftops?" Flechette asked, her voice raised just a little bit to get over the wind.

The buildings around us were of a wide variety of heights. The thirty floor height of the Protectorate headquarters was actually a fair bit taller than the average building surrounding us, though things got a lot taller to the west - northwest - whatever, across the island.

"That's 30th street," Flechette said, pointing to the street below and then to the water a block to the east. "And that's the East River. The PRT HQ is also on 30th street, but on the Hudson." She pointed back across Manhattan. "It's about twelve blocks - maybe a bit less than two miles. Think you can keep up?"

I grinned. "Lead the way!" I declared. I was already liking the sound of this.

"Let me radio for permission, first. You aren't going to go splat as soon as we start, are you? Because I'll have to sit through all sorts of retraining if you do."

I laughed and gave her a double thumbs-up like the complete dork that I was.

She stepped away for a moment and talked into her hand before coming back and unslinging her Arbalest. "We're clear. Just follow me!"

She looked down the sight of her weapon as she took aim at a protrusion on a nearby rooftop. Then she pulled the trigger and one of the oversized bolts she used went flying, trailing a long chain like it weighed nothing. The bolt sank into the thing she'd been shooting at and she shifted her grip before leaping off the roof with a whoop.

A quick shot of webbing and I was right behind her, screaming in joy as the world flew by with the wind whipping at my costume. The exhilaration of flight mixed with the surety of my spider-instincts to give me the freest feeling I could ever remember having.

This was the kind of chance I didn't have back in the Bay. Outside of a small area of downtown, we didn't have large stretches where it was nothing but tall buildings on account of the geography and a general lack of city planning during the Bay's early years. Here, though? Each block of buildings had a unique topography with highs and lows and all sorts of things built into or sticking out of the rooftops. Then the space between the blocks required a web-swing.

Despite being a normal human in some senses, Flechette's grapple-swinging was well practiced and I followed her lead. Crossing individual rooftops was largely an exercise in parkour, but the elevation changes, and the gaps between them, took more finesse.

"No fair!" Flechette yelled at me as she landed on a building beside me. We were up six stories from the building we had started on, and it had taken her a particularly tricky jump to cross the gap. She had been forced to wind in her chain in mid-air and the bottom of her swing still came entirely too close to the ground because she needed the extra momentum to gain height.

I had just used a web on the skyscraper across the street and another web from my opposite hand in an almost effortless transition.

"You should have two crossbows!" I happily suggested. The whole experience really was amazing.

"I can't… actually, maybe I could," she grumbled. "Not now, anyway. Three more blocks." She pointed to the PRT building which was now clearly visible with the giant silver PRT letters on the side. "Race you!"

Before I'd finished understanding what she said, she fired another dart past me and went swinging away, clearing two whole buildings in a single leap.

"Hey!" I yelled and took off to follow her as fast as I could. I had the advantage when it came to parkour, but she knew where she was going better than I did and her grapple was much faster than I would have expected.

She won, but only by a hair. I felt like I probably could have pushed past her a couple of times, but I really didn't care who came in first, as long as it was close. By the time we collapsed, laughing and out of breath, on the roof of the PRT building, I was exhausted but very happy with my day. I definitely understood why Spider-man would web-swing everywhere he could go. It was pretty amazing.

I was still feeling pretty great about my day when I collapsed into bed that night, though I had a nagging feeling that something was coming. I'd been in New York for an entire day and nothing too strange had happened. I'd been halfway expecting to have to fight half the capes in the city or something silly like that.

Instead… I'd met some people, shaken some hands, flirted a little, and generally had a fun time.

Of course, I had to be woken up in the middle of the night by a ringing cell phone.

 

[GrimmKenway8646]

Of course, I had to be woken up in the middle of the night by a ringing cell phone.

Click to shrink...

Local cape finally realizes the perils of having a phone. Random calls in the dark of the night. *shivers*

 

[ulkapind]

Swinging between building is still better than messing with public transport. The start of this chapter merely serves to reinforce this, no matter how fun those tunnel-traveling-in-an-improper-way brats are having rails are for railways.

I remember Lily being a member of the quick response squad that is very mobile among the New York Wards, but I didn't remember her being crazy enough to go swinging over buildings being how she moved!

 

[Swordchucks]

I didn't remember her being crazy enough to go swinging over buildings being how she moved!

Click to shrink...

I'm taking a bit of artistic liberty. Here's the passage I was thinking about:

At least this wasn't so different from the exercise she got on her nightly patrol back in New York. The problem was that this city was unfamiliar ground. The buildings didn't match together well, the skyline was jarring, didn't flow. Back home, traveling from rooftop to rooftop wasn't much harder than running, with the use of her grappling hook to move her every minute or two. Here, it was a jerky, stilted exercise, slow, awkward, demanding use of the grappling hook for nearly every building.

Click to shrink...

In the surrounding text, she doesn't really swing, but I can't see how she'd get away with it otherwise. I think Wildbow might have forgotten exactly how wide streets are and how hard it is to walk a tightrope.