Emissary - A Deputy Recursive Crossover (Worm AU/Canon)

Reset 3.05

Spoiler: Soundtrack

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In advance of the scheduled meeting with the Protectorate heroes, likely intended to get Rose to repeat her performance from the hospital, she went on patrol and I went to settle in ny new lab.

A lab. My lab. I have a whole Tinker lab to call my own! I am officially a Tinker now!

Perhaps this whole “joining The Man” issue was overblown, if they were so willing to put up with Rose’s antics and my past transgressions to get at my armorweave and her connections on the other side. Provided, of course, anyone could link up with her Earth Bet again, because without that dimensional traveler political capital she was just another cape, even if an unorthodox one.

Then again, as far as keeping the peace in a city ravaged by an Endbringer went, the “just another cape” factor became “one more cape”, which probably weighed the odds more than a little bit in favor of my acceptance. Some part of me realized that if Sophia was as horrible as everyone said even as a hero, then Director Piggot couldn’t be happier to swap her out for another Taylor Hebert, even if this one wasn’t a Brute. Some part of me didn’t care about that as much as the excursion to the detention block Rose promised me as recompense for the inevitable mud-slinging that she expected the meeting to become.

As much as I accepted that she was me, or at least a version of me, I still couldn’t reconcile that fact with how manipulative she was. I knew I was a bit touchy on control issues, but she… it’s like she somehow combined some of Lisa’s worst traits with obvious inspiration from Director Piggot sometimes. Trampling all over other people’s wishes to make her vision of the world the only possible truth, something I couldn't really imagine myself doing, and I was the former villain!

Shaking the dreary thoughts aside, I resumed cataloguing the glassware that came with the room as Angelica sniffed her way around the place. It felt hilarious, having a dog romp around in what was obviously supposed to be a “clean room”, but what I was going to do here did not quite call for rigorous sterility. Quite the contrary. I was told of the specifics of how a Tinker was supposed to operate in Protectorate or Ward service, and was expected to adhere to a lightened version of these.

A discretionary budget to spend on resources monthly, negotiable based on needs and utility. Moot right now with the city in the state of emergency, but if I could requisition a few breeding pairs of Darwin’s Bark spiders… To counter the money spent on me, I was also expected to provide value for it - either increases in my own capabilities (as Armsmaster operated) or producing things others could use. For Kid Win, both of these were obviously applicable. For me… well, I could make armor. Provide fabrics for offsite tailoring, maybe? If I set up a silkworm farm, I could fiddle with selective breeding, sell the resulting materials for a hefty profit… most of which the government would pocket, of course, but if that would get me help with taking down Coil, saving Dinah Alcott, fixing the city? I would make doilies with my spiders if they told me it’d help.

I smiled at the containers I retained from yesterday’s power testing. Orb weavers, black widows, a varied selection of flies and beetles, some of which I didn’t have access to, previously. The college’s entomology department would want some back when (if?) the damage done by the downtown sinkhole would be repaired, but I had a starting capital to replace those lost to the water and the damage to the Undersiders’ lair. Not a lot of each breed, but it was a start, and a start was all I needed.

A cough attracted my attention to the door.

“Aegis! Good morning!” I beamed at the Wards leader, fully kitted out in his costume of rust. I was wearing most of my costume, temporarily spray-painted into the PR-approved color scheme, reds and grays making it significantly lighter in shade overall, but with a domino mask, as the mask warning system for the lab wasn’t working yet. Hasn’t worked for years, they told me. Not that it was an issue when I could see someone coming from the next block over.

“Hey, Arachne. Settling in?” Carlos gestured at the cubes of insects. “Never thought I’d be glad to see so many spiders in one place.”

“I am not letting you eat them,” I said with mock seriousness, “Not until I’ve bred at least three times as many, at least.”

“...” He opened his mouth. Closed it, dropped his raised hand. Opened it again, then clacked his teeth shut in a panic as a fly flew past his face. Finally, he seemed to have recovered his ability to speak. “Why would I want to eat them?”

“I don’t know,” I deadpanned, looking up the fume hood system above a sealable reaction cabinet. “Why are you glad to see so many?”

“Because that’s thousands of helpers in keeping the peace over there?” he said weakly, waving his arm behind his back. “Never mind, it was supposed to be inspirational, but you seem to be eager as-is. What are you looking for?”

“The building’s wired to let me open the windows only if there’s an emergency, otherwise an alarm goes off. I want to be able to freely move my swarm between here and the outside, so I’m having a dozen mosquitoes map out the ventilation system as we speak. I was just wondering if there’s any way I can use this stuff for its original purpose. Maybe mixing venoms?”

“Two problems with that, I think,” Carlos offered, looking down to watch Angelica stare in confusion at his boot as she tried to gnaw on it after apparently recognizing the scent. “One, what sort of insect venoms exude fumes toxic enough so you’d need a fume hood for them?”

“No idea,” I grinned at him madly, realizing how insane I must have looked right now, wild hair and wild grin and wild glee at having my own lab, “Just something those action movies conditioned me to expect, you know? It has to be green and has to smoke to show it’s dangerous.”

“Okay, I think I can grant you that one. Second question. What would you need venoms for?” he went on, his voice turning concerned. Did he think… does he have no idea of a joke?

“Not all of them are lethal, you know. Paralytics are a thing,” I chided him, providing Angelica with a tiny bit of kibble to snack on, “A thing that lets me take down a criminal without doing irreparable damage to him is a good thing. Of course, a thing that lets me take down an S-class threat by doing irreparable damage as fast as possible is also a good thing.”

One I hope I never have to use, of course.

“Aren’t you…” he seemed a bit at a loss for words, “You know… a little too quick to reach for the burning-and-salting option?”

“You’ve seen what Bakuda does. You’ve heard of the Teeth. Of the Nine,” I offered him a shrug to go with the list of ways for us to die horribly, “I believe in being prepared for the worst, so that any other outcome is a pleasant surprise.”

To my great shock, he laughed at that. “Dios mio, you really are the same person, aren’t you!”

I huffed in protest, crossing my arms across my chest, suddenly aware that I was talking to a handsome boy and not really panicking about it. Before I could get to panicking about it, he continued.

“So, aside from ‘How do I open the window’, is there anything else you need?”

I shoved what panic I had into my swarm and tapped my chin thoughtfully. An idea popped into my head and I grinned wickedly.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m going to need to requisition additional supplies…”

He shrugged. “Okay, as long as you can justify it.”

“Good,” I began, “I’m going to need some of those plasma globes, a tesla coil, and a white noise machine that makes thunderstorm sounds.”

Whatever Aegis had been expecting me to say, it clearly wasn't that. “I’m going to regret asking why, aren't I?”

My smile widened further. “The way I see it, I have my own lab in a secretive base, which I will use to breed an army of bugs, harvest venom, and create suits of armor with which I will then rain down doom upon my enemies.” I spread my arms wide, “I’ve turned from a street-level villain into a mad scientist, and I'm going to embrace it with both arms.”

His face was buried in his hands before I was finished speaking, before sliding them down. “Thank you, by the way, for giving me new reason to believe in religion.”

I cocked my head to the side, furrowing my brow. “Um... why?”

“Because if this is normal for you, then managing a team with you and Clockblocker on it will officially be Hell.”

The two of us dissolved into laughter before his phone began ringing. He shrugged apologetically and answered it.

“Yeah? Uh-huh, she’s right here. She WHAT?!” Well. That doesn’t sound good.

“Rose got into trouble?” I guessed, then felt my heart drop as he nodded. “What is it this time?”

“Master/Stranger tank. Came in from patrol, ran into Laserdream, both had some sort of breakdown. Laserdream won’t stop crying, Rose won’t stop swearing,” he explained, his voice exasperated. Clearly, he thought he had his hands full with Clockblocker alone, the rude asshole. “Walk with me?”

“Sure. Angelica, heel!”

-------

Spoiler: Soundtrack

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We only were late by two minutes, and when we arrived, not even everyone was already there. The briefing room stank of spilled coffee, someone’s post-cigarette breath, machine oil and a little bit of fresh sweat. Miss Militia sat on a chair beside the lectern, twirling a butterfly knife in her hand, looking glum, or at least radiating glumness outward.

Battery gave Rose a quirked eyebrow as our trio traipsed through the door.

“Sorry, everyone,” Aegis announced, “It seems that someone,” he shot a look at my double, who looked decidedly sulky, “Thought it would be a great idea to announce that she wanted to kill Glenn in the middle of the lobby.”

I don't think I would forgive Battery soon for her role in what Armsmaster did, but I did smirk at her snort and grumbled exclamation of “Been there.”

Triumph glared at me from a front-row seat, turning away as soon as he saw who the new arrivals were. I couldn’t exactly fault him now that I knew it was his cousin that I’d inadvertently helped kidnap, but it still stung.

Dauntless was sewing up a hole in a bomber jacket, his Arclance propped awkwardly against the empty chair next to him. Belatedly, I realized it was a bullet hole he was working on.

Nobody said a word as we picked out a couple of chairs and sat down, side by side. Angelica was once again in Jonlan’s care, and clearly took a liking to the bespectacled Trooper. Rose, fresh out of containment, was fidgeting in her seat, clearly psyching herself up for her dramatic reveal. Or maybe she had an itch, I wouldn’t put it past Madison Clements to mess up the simple task of making a comfortable spidermesh outfit. When Aegis arrived at our end of the room a minute behind us, having finished his quiet chat with Battery, he easily slid into place next to Rose, and I had the pleasure of watching the unflappable smug version of me blush at his polite smile.

Finally, as Assault filed in, settling beside Battery, Miss Militia stood up, pressing some buttons on the lectern, likely engaging whatever M/S defenses the room had, which, judging by the clacking sound, included locking the door. Then she did something that shocked the other heroes, pulling her bandana down.

“There’s been a few things we were keeping from you,” she said gravely, her gaze moving from one masked face to another, “And I wanted you to see my face as we came clean about them. I want to have your trust as your new team leader, and that means taking responsibility for past mistakes and transgressions.” She gestured to the screen behind her. “Dragon will be joining us in a little while.”

“Does this have anything to do with… with what Armsmaster did on Sunday?” Battery asked, somewhat timidly. I couldn’t exactly fault her after the mixed signals Rose sent her way yesterday with that passive-aggressive apology of hers.

“Among other things,” Miss Militia, Hannah, nodded. “And in one way or another, it revolves around our two newest Wards.” She didn’t point, but she didn’t have to, as every head in the room turned towards us anyway.

I glanced to my side, to Rose’s encouraging nods devoid of her usual manic energy. With some hesitation, I pulled my domino mask off.

“My name is Taylor Anne Hebert,” I said, putting my glasses on again, because wearing them over the mask was quite the hassle. “And I’ve always wanted to be a hero. On my first night out, I stumbled onto Lung and, with a bit of help from the Undersiders, took him down. Armsmaster convinced me to let him claim the takedown to shield me from ABB reprisal.”

I watched Assault whisper something to Battery. I could have easily listened in, but I didn’t need to, the word ‘junk’ was quite audible in the otherwise quiet room, even over the hum of the air conditioning system.

“The Undersiders were convinced I was a would-be villain due to my outfit. So was everyone else,” I paused to swallow nervously. Why didn’t I wait for longer to get more dyes? Because I would have put it off indefinitely, and Lisa or Alec would probably have died to Lung that night. I did save them, after all. “So I came to Armsmaster as my point of contact with the Protectorate, offering to infiltrate the Undersiders, help catch the Masters of the Escape.”

“Isn’t that against the Rules?” Triumph noted, “You’d be essentially unmasking them?”

“Didn’t know the Rules then,” I countered, “Nobody teaches you these things at school. Nobody explains what Trigger events are until you ask for someone to tell you theirs,” I added bitterly, enjoying the way the entire room flinched, although Triumph’s was the slightest. Figures, of course he’d be the one with the easy Trigger. “And yes, I committed that faux pas as well.”

“Woah, woah, woah,” interrupted Assault. “Wait a minute, hold on.” Battery shot him a look, but he waved her down, “Seriously? How– how can you not have learned about that?”

I lifted my arms and dropped them helplessly in an apathetic shrug. “I don't know, the school just never taught anything about them.”

He looked around the room, incredulous. “Really?” He waited a second. “Really. This is happening. One of the most important things in the modern world is Parahumanity, and Winslow– you went to Winslow, right? –wasn’t even teaching kids about how they’re formed or why we don't do certain things?” I saw Rose shake her head out of the corner of my eye, and Aegis lifted a hand.

“They don't teach that at Arcadia, either. Glory Girl said her college classes did cover them, though. Parahumans 101.”

“Which means it's probably not taught at Clarendon or– Christ!” he threw his hands in the air. “And of course this is the first time we’re hearing about it because we never asked?” All three of us Wards nodded in sync. “Right. After this meeting, I’m making an appointment with Director Piggot. I think I might know why the villain population is so high if no one knows what the fuck is going on with powers.” He pulled out a pad of paper and began scribbling furiously on it. I looked at him oddly, before continuing.

“Back to the Undersiders, then. After the fight with Lung, they offered me a place, and I took it, and when I tried to strike a deal with Armsmaster over it before the bank robbery–” this time, Triumph did flinch properly, “–well, let’s just say, it left me amenable to staying a villain full-time. Learning that Glory Girl was just another bully certainly didn’t help my opinion of the heroes any.”

“And then the thing with Bakuda on Über and L33t’s show—” Dauntless spoke for the first time. He had a pleasant voice, higher-pitched than I expected, but still heroically masculine in that toothless PR way, like the narrator in a PSA.

“Yeah. Maybe it was stupid, throwing my lot in with the first people to treat me as anything other than shit for the first time in two years,” I admitted, trying not to let the bitterness set in again, “But that was more or less the point of no return for me. Then came the Truce against the ABB. While you stopped Bakuda’s bombs, we took down Lung, again.”

“You carved his eyes out!” Battery protested, but a hand on her shoulder from Assault sat her down in her seat. “Those are not the actions of a hero.”

“You’re right. Because I was not a hero by that point.” My agreement took her aback. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Rose grinning again. It keeps unnerving me to see her smiling like Lisa. But will she stop if I tell her to?

“Lung regenerates, and it’s a valid tactic to keep him to stay down for longer. Ultimately, we have Taylor to thank for the chance to Birdcage him,” Hannah stated somewhat emotionlessly. I still couldn’t figure out what was bothering her enough to throw her usual demeanor off, but not enough to make her cancel the meeting.

“So then the gallery attack was, what, a personal ‘fuck you’ to Armsmaster?” Triumph asked next, his tone still indignant. I’m getting your cousin back no matter what it will cost me, I promise.

“Not really. It was a job first. Coil says ‘embarrass the heroes’, we pick an easy target to do so,” I replied as dismissively as I could. “Of course, we didn’t know it was Coil back then, or that he used us to get at Dinah. I’m… I’m sorry, Triumph. I gave everything I had on him to Miss Militia. We will find him.”

“That name sound familiar. Dinah… Alcott?” Assault probed, rubbing the front of his helmet as if it was his actual forehead. “The mayor’s– oh.”

“The moment I learned the truth, I walked out on the Undersiders,” I went on, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “Two hours later, Endbringer sirens.”

Triumph caught my eye, and he gave me a slow nod. It wasn’t one of forgiveness – and, quite frankly, I didn't really think I deserved it until we got Dinah back – but it was one of understanding.

“And after that went down, Armsmaster decided he had the prime opportunity to screw her over again, and me as well,” Rose piped up, “Choosing a way that would theoretically tear a divide between us in the process, as at that point Taylor didn’t yet know the school bully that Triggered her was Shadow Stalker, but Armsmaster knew I knew.”

“Wait, what?” Dauntless jerked forward in his seat, dislodging the Arclance from its perch. The whole room must have winced as it clattered to the floor. “Is that why she’s…”

“...in the holding cells, yeah. Can’t ship her out before we make at least a token effort of talking to her mother, can’t reach her mother, circular situation,” Rose finished his broken-off thought. Funny, I never once paused to think that Sophia had parents too. It was as if she came into the world fully formed, already a vicious bitch with a mad-on for everyone and everything that wasn’t a certain traitorous redhead. I stifled the urge to giggle at the thought of Sophia Hess, Age Seven, Axe Murderess.

“Anyway, this is where I come into the story,” Rose went on, heedless of my mental tangent. Off came the mirrored helmet, which she told me she wasn’t repainting any time soon because she couldn't afford the 27 hours to spare and any other paint made zero sense here. Off came the Tinkertech goggles, letting me notice for the first time they actually had some sort of Egyptian motif drawn on them to go with the fancy name. Down came what was left of her hair. “You know me as Rose Ellison. That name, that person, is a fabrication. While there actually is a Margaret Ellison out in Montana that we’re related to,” she waved her hand between the two of us, “She’s not my mother. She’s my aunt, because my actual name is Taylor Anne Hebert.”

Silence reigned. Again. Waving off the sense of deja vu, I chortled through saying “You should work on your presentation better. They don’t seem to believe you.”

“Long story short: L33t built a portal thing,” she made a childish gesture outlining an oval in the air in front of her, “I tried to arrest him. I fell into the portal thing,” she made a diving motion through the space where the oval was, “Whoosh, I’m on a different Earth Bet where Aegis is alive, I am a criminal and not the Deputy Commander of the Wards ENE, and Alexandria is a rude witch.” That one, at least, drew some chuckles.

“Wait, Deputy what now?” Triumph gaped at her. She grinned in a way that vaguely reminded me of Aisha of all people (wait, does she know Aisha?! How can she know Aisha and not Brian?) and made finger guns, which she proceeded to point at people around the room.

“I was the first to hold the title. An experimental program, JROTC meets the PRT,” she gestured at the projection screen, where Miss Militia summoned a scan of what I assumed to be Rose’s– Deputy’s, because of course her cape name had to be something befitting her loyalty to the organization –PRT badge. A very me-like face stared from the photo, the lack of glasses the only thing that it had in common with the prettier, stockier, shorter-haired version of me that looked away from it to share a grin with the audience. “It was supposed to be a punishment detail of sorts after my becoming The Deputy - a PRT intern that had more cape arrests than some Protectorate heroes - a full month earlier. After I nearly committed suicide by cape trying to capture my world’s Shadow Stalker, who’d gone rogue when her probation violations were uncovered by accident during the background checks when I was brought on board.”

“To quote a great person who will eventually probably become a man, I call bullshit,” Assault objected, “This all sounds like some ridiculous capefic. You have all this Tinkertech, powers, and training of a PRT Trooper, all in a month?”

“What? No! I’ve joined in November,” she even took a step back under Assault’s verbal assault, “I was Deputized in early January, while investigating the flipside of Taylor’s Trigger event– because I was transferred to Arcadia, someone else fell into the trap laid for me and Triggered from it –and by late January, I was appointed as the first Ward ENE without powers, set to lead the team that was beheaded when Hookwolf killed Aegis.”

Now everyone gaped at Carlos. The poor boy raised his hands defensively. “All I’m saying is, I’m very glad that thanks to Leviathan, I got to outlive that particular Nazi.” He paused, glancing at Rose. She blushed. He blushed. They blushed together in a stupid cute way that made me wish for a bucket of ice water. “That and Rose– well, Taylor –because without her and her drone, I’d be Endbringer roadkill too.”

“I still failed to save Dean,” Rose mumbled, the blush gone from her face, her head hung low. Carlos finally stood up, drawing her into a hug with a bit of effort, given that he foolishly tried to hug her armored form around the shoulders, and he was barely a match for her in the shape department. Congratulations, Taylor, you’re not the least feminine girl on the team, and only then because the least feminine is also you!

He sat her down, and while he whispered something that I refused to eavesdrop on, Miss Militia took the meeting back under control. “The long and short of it is, there’s technology besides Professor Haywire’s that lets you travel between worlds, and there are other worlds besides Aleph out there.” She threw a glance in Rose’s direction. She wasn’t crying as I was originally worried, just hyperventilating a bit. I felt the insects in my lab (my lab! I have a lab!) thrum with my own emotions, but I refused to let my own façade slip up. “Meanwhile, our versions of Über and L33t have been handed over to Watchdog to see of they could replicate that feat from this end, because we have no idea whether the tech used to send her here is still functional... at least, not until very recently.”

She turned and waved a hand at the screen. “Dragon, would you like to take over?” The face that showed up on the screen was… pretty mundane, to be honest. I vaguely recalled being told that it wasn’t Dragon’s actual face, that being a virtual shut-in, this was her equivalent of a mask, but even knowing it was computer-generated, I couldn’t help but marvel at how lifelike it looked, down to the minute eye movements. She probably has some sort of tech that scans her actual face and maps its movements to this one?

“Certainly. While I've been... distracted, as of late, between Leviathan Cleanup and arranging for Armsmaster's transfer out of the city…” she trailed off before catching herself, “I’ve been setting up sensors to try to detect more exotic energy bursts, such as the one that heralded Emissary’s – The Deputy’s – arrival.” There was another pause, before she announced, “Based on her report that she was taken and delivered to the exact same spot in the Docks, we can surmise that however L33t achieved it, the portal maps directly to the corresponding location in the other world. And I've detected two bursts of Haywire particles since I began looking. Both were too short to gain an exact location, but I have a suspicion that—”

She paused again, seemingly looking to the side, presumably to a secondary screen away from her face scanner.

“It’s happening again?” Dauntless guessed, his voice wavering a little. I couldn’t fault him. Knowing that there’s actual parallel realities, and not whatever we’ve had with Aleph, must have been more than a bit shocking.

“Yes. The same energy signature that let us confirm the portal’s nature originally has just popped up on the scans,” the Canadian Tinker explained patiently, barely containing her enthusiasm. “And it’s localized to Armsmaster’s lab. That was my original guess as well.”

“The other Armsmaster is likely poking around in the devices, then?” Carlos suggested. “Maybe he got it to work from there, somehow?”

That made Rose’s head snap up sharply. “Dragon? What was the last thing Armsmaster worked on using the central workbench?” she asked hurriedly, strapping her gear back onto her head.

“The Halberd he used against Leviathan. The same one you passed on to Browbeat afterwards, I believe,” Dragon’s voice sounded lost in thought, “Why do you ask?”

“Should have noticed it earlier,” Rose’s voice was muffled by her helmet closing fully as she stepped up to the door. “He’s not the kind to leave circuit debris strewn around the place when he’s done working, correct?”

“No, he’s not. Did you notice something when you were in there with Kid Win?”

The other heroes snapped out of it, finally, and we were all out the door in a bustle as soon as Miss Militia unlocked the door with the security passcodes. While ostensibly useful, this mechanism was clearly not well thought-out for evacuation purposes.

“Aegis, Dauntless, follow Emissary. The rest of us will stay here. No need to cause a panic,” Miss Militia ordered, taking her seat again.

“Meet us there, I’ll explain!” were Rose’s last words as she ran off, and we followed, getting in each other’s way. In retrospect, a dumb decision, because a Protectorate hero chasing a stray Ward down a PRT HQ hallway does not a calming picture make.

I had a vague idea of the building’s layout by this point, having spent several days indoors with not a lot to distract me between bouts of waiting in hallways, so I knew where to go. And where to search.

“There’s…” I huffed as I paused in front of an elevator, leaning a bit against Dauntless. He seemed amused by this, if my costumed-hero-body-language-reading was correct. “...something like a, a memory stick in the middle of the empty workbench? Next to a container of circuity parts.” A beetle tried to shift it, but it felt heavier than it looked. Feeling the door to the lab cycle open, the beetle buzzed to grab Rose’s attention.

I was through that door last, just in time to see her laughing like a woman possessed as she waved a piece of obvious Tinkertech around. “They did it! They can send messages through, which means we can communicate!”

“So then, let’s see what’s on it?” Aegis suggested.

------

Spoiler: Soundtrack

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We were back in the conference room, everyone more or less in the same seats. In fact, the only major difference was the fact that at some point on the way back, Rose intertwined her fingers with Carlos and refused to let go after his first few panicked attempts to free himself. It’s like she suspected what was to come and needed support, any support. By the time we were shuffling among the seats, he relented, throwing me an apologetic glance in the process. I shrugged in response. They were still joined at the wrist when they sat down.

On the memory stick, as the large screen showed us, were three files, two small and one large. The text file labeled READ1ST.TXT was concise, to the point and so very Armsmaster.

“Armsmaster,

If you receive this first, please pass the accompanying video on to the girl that arrived two weeks ago via the same Haywire-type radiation-emitting portal as this object. Details will follow once we confirm her location.

You.


Deputy,

This is attempt #3 to send a message through the portal. The original device had been damaged during the fight. We are still devising appropriate repair methods. Each attempt uses different power settings. To respond, deposit similar items in the same space, including this memory stick. Will attempt pickup in 24H.

AM.”

The second file was an encryption key - the digital version of a Master/Stranger passcode. A quick test Dragon ran on it indicated that it was 96% accurate, confirming it was genuine enough, given the minute differences between the two worlds. The third file… started with a familiar clock-covered mask.

“Hey, Armsmaster! This is Clockblocker, and I know that if someone’s viewing this first, it’s gonna be you! If you haven't found her yet, Deputy’s yay high,” the on-screen Dennis indicated a height well above his head, clearly mocking the fact that Rose was even taller than the beanpole that was me, “Is wearing cape armor made like a PRT Trooper parade armor and has lots of muscles here, and here, and here, and here…”

He was shoved rudely out of the frame by a figure both familiar and not, the knightly armor looking like Gallant’s previous armor revision. There was a gasp and murmuring behind us, probably because they were hearing a dead man talk, but I ignored it. “Deputy Commander, I know you’re also going to watch this, so now that someone is done being a comedian–” there was a short scuffle as Clockblocker tried to take back the camera, only for him to be restrained by two sets of green-clad arms. Dean shot him a dirty look before rallying, “I can tell you what you really want to know. I don't know if you had an Endbringer attack last week or not, but we fought Leviathan in Boston,” there were a couple more gasps, though I couldn’t tell whose, or whether they related more to the confirmation that Rose’s Gallant yet lived or that he did despite facing an Endbringer of his own. “My armor got destroyed, Clockblocker landed in a full-body cast but Panacea made him better. Nobody else but us three went, and your sister’s safe. You can breathe out!”

Another shove followed, but this time there wasn't a scuffle to take the camera back. I pretended not to notice that this time Rose was crying, though I didn't think it was out of sadness if the ear-to-ear smile she wore was of any indication. The hyper blonde girl on the screen wasn’t masked and wore an outfit that someone could have easily called a deliberate mockery of what Vista stood for as a cape. Flashy. Girly. Similarly green. “Taylor, Taylor, Taylor! They tell me you’re alright, wherever you are, but please come back soon! Dad’s fine, but very worried about you! And Amy! And Ma–” she looked out of frame, listening to someone, before deflating a bit, “–right, sorry, Weaver, she was very worried when you disappeared! Here she is now!”

With that, she dragged in someone who looked a lot like me. Or, well, costumed like me, at least, except painted in blues and yellows. Weaver. Madison Clements. I clenched my fists involuntarily at the thought of one of my bullies being a Ward, then gritted my teeth at the memory of how I got here in the first place. If Emma ends up getting powers of her own, I am going to be so pissed.

“Commander, I’m sorry I failed you,” she said grimly in a way that made my mental train crash into a mental ditch and catch mental fire. This was not any way I expected a Madison to behave. Perhaps Rose was right when she said she changed? Triggers… the trauma involved in them could change a person, right?

She continued, “I couldn’t stop them from taking you, and then they got away when I was…” she clenched her hands into fists, “It won't happen again.” She sniffled, and I was surprised to find myself actually believing that she was really that emotional about my double. I was used to crocodile tears to get me in trouble, not... this. “Please come back, Commander.”

“Oh Mads…” I barely heard my other self whisper, sniffling.

The on-screen Madison seemed at a loss for further words before the camera turned around, showing a stern-faced Amy Dallon, wearing some sort of power armor, her hand around Vista’s shoulders. Missy, even leaving the costume change aside, looked different from the way the one here did. More… severe, a word I would have never thought I’d use to refer to someone as cute as her. Unlike Madison, she actively fought against being seen as cute, and it looked like Rose’s fared a bit better at it than the one here. She looked annoyed to have Amy’s armored hand wrapped around her shoulders, and her face screamed it at the world.

“Hey, Deputy. We were thinking of promoting Vista to your position if you don’t come back soon. Look how unhappy she is to have all that paperwork to herself— OOOF!” Amy was cut off by an elbow to the gut, causing her to double over and leaving Vista grinning grimly.

“And I'm more than willing to take that paperwork out on you if you keep talking about me like that,” she smirked, raising an eyebrow challengingly at Amy. “In fact, I don’t think you've done your reports since before Deputy left, maybe I should–”

“I'll get them done, I'll get them,” Amy wheezed for a second, before grumbling, “Seriously, how are your elbows THAT BONY, that shouldn't be possible…”

“I practice on Clock,” Vista shot back. From offscreen there came a cry that sounded suspiciously like ‘Knew it!’ before being drowned out by a yelp. Vista looked back at the camera. “Seriously, Deputy, come back before I go nuts. For the life of me, I don't know how you stand it.” Amy straightened up and stared into the camera as Vista warped out of the shot.

“Armsmaster says once they’re done mapping this thing out, they’re going to drop the plans for it as soon as you confirm whichever of the numbers you received.” Amy paused, and the mask of cheer she wore seemed to crumble. “Please, Taylor, please tell us you’re okay, that there is a PRT HQ at the coordinates we aimed at, because we need you back. Because–”

She got cut off by an irate Kid Win wrestling the camera away. “Amy! Those were my lines! Commander! We’re going to put the standard Protectorate encryptions on this thing, so if you’re seeing this, rest assured, unless this lands on more than one world, you’re probably the only one seeing this. If not, a request to the Armsmaster of the world this is on: please find the girl named Taylor Hebert, student at Winslow High in Brockton Bay. Help her. Please. Wards ENE, Earth Bet, dimensional coord 0800D, out.”

Dauntless was the first to speak when the screen went blank. “Well, that was more confirmation than we possibly needed.”

“Thanks a lot for broadcasting my name to the Multiverse, Win,” I muttered before turning to Rose, who was still wiping tears away. “The blonde girl– that was your sister?”

“Yes. Synod. Anne-Marie. She’s…” Rose paused for a moment, mulling the word choice over, “...invigorating. I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten as far along in the cape life as I did without her support.”

“Earlier on, you mentioned you were the first Ward without powers,” Battery spoke up, looking concerned. Studying what I could see of her face, I realized that Rose, Hannah and I remained the only ones unmasked. “But you have them now?”

Rose gave a somewhat stilted laugh at the question. “I guess it could be called powers, but I’m not a parahuman. The Thinker rating is a running gag since the first days of my internship, because Director Piggot refused to accept that I could do what I do without powers and had me tested several times.”

“And the Brute rating?” Assault took over from his wife, leaning a bit forward, resting his elbows on the unoccupied chair in front of him. In a five-row mass of chairs, he chose the fourth, like the class clown who always had to be at a safe distance from the teacher, but not on the outskirts of the classroom. “I’m guessing you didn’t find those muscles at the bottom of a cereal box.”

“No, I did not. After Shadow Stalker nearly killed me, Panacea did me a solid. My bones are reinforced, and my metabolism optimized to peak human efficiency,” she paused to flex a bicep, reveling in the way Carlos gaped at the sight. “With her as a dietician to manage my supplement intake, it was just a matter of spending enough time with the PRT trainers. I have several Trooper certifications now, but since I’m a PR figurehead, I can do a lot more good as an open cape. This secret identity thing I have to do here has been… kinda grating, to be honest.”

“That may be out of our hands if your friends establish stable communications between our worlds,” Hannah said, her worn-out expression reminding me that I forgot to ask what was wrong with her. “Once word gets out here that Taylor Hebert is a famous unpowered cape, you can bet your taser the public here will take a close look at her counterpart.”

“Speaking of the public and figureheads. What the hell is up with those posters I saw?” I managed to squeeze in, “I’m a damsel in distress now, apparently. Both of us are,” I grinned at Hannah, who only nodded grimly. Is that what’s eating at her? “In the meantime, I’m guessing that’s why you wanted to murder Mr Chambers earlier?”

“Please, do tell,” Assault perked up, exuding enthusiasm everywhere. “I haven’t seen any posters yet. Is it another anti-drug PSA? I can’t be the only one they stick on those, right?”

“Nope. They’re marketing the PRT internship program,” Rose replied, incredulous, “Somehow. I mean, it worked back home because I was the face of PRT ENE PR pretty much since the moment I was Deputized, but this is different, even if the narrative of me starting out as an intern remains the same.”

“So, what you’re basically saying, you wouldn’t’ve minded if such a poster cropped up from your PRT?” I needled, barely resisting the urge to snicker at her first world problem. Realizing the trap she just stepped into, she stuck her tongue out at me and went on the offensive.

“Oh, and they’re making T-shirts with that scene,” she countered, her fingers splaying out to outline a rectangle against her chestplate. “And several other images they’ve snagged off my drone and helmet cameras. Some will go in use for PR bulletins, a few will be used for updated ‘Who’s that cape?’ guidebooks, and yes, I’m getting credit and royalties as the photographer.”

“Well, with that sorted out, let’s move on to the second point of today’s agenda,” Hannah said, a bit of worry eroding from her at the mention of other images. Suddenly, I realized that showing the new leader of the Protectorate ENE as a beat-up bloody mess was a great way to set her up for failure. “Whatever you said to her, coupled with your outburst, kicked Crystal Pelham in a full-on hysterical episode. Doctor Karpenko has managed to calm her down, but now we have a very pissed-off Brandish stewing in Conference Room five, waiting to tear me a new one. You too, naturally, so this meeting was the only thing putting off our demise. Alright everyone, back to business!”

We filed out into the hallway. As I watched Rose detach herself from Carlos with the reluctance of a mother letting her child go to school alone for the first time, I had an mini-epiphany.

“Wait, isn’t that the door we ran past on the way to the lab and back?”

------

Spoiler: Soundtrack

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Chris was walking me through the peculiarities of using the various overlay modes of the map display on the Wards Console when Rose returned, looking like she was put through the wringer. Tearing her helmet off, the first thing she did was pour herself a cup of tea – not that the choice on offer was significant, but having Orange Pekoe was better than having no tea at all. I saluted her with my own mug of steaming liquid as she plopped down into an armchair.

“For the record: Carol Dallon hates me. I’m one sneeze away from a restraining order, or so she tells me,” she shared with no-one in particular. With Dennis and Missy out on patrol, and Carlos gearing up to go out with Chris as soon as they returned, the Commons looked deserted and empty compared to the celebratory atmosphere of Wednesday.

Curious, I’ve only technically been a Ward for two whole days, but I already feel… if not at ease, then at least safe. I still held that grudge against my double for depriving me of the option to choose, but… it wasn’t terrible, and as long as I kept the insects out of the Commons, the Wards were a welcoming bunch. I guessed it helped that most of them liked Rose, and some of that goodwill rubbed off on me. The fact that they all sympathized with the circumstance of my Trigger, unpleasant as the subject was to me, their politeness wasn’t borne out of pity. I wasn't weak, like Sophia and Emma tried to convince themselves for so long. I recovered. I persevered. I did not break.

“But that means we can infer the movements of drug shipments from the way the dealer activities shift?” I asked, probing what I thought was a setup for a trick question.

Chris blinked at me while Rose called out from her seat. “Exactly! I knew it runs in the family! When I voiced the same idea to my old team, nobody believed me at first!”

She stood up with the obvious intent to come over and look at the map Chris was showing me, but then got diverted by the sound of the doors opening. An ashen-faced Missy was about the same color as Dennis’s mask, and when he pulled that off, he was little different.

“Either we have cannibals roaming the city,” he began, only to stop until his full-body shivers subsided, “Or there’s a new serial killer out there that uses an ice cream spoon to dismember people.”

“Dude, not cool,” Chris chided him, indicating Missy with a jerk of his chin. She was standing motionless, half-leaning against the chair Rose just vacated, her mask in her hand, her lips moving soundlessly. I hurried over to wrap her in a hug, and she nuzzled her face against one of my armor plates, muttering indistinctly about blood.

“Rose, can you and Taylor man the console for us?” Carlos asked, pulling his helmet on, waiting for Chris to extract his new, larger hoverboard out of its stand.

“Of course, coach,” she chirped back at him and, before he could turn away, landed a quick peck on his cheek, barely missing the lips due to his turn. When he froze, staring at her in slight confusion, she spoke up. “Please stay safe out there, alright?”

He held up her hand that she put in his when she kissed him, gave it a reassuring-looking squeeze. “I promise.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s nothing for our fearless leader to worry about,” Chris said with assuredness that wilted a bit at the realization that only recently they’ve already lost one of their number, that being in the Wards was not a guarantee of avoiding harm.

“I certainly hope so,” Rose said quietly as the door closed behind the two of them. “Because he still owes me that date.”

 

Reset 3.06

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

[Rose]​

Staring at Carol Dallon’s angry, tired face was about as fun as staring down the barrel of a gun. If the gun could also produce hardlight weaponry to smack you with, that is. The good news was that this one didn’t hate me for poaching the Golden Healer and arresting her daughter. The bad news… was that I knew enough of Carol to know what to expect, but not enough to know why she was annoyed with us overall.

“Why am I not surprised to learn it’s you again?” were the first words she said at me after Hannah and I sat ourselves down across from her and her niece in the conference room. “First it was that odd story with you hoodwinking Legend into considering Skitter a hero–”

Nevermind, I thought to myself, Black-or-white morality and refusal to forgive the one who hurt Vicky. Thank you for consistency, Carol.

“Arachne,” Miss Militia corrected almost mechanically, “She’s a Ward now, and that involves a rebranding. Since we can’t do much about her powers, well…”

“–as I was saying,” Carol grabbed hold of the conversation again, refusing to let Hannah drive it to saner territories, “You took the girl that almost killed Panacea and made her a hero, and you used my daughter to do so! Victoria actually refused to tell me whatever it was that you made her do right after losing half her family!”

Good on you, Vicky. I’ll find a way to repay you for this, I promise.

“Panacea’s aid was necessary to establish certain details related to Skitter’s claims of mitigating circumstances,” Miss Militia said calmly, relying on the technically-a-truth it was agreed to use when questioned about the incident, “Glory Girl volunteered to keep guard in order to prevent anything untoward from happening, and we didn’t dare stop her.”

“And what, pray tell, was so important that you thought it worthwhile to upset Panacea’s rounds in the hospital following an Endbringer attack?” Carol ground out in a tone that made Crystal slowly twist in her seat to get as much distance between herself and her aunt without actually moving the chair.

If it was someone else, they would be screaming by now. Carol’s relatively level voice was unnerving as a result. For better or worse, the context of the situation made her forgo the superhero approach and so we were treated to the discombobulating sight of Brandish the Cape acting like Carol the Lawyer. Cold anger that kept her voice level and word choices elaborate. I had a sudden thought that Mom would have enjoyed having a verbal spar or two with Carol, if things worked out differently in her life. Perhaps, on some other Earth, they had.

Focus, have to focus, make her focus. Taylor is not the subject of this meeting!

“Missus Dallon,” I said, swiping my hand across my faceplate to render it see-through, “This doesn’t have to be a confrontation. The actions of Arachne – the artist formerly known as Skitter – aren’t relevant at this time.”

Both of the New Wave capes stared at me as if I just told them Moord Nag was taking Alexandria’s place in the Protectorate. Not entirely sure much would actually change… although my interrogation would have likely taken longer. Wait, did I just justify Alexandria’s cutting corners on the procedures?!

“Well, they’re not,” I blustered, trying to shake the image of Moord Nag’s possible Protectorate line-up out of my head, “Because there’s been debates since the dawn of law enforcement as to what to do about repentant criminals, and I don’t think we’re going to convince each other in the next few minutes. What matters about her is that since she joined up, the Protectorate stands with her,” I paused, “I stand with her.”

As an actual response, Carol narrowed her eyes at me. “The way you said that… it’s personal for you, isn’t it? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

I guess she’s pretty good in a courtroom, even if she’s terrible at being a mother (or a team leader, with Exhibit A still sniffling next to her). But nobody gets away with calling Taylor Hebert a boy.

“She’s my cousin, yes.” I nodded, before turning to Crystal, reaching out to lay a hand on one of hers that lay across the table, “And for what it’s worth, Crystal, I’m sorry about scaring you. I’m… I’ve had a terrible experience with the PRT’s PR before, and this time I have no way to avoid becoming a public spectacle, so feel free to have a laugh at my expense once it spreads.” I explained, trying not to trip over the words as they spilled out of me, “But none of that was your fault. I’m so, so sorry, I wish I could do more than just apologize, but my powers are mostly good for hurting people…” I trailed off, watching her face change. She… sort of stepped out of the gloom, if only for a moment.

“You can still use them for good, can’t you?” she asked, her voice a shadow of the shadow that it was in the lobby. It made me feel even more like shit, because the girl seriously did not need any more crap piled on her after losing both her parents and her legal guardian trying to force her into a needless crusade. I nodded slowly, making sure to maintain eye contact with her the entire time.

“I do my best with them,” I said honestly. “I don’t always get it right, but I try.”

“I’m… I’m gonna be okay, I think. T-thank you for explaining your side of things. Aunt Carol?”

She turned to her aunt and nodded weakly, probably indicating she was ready to go. Even with the implied confirmation that she accepted my apology, however, I still felt iffy about the whole situation. Apparently, so did Carol.

“This doesn’t change anything, Emissary,” Brandish spoke up again, “Stay the hell away from my family if you know what’s good for you,” she added, before standing up, pushing her chair back. It caught on a rough patch of vinyl flooring - if memory served, that came to be when Assault and Dauntless tried to settle a bet involving Molotovs, except this time they didn’t have Weaver with a fire extinguisher in hand available to stop them in time. She pushed it harder, and it still refused to budge. Huffing out, she lifted the chair and set it back by hand before turning to me again and continuing as if she hadn’t been cruelly interrupted by uneven flooring. “Or you and your cousin will find yourselves on Panacea’s blacklist in short order. Is that clear?”

“Brandish, this is–” Miss Militia protested, but was quickly rebuffed.

“–the only leverage New Wave has, I’m well aware,” Carol interjected before Hannah’s protest could fully form, her voice now more tired than angry. I suddenly realized that while I was focused on the children of the Dallon-Pelham clan, their matriarch was running herself ragged just as much as them, and this gesture of asserting herself as one team leader to another was important on a level well above me bringing her niece to tears by accident. “So, please, don’t make me enforce that.”

I had to… do something. Let her know she wasn’t alone in this, that there was no need to antagonize the Protectorate and PRT because of me, not with the city knee-deep in murky water and grim prospects on the peace being upheld for much longer. Except most anything I could say here would be taken with a spoon of salt, and I’ve already had the experience of antagonizing my own Brandish so I didn’t care for a potential re-enactment, especially one that would lock me out of talking to this Amy in private.

“Brandish… Carol,” I ventured, making her stop dead in her tracks halfway to the door. She turned on her heels, slowly, then measured me with a baleful glare. Crystal took the opportunity to stand behind her, out of the possible impact site. “Please… don’t,” I began, trying to find the words, “I get that you might not like us right now. I understand that I’m, well, I’m not someone you can really like at all, and I get why.” I gulped, “But don’t take it out on us–” I gestured both to Militia and the walls, indicating the rest of the PRT, “–because of my cousin and I.” I slumped down, “You don’t like us, but the city needs us. All of us. You can understand that, right?”

I paused, hoping that Carol would accept the Peace Offering. Better to accept the PRT as-is than to reject it for the sake of spiting the two parahumans that she didn’t like, right? Particularly in the wake of an Endbringer attack?

God, I hope that was how she sees it.

“When you put it that way, then yes, I can,” she sighed, “Victoria said good things about you, but you’re yet to convince me, and whatever kind of Ward–” she paused, until Hannah reminded her ‘Arachne?” in a light whisper, “–Arachne will turn out to be, I’m going to keep an eye on her as well. No offense.”

“None taken,” I replied, still feeling uneasy about how this turned out. “Crystal? Good luck out there!”

The older girl waved weakly before her aunt closed the door after them. I turned to Miss Militia.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I just–”

“Forget it, this could have gone a lot worse,” she interrupted me, dismissing some of my concerns in favor of others. She looked like she badly needed a good night’s sleep, but I was sure she hadn’t gotten one in years. Why would she? With a power that allows you to go completely without it, sleep can easily be seen as a waste of time, time that could be spent more productively on other things.

Perhaps whatever her concussion did jolted her Corona or Gemma? Wasn’t there a documented case of– NOT NOW!

“It does corroborate the report we received from Glory Girl, however,” I noted, trying to hold back from asking her directly. If my guess was correct, it would maybe be okay to ask, but if I was off by a mile, I’d just be rude to another heroine for no good reason. Not a good habit to get into. “She’s worn out, and it shows. How long until–”

“Don’t even go there,” Hannah said, cracking her neck as she finally got up from her chair. “You’re on Taylor duty until the end of the day, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I nodded, pointedly ignoring the term ‘Taylor Duty’, “Console slot now, followed by a visit to the detention center. The rest of the day is lab time, although for her whenever she’s in range is lab time,” I offered her a smile, however forced it may have looked, a Daniel Hebert #3 (‘A step towards unity’) “The testing people said she doesn’t seem to have any limit on her multitasking so long as she has enough insects to actually carry out her orders available.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask, any word on why they haven’t provided the ratings for her yet?” she asked, retying her bandanna. Once she was sure it would hold in place, we stepped out into the empty hallway.

“Doctor Mendez said something about trying not to think of her in terms of a threat,” I shrugged, darkening my visor, “But if you ask me, it’s because she and Doctor Pharkas can’t make up their minds whether Master or Shaker gets the seven while the other gets the four. At least they’re unanimous on Tinker 2.”

------​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

“And I’m telling you, the whole purpose of this thing is to experience the logic and procedure of the ops side without being exposed to danger!”

The argument went around in circles as Taylor and I waited for the boys to come back from patrol. Their fight with the Empire went badly, as Rune and Cricket managed to make off with a few cratefuls of medical supplies from an aid distribution center. Overall, this week seemed to be largely going in favor of the Empire, with them getting increasingly more brazen about the extent to which they poked and prodded the Protectorate-guarded areas and got away with it. At least they helped keep the Merchants from expanding their drug trade with most of the Empire’s known narcotics labs demolished by Leviathan’s efforts.

“But we’re not going to be doing it when we move to the Protectorate?” Taylor repeated stubbornly. I clinked my mug of tea against hers and we both paused to take a drink. The tea was bitter, but some unknown bureaucrat stocked tons of it in the building’s storerooms and it had nowhere else to go. “Someone somewhere must have been compiling a temporary list of ‘busywork for the Wards’ tasks and made it official policy by accident?”

“It’s not entirely busywork,” I repeated myself, “If it gets you to practice the coordination between the PRT and capes, lets you see more action than the restrictions would normally allow and puts Clockblocker’s 24/7 Bad Pun Radio in your ear!”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the pained expression she made. “Are you sure we’re related? His name is his least unfunny pun, and that’s saying a lot.”

“I didn’t say it’s a pleasant experience, but that’s also training,” I said in a lecturing tone, barely resisting the urge to grin like Sarah again. I wasn’t blind to the fact that Taylor became more guarded every time she saw me using a borrowed smile, and of these her villainous best friend always hurt her the most. “Being able to keep a Straight Face under pressures, both good and bad, is a valuable resource.”

“Well, then yours still needs work,” she stated flatly, turning her swivel chair back to the Console for a moment. “Kid Win, be careful flying in that area, we have a report about downed power lines there. Try not to get tangled up and/or electrocuted.”

“Roger that, Console. Will do, gaining altitude,” came Chris’s slightly crackly voice from the speakers.

Taylor let go of the transmit button and returned her atten– no, that’s not how she’s wired. Not even like Weaver. Every bug is her eyes and ears. If she’s not alone, she’s not unarmed, if she’s in the dark, she’s not blind, if she’s lost, she’s done it on purpose. In any case, she turned back to face me.

“What do you mean by ‘needs work’?” I asked when it became clear she wasn’t sharing it on her own.

She scoffed at her tea, making the steam wafting above it whorl in a pretty pattern. “Aegis. It’s clear you like him, but… it’s like part of you still hopes he’ll get the hint that even though you gave him his promise back, he’ll ask you out.”

“Oh really,” I said dryly, my expression carefully blank, “So you think you can see into my mind? That you know every little detail about me?”

She looked at me over her glasses, suddenly serious, so very much like Mom when she was about to dispense an Important Fact of Life that it physically hurt. And suddenly I realize why Dad may have been getting distant from us after she died. Huh, I guess this is why Taylor hates me using borrowed smiles, too. Whoops.

“But I can see into your mind, Mighty Owl,” she said ominously, reaching out to place her outstretched fingertips onto the crown of my head, “For I am the Mistress of Insects, and your mind is mine to command!”

I blinked owlishly at that. Perhaps her earlier irritation at the idea of Clockblocker was merely displeasure with a competitor? “Mighty Owl? And owls aren’t insects!”

“Yep. Calling you Ems may be funny for the sake of watching you squirm, but not when it makes my own skin crawl,” she admitted, “So since we both were Little Owls once, you shall henceforth be Mighty Owl, and I shall be Smarty Owl.”

I snorted a laugh at her, “More like Snooty Owl, if I say–”

Voices in the Commons made me pause, then turn around in confusion. There was no mask-up alarm. Intruders?!

“Where is everybody?” came the familiar warmth of Carlos’s voice, outlined in a faint buzzing sound I was used to associating with Weaver’s presence. I glared at Taylor, but she only took a smug sip from her mug, perfectly channeling Sarah in that moment herself.

“Yes, I think I figured out how to do noise canceling so long as the target isn’t paying attention to the background noise, why do you ask?” she said innocently as a moth brushed against my nose. I refused to flinch on sheer principle, then kicked myself away from her, reveling in the way she struggled to keep her tea inside her mug following the jolt as her swivel chair jerked aside. In the meantime, I rode my own chair out into the Commons to greet the boys.

“We’re in here, what took–” I began, but then stalled out as I took in the sight of Carlos taking his helmet off. He had helmet hair, but I didn’t care much for that. “Is that what you call ‘a grazing hit’?” I hissed, abandoning my ride to take the two steps necessary to grab his helmet out of his hands.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll be in my room? Writing my report?” Chris offered to no-one in particular, although I thought I heard Taylor mutter something from her post at the Console. That rang bells in my head for some reason, but I barely paid attention as the Tinker sailed past me on his hoverboard, riding it like a surfer that was catching some sun.

“Come on, you know I’ll heal,” Carlos protested as I studied the yellow-black bruises across his cheekbone, spread out across his neck and half a black eye. The eyeball itself, even if it was initially damaged, looked intact, and even the bruising looked a few days old in normal people terms. Which meant it was a terrible mess during the fight, but he didn’t report it!

“I also know that you need to stop pushing yourself as if you don’t have any limits,” I hissed before catching myself. Thankfully, so did he, and I was certain Chris was out of earshot.

“Rose… Taylor… Listen to me,” Carlos whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t feel the squeeze through my armor, having not dressed down after the morning’s functions, but the weight of it was comforting by itself, “You can’t do this every time I go out on patrol. I’ve done this dozens of times before, and knew full well I wasn’t in any danger.” He spoke in a clipped way, as if holding some emotion back, but I had trouble figuring out what it was based on his words alone, the whisper killing half the inflections at the outset. “Look, the paint isn’t even scratched.” He tapped the helmet I held in my hands and I looked down. It looked back at me with its empty eye-holes, bringing back unpleasant memories of me holding one just like this – or maybe the exact same one – except cracked and spattered with blood.

I looked back up to him, then froze, wide-eyed, as I realized me moving my head resulted in me getting someone’s hand in my hair for the second time in the past ten minutes. Except this time it wasn’t Taylor.

Was he trying to pat my head? Brush my hair? Drop something in– stop that, Carlos would never do that to me or anyone else for that matter, besides I can feel the hand is empty.

“Ah, screw it,” I exhaled, not letting go of his eyes with mine, “I know I promised I wouldn’t do it, but this week has… made me rethink some things,” I paused, biting my lip, then plodded on, “Carlos Santiago. Our patrol schedules share a break this coming Tuesday. Will you go on a date with me?”

Noise cancelling had nothing on the knowledge that Taylor could apparently squee through her swarm.

------​

[Taylor]​

My outfit as Arachne was still incomplete, but at least it looked less kitbashed than Rose’s temporary solution for having her entire Emissary outfit stuck in the repair shop.

I already had my borrowed spiders laying down the prep work for what would become my actual hero outfit and also for a spare bodysuit for my double to wear. However, the real stuff would come after I was done experimenting with the web-strengthening methods Chris suggested I look up. My main concern with the whole ‘feed spiders water laced with X, then their webs will be exty times stronger’ method was whether it would make them less flexible and/or more rigid and brittle, which could pose serious issues for their use in costume-making.

The elevator doors interleaved open, letting us out onto the detention level. Rose was in most of her regalia, clearly enjoying being able to wear her own armor again, and together we must have looked like quite the pair, faceless masks and visible holsters and all. Sure, mine only held a standard-issue stun gun, not the Lightning Rod of God that my double used, but given that it was supposed to be a holdout weapon, I wasn’t even certain I’d be using it any time soon. I still had my batons and my swarm, after all. And that was before I got into how weird it felt against my thigh when I walked, having gone for a hip holster, tacticool-style. Only way to tell if I could make the Miss Militia approach work would be with practice, which I was scheduled to start on Monday.

“Give me a moment, alright?” Rose said suddenly, half-turning to me in front of the door to the corridor with the cells. There were several of them radiating out from the central axis of the elevator shaft, still underground like the Wards base, but not intended for use as a shelter. Despite the evacuation on Sunday, the place looked like it hadn’t taken any water damage whatsoever. Perhaps the pressure doors separating each of the ‘spokes’ held well enough for keeping things out just as holding them in?

I nodded to her, then threw a glance at the trooper on duty behind the Tinkertech armored glass. Its bluish sheen was the main giveaway - the stuff was pretty expensive, but in a city where villains attempting to break out Birdcage-bound comrades wasn’t so much expected as much as it was a given, it made sense to provide adequate protection to the people at ground zero. My scouting parties consisting of cockroaches and fruitflies (why does this place have so damn many fruitflies?!) informed me that he wasn't the only Trooper on guard, just the only visible one. In that regard, the extra protection made sense - he’d be drawing fire from the hypothetical attackers while his buddies would flank them.

Not that it helped curb the breakout statistics any if the villains still broke the prison transports up to get at their imprisoned allies.

“Ma’am?” he asked politely. He still wore the faceless helmet all Troopers did, but something in his posture told me he was pretty scrawny under all that high-tech chainmail. Two beats later I realized I must have looked like I’d been staring as I maneuvered the flies that followed Rose down the corridor into a better viewing and listening position, while my other fliers took count of the four Troopers watching the screens behind a concealed door, while my other fliers checked and rechecked the people milling about the building’s ground floor entrance watching the ongoing repairs to the façade, while my spiders upstairs wove another layer of the mockup for the new mask that would be Arachne’s instead of the repainted Skitter one I was wearing now.

Of course, the real reason for my distraction waited in the glass-walled cell that Rose just stopped in front of. The only occupied cell in the block, since for obvious reasons Alabaster was being held in a different spoke, still waiting for a transport to a more permanent holding facility or for his comrades to break him out. With the city being what it was, neither was likely to occur for at least another week. A lot less could be said for the one we were here for. Shadow Stalker. Sophia Hess.

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

The two mercs Rose and I caught a few days earlier were upstairs, one in the medbay (thank god I thought to pack epipens), the other under questioning. Other than their names and reputations are mercenaries, the PRT hadn’t been able to figure anything out, but the supposition that they were Coil’s was pretty obvious.

“Sorry sir, I wasn’t looking at you, specifically,” I hurried to explain, feeling flushed and glad the Trooper couldn’t see my face, “I couldn’t get a good scan of this level before, so I got a little caught up in mapping it out.”

My scouts registered the click-clack of Rose unclasping and removing her helmet, the rustling of fabric as Sophia turned around to face her, while I positioned my fruitflies and spiders and one errant moth on the both of them. After all, if I couldn’t bring in enough of a swarm to watch them, I could at least get a sense for what they were doing with their bodies. I still focused on getting some proper flies and mosquitoes through the newly-discovered air vents. There was at least one security gap I’d be reporting to Miss Militia later today, that much was certain.

“Is this something I will have to report?” the Trooper asked warily, his hand hovering in the general direction of one of several landline phones on the console in front of him.

“What? Oh, no, not really. It’s in my file: I’m running insects across everything I can reach, then reporting back to Miss Militia on possible access points,” I explained hastily, “Lets me be aware of potential threats in case normal warning systems fail, lets me warn the higher-ups if there are ways for someone like Fog to slither in. It should be in the system under the Deputy Director’s orders?”

I felt the need to be specific because the talking-to I received from Deputy Director Renick regarding my display from my introduction to the Wards was still reverberating in my skull. It was incredible how he managed far more with a chastising tone than Director Piggot could with a threatening one, but in the end he agreed that my habit of not walking into a place I haven’t scanned with my bugs beforehand could be used as an additional layer of defense for the PRT HQ, especially if I was confined to it for the time being whenever I was on duty.

With a sigh, I added, “It also keeps me occupied whenever I have nothing better to do as well.” With that, I turned away from him (name tag says Jeong, it must be difficult being Korean and PRT in the ABB’s home town) and focused my attention on Rose. And Sophia too, if only out of necessity.

“Oh, look who it is. Finally found me, huh?” Sophia quipped, her anger translating both into her voice and the minute shudder of anger that she suppressed for the time being. The way Rose stiffened told me that it didn’t go unnoticed. “Or maybe remembered me is more like it?”

“Tag, you’re it,” Rose replied evenly, tapping the glass separating them lightly enough to not make a sound with her gloved hand. “I’d have been down here yesterday, but between New Wave falling apart and dealing with the aftermath of me bringing Skitter in, I barely had the time to sleep last night.”

I frowned. She’s… making excuses? What is she– wait, did Sophia just laugh or was that a cough?

“Ha! You finally arrested that bug bitch?”

I clenched my fists. I knew that it was her dislike of the Undersiders talking, because she had no way to connect Skitter the Undersider to Taylor the Punching Bag, but it still grated. Unfortunately, distracting myself from getting angry just gave me too much information on something moving swiftly into my area of effect. Or it could be considered fortunate, given what I was sensing.

“Trooper Jeong?” I spoke up suddenly, making the man’s head snap up sharply, “Can you reach the dispatch console from here? There’s a van approaching this location with armed people inside and I doubt they’re friendly.”

“Direction?” the man asked, punching keys on his console and reaching for one of the landlines.

“West, down King’s Street, I think?” I replied, making a tally of the van’s contents. “Six men in the back, all with rifles of some sort, at least one Tinkertech. One more in front with the driver, that one only has a sidearm.”

As Jeong related what I just said into the phone, elsewhere in the building I felt the bug I marked Dauntless with jerk upwards sharply, then zoom down what I thought was a hallway. As the guard detail in the lobby tensed, I turned my attention back to the prison cell, leaving it for the adults to deal with while beginning to gather a swarm in case they couldn’t.

“Arrested? I believe you were there when I said I was recruiting her,” came the reply to Sophia’s question, still odd to hear in my voice, with just a hint of smugness to mark that it wasn’t me speaking. Yeah, the bank robber is above you on the totem pole now, Shadow Stalker. I hope it grates.

“And so what, that’s supposed to make me feel better about you sticking me in here?”

Sophia was indignant, and I took the way Rose gently prodded one of the beetles perched on her hip to be my cue. “No, it’s supposed to clue you in that maybe there was some sort of mistake you made along the way that she hadn’t.”

The door swung open before me, but Rose didn’t turn her head. Neither did Sophia, actually. The silent staring match continued unabated until I was standing next to the other me, looking at my former tormentor through the armored glass rather than the eyes of my bugs. Now, however, I could use them freely, setting a few members of the swarm I kept parked in my hair to circle around my head in an imitation of an Egyptian halo again.

“The fuck? You’re letting her see my face?” Sophia sputtered, but Rose only smirked that Aisha-like smile again.

“Knowing your identity was part of the payment for my recruitment, Hess,” I hissed back, pulling my mask off. By the time I had my glasses back on, Sophia was scowling at me full bore.

“Hebert,” she hissed before going on the offensive, “What is this, you’re trying to ride your cousin’s coat-tails out of jail and onto the Wards roster?”

“And why the hell not?” I shrugged, “Worked out wonderfully for you after Emma’s dad vouched for you, didn’t it? You even got to have the school get paid to cover for you.”

“Right,” she snorted, “As if without that there would be anyone–”

“ENOUGH,” Rose bellowed, making us both (eugh, I just included myself in an ‘us’ with Sophia) look at her in surprise, “Whether you like it or not, Sophia, Taylor is a Ward now, and I wanted you both to know what exactly you are in for.”

With the attention shifted away from me, I refocused on finding the beetle that was on Dauntless. It wasn’t anywhere in my sense area, so I changed targets, opting for the mosquitoes keeping track of the troopers from the lobby. One of them, a tall one whose gender I couldn’t tell in the armor, was down, bleeding profusely, two more were barely upright while the rest held defensive positions, exchanging fire with the men from the van. A quick visual scan from the slowly massing swarm (why had I exterminated so many bugs in that goodwill effort? Oh right, it was mostly cockroaches, they wouldn’t help much here) told me Dauntless was zooming around using his Mover boots, so the beetle I marked him with must have simply died in the fighting. Just then, the butterfly I managed to land on his back to keep track of him again got squashed because Dauntless was hurled aside by a second van, as disreputable-looking as the first, and as rich in insect life for me to co-opt.

I formed a swarm clone in full view of Jeong, trying to remember how I had used the chittering and buzzing of the chitinous mass to emulate speech before. “Dauntless is down,” I told him, “Second van hit him. When is Battery due to get back from her patrol area?”

“Seven minutes,” he replied, completely collected. “Only other capes currently on the premises are you two and Vista on Wards Console.”

“Call her down, we’re going out there before the wounded bleed out,” I buzzed at him, then dissipated the clone.

While this was going on, the exchange in front of my actual face continued.

“And what’s that? So I don’t scare your weakling cousin away?” Sophia asked, surprisingly civilly as far as I was concerned. Perhaps, she did make allowances for Rose? How long had they known each other? A couple of weeks? Just like with Emma when she…

“So she doesn’t decide the Wards are all like you, actually, and you get to live with the responsibility of making someone Trigger.” Rose parried, then pressed her advantage before Sophia could recover from her frown, “I was waiting for–”

“There is a fight in front of the lobby,” I interrupted, my hand on Rose’s shoulder, trying my damndest not to show that being reminded that Sophia had a part in me getting my powers had gotten to me. “Thirteen Empire guys with assorted rifles, Dauntless was handling it until he got run over by the van of their backup. The troopers aren’t doing too well because a couple of the guns seem to be Tinkertech, backup is seven minutes out, and Vista, me, and you are the only capes on-site. We need to go now.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she asked, a momentary flash of irritation on her face making me realize it made me look ugly. Uglier. Whatever. We were already moving back out of the corridor with the cells, returning our masks back into place and ignoring Sophia’s cries of damnation at our abandoning her.

------​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

We returned half an hour later, lightly bruised and very proud of ourselves. The men in the vans turned out to be a bunch of Empire footsoldiers that decided to show their new cell leader - Stormtiger, it seemed - that Hookwolf’s death meant nothing in the grand scheme of tearing the Merchants apart for fun and profit. The fun lay in the tearing, and the profit in the looting of a drug lab which seemed to confirm the earlier reports that the Empire had lost at least some of their own. It was expectable that with the state of the city being what it was, some of its citizens would turn to various ways of escaping reality, drugs among them. After all, it was the main strategy of dealing with the steadily decreasing economy before Leviathan hit, so why should things change now? With the Empire’s own means of production lost to them, a pogrom on the Merchants would be triply beneficial. Or would have been, at least, until we stopped them.

“Sorry about that,” I chimed lightly, peeling off my mask once again with one hand while reaching for the armored case I was provided for my glasses with the other, “We had actually important things to do with our time.” I waved a hand in the air, having trace fruitflies fly off to leave a trail behind it, almost looking like fairy dust in the artificial light. In fact, I bet I could do it right if I get a few moths large enough. “But now that nobody’s dying, we can get back to you.”

Sophia’s indignant stare merely moved from the bug clone I left to keep watch over her to me as we walked back in, Rose following behind me this time around. I was surprised to discover that as long as I kept my mind focused on a single clone, I could keep it relatively stable longer than I thought possible, or, perhaps it was due to how sparse the bug cloud constituting it was. Then again, I haven't done much with the concept since using them to distract Leviathan. One way or another, the trick seemed to wipe away the last doubts Sophia may have harbored that I was who we said I was and not some idiot using the real Skitter in a ploy to play her.

“So if you Triggered in that locker and not later, why did it take so long?” she asked outright, confirming my conclusions. “January to what, April? When you robbed that bank? Three and a half months is a heckuva long prep time.”

“Did you go out the day after you got your powers?” I asked in lieu of an answer. The glare I got in response was louder than any words.

“Then why didn’t you–” she began, then thought better of it, growling and waving me off and turning to Rose. “What’s the point of this? I’m still locked up, and if you thought showing me that your weakling cousin has powers now would change anything, then you thought wrong.”

“I want to see what kind of person you are, Sophia,” Rose said earnestly. Now it was her turn to emulate our mother’s lecturing tone, so much like the time we argued back and forth on whether Boromir could be considered a true hero or not (I won the argument, having proven that he could and– oh. OH!). “When you can’t run away, hide behind numbers, adults or a weapon.”

“Yeah, well you’re looking good yourself, talking from outside the cage you put me in, Rose,” Sophia retorted, bringing my brain to a screeching halt as I realized the only person I’ve ever heard her address by their first name to their face without insulting them was Emma. I wonder, if we tell her Rose’s secret, will she Trigger again? No, shit, bad Taylor, that is a fucked up thing to wish on anyone.

“To be fair, you kinda deserve it?” Rose offered with a slight wince and a so-so hand waggle to make the emotion more specific. “I mean, not only did you break the terms of your probation pretty badly, you also colluded with your handler to cover it up, used your cape identity to harass Taylor on top of what your civilian one was already doing…”

“...the flute,” I suggested darkly. Sophia’s face didn’t change a bit, not even a hint of recognition.

“Good point,” Rose continued, her tone equally unchanged, as if she was completely divorced from our shared history in that moment. Of course, having gotten to know her in my natural habitat, I already knew what a load of bullshit her perceived stoicism was - as soon as nobody was looking, she’d probably crash again. Sure, I did something like that with my swarm, but she didn’t have a thingy in her brain helping her offload that stuff into 7.3E6 insects, give or take an order of magnitude. “Let’s add theft and destruction of personal property to the list. All of the above would be enough to get you jailed as-is just by stripping your Ward status away, but combined with the actual shit you pulled when breaking said probation, we can probably get you tried as an adult. Send you to grown-up prison, let the big bad predator have her–”

My hand on her shoulder stopped the tirade. “Step back from the Abyss, will you, Nietzsche?” She nodded appreciatively and jerked her chin at Sophia.

“My point was, the city’s short on heroes, people to help keep the peace,” she explained, “There’s some pushback to let you out, shackled in some way so the PRT can keep track of you, properly this time, but without neutering your power in a way that gets you killed. Compliance brings leniency, the whole Snake Plissken treatment.”

I didn’t know who that was, but the way Sophia’s gaze shifted, she seemed to get the reference. Is half a year really long enough to stop being the same person? Or are there other differences we simply haven’t realized yet?

“The obvious problem is, they trust you about as far as I can throw you,” I took over, interrupting Sophia just as she was about to open her mouth. “Which is quite a lot more than I would ever trust someone who only became a hero to maul people without consequences.”

“Are you two done?” she sneered in response, burying her hands in her pockets. “Gawd, it’s like I’ve got three Gallants in here preaching at me,” she drawled, but then seemingly caught herself, freeing one hand to wave in a shooing motion, “Yeah, yeah, I know he’s dead, but that doesn’t stop him from being an example. I didn’t do this shit just to beat people up.”

“Then why? I know Doctor Yamada will be asking you the same thing come Monday anyway, and Doctor Karpenko probably already has, but it’s clear that you saw something in me that you didn’t see in her.” The way Rose said that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Instinctively, I knew that she was only doing it as part of mirroring Sophia, to get her to talk, but a part of me couldn't help but whisper that Emma must have started small too. “I’m trying to figure out what it was, and what it says about your… continued worth, as a hero.”

“I couldn’t not be a cape,” Sophia said hesitantly after a short pause, eyes still boring into other-me’s. “And when the options pretty much are ‘sideshow freak’ like that doll-girl, ‘primped-up skank’ like Gory Girl or stooping to the same level as the fucking Nazis…”

“Thus, the vigilante thing. And then what, the violence turned out to be a fun bonus?”

“...I don’t know. Maybe. Something pisses you off, you better do something about it, y’know,” she paused to shrug, her pocketed hands making the gesture extra exaggerated. “Nazis piss me off. Merchants piss me off. Taylor fucking Hebert pisses me off,” she added, finally turning to look at me.

“Because you think I’m weak or because Emma does?” I ventured. It wasn’t something Rose told me to push for, but it was something that still bothered me. Whose idea was it to go after me to begin with? Rose’s Emma shouldered the blame, but then again, she was also institutionalized, which kind of makes you take any statements that kind of person makes with a spoon of salt. Even if they used to be your alternate universe best friend.

What’s more, I had learned the lesson that my other self was evidently still struggling with: not everything in our worlds matched.

“Does it matter?” Sophia shrugged again, “She’s my friend, we share a lot of things, opinions on prey included.”

“There was a time I could have said the same about her,” I replied, refusing to take the bait. “But let me make something clear. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that I did nothing useful with my powers. What did you expect me to do? Go Carrie on you three?”

She just laughed at that, making me curl my upper lip in a decidedly Rachel way. In a way, I felt that she would be living on in me as more than a month’s worth of a dysfunctional almost-friendship based on beating the shit out of–

Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” I repeated out loud, just for the sensation of a Eureka moment. If this is how Lisa feels all the time, I can understand why she’s so smug. “You’re like Rachel. Powers fucking with your head make you want to fight all the time!”

Rose blinked at me, then at Sophia. “That actually would make a lot of sense, given what your mother told me yesterday.”

That seemed to get a rise out of Sophia, stifling her reaction to being compared to an Undersider. “She was here? And didn’t–”

“No, she didn’t,” Rose repeated, her voice tinged with sadness. “Even after I begged her to.”

A distant part of me cheered at the fact that even Sophia’s mother no longer wanted to have anything to do with her. A larger part of me fought back the traitorous tears at the thought of a mother being fed up enough to abandon her daughter with such finality. This leniency towards Sophia I could allow Rose, as she probably pleaded with Mrs Hess after making a similar conclusion as I just had.

It seemed like an hour passed until one of us spoke again after that, although the spider watching the digital clock in Trooper Jeong’s armored cubicle (I found the chink in its armor, it would be going on the report as well) told me only a couple minutes passed at best.

“I saw someone I could possibly call a friend,” Sophia admitted quietly, “Someone who had powers, valued strength, someone–”

“–you thought you could share your ideas with, like you did with Emma?” Rose finished for her. “Was that before or after you two decided to make me a trophy to rub in Taylor’s face?” she snapped, seeing Sophia’s crestfallen face, “Oh, don’t look at me like that, the PRT has people for doing that kind of stuff to phones just as the police and FBI do.”

“...it was part of it. You’re strong, smart, attractive. Everything–”

“–that I’m not?” I snapped, getting riled up myself. “You thought she’d be like a better me, to replace the me in Emma’s mind completely?”

“Something like that, yeah,” she shrugged again, resigned this time. Whatever her reasoning, she seemed to understand that after what she just admitted to, there was no way Rose would petition to have her released to patrol again and it looked like it broke something in her.

“You know what the most fucked up thing is about this situation?” my other self said, fiddling with her helmet for some reason. “Knowing what I know now, I can say with certainty that had you not been a bitch to her on day one, Taylor Anne Hebert would have probably become your fiercest friend and kept you from doing half the shit that landed you on probation to begin with.”

“...or maybe made it worse,” I admitted darkly.

“But instead you, having already had your Trigger event, resolved to push this girl that never did anything to you, push again and again until she had her own,” Rose went on, almost absently, as if she wasn’t actually airing her own feelings. I knew, going in, that we weren’t doing this solely for my own peace of mind, but hearing her speak made me realize that maybe she needed this more than she let on. I had made a sort of peace with just wanting to leave all this shit behind me a while ago, but it took me getting powers to do so. She never got that option, and apparently never getting to talk it out with either Sophia or Emma gnawed at her on some level. I felt oddly pleased that it didn’t for me, that I was content to have them be locked away and forgotten as a bad chapter of my life. “So I don’t know what exactly happened to you to make you this way, but I do know that you’re a waste of a perfectly good set of powers, Sophia Madeleine Hess.”

With that, she pulled her helmet on and walked away without a further word, clasping it into place already on the way. I looked at her retreating back and then at Sophia. More for theatricality than anything else, I spared a glance down at the spiders I planted on Sophia to give her a jump scare if she started acting up left her cell and climbed up my legs, then looked back at her face, an expression of dawning disgust upon it. Pulling off my glasses, I stowed them in my back compartment, turning away as well, and pulled my mask on as I walked to the door. Sophia said something that I didn’t quite hear, and I didn’t care to, but the moths I left behind did anyway.

“Fuck.”

------​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

Saturday morning came as more of an inevitability than a necessity, and my mixed feelings on the subject persisted all the way through our morning showers and breakfast and Dad’s departure to help Kurt and Lacey out with their own home repairs. Oh crap, at some point we’re going to have to tell them something about Rose. But first she and I have to start talking again.

Last night ended on an argument as I came to realize most of what we did was a well-measured psychological grind-down. Rose used me to do to Sophia in an hour what the Trio did to us for over a year. The only difference was that she used her knowledge of Sophia’s private life, prior experiences and whatever training she may have had on the subject to achieve results worthy of an actual Thinker. Just like Tattletale. I scored a vicious hit when I told her it was the kind of thing that I’d seen Lisa do to Panacea at the bank, causing her to step back as if slapped. The following argument only stopped when Angelica started growling at us both, and then stared us down until we stopped.

Yet another comparison of what Rose did to Tattletale sobered me. Lisa was my friend, she was kind and helpful even when she tried to use me in her play against Coil, as Rose surmised. But she was also rather sharp-tongued, pulling no punches in her enmity with Glory Girl and her family, and having seen Crystal Pelham and Victoria Dallon being teary-eyed messes must have displaced something in me. Pretty girls can have fucked up life situations too. They can come from broken homes, like Sophia did. They can have infirm parents, like Victoria did. They can have parents that hate each other, like Missy did. Or they can have no parents, like Flechette, our soon-to-be teammate, did.

Or they can be broken until they turn into monsters, like Emma was.

I looked up from my silent contemplation of clothes Lisa helped me pick out to see my double, my other, my not-twin, my “cousin”, my… sister? Sister had a nice ring to it. She stood in the doorway of my room, a constipated look on her face that was very much like the one I had on mine this morning after showering. I occasionally had the same look because of Dad, and I was willing to bet all my black widows that so did Rose. Angelica sat next to her, her best “look what I brought you” face on display.

Before I knew it, Rose and I were hugging each other. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, “I’m so so sorry, I shouldn’t have, I kept feeling like you would agree with me no matter what because you’re me and–”

“–and I’m not you, not all the way,” I finished as I squeezed her harder. “I’m sorry too, I mean, yes, you did a shitty thing and you did it to Sophia fucking Hess but it was still shitty…”

I felt my hair in the general vicinity of her face get heavier as it became wet, but ignored it. I tried to pretend the shoulder of the hoodie Rose was wearing was still dry as well. It seemed to be a mutual unspoken agreement.

I gasped, “And I know you needed it, but please don’t use me like that again without me knowing.” I pulled back from her. “I got enough of that manipulation bullshit back at Winslow.”

She winced. “Agreed. I see where you’re coming from, Smartie.” She leaned back into me, and the two of us just sat there for a moment, before she gave a loud sniff. “So… uh… Shall we put this whole thing behind us?”

“We are already doing the awkward sibling hug thing anyway. Would be just a waste of a hug otherwise?” I proposed.

She nodded again, and we disengaged. I pretended not to notice how she pretended to scratch her nose while surreptitiously rubbing her cheek along the way. “So… ready to do some shopping? I did threaten you with new clothes after all.”

I took the obvious out at face value. “Ugh. Do we have to? And… what did you just call me?” I furrowed my brow at her and she laughed, ruffling my hair with the hand she wasn’t using to lean against the doorframe.

“What you wanted to be called, T. Heh, it sounds like Smar-T if you say it just right,” she went on, making faces and jazz hands at me each time she said my suggestion for a nickname, “Smartee, smartie, ess-mart-eee… Do you feel like a supermarket yet?”

I gave her the flattest look I could muster while the insect life around our home laughed for me. “You realize of course that I can still call you Mitey to justify using my powers on you? Maybe it will work just like it does with craaa-ha-haaaaabs!” The last words came out in a fit of hysterics as my self-control broke down and I spiraled into a laughing fit, snorts and all.

------​

Angelica remained where she was, however, her face a perfect expression of utter bafflement at the odd behavior of her two newest pet humans. She still missed her Mistress, but she was now sure these identically-smelling girls would do right by her until Mistress returned. Until then, she would watch over them as she was supposed to.

 

Reset 3.07

[Rose]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

As we wound down our morning run, I was running and re-running the mental to-do list I’ve had for this weekend. We had the Saturday off officially, but were still expected to be able to rush back to HQ to suit up at the drop of a hat when things went awry somewhere.

With the Empire making overt moves against the only other actively villainous gang left in town, it was clear that it was a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ and that didn’t exactly instill me with confidence. Even with Dad doing the cloak-and-dagger shuffle yesterday to quietly pick up a gun locker for the house so Taylor and I could keep our tasers locked up properly, which meant we had more properly organized resources to defend the house and Dad with. I had half a mind to tell him to look into getting a gun for himself, but while we were working on getting the locker set up, he mentioned that he already reached out to a friend of a friend about getting his license renewed ever since Leviathan rolled through town. I chalked down the fact that Taylor managed to catch the skillet she dropped in surprise downstairs (she was, of course, eavesdropping even if we were still on the outs at the time) to our Winslow-honed reflexes and nothing would convince me otherwise.

One way or another, my mind kept returning to work-related issues. The report I drafted last night on Sophia’s wibbly-wobbly mental state that seemed to view me as a potential partner in all meanings of the word (complete with a moment of fridge horror as I realized she and I had similar criteria in picking who to be interested in in that way). The fact that she did genuinely regret being torn from her family. The fact that Flechette would be arriving by plane tomorrow and we’d still have our crossbow-wielding (arbalest, my exhausted mind supplied) athletic queer person of color slot filled to tick all of those weird boxes Glenn was so fond of… although if I knew Glenn as well as I thought I did, his manipulative ass would already be trying to get someone of more obvious color to supplement her.

But the list went on beyond work. The fact that I had a date on Tuesday and had no idea how to prepare for it. The fact that after this we were going to the PRT building to record the video message for my home world. The fact that Taylor took our reconciliation as a sign that it was time for some “fake it till you make it” of her own and demonstrated it in full force as we left the house towards the temporary Lord’s Street Market In Exile. The last part was due to the fact that the actual site of the market was still a mess of rubble, along with most of Lord’s Street itself.

“And a dress. You don’t have a dress and you’re gonna need one if you want to impress him!” she went on as I tried to convince Angelica that trying to lick every mystery spot on the roadside was a terrible, terrible idea.

“I see you’ve put a lot of thought into into me impressing him, Smartie,” I grinned at her (Miss Militia #4, ‘Once in a blue moon’, because I missed seeing it myself), poking her shoulder lightly, “It's almost as if you're covering a sadistic streak I didn’t know we had by making me try to impress a guy with a dress when you know how much we hate that.”

She snorted, but didn't quite meet my eyes.

"Okay, first off, I said dress, not heels. Not actually a sadist," she remarked with a mock lecturing tone and an upraised finger, “Second, you’re not scrawny like I am, Mitey, you’re going to look mighty fine in a dress.”

“Except for the biceps?” I shot back with half-chuckle as I flexed. My t-shirt stretched obligingly and Taylor made a hmmm kind of face that on a normal person meant a funnily puckered mouth and on us, wide mouth be damned, looked like a failed attempt at a duck-face.

“That depends on what are you planning to do with the tattoo? Shouldn’t there exist dresses with these, I don’t know, ruffled shoulders? Sleeves, maybe?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, then stabbed her in her miraculously exposed collarbone (I have to remember to thank Sarah for making her buy this shirt, I remember how terrifying that first step was for me) with a pointer finger. “I. Am. Not. Wearing. Ruffles.”

Her raised palms in a mock defense posture indicated consensus. Now if only she’d stop laughing about it. She’s got me imagining it too now!

“Anyway, while we’re at it, we should also look into getting me some unmentionables to replace the government stuff,” I said, trying to return this conversation to saner pastures. “Can’t really wear a sports bra under a dress, and them all being the same grey color is driving me nuts.”

“Does anyone ever legitimately use ‘unmentionables’ in a conversation between two real live people anymore?” came a smug-sounding voice from behind me. Angelica abandoned yet another mystery puddle for a curious sniff at a familiar figure. Sarah. “I, uh, don’t have a restraining order or anything, do I?” she asked cautiously as I turned around to face two familiar smug faces, one lined in a cloud of wild black hair, the other sporting a chopsticked bun of blonde above it. Or I did, before the blonde bun was partially obscured by a mane of curly dark hair as Taylor engulfed Sarah in a hug.

“Lisa!” she cried out, a little uncertainly. “It’s good to... um... I mean...” she slowly withdrew, before she was pulled back into an equally firm embrace. I was a little surprised by the genuine smile on Sarah's face, but maybe I was just too used to thinking of her as–

There was a clearing of a throat, and Jean-Paul Vasil of all people held his arms wide, looking between the three of us. “Can I get a hug too?”

Sarah gently let go of Taylor right in time for Taylor to twist on her heel and punch him in the shoulder, causing him to step back once. Then again as my fist hit his other shoulder.

“Two for flinching,” I added sweetly.

“Ow,” he chuckled good-naturedly, “Since when does the dork have a jock sister?” he asked, more rhetorically than specifically. What little I recalled of actually speaking to the boy rather than fighting him told me he was never one one for polite conversation.

“Cousin,” Taylor and I corrected in unison while Sarah thwapped him upside the head with her hand.

“Bad Alec, don’t antagonize the girl who can probably break you in half with one arm,” Sarah admonished him while providing me with a name to use. I’d almost begun to get angry at Taylor for leaving me in the lurch with a cape’s identity again, but then realized that she may not have known who he really was and expected me to know his pretend name like I knew Sarah’s actual one.

“I’m Rose,” I introduced myself, “Taylor’s cousin. I’ve heard a bit about you,” which is to say, I realize the obvious fact that you’re a cape. And know the unobvious thing about who your dad is.

“Likewise, although what little I heard was kinda colored by our falling out with the dork over there,” he admitted, returning my handshake. His palm was soft and frail, but his grip pretty decent for a guy that looked like physical labor of any kind was inimical to his very existence. “She didn't give out many details other than you're kinda obsessed,” he said as he let go of my hand. I shrugged.

“Fair enough, she told me you were an ass.”

A smile spread across his fair features. “Accurate.”

“Anything I should worry about?” I asked, only half-serious. If there was something to worry about, it would have already come up. He only smiled in response before turning to the other two girls letting go of each other. Sarah immediately took up the slack as if she’d been part of a shared conversation for a quarter hour at the very least.

“We’ve, uh, had to move. I’m sure you understand,” she explained as I offered her a sympathetic wince. Because of Taylor’s defection or because Coil is doing a play? Why can’t it be both? She seemed to pick up the obvious unasked question immediately, “Variety of reasons, but the point is, we desperately need a new sofa. The old one got mildewed up after spending last Sunday in water.”

“At least it wasn’t bloodstained like last time,” the boy who was Regent chimed in cheerfully. Just like the one back home, it felt impossible to guess whether he used emotional inflections to provoke whoever he was talking to or merely chose them at random.

“Well, Shadow Stalker is off the streets now, isn’t she? No more worries on that front,” Sarah remarked matter-of-factly.

I mentally noted the fact that much like my own, this Sarah was fond of trying to have a direct dialogue with your thoughts, but when not aimed at irritating the crap out of me, it looked a lot more impressive. With the aid of her Thinker power, she could, theoretically, juggle two or three conversations simultaneously, but in reality that probably meant merely tripling the rate at which the number of people wanting to punch her expanded. I savored the half-hidden flinch she made at that thought, and the pout she made afterwards.

“Fine, be that way. We’re out shopping for stuff, you’re out shopping for stuff, how about some–”

“Shopping Area Truce!” Jean-Paul, no, Alec, exclaimed loudly over whatever Sarah was trying to say.

With an exasperated sigh, she nodded. “As good a term as any. What are you looking for?”

Taylor looked at me with an odd mix of questioning and defiant expressions, then smiled at my shrug and turned to her friend. Just imagining all the paperwork the reports on this are going to generate makes my head hurt.

------

[Taylor]
[Original omake]​

They settled around me in Fugly Bob’s, shopping bags squished to one side beneath the table. I took the center seat in a corner booth, Rose sat to the left of me, and Lisa to the right, with Alec settling across the table from Rose beyond Lisa. The place looked somewhat beat up by the waves, but the signs said it managed to reopen on Wednesday, and the repair work went on just as the patrons came and went and made their orders and ate.

“I have to say. You look crazy similar. Is that. A normal thing?” Alec noted in bursts, between bites of his burger. I was a bit confused over how… friendly he was being, but at the same time? Beggars, choosers, gift horses, yada, yada. If his company was the toll for having access to Lisa, then so be it. “I mean. I kinda look like. My elder sister. But no other relatives. In my generation.”

Rose shrugged in a way that said ‘fucked if I know’, which made Lisa giggle a bit. It felt as if whatever her powers found offensive about Rose before, they’ve adapted. Or maybe she just wasn’t riding the mother of all Thinker headaches today?

“Runs in the family, I guess? It helps a lot that Taylor’s mother looked somewhat like mine despite not being related by blood,” she bullshitted for the benefit of one quarter of the people at our table, although it did remind me that Aunt Margaret did look more the part of Mom’s relative than Dad’s. Huh.

Alec tapped a fry to his chin, leaving a little grease spot. “I mean, there is Uncle Bill, but he's weird.” He clearly was still on the subject of his own family tree.

My eyebrows shot up. “You call me a dork, what the hell does your uncle do?”

“Tax attorney,” he shot back before shoving more fries into his mouth. Seeing the looks on our faces, he swallowed and retorted, “Hey, if you'd met my family, you'd know how weird that was.” In the silence that followed, he followed up with, “Oh, and he has a pet alligator.”

My eyes met those of my fellow ladies and we silently agreed to power on through that.

Lisa settled back a little bit, her face gaining a more serious cast. “If you don't mind–” she shot a look at my cousin, “I do have some information that I think your bosses might want to know. ” She smiled beatifically. “Off the record, of course.”

Rose and I rolled our eyes. “Of course.”

She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Here’s the deal: there’s some sort of ritualized killing going on around the city.” I saw Rose shudder out of the corner of my eye. Lisa nodded. “Found some of them already, have you?”

“Like someone took an ice cream scoop to the bodies,” Rose shuddered, and I only suppressed mine by shoving my emotions into my swarm. Alec had gone oddly still. Lisa just looked confused.

"That’s.. . interesting…” she let the words fall from her mouth as if carefully picking each word individually. I glanced at Rose, who didn’t seem to notice that something was off with my friend... though she could have been preoccupied with the mental image of the murder. “The ones we know about were pretty badly burned, and several had been cut up quite a bit. Anyway," Lisa went on, “We learned that the Empire is batting down the hatches, preparing in case it's the Nine.”

“It’s not, right?” I blurted, leaning forward. “It’s not the Nine.”

To my dismay, she gave me a sad smile.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but…” she trailed off, giving a significant glance at Rose. I grimaced internally. She'd been wrong before.

“While there is no Think Tank conclusion yet, the PRT seems to pretend that whatever this is, it’s not the Nine,” Rose replied hesitantly, “It’s not like they currently have the manpower to search all the possible nooks and crannies of the city for them anyway.”

“Alright. Setting that aside for a moment, Coil has set up Grue in a partnership with some new cape in the area near his home. Grue’s, obviously, don’t know where Coil lives.”

Rose raised her hand in question. “Alec? You’re in on Operation Fuck Coil, I presume?” When the boy nodded, she went on, “Then in case Lisa hasn’t warned you, I take my cousin’s life and safety very seriously. Please don’t try to fuck us over. Y’know, just a word of warning in case you change your mind?”

“Nah. I’m your man. He’s given me good reason.” He waved his hand vaguely in front of his face. “Now, the two out-of-town capes Coil promised us as backup, that, that is going to be a much harder sell. Gonna have to work around them.”

As one, we turned our questioning looks at Lisa, who shrugged. “One’s some sort of Shaker. Coil claimed he, yes, both of them are a he, will help maintain the Masters of the Escape rep. The other is a Trump, or at least one of his ratings is a Trump. Both about our age, white, and likely only in it for the money. Anything you can give us?”

“Shadow Stalker is beyond rehabilitation, they’ve decided to start processing her out for juvie as soon as everyone signs off on it,” I doled out the first piece of info out. Lisa cocked her head to the side, then giggled nervously. “What is it?”

“She hit on Rose? Seriously? How’d you– oh, shit, sorry, sorry. Dropping it.”

Rose nodded appreciatively. “In her stead, we’re getting Flechette. Try not to get shot by her, I believe you saw what she did to Leviathan?”

More nods followed, then Alec pushed himself up against the booth's sides to look at someone entering the place as they seemed to catch his eye. “Okay, two questions. Where do I get me a T-shirt like that–” he indicated a young woman with incredibly long dark hair, dead straight, going well past her waist, a risky proposition even before the city got flooded. Rose growled and I saw why - the girl was wearing the T-shirt with the Emissary poster art. It has begun. We’re officially merchandise now. Alec settled back into his seat and steepled his fingers, elbows propped on the tabletop, “–and how much would it cost me to get the two of you to make out? I mean, muscles aside, you’re practically twins, and believe it or not, I’ve never had–”

The rest I didn’t get to hear as Rose threw the rest of her fries at him, and then so did I.

------

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

The experience of recording a video letter to people I’ve never met but which were analogues of people I knew here felt incredibly confusing. Like one of those stupid ‘write a letter to your future self’ assignments at school, or ‘if you met Abraham Lincoln, what would you ask him?’ which I hated almost as much as Madison who has consistently stolen the frankly atrocious drivel I put out for these, leaving me forced to hand in near-blank pages when the allotted writing time ran out.

And then I realized that this is how Rose feels every day that she spends in this world and played along with her cues. Hopefully, the people on the receiving end of this thing would find it as awkward for them as it was for me.

Dauntless collated the separate recordings everyone who wanted to contribute made - five in total, from Rose and I, Director Piggot, Miss Militia, himself and Aegis - on the memory stick the original came in on. When Velocity placed it on the area of Armsmaster’s workbench clearly delineated with yellow sticky tape based on CCTV recordings of the way it originally arrived, the rest of us were watching it get hoovered up into thin air through a camera, in case the portal gave off any unwanted energies. I couldn’t blame them - L33t’s tech was unreliable even for the man himself, and as good as Armsmaster was supposed to be at repurposing the work of other Tinkers, a kitbash of a salvaged damaged teleportation device made by L33t was an amazingly convoluted way to spell ‘cancer in your everywhere’.

And then Rose was writing her report on our encounter with Lisa while occasionally pinging me to double-check the things she and Alec said about their new recruits, but “one’s a Shaker, the other’s some sort of grab-bag with a Trump aspect” was incredibly vague, and that was after Lisa’s power had a go at the hints Coil dropped. I hoped we’d find a way to uproot the slimy bastard soon, because while I was sitting here in a ridiculously hardened underground base making new friends, Dinah was out there in a ridiculously hidden underground base being drugged out of her mind.

Kind of an odd way to spend our “day off” as what was supposed to be an hour-long in-and-out turned into a four-hour stay, and Dad said as much when we phoned him to warn him of the change of plans. At least Missy was enjoying herself playing with Angelica while I adjusted the positioning of some of the hardpoints in my almost-completed Arachne mask. I was talked out of using mandibles as part of the design this time, but did succeed in getting to keep the full-face coverage, at least.

“Alright, that’s done. Taylor, how’s it looking on your end?” my voice called out to me to snap me out of the process of redesigning the armor to allow for concealable hooks for carrying additional equipment externally, like Rose's back armor plate did.

“My end? I was waiting on you!” I protested incredulously, “But also, I’ve been looking into how your armor works in order to maybe improve mine. What’s the idea behind the two loops on the inside of the top of your back armor?” I tapped the top of my shoulder to illustrate, “They don’t look comfortable to use to attach something for you to carry.”

“Oh, that’s because they’re for carrying me,” she laughed, standing up from the workstation desk and stretching her back. I couldn’t help but envy the relief of abs I saw through the gap this created between her T-shirt (Chevalier this time, the one with the ‘I like big swords and I cannot lie’ caption) and jeans. The knowledge that she cheated with Panacea’s power to get them made it much easier to wash the envy away. “A remnant of a failed side-project that gave me drone control in my helmet - that was originally supposed to be a drone-based flightpack for me to strap in to, not a literal spy drone.”

“What happened?” Missy asked, and I tried imagining what it would be like to fly under your own power and not carried by someone else.

“Too much muscles, they couldn’t lift you without using a helicopter?” I added with a slight grin to offset the fact that what I said would have probably been hurtful instead of ribbing had someone else said it.

“Ayup. Exactly that.” Rose nodded, making Missy and I blink in surprise at each other. I only meant that as a joke! “Either we’d have had to go for a jet engine which is impossible for a non-Thinker to maneuver quickly enough no matter what movies may tell you; or a movable rotor assembly that was either impractically slow or obscenely large, both of which made me a flying piñata.”

“Let me guess,” Missy said, the snideness rising up in her voice with every syllable, “The idea came from PR because of how toyetic it was?” She spat the word as if it was a curse. Belatedly, I realized that for someone who fought to be recognized for what they did, not what they looked like, she would have likely considered it as one with good measure. She muttered a few actual ones when Rose nodded again.

“Sadly so, BUT!” she interjected, raising a finger, “This was the one project I really wanted to go with PR on.”

“Why, don’t tell me you wanted your toy to look cooler?” Missy snarked.

“No,” other-me answered primly and I knew she was lying through her teeth immediately. I shot her a look. “Okay, yes, I did, but that's not the real reason–” she explained over the eyerolling. “My old team lost its primary flier shortly before I joined up–” the bugs I put on the back of her shirt were the only reason I knew she jolted slightly, and a quick bit of mental math told me why, “So I thought having extra mobility would make me more valuable.”

“It doesn’t,” Missy nearly growled, petting Angelica a little too hard and causing her to whine. A placating gesture or two and the both calmed down, before she began again. “It just makes it easier for them to keep you away from the actual fighting and on ‘crowd control’. It’s bullshit.”

“Speaking from experience?” I asked gently. She nodded stiffly. Rose shrugged.

“Well, like I said, it didn't work out, however!” She gestured to her back, “We did reinforce them, so now they can be used to have me carried by a flier, or an Alexandria package without too much trouble for them, or restricting my movements.”

Missy and I, despite ourselves, looked interested.

“How’d that work out?” I asked. She sheepishly scuffed her feet against the floor.

“I don’t actually know, we, uh, never actually got around to testing that. Lack of fliers, remember?”

I gave her a mocking thumbs-up. “Don’t worry about it, I’m sure you can find someone to fly you around like that old Superman movie... except instead of Lois Lane, you’re a sack of potatoes.”

“I know where you live, you know. My vengeance will be swift and terrible.”

“Wait a moment,” Missy said, lost in thought, “You said you talked to Alexandria after the Endbringer. Why didn’t you ask her for help testing it?”

We both stared blankly at her before Rose took her turn using Mom’s lecturing voice.

“Missy, I may know Alexandria, but you don’t just ask Alexandria to test your equipment!”

“Aegis then? Browbeat standing on a stepladder? Glory… Girl?” Missy listed off, counting off her fingers, but slowed down to a crawl and then stopped altogether as she saw Rose grow beet-red and then bury her face in her hands. We gave her a few minutes to calm down, although a little bit of banging her head against the desk was still involved before she finally left her seat.

“Alright, I ate enough of your not-cape time already, Smartie,” Rose pulled me off the sofa by my hand as she said it, acting as if the earlier meltdown never happened, and Angelica reluctantly followed suit, giving Missy a parting lick on the nose before she did so. “Let’s go waste the rest of it on being teenage girls.”

“I am not playing dress up for you!” I protested as we collected the various shopping bags from where we dropped them.

“You see, I was going to suggest watching crappy movies over ice cream, but your idea sounds so much better–”

Turned out, bagged jeans can work as a makeshift bludgeoning implement.

------​

[Rose]​

Sunday brought a new Ward into our midst. Flechette (“Call me Lily!”) looked a little more haggard than the one I knew despite the short distance from New York to Brockton Bay precluding jet lag of any kind. I tried to wrack my brain for more details from her file, because the digital one the PRT database gave me access to was frustratingly sparse. Orphaned or divested from her family in a final way, basically lives on base, shuffled between teams to fill gaps as necessary for years now. None of it spoke too well about the Youth Guard of New York, and probably meant that they didn’t care she had been moved between six teams in half as many years, as long as all of them were still in the Tri-State area. Lazy bastards.

Introductions proceeded apace as if rehearsed. Carlos went first of course, my wonderful Carlos, polite and businesslike as he outlined the arrangements regarding her temporary presence on the team. Dennis greeted her next, his usual humor subdued by the knowledge that she was filling a gap left by the death of one teammate, the departure of another because the warzone we lived in became a disaster area on top of that, and the arrest of yet another. At least he didn’t try to freeze her. That would have probably ended terribly for everyone involved, given her power.

Chris was next, face smudged with silver paint and blissfully unaware of it, shaking her hand with none of the ‘another girl on the team’ glee that Dennis exhibited even in his desaturated state. He was followed by Missy, who looked like she was finally starting to breathe fully again for the first time after learning of Dean’s death. She looked Lily up and down, as if taking measure of her, which almost looked genuinely intimidating given the fact that going by their heights alone, nobody would have made the assumption there was an age gap of four years between them.

And then there were we.

“I’m Taylor, and before you ask, yes, when we last met I was still Skitter,” the other me said, in a little too pre-emptively forceful way. She’s on the defensive already. She can’t seriously think Lily is another So– she does, doesn’t she?

“Hello Taylor, and that doesn’t tell me much at all?” Lily deflected beautifully, and– wait, did she just bat her eyelashes, what– “I mean, from what I saw of you at the Endbringer fight, you were selfless and decisively heroic. Are you sure you were a villain?”

“Oh yeah, plenty sure,” Dennis offered, miming slapping a mosquito on his neck. I barely caught a flash of irritation on Taylor’s face before he did it again, this time with a yelp of genuine pain. “See what I mean?”

Sweet merciful heavens, he’s Regent. How did I not see this before? He’s like his heroic counterpart, for the same varying degree of ‘heroic’ as Regent is ‘villainous’ now that he’s no longer Hijack. They must never meet in their civilian identities.

“And I’m her cousin, Rose,” I said as Lily took my hand. Just as with Taylor, she had to look up to meet my eyes, but there was something missing there that was present for when they shook hands. Her palm was small like the rest of her, and her handshake was neither here nor there, not inexperienced but not properly gripping either. Desensitized. She’s done this too often already for it to matter. We’re just another layover station until she’s torn away again, shuffled off to who-knows-where.

God damn it, I’m going to need to talk to Dr. Karpenko about seeing her. Wait, Yamada rotates in next week. I can hold it off till then, right? I may need to give Lily a hug or two.

I seem to be doing that a lot lately. Maybe Taylor can help me out here? She certainly needs the practice...

“Yeah, I’ve seen the posters already,” she replied with an awkward but polite smile and a tone I would place halfway from schadenfreude to respect, a decidedly odd combination. “I hope you don’t plan to make it a series featuring all the Endbringers?”

I blinked at the question. It was probably aimed at being humorous, but the tone made it sound as if she did not approve of my recklessness. Which meant two of us.

“Permission to speak freely?” I half turned to Aegis. He looked taken aback, but quickly recomposed himself and nodded. “Fuck. No. Unless they come here, the only things I’m going to be doing to the other two is screaming obscenities at them while carrying the wounded on my back in the general direction of far away.”

There were laughs at that, although Taylor was giving me a questioning look throughout my response. “But you’d still go?”

“Wouldn’t you?” I retorted. I did not get a response.

-------​

[Taylor]​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

On the eve of her date, after a day of going on patrols and trying not to do any more awkward things to our commanding officer, Rose was practically vibrating with anticipation. She now had a dress, a handbag, a pair of tennis shoes and a collapsible umbrella all basically in the same shade of red, which she claimed was “burgundy” and which my bespectacled eyes could not properly appreciate. In return, I almost ‘appreciated’ all over her dress with my cocoa, but the amount of effort that we’ve had to put in to get hold of it was too significant for me to ruin it. Stupid pragmatism.

“I have to admit, this is probably the weirdest situation the father of a teenage girl can find himself in,” Dad stated, waving his mug of tea for emphasis (Rose insisted that he try the orange-peel Earl Grey blend, and he seemed to like it), “I’m watching my daughter, but not, prepare for her first date, but not, with her boyfriend, but not, who has died. But not!” he added hastily when he saw Rose glaring at him from her ministrations to the shoes. “Please don’t make me regret letting you out of your grounding a few millenia early.”

After a lengthy argument about the merits of heels and their uselessness in the post-apocalyptia of Brockton Bay, Lisa of all people had managed to convince my bull-headed dopplegänger that light shoes, like tennis shoes, were an acceptable alternative. As a result, the only valid complaint Rose had was about the odd default lacing, which was what she was doing now: lacing and re-lacing the poor shoes, trying to find a layout that would ‘feel right’.

“Well, if nothing else, this gives me a preview of how you’re going to behave when I go on my first date?” I offered, before hastily hiding behind my mug of cocoa at the look Dad gave me.

“I feel it’s going to significantly depend on your choice of boyfriend,” Dad said very blatantly, “Or girlfriend. Don’t think for a moment that factor is going to make me less wary.” Why did that caveat make me think of Lily just now? Would she be up for playing a prank on my Dad or it would be too cruel on– OH MY GOD, I have become Madison.

“Daaad,” Rose chided while I was having a mini-meltdown, finally putting her shoes down, apparently satisfied with the result of her ministrations, “You don’t have to worry, he’s a perfectly gentlemanly and good Catholic boy, well-behaved too.”

“Let me be the judge of that for myself, please?” Dad’s tone was almost pleading. Oh no. He did not just imply the ‘yours may have been, but this one may be different’ I just felt.

Rose assuaged my worries by rolling her shoulders. “Sure thing. He’s coming by to pick me up tomorrow, you can give him the shovel speech then?”

“The spade is still downstairs, last I checked?” I offered helpfully, taking a step in the basement’s direction. “I can go clean the rust off it, just in case.”

“What did I ever do to deserve this?” Dad exclaimed, his hands raised in an exaggerated shrug above his head, “Not only do I get to have two daughters now, I get lip from each worth enough for two.”

“That is correct, we’re kind of a feedback loop of awesomeness,” Rose quipped, stepping up to me to drape her arm around my shoulders.

“Which we inherited from you and Mom, of course!” I hastily added, finally managing to provoke a smile out of him.

“Well then I hope you’re also awesome at figuring out who’s doing the dishes from today’s dinner, because the sink is still full?” Dad struck back, regaining control of the household.

------

[Rose]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

The café we ended up in after the movie was one I’d been to in my version of Brockton Bay exactly once before. Even the fact that its walls were pistachio green rather than periwinkle blue did not deter me from smiling at the memory of the boy from Arcadia that asked me out on a dare from his friends and how he bumbled his way through every step of the day.

“I’m guessing you’ve been here before?” Carlos asked, his kind smile warming me up from beyond the menu. “With..?”

He did not finish the question, and I was glad that he did. The face he made when I shook my head was also quite entertaining. “Blaze, you know Will Blaze? Asked me out on a dare. I mean, Arcadia only has three open capes, and no way in hell would he ask out the one dating Dean Stansfield or her sister who everyone knows keeps turning people away after the double dates her sister forces on her.”

Carlos huffed out a hearty laugh at that, “I’m willing to bet you know the reason for that as well?” When I nodded with a smile pilfered from Vicky (#6, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’), he went on, “But I digress. Didn’t you say you didn’t date after…? Therapy and somesuch?”

“You’ve met my cousin, right?” I answered with a question of my own. “Until y– someone made me feel like I deserved attention, deserved to be liked, maybe even loved, I knew how painful being spurned and rejected is. I’ve seen my bullies twist others around them to do things to me in exchange for dates or the mere potential of dates. I helped him win that dare on sheer principle.”

“Was it as disastrous as I think it is? Blaze is about as suave as Crawler, or Butcher maybe,” Carlos laughed again, before becoming ashen-faced at the realization of what he’d just said. “Shit. That didn’t come out right.”

“Well, in any case, isn’t the current Butcher a woman anyway?” I asked, innocuously placing a calming hand on his. My early-morning manicure, tones matched to the blood red rust of Aegis’s costume, still felt a little alien, but perhaps Taylor was right. I did preen for this to the point of obsession. And it felt like all of it was worth it, so far. “Like the three or four before her?”

“What? I thought Quarrel replaced a man– oh boy. Is that another divergence?” Carlos didn’t seem to mind my hand on his, but his habitual back-of-head scratch looked awkward with him using his off hand for it.

“Given that our Quarrel is still alive and well, yeah, I’m guessing it is,” I replied with a nod before realizing we could settle this more easily. “What number are you guys on?”

“Fourteen. And now we’re talking shop instead of what we came here for?” he chided, waving the waiter over. “Hello there, Andrew,” he read off the nametag, “We’ll be having the to-share Caesar bowl, and a pitcher of the–” he trailed off to look pointedly at me. Oh, right.

“Yeah, the raspberry-mint lemonade, please, thank you.” I offered Andrew the waiter a borrowed sheepish grin (Aisha #2, ‘Whoops, Didn’t Know It Was Yours’) and Carlos got a genuine one. “Sorry about that, I was still trying to process how the hell a cucumber lemonade can be a thing.”

“Oh, I have no doubt that it can, just not that it would have a lot of taste to offer?”

Carlos shrugged and we laughed at that and it was a major load off my shoulders, especially after the earlier realization that using my experience of B-movie watching with Dennis to pick Jack Slater V as the movie of the day (Arnold really should have stayed in politics) was kind of a goof. Then again, we did have a good time of yelling at the screen in the mostly-empty theater, berating the cast for shoddy tactics, the awkward shoehorning of the token capes into a series that never had them before and the general ‘okay if you don’t take it too seriously’ vibe of the movie.

“So tell me, how’s Lil’ Ramon is doing?” I went for an icebreaker. I did check Carlos’s file to make sure he also had a much younger brother than himself in this world as he did in mine. The surreal experience of knowing that the local Aster Russell was over a year older than the one I knew made me check just in case.

“Lil’ Ramon?” Carlos repeated incredulously, then shook his head before continuing. “He’s so very proud of a Chevalier drawing he’d made last week. It got on the fridge and all,” he paused before adding, much more sullenly, “The first drawing that I did to get on the fridge was at five.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, the only creations of mine that got fridged were make-believe Alexandria outfits, so Ramoncito has us both beat.” I reciprocated, hoping to keep the good flow of the conversation. Carlos got a fond look whenever he talked about his brother, and he rarely did so on duty. This was a way for him to relax. “In retrospect, I should have chosen my idol better.”

“I still think you’re being unfairly harsh on her,” Carlos chastised me before turning to accept the lemonade (raspberrade?) jug from the waiter. “Full glass?”

“Make it a half, makes it easier to keep what’s in the glass cold before drinking it,” I nodded to the gesture of the jug tipping above my glass. Having pink lemonade swirl around in what was clearly a wine glass made for a mesmerizing sight, and Carlos sure made a great show of pouring it.

“Are you getting along with your cousin okay?” he took his turn, setting the jug down on the provided stand. “No fighting over territory or anything?”

“It’s weird, you’d think that, I did think that, but we’re… okay? Copacetic, maybe,” I shrugged, “It’s like some part of our Winslow-ingrained paranoia recognizes each other as myself, and we feel utterly safe with each other. There may be misunderstandings, we’ve already had our first spat this weekend, but in the long run? It’s like having the perfect imaginary friend, except she’s real. And also yourself, if that makes sense?”

“Yeah, I guess I can get that. Family,” he emphasized the last word in an almost palpable way. Family was important to the both of us, and taking care of our respective families had perhaps been an exploitable trait we both shared. Well, at least the me that was the Deputy, if not the me that was Skitter. Taylor was still relearning how to communicate with Dad without them shutting each other out. Perhaps the joke I made on my first night at the Hebert household of this world was on the money - Taylor and Danny Hebert would always need someone third to push them back together. Here, that was me. Back home… “R– Taylor, what’s wrong? I may be able to take it, but your fingernails may not.”

I looked down to where my clenched hand almost left grooves in his. I quickly withdrew mine, offering Carlos the most apologetic look I could. “I… sorry, we were talking of family and I realized how much I missed mine. This Dad is similar in a lot of ways, but he’s not my Dad, if you can see what I mean?” Why did I ask? He’s Aegis, the understanding Ward Leader. He certainly can. “And I miss my sister.”

“Yeah, I can imagine how I’d feel if I couldn’t see my brot–” Carlos began saying, but cut himself short. “Ah, sorry about that.”

Spoiler: Soundtrack change

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“Heh, you’re sorry and I’m sorry,” I quoted with a weak chuckle. “Stop apologizing, please,” I whispered, screwing my eyes shut, “Y-you’ve got nothing to apologize for. I’m– I know I’m a mess, but I hoped that if–”

I was interrupted by Andrew’s return with the salad. He kept conspicuously quiet as he placed the gigantic bowl of Caesar - a mutual agreement, intended for a party of four, so perfect as the primary meal for a party of two regenerators - and whisked away, sending questioning glances at my doubtless puffy red eyes and Carlos’s bewildered expression.

“Well, I guess at the end of this evening, he’s going to be asking one of us for a phone number,” I rattled off, my mind defaulting to a Dennis-worthy quip as a natural defense, “But no bets as to who.”

With a sinking heart, I realized that Carlos let out a breath that he didn’t really need to hold, given his powers.

“I feel like such an asshole,” he said, “Because I just thought ‘Dios Mio, I’m glad I’m not the only one feeling this way’ and you don’t deserve that, but I–” he paused, but resumed pretty quickly, “I think I know what you’re doing, and I can see it isn’t working out, because I’m not actually him, and even if I was, the you of now is not the you that he fell in love with. From what I understand, even your cousin is closer to that point right now, and I hope you understand that I don’t feel romantically inclined towards her in any way.”

“Carlos, I just–” I began, but his raised hand stopped me.

“Taylor, please let me finish. I promise there’s a point to this,” he said before lowering his arm back down. “I am as much to blame as you here, for not shutting this down from the get-go. It’s better to think of this as the example you suggested when we first discussed this - you’re a star-struck fangirl whose idol didn’t live up to the image you’ve built up inside your mind.” The sigh he gave was heavy, like he just dropped off a heavy burden he was carrying. “If I’m counting right, you’ve now spent more time mourning him than knowing him. This isn’t good in any way, for you, for me, for team cohesion.”

He paused to take a sip of the raspberrade, giving a sad chuckle as he did so while I was still lost for words. Was I really doing this to him? To this wonderful patient boy who did nothing to hurt my feelings even as I pretty much threw myself at him? Entrapped him with a silly promise and then took it back and then made him go through with it anyway?

“And now I feel like an asshole again, because this stuff is amazing,” he muttered more to himself than to me, but it didn’t matter. I’ve tried it the last time. It was amazing. It was also the furthest thing from what was running through my mind at that moment. “So this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to finish this date, eat this mountain of salad, take a walk down the Boardwalk, and you’re going to woman up and try to let your Carlos go. Whatever I can do to help with that, I will do, because the city is still falling apart and I could do without my best field commander falling apart with it. But tomorrow? What you’ve been doing with me stops. You will talk about it with Karpenko, or Yamada when she gets here, and politely but firmly make sure your cousin won’t be doing the same thing you did, to me or anyone else.”

With a frozen detachment, I noticed that while he was speaking, and I was mesmerized like a snake before the flute of the snake charmer, he managed to scoop quite a bit of salad onto our respective plates and refill our glasses, giving at least a passing semblance of feasibility to this scene to an outside observer.

“I just thought–” I began shakily, “I hoped that if I were to have this, then things would somehow would work out. But in retrospect, that was kind of a stupid hope, wasn’t it?”

“Taylor, stop. Don’t do this to yourself. You’re stronger than you think, you’ve gone through multiple crisis points–” I had no idea what a ‘crisis point’ was supposed to be, but I made a mental note to look it up later, “–and even one of them would have broken a normal person, or Triggered them. You, on the other hand…”

Ah. Potential Trigger events. I suppose the terminology had to differ somehow between the worlds as– NOT NOW!!!

“... break down whenever a certain subject comes up,” I sniffled, smiling weakly. He shook his head in response.

“But that doesn’t speak ill of you,” he protested softly, “It only makes you human. Now, please,” he raised his glass, and gestured for me to do the same, which I somehow managed to do without spilling any raspberrade on myself, “Tell me about the life and death of Carlos Santiago.”

 

Reset 3.08​

[Taylor]​

Last night was a whirlwind of emotions centered around the eye of the storm. Rose. She was subdued, eerily calm and perfectly polite, giving evasive answers to most questions besides sharing a surprisingly spirited opinion that maté was a brilliant thing that I should absolutely try. Dad was beside himself, cycling through worry, fury, panic and anger that told me something I’d already suspected, albeit for entirely different reasons. If I was to ever spontaneously develop a boyfriend, he should only find out when we’d mail him the wedding invitation. Preferably from Mars.

But when we bumped into each other on the stairs – me coming up after grabbing a glass of water to drink if I needed to, her to get her own (a simple agreement we’ve reached after we both triggered each other’s dangers reflexes by stalking around in pursuit of water to drink on Sunday night) – she stopped me with an arm on my shoulder.

“You were right, Smartie,” she said, her words slightly slurred from her obvious desire to go to sleep in order to move on from this day, “It needed airing, and he called me out on it.”

After a minute’s worth of a pause that made me think she may have fallen asleep with her eyes open, I decided to risk asking. “And?”

She nodded absent-mindedly to some thought before replying. “And that was it. We ate, we took a walk along the water, we talked,” she made a small smile, a genuine one, and I was proud of her for being honest about her feelings, “And then he made me let go. You know that thing about fighting phantom pain in a lost limb?”

“From the Maury Arty, MD episode?” She nodded and I dreaded the context for that memory. “What of it?”

“I got to give my Carlos a goodbye kiss,” she whispered in a strangled voice, “And I want you to hit me upside the head if you ever see me act on those impulses again.”

“Take my glass, go to bed, sleep will make everything better, I promise,” I whispered back, doing my best to emulate Mom. For whatever reason, Rose defaulted to obeying me whenever I did that. I really shouldn't abuse it, but this is something she needs right now.

“Thanks… for everything,” she managed to say before trudging back up the stairs, my glass in hand. As I returned to the kitchen to fetch another, I mentally amended my promise about Dad and possible future marriage to doing it from the Mars of another reality.

------

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

I had my first ever Tinker report in hand, however small and insignificant the achievement was in the grand scheme of things. It was mine. I did this. I made a thing and I had an official analysis report on it, just after a week of being a Ward. And I wasn’t even officially announced yet!

The Tinker review board for Brockton Bay was not a large affair, its five members reduced to three following the Leviathan battle, but even so, these men and woman were tasked with the unfortunate purpose of vetting anything that Kid Win built before he could use it in the field. Well, Armsmaster and myself as well, but I was a Tinker only on paper, and the requirement list for my stuff was a lot shorter since nobody expected me to make things that would at best kill the target and at worst, vaporize half a city block. The pleasures of not using energy-based anything, I supposed. That did not, however, absolve me of the requirement to hand my work in for testing.

The sample I submitted for analysis was a square foot of woven material similar to the one used in my original attempt at making my costume – the stuff that was too thick and inflexible because I didn’t know what I was doing back then. This time around, I had actual bulletproof vests to study, reports on ballistic physics and how they interacted with armor fabrics and, most importantly, actual design specs on weaves used to produce PRT-grade equipment.

The upside was that my stuff put theirs to shame at this thickness, especially if I used the more complex of the interlock patterns I got from the reference materials. The downside was that it took several days to make enough of it for a single personal vest at my current production capacity, and required me sticking around to supervise the spiders so they’d weave and not eat each other or wander off.

That part was outlined in my report as well. The fact that my stuff qualified as “Tinkerfab” as Rose called it, as in, parahuman-made but not dependent on being a Tinker to use, sort-of compensated for the fact that I’d either need to make a full-time job of it or my future clients would have to accept very loose deadlines.

Granted, part of the production capacity was tied up with finalizing my mask. Helmet. Face. Arachne’s design was a lot less insectile than Skitter’s was, probably having more in common with one of those armored balaclavas the special forces used. At the insistence of the two Chamberses, it had an option to leave my mouth open, but with it being as much a distinctive feature of Taylor Hebert as the hair, it was a good enough reason for me to secure the right to leave that option optional. I already had enough theoretical trouble to face because of Rose’s regular raised-welding-mask impression. The thought made me snort in a laugh that I failed to suppress, startling Angelica from her preferred napping position under the desk with the beetle shedding station on it. So yeah, the names I gave to my setups were stupid, but keeping every step of my process confined to a specific point in the lab was heaps better than having to clear out the basement floor after I was done with every step. I had the space to go around, even if I couldn’t spread my spiders across the ceiling and had to make do with what was rapidly becoming a literal wall of terrariums, sacrificing some of the shelving in the name of higher web-spinning capability.

After taking another longing look at the report, I was forced to put it down, tell Angelica to stay (I did not expect to be gone long and I had bowls set up for her in my lab now) and go down to the Wards area to get changed.

Flechette’s reveal was arranged for today, to be followed by my own on Friday. I had no idea why it was set up this way – probably to space me further out from my ‘cousin’s reveal which also happened on a Friday. One way or another, I was in the PRT detail watching her give her obviously well-rehearsed speech about serving the good of the city in its time of need. There was something in the way she said that that felt familiar. Perhaps it was the feeling of being alone in the crowd?

I nodded along and clapped when appropriate, feeling somewhat uncomfortable in the off-the-shelf uniform shirt and slacks Rose made me wear. My ‘cover’ badge was slung around my neck, my hair in a loose braid down my back. I was, to everyone who’d look, a PRT Intern, just like Rose Ellison was. It only hit me right before the event, as I was making my way from the Wards HQ-reaching elevator through the usual crowd of PRT employees towards the conference room.

This setup made me invisible in a way that casual wear the Wards often came in in really didn’t. If you saw a teen in casual wear milling around the building, well, that’s gotta be a Ward out of costume because they don’t really look like a lost tour group member, too certain of where they’re going. If you saw a teen in a uniform with a badge that said INTERN on it in big block letters? They might as well have been furniture.

------​

The reasoning behind my dress-up was twofold. The first, as laid out by Hannah’s somewhat clipped explanation, was that I needed a cover for my daily visits to the PRT, one that went beyond “walking with my cousin who works there and staying over while she does”. The second was more or less pushed through by Rose with, surprisingly, the support of Carlos.

“It’s easy to feel insulated, but this puts you in more direct contact with what the PRT does at large.” he said when I asked before the press conference, apparently putting him on the spot. He rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, then sighed. “Your cousin has a point there: with your powerset and history, cultivating a Stranger 0 mindset is a pretty good idea.” When I made a face (it had more to do with my uniform tie not being a clip-on, but he had no way of knowing that), he was quick to elaborate. “You probably already have experience using your powers while out of costume and pretending you have nothing to do with what the insects are doing, But that doesn’t mean your body shouldn’t also be doing something in the meantime, if your power allows it.”

“Sounds an awful lot as if you’re trying to justify training me in infiltration,” I noted dryly, refusing to jump up and down in celebration of my victory over tying the tie. My asshole double was grinning behind our leader’s back, while somehow still looking anywhere but him. “Not a very heroic task, is it?”

“Invaluable stakeout skill, especially considering your overall overwatch capability,” Carlos countered, righting the messy knot of my tie. “Alright. You’re ready to go, while we still have to suit up to make the stage presence. Try to be a friendly face in the crowd for Lily, alright? When it’s your turn, you get to pic–”

“Dennis,” I snapped off immediately, a part of my mind realizing the ‘friendly face’ factor was the third reason to subject me to a tie, “I want Dennis to suffer the wrath of the tie.”

Wait a minute. If I’m Lily’s pick, does that mean– and me picking Dennis out of spite will–

“So it is written, it shall be,” Rose pronounced ominously, distracting me from my jumbled thoughts, then turned to head for her room. “Go mingle, Smartie, back our newest teammate up and try not to let any office types wrangle you into getting them coffee.”

“I’d like to see them try,” were Carlos’s parting words as I stepped into the elevator that would whisk me upstairs before them.

-------

[Rose]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

The post-reveal party was a mixed impression - per tradition, Lily would be up for an inaugural patrol, just as I had been two weeks prior, and I was chosen to be her guide. On top of that, due to shortness of hands, part of our initial circuit would be acting as honor guard for the departure of the prisoner transport that would be taking Sophia out of the city.

But before that, there was still time for cake. Cake and awkwardness, as through some magic of delays and getting stuck talking to fans (random fact: Caryn Ives now has an autographed Emissary T-shirt, likely the same one I saw her wear to Fugly Bob’s on the weekend), most of us, Angelica included, were already in the Wards Commons when the doors opened, admitting Taylor and Lily in together.

Probably due to the fact that they were alone and Taylor was watching out for people who may have been watching, Lily was unmasked. As a result, her rapt attention to Taylor’s rambling monologue about using her bugs’ proprioception to achieve better spatial awareness in order to optimize her movements was on full display. I think we might have a small problem here. First comes the power comparison. Second comes the power synergy. Third comes the k-i-s–

The crestfallen look on Chris’s face almost matched the manic glee on Dennis’s, but Carlos and I exchanged looks of pure worry. At least until I was elbowed in the unarmored side by Missy, who hissed at us, making Angelica look at her questioningly, but the tone that followed seemed to satisfy her enough that she relaxed again in her place by what was rapidly becoming Taylor’s favorite chair.

“Stop being weird about it, it’s way more one-sided than whatever you had–” Missy paused at Carlos’s pointed look, then rolled her eyes, “–with Sophia, you weirdos. I’m not touching whatever you two did yesterday with a ten-foot pole.”

“Nothing,” I was quick to declare, painting a reasonable facsimile of the closest Emma could get to ‘awkward’ nowadays, #9, “Fake it till you make it”, on my face. “We’re good.”

She shook her head in disbelief, then turned back to watch Lily’s face lose some of the rare excitement it had since I’ve met her.

“Cake?” the perpetual new girl asked, the confusion in her voice leading me to make a mental note to yell at Legend some more when I next saw him. He may have a second or third in command to handle this, but her transfers were a matter of record and pretty closely spaced.

“It’s kind of a welcome-the-newbie tradition?” Dennis explained, offering her a plate with a piece topped with an edible lily on it, “Well, part of it, but you’re getting your first puke-on-costume and shot-point-blank ceremonies later during your patrol, don’t worry!” he added with what passed for a reassuring grin on his face when she accepted the cake.

“Do I get to skip that one?” Taylor asked warily, “I mean, taking a Lung to the face tops that, right?” Dennis shrugged while Chris and Carlos nodded rather vigorously. Missy simply grinned, having been on both sides of how Taylor fights already.

“You fought Lung face-to-face?” Lily blurted though her first bite, sending some of it flying at Taylor. “Oh. Sorry!”

She reached to pick the largest piece off Taylor’s cheek, but that was all she got as Taylor raised her hand. “I got this,” she said resolutely before turning away from everyone, pulling off the band that held her hair together and shaking her ponytail loose to cover her face. When she looked back at us half a minute later, her face was completely clean and I was sure I only saw the cockroaches running for cover into her hair because I knew what to look for. She shook her hair to get all of it to fall off her shoulders to her back and did her best impression of a beaming smile. “See?”

I have to hand it to her, she realized doing it head-on would make the worse impression on Lily and pre-empted it. Not as unsocialized as she worries about being.

“Did you– did you just clean your face with bugs?” the older girl asked, despite all of Taylor’s efforts to keep her mind off that very fact, making Dennis shudder involuntarily, almost dropping his own cake slice.

“Keeps them fed, keeps me clean,” Taylor replied straightforwardly in a very Rachel way. “It’s a godsend for keeping the house clean, too.”

“Kind of like a slightly creepy Disney princess, yeah?” Dennis offered, and hesitantly reached to get a slice of his own, getting his self-assurance back with every second he spent not being stung.

“Nah, her singing voice leaves a lot to be desired,” I offered, finally getting my hands on some cake for the first time in two weeks. “I think it’s her way of keeping me from banging on the bathroom door while she’s showering.”

“At least I don’t leave my exercise equipment where someone can trip over it!” Taylor countered, snagging some cake for herself as well, not diminishing the remaining part significantly. It was a stupid thought to have, but with James gone, it felt as if the same size cake could now feed twice the people it did before.

“It’s how we tell them apart,” Missy explained to Lily in a deliberately loud whisper, “What they bicker about. Then they settle on a stupid compromise and move on.”

Taylor and I both paused to glare at her, but she only grinned in response. With a sigh, I put my arm around Taylor’s shoulders, giving her a light squeeze. This time around, she didn’t seem to object.

“That’s what you get for putting two control freaks under one roof, I guess?” I quipped, realizing that if our sibling rivalry already became the butt of jokes, we may be doing it too often.

“Yeah, D-Dean said– well, used to say Amy and Vicky are the same way sometimes,” Chris piped in, stumbling a bit over his friend’s name, “Especially with fighting over the bathroom.”

The reminder of our fallen teammate turned the mood somber, and Taylor quietly polished off her slice, then went to her room to change back into her costume. Angelica kept following her with her gaze but did not get up. She did perk her ears up when Lily kneeled by her side to pet her.

“And you must be Angelica,” she said in that tone of voice people adopted when talking to little babies and dogs that they liked, “I hope you and I get along. I’m sure your owner wouldn’t mind that.”

On the other side of the room, I saw that Carlos pulled Chris aside, but all I overheard were snippets about his new Tinkering results. Part of me felt guilty about stealing Chris’s own moment of realizing his specialty, but on the other hand, he’d spent three more months without it here, and that was three months of equipping his team with better gear that we weren’t getting back. The current situation somehow made a lot of people nod at me in conversations when they didn’t think I’d notice.

Taylor came back right in time to see Angelica licking the traces of cake from Lily’s hand. I was finishing rechecking my loadout – after the thing with Alabaster, I made sure to also carry a quart of foam solvent on me just in case, in addition to things I used back home. Missy came up to the four of us, looking serious again.

“So, ready for your first patrol in our little slice of post-apocalypse?” she asked in an unfittingly serious tone. Lily responded with an equally over-serious nod before fastening her mask back in place.

“You’re going to be handling us on console, right?” she asked, getting a resolute nod in return. With that, Missy gave a quick farewell and moved to take her station while Lily turned to Taylor, who was bent down, fastening the lead back to Angelica’s collar. Rules apply to everybody, I noted absent-mindedly.

“I’m going to ride the elevator up with you two,” Taylor said, standing up, “Need to wrap up my reports on costume production capacity now that my own is complete. Rose, didn’t you say you wanted to replace yours?”

I gestured for us to move, and we bid our farewells to the boys too before stepping out through the armored door.

“Yeah, whatever detergent they gave me to use to wash the blood out did something to the material,” I admitted, miming the universal gesture for getting your underwear out of a twist. “It’s all stiff now, and a bit itchy.”

With a bit of a collective chuckle, we boarded the elevator, pushing our respective buttons almost in sync. Lily stood back in the cabin, seemingly content with simply watching us talk.

“Yeah, that’d be the cheap stuff,” she nodded thoughtfully, “If yours is anything like mine, you need to use the softer stuff, actually intended for silk, you know? Didn’t you tell the quartermaster the brand you used before?”

I shook my head, wording around another divergence between our worlds, “They don’t have that stuff here, so I was going to go with whatever you’d tell me to use,” I nodded at her as the doors slid open on the ground floor. “Maybe we’ll be able to salvage this bodysuit from starchy hell?” Taylor’s vague shrug did not instill me with much confidence, but she was studying actual ballistic armor weaves now, maybe she’d make me a bodysuit that would be better all around than the one Madison made was. The elevator tried to close its doors before we realized we haven’t left it yet.

“See you later, Arachne,” Lily said as she stepped out with me, “You’ll still be here when we get back, right?”

“Can’t leave without my minder, can I?” Taylor replied with some amusement, gesturing at me with her occupied hand while she reached for the controls with the other one, “Good luck out there!”

“Thanks!” Lily told the closing elevator door. Then, she spun on her heel to face me. “Shall we?”

-------

[Taylor]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

I was thankful as hell for the fact that Missy was a goddess of radio discipline, because otherwise the triple layers of conversation may have led to a lot of uncomfortable situations.

“You’re not going to do to Lily whatever it was your cousin did to Carlos, right?” she asked a cluster of my bugs that I set up on an agreed-upon small tray to the side of the console.

“I was the one who forced her to sort it out in the first place,” they chittered back. Infinite multitasking is a godsend when you need to somehow make paperwork more palatable, and I was pretty sure Missy appreciated the company. With Chris in his lab and Carlos and Dennis heading out, all she had for company are the voices on the radio and that’s no substitute for her desire to go out and do something, a sentiment I wholeheartedly shared. “And sort it out they did, as far as I know.”

“Good to know.” My fruitfly contingent felt Missy nod once, a short sharp thing that I suddenly realized was very much like Miss Militia’s. In retrospect, Rose obviously couldn’t be the only person around that copied gestures from others, knowingly or not. Hell, half the body language I showed Glenn as the supposed movement of my Arachne persona was stuff I picked up from looking at Emma over the past years, both good and bad. “So, about you and Lily–”

“There’s nothing about me and Lily,” I hissed, then had my bugs repeat much more calmly, thankful nobody could see the face I was making. I swept the now-ruined bug shells that I smashed in my indignation off the desktop and into a trash bin and began layering them again. “One of the reasons I didn’t want to join the Wards originally was to escape the awkwardness of high school, not get more of it in my cape life.”

“Oh. Oh. Sorry,” Missy backpedaled sharply, then turned to the secondary console to enter the report from Rose that the potholes on 17th street were finally filled in and the PRT patrol routes that relied on that street could resume as normal. “I wasn’t thinking– I’m sorry.”

I sighed. I wanted to avoid the pity party as well.

“I propose a pact,” the bugs chirped out, then fumbled around to form a large number 1 on their allotted tray. I was proud of how I managed to stack them to form a three-dimensional bezeled shape, kind of like a cake. A cake made of bugs, but still. “Every time you do the walking on eggshells thing around me, I get to tell you how cute you are. You can do the same. Deal?”

“But Smartie, I’m not into girls!” the little green space manipulator replied with mock horror. I resolved to punch her in her cute little shoulder next time I was physically near her. The bugs shaped themselves into a 2.

“Okay, if we’re to continue the naming convention, you’d be Shorty or Greenie, pick one,” I countered, making a note about layer composition on one of the three dry-erase boards I was provided with. The book on tank armor that Chris loaned me was immensely useful in optimizing the positioning of shells in my new armor panels, even though Rose kept insisting I should cave and go for ceramics like she did. The bugs made a 3. “Also, I’m not into girls either is what I’ve been trying to tell you. And even so, I don’t want to rush into things, especially with such a bright example of what not to do right in front of my face.”

“So, basically, I should mind my own business?”

She sounded a lot less offended than the wording would imply. In fact, as far as my bugs could tell, she was amused.

“Oh, you can mind my business as much as you want as long as you don’t spread it around or talk to me about most of it.” I had the bugs try to do a similar inflection of amusement, because I needed more options in my range besides ‘quietly creepy’ and ‘loudly creepy’. I would gladly settle for ‘amused creepy’. Missy’s snort told me that I either succeeded or made a funny that was good enough to stand on its own.

“And now that we have the proper context for my next question,” the bugs made a 4, “If you want onto the Extra Protective Costume Without Extra Weight train, I have to ask if you’re going to let me have my bugs crawl all over you.”

------​

[Rose]​

Thursday began with the house phone ringing off the hook. By the time Dad made his way to it, I was pretty certain every bug, dog, cape, man, woman and child within the radius of Taylor’s power or Angelica’s barking was wide awake and aware that things were amiss in the Hebert house.

“They what?” I heard him yell from downstairs as I looked at the clock blearily. It was fifteen minutes to the alarm, so the morning was not a total wreck just yet. And that is how we jinx these things, you and I.

As Taylor and I came downstairs, already dressed for our morning run, he was putting the phone receiver down on the cradle with a resigned look on his face.

“What’s going on?” Taylor asked and immediately winced at the face Dad made in response.

“The Merchants showed up at the refugee camp that was set up on DWA grounds. Tried to peddle their crap, and turned violent when they were asked to leave,” he paused to run a hand through his already-distressed hair and sigh, “A fight ensued. Seventeen wounded, several of them children. Two dead, one Merchant, one guard. Thank God there were no capes with them.”

“Go. We’ll keep the house safe,” I said, “And keep in touch, with the city in the state that it is, their capes may still come to–”

“–get some revenge going, I know,” he sighed again before ruffling my hair. It was amusing how confused he got at the realization that he had to reach a bit higher than he did with Taylor. “You two keep each other safe as well, alright?”

“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m not going out as a cape until tomorrow,” my second-shortest sibling said with a severe expression, “You still have time to rack up a leading score before I start.”

“If that helps, my version of you once took down Mush with nothing but a crowbar…” I began as Smartie rolled her eyes.

------

[Taylor]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

“It was actually unnerving, like she… like she’s given up,” Rose was explaining as we walked the already-familiar path to the PRT. “And yes, before you ask, I was alone there. Felt like an asshole for making Ell camp outside the garage, but after what we already did to her I just–”

“–couldn’t bully Sophia again?” I finished for her. My double gave a weary nod. I sighed deeply. There was clearly something still gnawing at her over it, and I was a bit fed up for having to be the responsible sibling, but there was nobody else for her to talk this through with. Outing her issues to the PRT wouldn’t achieve anything except getting more restrictions piled onto the two of us if she was declared unfit to be my minder on her own. Letting her wallow in self-recrimination over Sophia fucking Hess was downright unethical. The only way out was through. “And the patrol itself? You didn’t tell me a thing yesterday, what with your odd infatuation with the idea that Ell doesn’t realize I’m too straight for her.”

It felt stupid to have to use code names for our Wards friends, but on the other hand, it made for good mental discipline to prepare for when the city would stop being a disaster area. No ifs about it, even if the two of us would have to help re-pave the damn roads ourselves. This was our city, even with all the pain it had caused us, we fought and bled for it, and we were not going to allow it to die.

“Fancy meeting you two here,” an unexpected voice cut in. Normally, he would take a path two streets over, but the shortage of options in varying routines and his unwillingness to resort to the same “internship” cover as we were using meant Dennis kept using the various semi-hidden entrances in and around the PRT building to clock in. Wait, clock in? Now they’ve got me doing it too!

I had far more questions regarding his decision to take the trip a few minutes ahead of what seemed to be his semi-regular time, as tracked by my fliers.

“Oh, you know, just walking our dog to work, as one does,” Rose deflected with a grin, one I couldn’t recognize, and I doubted she had any of her own that differed from the ones I knew the sight of, “She’s got an important interview to attend to at Dog Central, don’t you know.”

“The life of a Top Dog is never easy, but our Angelica is good at it, aren’t you girl?” I took over, delivering the well-deserved headpats to the lady of the hour as she puffed her chest out to better impress on the doubting human that she was the toppest dog to have ever dogged.

“You two are unbelievable,” Dennis shook his head, chuckling at our byplay. “How long did you say you were separated for again?”

“Ten years,” we chorused, then grinned as one, then chorused again, with me using a faint buzzing in Rose’s ear to cue her in better, “But we’ve caught up.”

The blank stare we got was so worth it. With some extra practice I could probably function like a bug-powered switchboard, as long as every participant was within my range and okay with having a bunch of different bugs in their ears to provide all the necessary frequencies. I still had trouble getting laughter to sound unlike something that made children cry and adults cry and everyone else cry too. Then we’d just have to deal with the entomophobes like Dennis. At least he finally got himself under control about being near me out of costume, after Dauntless and Miss Militia impressed on him the need to keep secret identities secret multiple times due to how he’d sometimes flinch in the general direction of away from me if he so much as thought he heard a fly buzz. One time that even caused him to collide with the actual fly!

We moved on to more inane chatter for the rest of the way, up until the PRT lobby, where we played out a skit to bring Dennis in through this way for the odd early bird couple of civilians that looked a bit overdressed for the weather. Then again, if those were the clothes on their backs when the waves washed their homes away and they were here to check the confirmed survivor lists which they were standing next to, could I blame them? I still tagged them with blowflies just in case as Rose made a show of talking the guard into letting “her friend Dennis” come in for a bit to look at her workplace. A few code phrases later, he finally realized that none of us were simple teenagers and let us through to the secure elevators.

“So, what’s in the cards for today, Tay?” Dennis asked me, his voice almost the same full playful cadence that it was whenever he spoke to Missy or Victoria. He was still wary around Lily, but Rose got special treatment on account of being badass and some of it splashed onto me by relation. I guessed it was balanced out by his fear of Skitter to end up in this grey area of ‘flirty but fearful’, like the way he would probably treat any of the Traveler girls. Provided none of them are gay, of course. Would be hilarious if Sundancer was, wouldn’t it?

“Going to be taking measurements for preliminary mockups of new undersuits for Rose and Missy,” I answered eagerly. I guess I am a real Tinker now. One casual question about my work and I’m about to launch into a tirade about it. Well, phooey, can’t blame me for being enthusiastic about being recognized. “But I’m sure you don’t want me to tell you how I’m going to have bugs crawling all over them to do that?”

“Um, actually I thought they told you about the costuming mannequins yesterday?” Rose piped up warily as the elevator doors slid open, silent as always. “The Image department makes and maintains these flexible dummies so that each of us has to undergo the indignity of being measured in detail once a year at most…”

Both of us blinked in surprise at her. My mind’s eye immediately jumped to the oddly orange-colored mannequins I’ve seen at Weymouth Mall on numerous occasions as they were changed in and out of clothes, the vague articulations of muscle on the male ones and breasts on the female ones and felt a blush treacherously creep up my face. Dennis’s slightly unfocused gaze may or may not have been caused by the same chain of logic.

“Can I get a copy of myself, you think?” he asked, shattering that illusion immediately. Rose shook her head with a light chuckle, stepping into the Wards Commons, the door’s timer having spent itself while we were gawping at her.

“It's just a blank dummy shaped like you, not an actual likeness,” she tried to explain before giving up almost immediately, “Then again, if we stick a wig on it…” she trailed off in contemplation. Perhaps it was the need for the dramatic, perhaps the sight of Lily swinging a rapier (Or is that a foil? I never learned the difference…) through the empty air in what was clearly the worst possible combination of practice and flagrant disregard for safety regulations. At the sound of Rose’s wolf whistle, she jerked, ruining a complicated flurry and nearly dropping her weapon.

“Holy geeze!” Dennis exclaimed, “You actually did it! You tried out my idea!”

“Well, it was a good idea,” Lily admitted, brandishing her rapier again. “My primary power makes the material irrelevant, and the lightness of this thing means my secondary aspect can get more mileage out of having a blade I don’t need additional training to use.” At our dumbstruck expressions, she elaborated. “I used to fence regularly until recently. Image stuck me with the arbalest, but I can use my power on anything, and Dennis had this idea based on a videogame–”

“Laser Rapier,” Dennis nodded, “Kind of like a lightsaber, cutting through anything, but with a very thin blade. If she has pre-existing skills, why not make use of them?”

“You’re not just a pretty face, are you?” I finally managed to get a word in edgewise.

“Yeah, well, Dean always got on my case about how I should prepare for being team leader when Carlos ages out,” the Molester of Time replied, “I guess some of it must have taken root. Wait till you hear the ideas I have for uniforms!”

“Ah-ah-ah! I was on the same team as Biscuit for five months which was five months too long!” Lily cut him off sharply, “If the name Roy Mustang is involved in any way, you’re modeling the uniforms yourself!”

To everyone’s surprise but mine, Dennis made a pretty good curtsey. “I do have the legs to pull off a miniskirt, don’t you worry,” he said in a reassuring tone. Naturally, he reassured precisely no-one.

“Alright, dressmaker dummies, where do I get them?” I asked, turning to my cousin, sister, double, backup, whatever. The nomenclature for it kept getting messed up in my head, particularly after that video we made last weekend.

“Oh, those,” Lily said with distaste and a sneer. “I remember the fun of having to get what amounted to a permission slip from Legend to keep my costume intact no matter the transfer,” she reminisced in a very un-nostalgic tone, “Because color-coordinated teams sell so much better, and my dark tones ruined the line-ups.”

“Yeah, well with my spidermesh dark tones are an inevitability, so once I get my lab ra– uh, sorry, valuable volunteers,” I corrected myself, throwing a saccharine smile at Rose, who bounced it right back, “Suited up, you can be next, if you want? How bulletproof is your outfit, again? This is Brockton Bay, after all.”

“You know what?” Lily said suddenly, a mischievous grin playing across her features, “Just for asking me that question, I’m going to help you carry the damn things up the stairs if you need to.”

------​

For the record: shooting the shit is fun. I was growing to appreciate it more and more each day. I had some of that with Alec and Lisa in the past, but with Missy and now Lily it just… felt better, somehow. Especially Lily, being as much an outsider as I was meant I could trust her not to secretly be here as my second minder or anything.

As a result, not only did she help me procure and set up the appropriate mannequins for Missy and Rose, she also stayed in the Designated Visitor Area of my lab while I worked. She talked and joked with me as I danced around them with a clothier’s marker, transferring over the notes I made on the cut of Missy’s dress and adapting the ones on my own outfit to Rose’s proportions. We swapped ideas on a battlefield awareness training course - not one the Brockton Bay Wards would ever have time to use, of course, but one that could be used to deliver some of that genuine Brockton spirit to other places.

As far as we both knew (and Rose confirmed via my insect radio from her place at the Console), only Detroit and maybe Las Vegas were as dangerous to a Ward’s physical health as the unofficial Cape Capital of America. And instead of helping my warzone of a hometown, I was stuck indoors. Well, not any longer. After an evening briefing from Mike Chambers, this Friday would be my official debut as a Ward.

It couldn’t have come sooner, because even though I desperately wanted to get out on the streets in a cape capacity after that taste of it earlier in the week, when it was here, I felt like I wasn’t ready.

“How do I look?” I asked my Critical Review Committee, which consisted of Chris, Lily and Rose today. They would all be on stage with me as Carlos had a patrol with Missy and Dennis would be in the crowd, as per my request. When I raised the topic of my guilt with Lily yesterday, she waved it off, saying she wouldn’t be allowed not to be on the stage as a recent team addition. Trusting her to know the procedure like the back of her hand, I went back to my PR-approved hatchet job of an introductory speech. But this was then and this is now. I could practically feel the words comprising it escaping my brain through my ears.

“Don’t fret, you’ll be fine!” Rose assured me as she handed me my mask and accepted the glasses in return. It was time to stop being meek Taylor and be the badass, sleek Arachne. “Lily and I put out your speech in large, bug-friendly printouts on every horizontal surface of your lab!”

“You what.” Two words was all I managed before a small cloud of mosquitoes I was using for lab manipulation swooped down on a desk, their blurry vision telling me of a vaguely house-shaped blob. “Are those big monochrome kiddie pictures?”

“Yep!” they replied in unison, then Lily continued speaking. “I thought you’d be able to see them, because we weren’t sure whether you could actually read Braille?”

“If I didn’t know you weren’t being completely genuine about this, I would have strangled you two already by now,” I growled through my mask, turning on my heel. I hoped to hell and back the inaugural patrol would go better than this.

------

[Rose]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

The rain pattered against the window, the morose weather bringing unwelcome memories of two weeks ago. Has it been so little? It feels like months have passed…

We were squared away in Taylor’s room – somehow, it was easier to not think of it as my room when it still looked largely the same as it did back when I was merely Winslow’s pariah. The changes must have piled up bit by bit, just like the Wards Commons, until the image of the ‘now’ of this world looked very much like the ‘six months ago’ of mine.

She needed this downtime after walking the streets with me. In costume. Cutting loose with her powers. Fourteen arrests, including two muggings and a home invasion later, and Mjölnir ran out of batteries before we ran out of patrol time. Taylor had a lot of pent-up energy and it needed a release. And now that she was spent, she needed a supportive and calm environment to cool down in.

It’s been awhile since she last did this, likely with Emma. She didn’t get to this point with Sarah because of me, and didn’t have Amy like I did. Just… sitting around, talking about this and that, small inconsequential nonsense, while the world outside went on its merry way, heedless of two teenage girls discussing whether Alexandria was actually ugly under that helmet of hers, or how differently our lives would have gone if we had some other cape’s powers.

“Huh, you should have seen the gears in Panacea’s head grind to a halt when I asked whether she would have rather had some other powers,” Taylor said, grinning. “For a moment there it felt as if she would pull her robes off, hand them to me and walk out.”

“To be fair, you said that in the middle of a situation where hundreds of lives depended personally on her,” I pointed out, my open palms tracing out a circle in front of me to indicate the severity of the burden that Amy took on. Kept taking on, because she was an idiot who didn’t know when to stop. Perhaps that’s why we connected so easily?

“Oh. Shit,” Taylor said meekly, turning a bit inwards. Crap, undo, undo!

“To be fair,” I said, wincing in hindsight at how I'd handled it, “I asked her if she’d like to take a break when I saw her then... and I didn’t consider that myself until about two nights ago,” I gave a small wry grin.

“Maybe we just suck at talking to her,” Taylor suggested, her face in a grimace.

I shrugged. “In any case, she has a lot on her plate, and her problem is that she doesn’t know there are options other than piling more on,” I went on, “Powers need to be used, and so she rationalizes her urge to keep healing since it already coincides with her belief that she should be. Kind of like you and being a hero, maybe?”

“What do you mean?” The frown gave her an actual owlish appearance, furrowed brows and all. My outline in the reflected light of the window in her glasses sighed.

“When you got powers, what was your first impulse?” I asked as a way of reply.

“That they’re not what I expected and how the hell would I go out and be a hero with them?” she shrugged awkwardly. I gave her a small smile in response, one of our own.

“And then you thought how to best apply it to your goals, right?” I coaxed the idea out of her, not wanting to force-feed it. She needed to understand the context as well as the logic. “It wasn’t ‘what I should be with this power’, it was always ‘how do I hero with it?’ and so you ended up with the most badass of costumes.”

She scoffed instead of agreeing. “Yeah, right. So badass that the Undersiders decided to recruit me, and Armsmaster had to clarify whether I was a hero or not. All because I messed up dyeing it.”

“You know,” I said with mock sternness, “I think I’ve been going about this whole cheering you up business wrong. I recall I didn’t start getting upbeat again until my self-esteem lifted off rock bottom.”

She scoffed again, crossing her arms in defiance. “Queen of the Unsmiles, that’s me alright.”

“Liar! I saw you smiling at that boy we keep seeing on our morning runs,” I replied, prodding her nose gently. “And Missy. And some of Dennis’s jokes. And sometimes when you talk Tinker to Chris, however that works. And…” I trailed off as two trains of thought converged. There’s no harm in trying, right?

“And? You realize that some of these things, they work because I get input from the other side, right?” she countered, doing some sort of weird one-armed cat’s cradle gesture between our faces. “Besides, the morning run guy keeps smiling at you, I just don’t want to mess his morning up by being morose.”

“Well, the mere fact that you use that exact reasoning is already a sign of positive change,” I noted, grinning momentarily before I was serious again. “As for the input part…”

I reached out gingerly with both hands, plucking the glasses off her face. She blinked at me questioningly as I put them down on the bedside table.

“Rose? What are you doing?”

I brushed her cheek with the back of my hand, looking into her unfocused eyes, the tiny me's reflected in them giving me funny looks. A fly buzzed past my face, then did a pirouette and landed on my nose

“M-mitey,” she repeated nervously, “Stop scaring me. What are you–”

I flinched, pulling my hand back.

“S-sorry, it's just that... I was trying to get into the mood and-–” I stammered, before Taylor interrupted me.

“Omigod, it's that thing! What Regent said! You're not seriously considering it?!” she almost yelled, but caught herself in time. Still, she was pretty loud about it. I hoped Dad wouldn’t hear, not that there was anything untoward happening here right now. “Or was it the way Lily keeps looking at me and not you?”

It was my turn to blink questioningly.

“Why can’t it be both? I think we're somewhat attractive, you hopefully think the same, we both know what we enjoy and we could–”

“Rose, Taylor, I appreciate your helping me with my self-confidence, but I'm, well, not into girls? And frankly speaking, still surprised you are,” she replied patiently, with an air of 'I can't believe I even have to say this out loud' about her words.

“I’m not... Well, I told you I don’t pay it a lot of attention, but I never actually–” I shrugged, making a weak wave with my right shoulder in a ‘you know’ kind of gesture, “I– I’m sorry, sorry for forcing this on you without asking, I hate when people do that to me and I think you're the same and–”

Her hand on my shoulder stopped me. I thought I saw a glimpse of wetness in the corners of her eyes. Wait, what did I do to make her cry?!

“Rose, stop beating yourself up over this. You did for me more than anyone else in the past year-–”

“–except for Lisa, of course,” I couldn’t resist saying. She looked offended.

“–even Lisa, because she was doing things to fit her own goals regarding Coil, and you threw yourself in selflessly, even though you keep thinking you and I want the same things," she finished, somewhat indignant by the end. I noted idly that the glasses still remained on the table, but did not raise the issue. She didn’t really need them anyway. Not with her army keeping watch over the house. My cousin, my sister, my self, the nascent A-Class parahuman. How do I keep blindly assuming we think the same way?

“Well, we kind of are the same person at the core? Half a year’s worth of differences couldn't have changed us too much?” I offered weakly, not really believing even my own words.

“Said the super-agent with an Amazonian build to the twiggy former supervillain,” she laughed and I joined in. It felt like an odd echo effect, because our laughs, at least, still were identical. Suddenly, my attention was on a small scar on her cheek that I’ve never had. Was it the Trio? Bakuda? Lung? Her life may have begun like my life, but it isn’t my life anymore. It’s hers. I can’t keep trying to take control of it.

"Shit, I'm sorry,” I finally spoke, “Maybe you're right, I didn't endure another three months of bullying by the Trio only to have superheroes join in, and you didn't fall in love with Aegis only to get him, the only Ward considered unkillable, murdered by Hookwolf," I sniffled, feeling the tears coming for the first time in a while, but I didn't care at that point, "And that got Gallant to hate Parian, who I got to join New Wave because I poached Panacea from them, and they hated me for it, and then he hated them for accepting Parian and he broke up with Glory Girl over it, and now Gallant here is dead, because I was too busy saving Aegis because of how selfish I was–”

I was babbling, hysterical, not even noticing when I found my face buried in her shoulder, soaking her PJs with my tears.

“–and I try for the best but I keep messing up, what kind of a leader am I?”

She gently lifted me off herself, not without effort, the way I was clutching at handfuls of her pajama top, and then she was looking into my tear-stricken eyes again, her own face tracked with double tracks of wet.

“The very best,” she said with certainty, “Because you care, and because you can feel that you should worry,” she sniffled, and I sniffled, and we broke into stupid giggles over the ruined moment of pathos. “Now if you’re gonna kiss me, do it before I change my mind and as long as my tears make you kinda look like an effeminate boy to me, short hair and–”

I interrupted her babbling by gently grasping her chin with two fingers and guiding her face to mine, touching lips to lips, mixing our tears together.

 

Interlude 03.F​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

Edmund always hated these excursions to the big cities. Having to crane his neck up to look at buildings, checking for threats - pah, he had better things to do. His power worked on a relatively short range and he would have greatly preferred to stick to that short range, not… whatever this was going to be.

But it was an order direct from the top. Old Woman Martha (try as he might, Edmund could never get into the habit of calling her Mama) said he would be going and so here he was, riding shotgun next to Martha’s son, Marshall. All three branches sent out their representatives to attend to the slight caused by the Unfaithful of Brockton Bay, first when they harmed the Lord of Waters, and then when they plastered imagery of the insulting wounds all over the Internet and the sundry items which they sold to other Unfaithful. That more so than the images online had been the proverbial straw that broke the sinner’s back - profiting off the Lord’s suffering was a grave offense.

All in all, their group had twenty five people in it, ten of them with powers. Marshall, along with Edmund’s brother Albert, hammered out a plan - and what a plan it was! - to bring the Unfaithful to heel, make them respect the law of the Lords of Elementals, and today it would come into action. The five vehicles they’ve been granted for this task by their families carried a select few of them to their destinations, the others already ensconced in the refugee camps they would be handling.

Edmund disembarked from the refitted Hum-Vee that still bore the lightning bolt imagery its previous owner - a tacky Unfaithful cape from Texas whose lightning powers have been taken into the McVeay family tree through the offspring of Angeline, the healer assigned to their group today. Her six-year-old son already possessed great power, and surely would bring more to bear as he matured.

Edmund shivered in the early morning chill of the water-drenched misbegotten hole of a city they were supposed to drive into the ground. Maybe it was an aspect of his powers and maybe just a personal quirk, he couldn’t truly remember, having grown up in a much warmer place than this. Maybe it was the fact that as someone traded into the Mathers clan from the McVeays, he just wasn’t as keen on admiring the handiwork of a different Lord than the one he’d been brought up to worship. Maybe it was something of his own power telling him he’d be suboptimal here, like the things Father Sturluson, who used to work for the PRT before finding the faith of the Lords, used to talk about powers telling their hosts how to use them best.

One way or another, the light drizzle that quickly made his coat wet, darkening its marine blue to a deep blackish tone, was irritating him, and that seeped into his voice when he bent over to knock on the window of an idling police car.

“Got a light?” he rasped at the officer, a young twenty-something whose gender Edmund couldn’t even begin to guess. They were alone in the car, but it seemed that their partner ambled off to get some donuts from the place next door to the one Edmund and Marshall needed. Which meant the car and the two policepeople had to go.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that?” the cop replied, rolling the window down from the smidgen it was originally open for. Their voice did not make their gender any more identifiable, and Edmund briefly wondered if they were a gay, whatever the gender. It was a thing that the gays did, was it not? He didn’t need to know much about them to hate them, after all. Edmund cleared his throat, already feeling a cough developing from the humid air, and wiggled the cigarette he held in his hand between their faces for emphasis, hoping it would not fall apart into a soggy mess of paper and tobacco before he managed to light it

“Got a light?” he repeated, smiling a bit at the cop’s affirmative nod. Their partner was just returning to the car, and apparently took notice of Edmund's greatcoat. It was part of his costume, but worn open and with no other elements of his gear in view, it only made him look like one of those weekend warriors that loved to reminiscence about times past with a prop gun in hand. This made him appear knowable. Safe. The fact that he was comfortable moving in it despite the armor mesh sewn into the lining also made him look respectably professional, a thing he had used more than once to twist the Unfaithful towards his goals before.

“Making nice with the populace, eh, Fredricks?” the new arrival chuckled through his walrus mustache which didn’t work at all on his blocky face. Edmund briefly wondered if he should have been a carpenter instead of a cop, but either way, the mustache had to go.

The younger cop produced a lighter, clicking it to offer Edmund a tongue of flame. “Much obliged,” he said graciously as he bent down to light his cigarette. As he exhaled his first puff of smoke, he waved his hand to spread it out. As he did so, the little flicker of flame still adorning the lighter waved back and forth before hopping off the lighter onto the policeperson’s chest, spreading much faster than it was supposed to. Before the other cop could react, his donut-laden hands in the way of pulling a gun on Edmund, another tongue of flame hopped off the younger cop onto Edmund’s cigarette briefly before making the leap to the man’s mustache through the rain. Not that getting hit by one or two droplets of water would impact a fire under his control in any way that mattered, anyway.

Edmund clicked his tongue as the cop in the car began thrashing around uselessly, trying to beat the flames out, and the older one found his uniform too ablaze to keep holding on to the donuts. Edmund caught one of boxes before the man could drop it like he did the other one moments later, and, placing his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, strode towards his destination, opening the box along the way. He felt conflicted over the fact that the street was empty enough to guarantee that nobody saw the trick except for him and the two smoldering carcasses that used to be cops, but on the flipside that also meant nobody would call for help too early.

He offered the pick to Marshall, who just came up himself, having finally parked the car. “I’m betting the one with the sprinkles has a jelly filling,” Edmund suggested, knowing full well his elder preferred cream-filled donuts. He just wanted the sprinkles, that was all.

Inside, they were joined by Patrick and Angeline, who arrived through the employee entrance. The bulbous growths on the face and neck of the guard slumped over in the chair next to the door meant he tried to get in the healer’s way. Edmund resolved to thank Elder Adams for bringing the woman along on this task. If they succeeded in tonight’s mission, they would be bringing the wrath of the city’s hero capes down on them, and he knew enough about them to be certain he had little to offer to stop most of them from breaking him in half. Being able to walk it off went a long way. The fact that she was very attractive despite having already borne two sons and two daughters for the clans was not a downside either.

On Marshall’s signal, they pulled out the missing items of their costumes - the woman’s face mask for Marshall, the point man on this outing, Valefor. His robes came out of the sports bag he was carrying. The lion’s head, complete with mane painted in actinic colors of a false flame, turned Angeline into Buer, her clawed gauntlets leaving her palms bare so she could both fight and heal and harm with her power. Patrick opened his tasseled leather jacket to unsheathe his bowie knife and pull on his owl-faced mask, the face of Andras. Edmund himself slipped on the Tinkertech gauntlet that allowed him to summon an open flame in the palm of his hand, letting out the ruffles of his shirt loose from under his scarf and buttoning his coat up partway to frame them. The last gesture, two slightly mismatched halves of two different cows’ skulls stitched together into a mask, turned him into Bifrons.

The Fallen have arrived to deliver a message, and it would be written in the blood of Brockton Bay.

------​

While Valefor was busy having a discussion, well, if one could call his one-sided lecture a discussion, in the next room over, Buer and Bifrons watched with glee how the crowd reacted as Andras played his knife along the throat of one of the hostages. They were not looking themselves, knowing that was part of his peculiar Stranger/Master power - being compelled to watch, but unable to do anything, as he killed someone, and then being overcome with the desire to kill someone else when he was done.

It took a lot of effort to nail down the exact parameters of his powers and the experiments resulted in no less than three separate false Slaughterhouse Nine “sightings”, but the payoff of having a deterrent that could stop anyone dead in their tracks was invaluable. As the death throes of the hapless woman Patrick chose to be his first victim of the day gurgled out, the crowded hostages went wild, clawing and biting and hitting each other. Edmund knew Valefor trained under Patrick’s father when he was younger, and while more specific, his power worked a lot like the two older Masters did - seeing meant believing. There was the potential issue with capes like that vigilante in New York who gained powers after being blinded in a traffic accident, but for these cases, the clans had other… specialists… to call on.

Since that aspect of his power was discovered, only one Brother had been lost to Andras’s induced compulsions, and that, too, was a valuable lesson - it worked through mirrors, but not through cameras.

Today, they would get to see whether Valefor’s worked the same way.

Bifrons made a whip of flame snap into the face of one Unfaithful that tried to grab at him, snarling and swinging his arms wildly, and the man reeled back, howling in agony from his scalded nose. The sounds stopped as a petite woman in a plain green dress managed to sink a fountain pen into his left temple, but then her howl of agony replaced it as her compulsion ended and she came to realize what she just did. Edmund grinned beneath his skull mask. At least three of the unpowered recruits they had primed for spreading chaos in the refugee camps once they received the signal came from such survivors of their attacks elsewhere. Self-loathing was an amazing motivator, and the promise of powers and protection from the Lords of Elementals did the rest.

If she lived to the end of this day, he would be the one to take her, Edmund mused as he turned to the sound of Valefor returning from his locked-off room. She had a very impressive figure and a lovely face, marred as it was right now by the tears of the truth even as Angeline tried to wipe them away, and Edmund always wanted to have beautiful children. “It is done. Let us proceed,” he commanded, and the two of them fell into step after their field commander, leaving Buer to tend to the potential converts.

------​

“Brockton Bay,” Valefor told the cameras, lounging on the sofa set up in the ‘Good Morning, Brockton!’ studio (Edmund found the overbright design of it tacky, but Valefor forbade him to torch it until he was done), “You were chosen, chosen to be judged by the Lord of Waters, the mighty Leviathan, but instead you chose to spit in the face of the Lord,” he paused to reel his temper back in – or pretend to, anyway, not that anyone could see his face under the mask, “For the transgressions against the Lords of Elementals, those that you have lauded, shall be put to death.”

Bifrons turned away from the studio momentarily, trusting the enthralled crew members to do what they were told, and looked through the windowed hall installed for the tour groups to peek in on the TV magic happening right here at Brockton’s local Channel Two studio. There, Buer was quietly talking to the three survivors of the kill frenzy, the woman in the green dress among them.

He knew the gist of these talks, just as he knew the chances of recruitment. Slim to none, but it was a way to kill time and a non-zero chance was always a good reason to do something if it cost you nothing. Angeline was ruthless, and none of the three posed any threat to her whatsoever.

Bifrons looked back at Valefor’s live broadcast, occuring in the flesh before him and on the numerous screens surrounding his position at the editor’s chair. He saw Andras wrestling another thrall into position behind Valefor, his bloodstained knife at the ready. He recalled a ridiculous incident from last summer, when the whole camp learned Patrick’s power wasn’t limited to humans. Apparently, smashing a fly in view of other flies had the exact same effect. It was a gloriously insect-free summer, despite the heat… after a day or two of some of the buzzing nuisances deciding humans were appropriate targets, that was. Nevertheless, it was a small price to pay.

Channel Two was chosen specifically because Edmund’s research during their road trip here showed it was the most-watched channel among the people that stayed in the city, owing likely to the fact that it was the easiest to tune a VHF antenna to. One way or another, they expected their accomplices - Ose, Barbatos, Solos and the others, both powered and not - to sow panic and violence in the refugee camps, hopefully drawing the attention of the city’s heroes from focusing solely on the TV station.

Of course, there was a risk that some patrolling heroes would be nearby, or be attracted by the burned corpses on the sidewalk, but what would one or two capes that are afraid of killing do against four that were not?

“The one known as Chubster shall not escape our wrath, but the Ward Emissary and the Undersider Skitter shall be put to death for their transgressions very shortly,” Valefor paused to point at the screen dramatically, “And do not think we do not know the role Miss Militia has played as well or the fact that Skitter chose to run to the Wards for protection. We will–”

“What is that sound?” Edmund mumbled to himself, turning back to the window he saw Buer in. She was staring back at him, her mask expressionless. No, not at him, at the pane of glass between them.

It was vibrating in place.

 

Interlude 03.V​

[Panacea]​

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

I was grinning like an idiot. I had an arm again! Granted, it was a temporary setup, a skeletal affair that Chris built with the help of Armsmaster, some outsourced Toybox tech, and one of my anatomy reference charts, but I had ten fingers again. He babbled at me about using telemetry data from my armor to reconstruct the range of motion and movement patterns, but all I heard was ‘will move like the old one used to’ and ‘should link up with the armor with no problems’.

I flexed the fingers, watching the currently-uncovered mechanical inhards shift and twist and pull, resulting in the arcane act of opening and closing a fist, one finger after another in a wave - a sign that it was a conscious effort and not random neural feedback. V sign. Air quotes. The bird. Dog shadow puppet I remember making with Vicky long ago. I must have looked like a five-year old at an ice cream cart when I made a jaggedly asymmetrical shadow bird flap its wings with Chris’s desk lamp. Brutus gave me a side-eye before letting out a Wuff and going back to sleep, clearly not interested in his owner’s antics, but I didn’t care, I had two hands again!

“How does it feel?” Chris asked, his question reeling me in a little bit. He was seated opposite me on a swivel stool, turning away every now and again to check the numbers that his diagnostic software gave him from the thin cable plugged into my new bicep.

“It… doesn’t. I mean, I have to be looking at it to tell that it’s actually doing something,” I admitted somewhat hesitantly, “But the important bit is, I can drive a car again! I can hold a book and turn pages at the same time! I can–” give hugs, but not to the one I’d want to hug right now. “I can be me again!”

“That’s good to hear,” he said absent-mindedly as he idly typed in a note – why does it say “eggbeater,” make sure that the next upgrade isn’t weird – “And the weight? It’s not pulling your shoulder, or causing any pain?”

I shook my head. “No, no pain… I mean, it does feel like my arm is trying to lift a weight it doesn’t know how to lift when I raise it, but…” I trailed off, making a quick shrug to indicate I was done.

He gave a slight smile. “That’s normal…” he paused as he saw my incredulous expression, “Based on what testimonies say about getting prosthetics, I mean.” He tapped his chin, “Not sure whether all Tinkertech limb replacements are supposed to work this way, though,” he shrugged and grinned sheepishly, “There’s not too much historical data on that… and there aren’t that many volunteers to try, either.”

Chris reached under the table, pulling out a plastic cap and a foam-lined case.

“Okay, I’d say that you should go to physical therapy, but, well, yeah,” we exchanged nods, clearly he knew it was dumb telling that to Doctor Dallon, “You’re going to have to relearn how to use your arm; you might be able to move it now, but I don’t know how that will translate to using it for actual stuff, not to mention patrols and combat.”

I sighed. “So I’m stuck on Hospital and Research rotation for a while longer.”

“’Fraid so. The next thing?” He dropped both items in front of me. “That arm isn’t waterproof. Not yet anyway. If you want to bathe, you’re going to need to take the arm out and put this–” he tapped the plastic cap, “–over the connector socket. And when it’s not in use, the arm should go in this,” he slapped the case, “To prevent damage and so… y’know… you don’t lose it,” he glanced at Brutus’s sleeping form, “Or someone doesn’t try to use it as another chew toy.”

“In his defense, you really shouldn’t have left that rubber gasket out.”

“And in my defense, Tinkers generally don’t have to worry about dogs getting into their labs,” he huffed.

I flexed my fingers, splaying them on the table, before pulling my new arm back to my side. ‘What wouldn’t I gi–’ I briefly wondered, before I stopped myself and wrapped my arms around Chris, pulling him into a hug.

As hugs went, I thought, Chris could do better, he was just sitting there, tensing up, not moving and– and then my good hand brushed against his exposed neck, and I released him immediately. He gasped.

“Oh, my god, I’m sorry, Chris I–” I stammered, raising my shiny new metal Tinker-crunching piece of Tinkertech to my mouth in surprise before realizing how easily that happened. Both the crunching and the raising.

“No, no,” he wheezed, punching himself over his lungs in that dumb gesture Hollywood shows people for some reason and coughing, “You just got it, you don’t know your own strength.” He smiled slightly, “You should probably work on that, though.”

Shame filled me. “But I should know, I mean, I know the human body better than anyone except maybe–”

“Don’t go there,” he wheezed one last time before straightening up and speaking normally once again, “If you play the ‘I should know better,’ card you’ll be here all day.”

“Still,” I tapped his hand and the faint bruising around his upper arms and back faded to nothing, “I am really thankful that you’ve done this for me.”

He shrugged, “I’d do it for any member of my team that I like. It was my pleasure, and hey,” he smiled, “It’s something new to try out. It gets old doing the same work on my board or my guns over and over again. Personally,” he gestured to the laptop, which already had a full page of notes typed up, “I can’t wait to start on the Mk. 2 Panarma.”

“We’re not calling it that, or you can go without healing next time I find your lack of faith disturbing,” I grinned as I more or less dropped my open palm onto his shoulder, producing an impressive flinch.

“Easy there, Darth Amy,” he chuckled once he got the wince off his face, “It’s still just a test build, you break it, you set me back a day or five.”

“Alright, alright,” I acceded, letting him go and flexing my metal fingers where I could see them so I’d know what I was doing. They handled instinctual movements surprisingly well, but any conscious focus on the fact that I couldn’t feel them broke the spell immediately. “Good save, but a word of warning - if anyone makes a Terminator joke at me, I’m giving them a taste of what period cramps feel like,” I made a fist of metal and grinned at it. Can I get away with making it steel-plated or should I read up on Floret’s research into skin grafts?

“Why do you hate Dennis so? Is it because he was the one that got you and Taylor hooked on those hypermasuline movies in the first place?” Chris laughed as he wound the cables from my prosthetic up. I gave him a wave of my meaty hand in a so-so gesture and we laughed together this time.

Then something struck me. “Member of the team that you like?”

He fidgeted. “Well, yeah,” he stood up, and began to clean up the piles of electronics and equipment into piles or stacks that barely looked more orderly than what they were like before. I raised an eye at him, “We don’t know who else would join, what if there’s another Sophia? I wouldn’t make her an–”

“You’re still mad that Dean broke his armor, aren’t you,” I deadpanned.

“I worked for weeks on that suit, it barely required maintenance, and it was one of the better things I’ve made before I found out my specialty!” he growled, throwing up his hands. “The least he could have done was to take better care of it.”

I snorted and leaned against a tabletop away from the infinite cycle of reshuffling components. “It allowed him to survive an Endbringer, Chris,” I noted pointedly, “I think that maybe you’re selling Dean short a little.”

He sighed before leaning against the table. “Yeah, maybe.” He paused, before looking me in the eye. “I’m still allowed to be mad at him even though it wasn’t his fault, right?”

I thought back to Caryn and Taylor.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Cool.”

The door to the workshop slid open, revealing Armsmaster, looking slightly out of breath. Since we were using the smaller workshop attached to the Ward dorms, there was no alarm, and we probably didn’t hear the Wards Commons one through the door and our awkwardness.

“Kid Win? Panacea?” And like that all merriment was gone. His tone demanded action, and we snapped to attention. “It’s good that you’re here. We have news about the portal.”

“News?” Chris asked, “What kind of news?” He started, “Did something happen to the generator? Was there an explosion? Is the–”

Armsmaster shook his head and turned his body slightly so that he stood at an angle to me. A note of suspicion wormed its way into my mind.

“The news is that it worked. At 1300 hours, we got a message back from the other world. It just finished M/S screening, and it’s verified.”

My eyes widened. “Does this mean…”

“Yes, Panacea. We’ve found her.”

Cheeky bastard knew I’d try to glomp him again, I thought as my cheek smushed awkwardly against his pauldron from an awkward angle. I still had my vengeance by surprising him when my new arm clanged against his back, making him flinch.

------

[Danny Hebert]​

It took less than an hour to get Danny from getting the call at work to sitting in a darkened briefing room next to Anne-Marie and a remarkably tanned Triumph, who had apparently just gotten back from vacation or something? He wasn’t sure, nor did he entirely care.

He did care about why he himself was there, though.

His daughter was alive.

Danny reached out and placed his hand on Anne-Marie’s, and she turned and smiled one of those ten-thousand-watt grins at him. He frowned internally even as he tried to respond in kind. When was the last time she had smiled like that? Had to have been before– oh, right.

“Dad?” She whispered, her brow now furrowed in concern, “You all right?”

“I’m… I’m fine, sweetie,” he finally managed to reply, “Just… just happy to hear that your sister’s fine.”

She grinned again as Armsmaster stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat.

“As you all know,” he started off, before looking down at the podium again. “Deputy Commander Hebert has been missing for three weeks now. Our search for her has been thus far unsuccessful… until today, that is.” The leader of the Protectorate waited a moment for the murmurs to die down. “One of our exploratory probes was returned to us today with several video files confirming that the Deputy Commander is alive and well–” He held up a hand to forestall more outbursts. “We will only be showing you one of them. There are multiple files, some of which contain information that is either classified or marked as personal, with a short list of EYES ONLY recipients attached, likely related to the contacts the Deputy Commander established wherever she ended up. We will be making the appropriate people aware of these files over the coming days. That being said…” he tapped a hidden button on his gauntlet.

The ceiling-mounted projector whirred to life, before an image began to form.

Danny’s heart leapt into his chest. Her. Taylor.


“Taylor? You heading out?”

She turned to him, bag slung over her shoulder, a smile – one of her own, thank Scion – on her lips.

“Yeah, Dad, I got called in early,” she looked apologetic. “Sorry I didn’t mention it, but…”

Danny held up a hand, “Don’t worry, I know how it is. You’ve seen me have to leave because one of my people got a little too rowdy at the bar,” he smiled, scratching the stubble on his chin. Note to self, he thought, buy more razors. “I’m just saying that you’re forgetting something.”

Her hand shot to her taser, even as her lips started moving, Danny couldn’t help but slip into a nostalgic grin at how she started going over her supplies.

“Taser? No. Spare clothes? No. Protein bars? No, extra spare clothes, shower supplies– Eep!“

The undignified squeak she let out as she was hefted into the air by his arms was an absolute delight.

“Kiddo, the day you leave my door to save the city without saying goodbye to your old man is the day you spend a month grounded,” he said mock seriously as he squeezed her tight, her embarrassed blush making it even funnier to him.

“Daaaaad,” she whined, squirming but not truly attempting to escape, “Stoooooop.”

“No.” He was adamant. He was resolute. He had a point to make. He would not be letting her go until–

Finally, she relaxed and hugged him back. “Dad, I’ll be fine. We’re not going to be doing anything dangerous. At worst we think that our patrol route might go towards Über and Leet, but they’re practically harmless.”

Danny stiffened and pulled her closer. “I know you’re as safe as can be… but Taylor, I can’t help it, I’m worried. I…”

She gave him a reassuring squeeze. “I know, Dad.” She looked him in the eyes. “I know.”

Finally, he let her go. “I’ll see you tonight, Dad,” she whispered. “I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to it, Taylor,” he whispered back.

And with that, she stepped out the door.


And Taylor didn’t come home that night.

The weight in his chest loosened a little.

But here she was now, sitting in a room sort of like the one she had at the Wards base here, wearing what was clearly the same armor as usual, just repainted.

“Okay, just tell me when we’re ready,” she was saying to someone off-screen.

------

[Panacea]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

I let out a snort. Of course.

“What do you mean, it’s already recording?” Screen Taylor facepalmed through her mask. “Ugh, just… just cut that out of the final portion, alright? Don’t forget!”

Whoever it was clearly forgot.

The costume was different. No longer was it themed in the style of a PRT Trooper, but had a soothing metallic green paintjob. The helmet was mirror-sheened, though – bereft of paint, something had clearly happened to it.

Taylor removed her helmet, giving a small smile to the camera. It reminded me of Madison and the way she used to look at Taylor after earning her forgiveness.

“Hello! If you’re watching this back home… I’m alive.”

Armsmaster had to pause the video to let the cheers and muttering die down. Reactions ranged from Anne-Marie’s excited “YES!” to the sigh of relief from Madison, who slumped down in her seat. Dean gave a momentary glance at the bug controller, concern in his eyes, before he smiled gently and settled in to hear the rest of Taylor’s speech. I decisively ignored the blooming warmth that spread through my own chest.

Finally Armsmaster restarted the video.

“I… What I’ve been through is just…” she ran a hand down her face, “It’s just been so insane. I don’t even… I miss all of you so much, but I’ve been making friends over here… Dad, Anne-Marie, I’m…” She dropped her hands to her side. “I think I should just show you how insane things are.”

She gestured to the side once. Then again. Finally she rolled her eyes and walked off-screen, before coming back, pulling someone that looked like a taller, skinnier Weaver.

“No,” hissed Madison. I turned to look at her in confusion, then felt the blood drain from my face as I recalled how exactly Madison and I had met.

“You think your day’s bad? Try finding out…” Taylor started, before the stranger finished her sentence, ruefully, unwillingly. In Taylor’s voice. Literal Stranger?

“That you have another you running around,” the figure droned the obviously pre-prepared text, before wrestling with the golden-eyed mask, revealing… a second Taylor.

I couldn't stifle the squeak that escaped at the thoughts that ran through my head at that very moment. Anne-Marie, being the sweet girl she was, elbowed me in the side.

After a moment of purging my mind by force and thoughts of reverse-helix DNA, I managed to notice that they weren’t quite the same. This Taylor’s nose was straighter – clearly she was the more careful one of the two. She was an inch or two shorter than my Taylor – boy, my cheeks are warm today, why didn’t they turn on the AC here? – and from the glasses that she put on, Other-Taylor hadn’t had her vision fixed. Also, my Taylor’s hair was cut shorter while Other Taylor’s hair was more in line with what I was familiar with.

“My name,” the new figure began, “Is Taylor Hebert. The native one,” she shot a glare at her oblivious counterpart, “And up until recently, I was a villain named Skitter, as well as a member of the Undersiders.”

“Skitter?” Interjected Clockblocker, to the sounds of people’s annoyance, “Who’d come up with a dumb name like that?” He shook his head in disgust.

“I was named by Clockblocker of the Wards, so Dennis, that one’s on you,” Other Taylor told the camera accusingly.

“HA!” barked Vista, but her attempt at mocking laughter was stifled by Anne-Marie kicking her under the table. Certainly, what else could the Deputy’s kid sister be but a kind and caring soul?

“I go by Arachne, now…” she looked lost, “Honestly, I’m not sure what to say here…” She gave a halfhearted wave to the camera, “I uh… I can control bugs?” a group of spiders descended from her fingers on webs like a parody of puppeteers, “Hi… other Dad and new sister?” She shook her head slightly then continued, “My Dad and I have been keeping Rose–”

“Two sisters!” I thought I heard Anne-Marie whisper to herself. She looked like she just won Christmas.

“I’ve been going by ‘Rose Ellison,’ here,” interrupted my Taylor, “Yes, after Aunt Margaret, Dad.”

“A-hem,” growled the twin in the skintight bodysuit (stop it, Amy, I rebuked herself), “As I was saying, we’ve been keeping her with us until we can get her home. I mean, we as in– well, not my Dad and I.” She shrugged. “Sorry, other Dad…” she shook herself, “Still sounds weird.”

“Taylor now has two daddies?” Dennis softly joked, leading to a snort from Gallant, a groan from Chris, and a soft facepalm from Mr. Hebert.

“But as proud as I am of you fixing the front step, or getting the TV working again…” she vaguely gestured from the screen, “TV Versus Dimensional Tinkertech. Sorry.”

I grinned as she heard Mr. Hebert whisper “Fair enough.”

My Taylor– Rose– no, I decided that I liked ‘my Taylor’ better, so it would be best to stick to that –gave a weak smile. “My identity, or rather the fact of our double identity, is a secret over here. Only a few people know about it–” she started counting on her fingers, “The local Protectorate, the Triumvirate, Directors Piggot and Costa-Brown, a few Troopers who arrested me for bringing in Über and Leet – the local ones,” she added hastily while moving to the other hand to count, “Those idiots didn’t follow me through, the Dallon sisters and Aegis. He’s alive over here, by the way,” Her eyes fell, “But we lost Gallant and…” she stopped as a nearly-identical hand fell on her shoulder.

“It’s in the report, you don’t have to…” Native Taylor’s voice trailed off. The two shared a significant glance with one another before my Taylor continued speaking.

“As far as everyone else is concerned, I’m Taylor’s cousin Rose from Montana,” she paused to tap her nose, “We look alike enough, but different enough, to pull it off, I think. Maybe Clockblocker suspects foul play.”

“Ha-mphhh!” Dennis exclaimed through Dean’s hand clamped over his mouth.

“Yes, I know about the Madison Clements of your world,” Other Taylor said ruefully, evoking a gasp from her (her other’s? This was getting confusing fast) former bully. “Not-me tells me she’s earned her forgiveness, but forgive me if I wait to see for myself.”

I could see that Madison had only managed to nod jerkily in response as if the other Taylor could see her. That was yet another awkward talk in the making.

“So, quick recap of the other fun things: Vicky and Amy are still active on the New Wave roster, but after losing Sarah and Neil Pelham to Leviathan, the team is looking shakier by the day,” my Taylor slid into her Deputy Commander voice, making me feel as if she was already back, just conducting another pre-patrol briefing on the gang situation. “Alexandria has expressed personal interest in the way I’ve arrived here, so we’ve asked Armsmaster to forward the whole thing to her and Director Costa-Brown. Oh, and speaking of Armsmaster…” her face grew sad while Other Taylor scoffed. Clearly, the girl has led a much worse life that my Taylor. Then again, if she went through the same shit as my Taylor and had the locker done to her on top of that?

I wonder what Madison would do to her other self if she was allowed to meet her.

I spared a brief glance at our Armsmaster, and by the way his expression darkened one could tell he’d already looked at the end of the book to find out he was the culprit.

“He’s bound for the Birdcage for violating the Endbringer Truce against Taylor here,” my Taylor went on, hugging her other self around the shoulders. “Because his brief one-month vendetta against her that followed her takedown of Lung on her first night out–”

“You’re telling it wrong!” Arachne-Taylor (ArachTaylor?) interrupted, gesticulating wildly, “I went on my first hero patrol in April because I needed to wait for the spiders to finish making the costume–”

I thought I heard Madison whisper “Knew it!”

“–and assisted the Undersiders with Lung by accident. They decided I was a villain and asked me to join…”

------

[Armsmaster]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

You knew, going in, that the message addressed to you and Hannah from the other world’s Hannah would likely concern both the difficulties she’s likely facing as the new Protectorate leader, but also the reason for finding herself in that position in the first place. Listening to her only confirms your suspicions as to what the answer is.

You.

Or, rather, the other world’s version of you, where Deputy Hebert gained powers in the incident that she narrowly avoided here and which Weaver was subjected to instead. Where you still screwed up in preparing the next generation of heroes as Shadow Stalker still did the same atrocities and more, having been left unchecked until the Deputy went after her.

Where you apparently failed to recruit the newly-minted hero that Taylor Hebert wanted to be, and in doing so somehow became fixated on her successes as the direct reason for your failures, judging by some of the classified reports the Deputy’s data packet contained. Of course, these same reports also exonerated you, citing the vast differences in personality offered both by the therapy sessions the Deputy forced on you and Dauntless to overcome your mutual dislike, but the mere fact that you had the capacity to break the Endbringer Truce in such a flagrant way…

It was worrisome.

Your mind flashed back to an old poem by Robert Frost about roads not taken that Legend was surprisingly fond of, but banished it quickly.

You were struck with a desire to meet the other Colin then; to speak with him, to find out what happened. You suppressed a twinge of envy for Dauntless, having received a message of his own from his dimensional twin, he would know how he turned out. The other Colin and you weren't so different... and that was truly scary at how close to falling you had been.

What was even more worrisome, the Miss Militia on the other side of the screen looked… harried. Wrong in more than one way. It was until she started to speak that you didn’t notice the reason for her oddly parted hair, a surgical scar just above her forehead, but once that happened, you couldn’t not look at it.

Out of the corner of your eye you saw as the Hannah on this side of the screen unconsciously reached for that same spot on her own head. You didn’t find it all too difficult to place a placating hand on her shoulder to soothe her worries as you both returned to her interdimensional counterpart’s retelling of the Deputy’s feats on her world.

But most of these things you’ve already heard from Deputy Commander Hebert. Why would she need the two of you to listen to this in private?

“And Hannah. Take note. Pass it on, because it’s not something I’ve found recorded in academia on this side regarding Noctis capes,” the scarred Hannah told her unblemished counterpart. “My wound made me lose the ability to escape sleep. I went for seventeen wakeful hours after the surgery, getting progressively drowsier. Six hours of sleep were followed by fifteen hours awake. Each time I stay awake for less, but thankfully sleep about the same.”

You hear the breath of the Hannah at your side hitch as the other one adds, “My powers are changing, and it was not due to a Second Trigger, and I fear it won’t stop at just the sleep.”

-------

[Dauntless]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

(or open this link in a new tab)

Nate Velasco was not a complicated man. He liked good hearty food, southern rock and country music, beer that made his nose itch from the fizz and women that had a bit of a plump on their bodies and a bit of gruff in their voices.

Therefore it was with great confusion that I received a video he had recorded for me.

“Hello, Nate,” the recorded Nate told me, “Pull up a chair, get that Bud open, and let’s talk, you and me. You see, Emi– well, Deputy tells me you’re a fixed man, that she made you and your Armsmaster work your issues out,” screen-Nate paused to take a swig of his own can, and I followed suit, having taken his advice regarding seating arrangements. “She wouldn’t tell me how we did it, and I’m never going to find out now that mine has been packed into a steel container with breathing holes in it and is about to be shipped off to Hell on Earth.”

“I’m still having trouble reconciling that, Nate,” I told the recording, beer swishing in my can as I gestured.

“I know, crazy, right?” he spoke back, probably feeling like an idiot for talking to a camera as if someone was talking back. “So here’s how it’s gonna be. I marked this recording private, and they agreed to abide by it - at least on this side.” He paused to reach for something out of frame, then pushes it up to the camera lens. On it was the image of a woman, one I vaguely recognized - Natalie? The Director’s secretary? Right, I kinda liked the way she looked, but we’ve barely ever talked before and–

“Yeah, that’s right. The Director’s secretary,” screen-Nate confirmed, his voice a little bit woozy by now. Figures, of course he’d be as much of a lightweight as I am.

“I know how you might look at her, because so did I,” he plodded on, driving a stake of concern into my heart over what he was about to say, “And if I managed to convince her to date my civilian ID, so can you. Listen up.”

I sat up a lot straighter then, even took out a mostly-empty legal pad from my desk. As I prepared to take notes, he barked a short laugh.

“Of course, maybe you already are and maybe you can show her this so she’ll laugh at how much of an idiot I am, but I asked the Deputy if you were single and she looked at me like I was crazy and said no, so if she ever questions you about me, deny everything.”

The wide goofy grin on his face was infectious, and I was certain I was wearing one of my own by the time he polished off the first can of beer.

-------

[Rebecca Costa-Brown]

Spoiler: Soundtrack

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I paused the video.

Doesn’t think highly of this other Alexandria. Was genuinely surprised by her assertions that there can be only one Alexandria between worlds. Sloppy, other me, very sloppy.

The two girls on the screen were unlike night and day, more akin to the two pieces of a mahjong pair - superficially the same, but a dab of paint here that the other one didn’t have, a scratch or chipped edge on the other from being thrown across the room. It added up.

They started out the same until their… divergence. Even on her own, before all this, Deputy Commander Hebert was making waves. Thank heavens we never gave her the political leverage by drawing attention to Brockton Bay with a quarantine. She might have been in my seat by now.

I restarted and paused the recording again several more times. Each time the other Taylor Hebert, Skitter– no, Arachne, better ensure I get the names of the obvious future ambassadors of goodwill between our two Earths Bets right – spoke up, the differences stacked up, becoming more and more glaringly obvious.

They would work well together because they are the same person at the core, different experiences and skillsets but very similar logic. Like an extension of one’s own limb…

I thumbed the intercom, pausing the video for the ninth time.

“Caroline,” I told the girl on the other side of the archaic machine that may have been older than me, no doubt bought by the PRT from some Army surplus warehouse back in the nineties, “Could you please call Alexandria in?”

“Certainly, Madam Director!” replied the twentysomething who I suspected only took the job because of the view out of my waiting room, because the pay was pretty atrocious considering the rent rates in the entire LA-Frisco area. She led an easy life nonetheless, recently adopted a dog from a shelter with her partner. I hmmmed. Very few people were brave enough to date Case 53s, let alone intend to marry them. I briefly wondered if either of them would be ever able to forgive me if they knew.

I was torn from my musings by a knock on the door.

“Madam Director?” a voice every teen, tween and thereabouts girl in the country dreamed of having asked.

“Enter!” I commanded, and the door creaked open, admitting the grey-and-black costumed form of the heroine that served as one of the icons of what “hero” meant in this country. Especially now that the actual Hero was– Not. Now.

“Elizabeth,” I told my body double once I was certain the privacy generators were working full force, “I understand that you came in contact with one Deputy Commander Taylor Hebert, more widely known as a open cape Deputy, in the past. I need you to tell me everything you know about her.”

“Of course, Rebecca,” she replied airily, taking off her helmet, her twin blue eyes so unlike my own lone brown one.