Part Nineteen: Expanding the Team
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Alea Iacta Est
Part Nineteen: Expanding the Team
[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Taylor
We converged back at Kayden's apartment, where Theo met us at the front door. "She's sleeping," he whispered. "How did it go?"
Annette grinned broadly and gave him a high-five with the hand that wasn't holding Amy's. "Operation Fleeing Goblin was a total success, bro," she told him with a broad grin. "Lung bought into it; hook, line and sinker. Then Janet trapped him in a water bubble, and Vicky played whack-a-Lung until he ran out of air."
He let out a sigh of relief as the rest of us trooped past him into the apartment. "The plan worked, then. I thought it would, but you never know until you try."
"You two gave us the best run-down on how he'd react and how to draw him in," Lisa said. "Between your knowledge of his motives and Annette's tactical know-how, this was definitely your win as well."
I thought he was about to answer that, but then his eyes went to Kayden. She was perfectly fine, thanks to Amy, but her costume was still a little scorched here and there. "Mom!" he said, still keeping his voice down but with concern evident in his tone. "Are you okay? Did he get you?"
"I'm fine," she assured him. "He tagged me a little bit, but it just made the plan work even better, and Amy fixed me afterward." She smiled broadly. "You should've seen him swimming around in that globe of water Janet had him in, like the world's biggest, ugliest goldfish. And every time he stuck his head out …"
"Pow!" Vicky whispered the word and mimed a swing of her fist. "Most fun I've had in ages."
Dad turned to Janet, who'd been quiet for the whole ride back. "You okay?"
"Yeah." Janet nodded. "I think I am. Working with all of you, taking menaces like Oni Lee and Lung off the streets, this is good. We're actually making a difference … right?"
"Oh, we absolutely are," I assured her. "This is what teamwork is all about. On our own, no single one of us could've done what we did tonight, or even when we took down Oni Lee. Working together, especially with someone like Dinah to manage our capabilities, we're capable of far more than the sum of our parts."
"What Taylor said," Dinah agreed. "I know some of you might be used to more freewheeling cape fights, instead of the paint-by-numbers stuff we're doing these days, but …"
"Oh, God, no." Amy rolled her eyes dramatically. "Those fights were nightmares. I had no idea who was going to get hurt, or if I was going to be able to get to them in time. The way we're doing it in this team? It's a dream come true. One, two, three, done."
Andrea tilted her head. "So usually it's a case of just go up to whichever bad guy doesn't have someone on them, and hope they don't have a power that'll totally no-sell what you can do? That's no fun."
"Also that they're as tough as they look, so I don't accidentally splatter them all over the nearest building," Vicky added. "For a while there, I'd actually wait until someone got hit by someone else, then figure out how hard I needed to hit them from that. Not the best strategy, just saying."
Lisa grinned. "So then you had Brandish yelling at you for being too hesitant. Which led in turn to stuff like the Great Bus Debacle."
Dinah cleared her throat quietly as Vicky facepalmed. "As much as we all want to hear that story—I know I do—it's getting close to my bedtime, and I'm pretty sure everyone else wants to go home too. So I just need to ask this question: does anyone have a problem with the way we took Lung down tonight? Any suggestions, queries, or objections? Ways we could've done it better?"
I knew why she was asking that—her power needed all the input—but it still felt a little odd to have her taking the lead when she was the youngest person in the room by a couple of years. I shook my head, then glanced at Lisa and Vicky. Neither of them seemed to have problems.
"None whatsoever," Kayden said. "You're batting a thousand, so far. I can't guarantee it will stay the same, but right now I'm not going to try to fix what's not broken."
"Yeah," said Andrea. "Just watching from the outside, you guys are like a well-oiled machine. Nobody has to do it all, and everyone's got a part to play."
Dinah looked around the room, observing each of us in turn. Whatever she saw must have satisfied her curiosity, because she nodded. "Good," she said. "Tomorrow night, we'll decide who we're going after next; the remains of the Empire, or Uber and Leet. Also, I have a feeling we need to recruit, so we can talk about that too."
"What?" I asked, remembering only at the last moment to keep my voice down. "Recruit? We're kicking ass. Why do we need more people?"
Dinah met my gaze with certainty in her eyes. "Because there are people out there who can no-sell us as we are. I don't intend to let that happen."
Almost by instinct, I took out a six-sided die and flicked it into the air, then held out my hand to catch it. While it was still airborne, I told it to bring up a number relating to how correct she was, with one being 'least' to six being 'most'. It smacked onto my palm, with six dots staring back at me. "Ah," I said. "Right."
"Understood." Dad nodded to Dinah. "Taylor and I can drop you home. Janet?"
Andrea fielded that one. "My spare bedroom's still clear."
Janet nodded. "Thanks. I still need to get a place of my own. I don't like living on charity."
"Pfft. You're one of us now. It's not charity. It's teamwork. This is me doing my part." Andrea hooked her head at the door. "C'mon. On the way, you can tell Annette and Amy and me how cool it was to put Lung through the wash cycle."
"Uh, I can give you a lift home, Ames," Vicky offered.
Amy glanced at her, then back to Annette. "I'm good. Let Carol know I'll be home shortly."
One by one, we filed out the door again. As the last one out, I paused and nodded to Kayden. "We kicked ass tonight."
She smiled back tiredly. "We definitely did."
Hillside Mall
Two Days Later
"Excuse me, is this chair taken?"
The teenage boy looked around from his study of the crowd in the busy food court; a girl two or three years younger than him was standing there. "Uh, no, it's not," he replied, a little awkwardly. Social skills were not his thing, which was why he was people-watching in the first place.
Letting her take the chair so she can sit with her friends is obviously the polite thing to do.
"Thank you." However, to his surprise, she pulled the chair out and sat opposite him. "Can we talk?"
His attention, until then half on the crowd around them, snapped fully on to the girl. She had brown hair, and looked twelve or thirteen or so. Not anyone I know. Belatedly, he realised that she had no food with her; he had bought fries so he wouldn't appear out of place while he observed the crowd, but she had none at all. She specifically wants to talk to me. Is this some sort of prank? "What's going on? Who put you up to this?"
"Nobody," she assured him. She didn't seem to be bubbling over with mirth, as he would expect a prankster to be. "I just want to talk to you about something that we have in common."
"And what might that be?" He kept his voice neutral and tried to keep his face the same way.
If this is a gang recruitment, I'm outta here. If she's trying to pick me up, I'm definitely outta here.
"Powers."
Her delivery was calm, smooth and devastating. One word that rocked him back on his metaphorical heels.
Did she just say—
"What?" His voice sounded thin and reedy in his own ears.
"You heard me." She glanced around, not obvious, a flick of the eyes to the left and right. "I'm not going to say it again, but it's what we have in common. You've only recently gotten them, right?"
He nodded jerkily. There was no sense in trying to lie. He hadn't given himself away—his powers were hard to spot in action, by definition—so she had to be some kind of Thinker. "The—the PRT knows about them," he said. Maybe that would give her the message to back off.
"But you're not in the Wards yet." It wasn't a question. She knew.
"I … no." He was bad at social situations. Having some kid just come up out of nowhere and start talking about what should be the biggest secret of his life … he had no idea how to handle it. Saying as little as possible was his go-to, and even that wasn't working.
She leaned back in her seat. "Are you sure you want to even join them? You're not a combative person by nature. You prefer to be in the background. Would you really be comfortable wearing a costume alongside them, being in the public eye like that?"
She was leading up to a point; that much, he could figure out. Exactly what her point was, he wasn't sure yet. He corrected himself: I know where she's going with this, but I don't want to think about it.
"You're trying to poach me out from under them, aren't you?" he asked, keeping his voice down. It wasn't hard to figure out, and he'd never been stupid. She'd laid out all the clues, probably to see how he reacted.
"I am." Her tone was steady and up-front. The expression on her face remained polite and friendly; two strangers chatting in a mall to pass the time.
"… wait." He frowned. "I doubt you came here from out of town to recruit me, so what team do you belong to?" He wasn't aware of any teams in Brockton Bay that had a twelve-year-old as part of their number. "Am I your first recruit?"
If I am, that's a hard nope.
She chuckled. "No. We've been operating in the city for a while now. I spoke to the others and they agreed that we don't have many medium-heavy hitters. Thinkers, yes. Heavy-heavy hitters, yes. But nothing in between. Plus, you've got other capabilities that I think would make you a worthwhile recruit."
Now he was totally lost. "What's your team name?"
She leaned back in her seat. "We don't have one. We operate in the shadows."
Talking to her was like grasping fog. "So, what have you done recently?"
Lowering her voice, she leaned forward again. "Empire Eighty-Eight. Merchants. Coil. ABB. That's what we've done."
He blinked, staring at her. It was true that since losing Kaiser and Hookwolf—the details on the villains' deaths were still sketchy—and having Cricket, Stormtiger and Alabaster arrested by the PRT, the Empire had been left dramatically on the back foot. Nobody quite knew what Purity was up to, though rumour claimed that she was still seen occasionally, flying around the city.
He'd also heard that the Merchants had gone down hard, that Coil had been arrested after being dragged bodily out of his flooding underground base, and that the ABB had been picked off over three nights, the bound and unconscious capes left for the PRT to find. Up until this point, he hadn't connected all these arrests together. If true, then this was massive.
But was it true?
Could she be just running a scam on him?
She nodded, as though reading his thoughts. "I get it. I'm just a kid to you, making bold claims. You're going to want some sort of proof, right?"
"It would be good, yeah." He didn't like being pushy, but sometimes it was necessary.
"Good. You're thinking. I like that." Without taking her eyes off him, she raised her hand and snapped her fingers. A moment later, two girls walked past the table on her side, coming from two different directions, each one dropping a folded piece of paper on the table. They strolled on, not even bothering to look back, as he stared.
"What was that about?" he asked.
"I'll show you in a minute." She had her phone out now. Turning the screen toward him, she started a film-clip playing. "We don't have footage for Kaiser or Hookwolf—those were kind of ad hoc affairs—but here's the Merchants."
In the footage, he watched as water poured out of the doors and windows of a house. It looked like a movie, only the quality of the imagery wasn't good enough. In the next moment, Skidmark burst out the front door in a wash of water and sprawled on the road. Then he got up, threw a coloured field at the asphalt under his feet, and began to skate off … right up until he ran face-first into a fine-stranded net that had been strung across the road. It wrapped around him, tighter and tighter, until the villain was completely bound up.
He blinked. "Whoa …"
The girl grinned and tilted her head. "There's more." She turned the phone so she could see what she was doing, and flicked up a photo. "Whirligig." Similarly wrapped up, the Merchant lay in a pool of water in what looked like a back yard. "Squealer." This time, it was an alleyway, with the Tinker bound in a fishing net.
"That's impressive." He frowned. He and water had a … contentious relationship, considering his Trigger event. "How did you do the water thing?"
"We have a hydrokinetic." She flicked to another photo, of Lung lying face-up in a pool of water, unconscious. The villain lacked his trademark metal mask, but the dragon tattoos were hard to miss. "She's very, very good at what she does."
"Jesus." He rubbed at his forehead. "Okay, I get it. You're not just pulling my leg."
"No, I'm not." She picked up both folded pieces of paper, holding them between two fingers. "Quick question: what's your favourite ice cream flavour?"
Unprepared for the hard left turn in topic, he floundered briefly. "Uh, mint choc chip. Why?"
"In a second." She grinned. "Give me a number between one and a hundred."
"Uh, uh, eighty-seven." He glared at her. "Why all these questions?"
In answer, she passed him both folded notes. He opened the first one, to see the number 87 looking back at him. His breath caught in his throat, and he slowly unfolded the second one. Written on it were the words 'mint choc chip'.
Carefully, he turned the notes over, looking to see if other numbers or flavours had been written on them. Nothing. Finally, he looked back up at the girl, half-expecting to see her seat empty. She was still there.
"We have Thinkers," she said simply. "Sorry about the second-rate magic act. I wanted you to be sure that I hadn't faked the notes somehow."
"You have Thinkers," he repeated. "Most Thinkers can barely predict the weather. How …?"
She shrugged. "I'm a management Thinker. I can see who the best person for any given job is, and advise them on how to do it best. That's how I found them and built this team. And that's how I found you. So, are you interested?"
This was going too fast. "Um … can I have a while to think about it?"
"Sure." She slid a card across the table. "Call this number if you decide to take me up on it."
He picked it up and examined it. The word MANAGEMENT was printed on it, along with a cell number. "So … you're calling yourself Management?"
Shrugging, she waggled her hand from side to side. "It's more of a job description than a code-name right now. We're very costume-light at the moment."
"Uh … okay." That didn't fit any superhero team he'd ever heard of before, but she had said that they operated in the shadows. "Thanks."
"You're welcome." She got up and pushed the chair in. "Have a good one."
He sat and watched as she walked out. Slowly, he ate his fries as he continued to people-watch, but his heart wasn't in it anymore. The pieces of paper were still in front of him, still bearing the number and the ice-cream flavour.
The girl had been so certain of herself, so centred. He wished he could be like that, and knew he never would. Even before his powers, he'd had a tendency to step back, to second-guess himself. The one time he had acted on an impulse, he'd nearly died.
Again, he read the name on the card. He'd thought when he got powers that … well, not that he'd learn the secrets of the universe, but things about the cape aspect of society would make more sense to him. And in all fairness, some of it had. But this encounter, with a bunch of heroic capes acting outside even the understood guidelines of how superheroes operated, had thrown all that on its ear.
When the fries were finished, he got up and headed outside. There was a bus waiting at the stop, so he boarded it. All the way home, he wrestled with the problem. What do I do?
He didn't want to be a flashy hero, out in public, going after bad guys in the name of justice. The few times he'd costumed up and gone out, it had been more from a sense of obligation and to test out exactly what his powers could do rather than a need to punch evil in the teeth. This new team didn't show up as people who wanted him to be loud and proud with his abilities, but they still wanted him for his abilities. Which meant they'd want him to get into fights.
It was a problem.
Getting off the bus, he walked the one and a half blocks home, still ruminating over the dilemma. His mother was in the kitchen when he came in the front door. She called out a greeting which he automatically returned, then headed upstairs to his bedroom.
Closing the door, he kicked his shoes off, then reclined on his bed. His phone was in his pocket, where it had been all this time. Slowly, he pulled it out and dialled a number from memory.
It rang twice, then a familiar woman's voice answered. "Good afternoon, Browbeat. Did you have any more questions, or have you decided to join the Wards?"
"Neither," he said. "I'm looking for advice. Another team, one that's not in the public eye, has approached me, in my civilian identity. Somehow, they knew I was a cape. They showed me evidence that they were involved in the capture of the Merchants and of Lung, and they claimed responsibility for the Empire Eighty-Eight and Coil as well. What do I do?"
There was a pause, then a man's voice came on the line. "Browbeat, this is Deputy Director Renick. Have these people threatened you in any way, said anything about outing your secret identity?"
"N-no," he replied. "It was all very polite and civilised. She—the girl—called herself Management, but said it was more her job title than her code-name. I didn't feel threatened at all, the whole time."
"Hmm." Deputy Director Renick paused for a moment. "I want you to listen very, very carefully …"
Taylor
As the bus with Browbeat in it pulled away from the stop, I headed down the street with Dinah and Lisa to where Dad waited with his car. He'd been in the food court with Andrea, just play-acting a couple doing couple things (though in my opinion it was more than play-acting on both sides) to keep an eye on the action.
I climbed in first, so Dinah could sit in the middle with Lisa on her right. Nobody said a word until seat-belts were clicked and Dad had pulled out into traffic. We didn't think we were under surveillance, but there was no such thing as being too careful.
"So, how do you think it went?" asked Dad.
I'd already rolled the dice. "No matter how Dinah approached it, we had at best a forty-one percent chance of him stepping up. But I've got an eighty-four percent chance of him contacting the PRT, and them advising him to join us as a mole."
Lisa nodded. "That's my read, too. If we hadn't acted, the slackening in overall crime would've had him hanging up the mask inside a year. As it is, we get a member who thinks we don't know about his little secret."
"Well, that's two of you," Andrea observed.
Dinah shrugged. "I told him my power picked him as the best person for the job. I didn't tell him that the job was 'mole'."
"And you're certain we need him?" Dad's tone wasn't overly pleased. I could definitely understand why.
"Yes." Dinah nodded. "We need a mid-range melee person. Plus, he can be bulletproof, he's less likely to require Amy's assistance because he can patch up minor wounds, and he has other capabilities which I personally think will be useful in future."
"You know, Vicky's good at the melee stuff; plus, she's also bulletproof," Lisa offered. "She can do everything you just said except the patching up of injuries. Besides, she can fly and he can't."
"We've been over this," Dinah said, her tone just a little acerbic. "Vicky won't always be available, and when she gets enthusiastic she's been known to break things. Browbeat's a lot more reserved. Besides, we can use him to feed Director Piggot the information we want her to have about us."
I scratched the back of my neck. "Okay, so if I get this right, Browbeat thinks he'll be working with us as a secret mole for the PRT, and the PRT thinks we don't know about him being a mole. So the only people in the know is us. Are us. Whatever."
"Sounds about right, hon," Andrea agreed. "Personally, I still think we should've tried to recruit that Vista kid. She does not look happy on the bottom end of the totem pole."
Dinah shook her head. "She's not mentally ready for something like that."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Thirteen point five six one percent chance of agreeing, twenty-two point one nine three percent chance of pretending to agree and taking it to the Director. Sixty-four point one three seven percent chance of just turning us down altogether." These were also rolls I'd done in advance.
"Long story short?" said Lisa. "She's a good little soldier, and she'll always be a good little soldier."
"Even though she'd be happier in our team." Andrea sighed. "Well, maybe she'll change her mind at some point."
Dad cleared his throat. "Well, there's no perfect solution for her situation, so let's leave things alone on that front for the moment. On the other hand, it might be an idea to decide what level of secrecy we're going to be using with this guy. He wouldn't know Dinah from any other girl of her age, but there's zero chance he won't recognise Amy and Vicky unmasked, and Kayden is pretty obvious as Purity when she lights up."
"That's a good point," I said. "Let me get together with Dinah and Lisa, and see if we can't figure out how to work this."
Dinah grinned. "Strategy engine …"
"For the win," Lisa finished.
"Darn tootin'."
Browbeat
Lawrence pulled out the card Management had given him, and studied it. He wasn't at all sure that he liked what he was about to do, but Deputy Director Renick had assured him it was entirely innocuous. Or as innocuous as infiltrating a teenager into a shadowy cape team could get, anyway.
Renick hadn't tasked him to find out secret identities or sabotage their missions, which was good, mainly because he would've refused. His entire job was to watch and assist, and report back with his view of how the team operated.
One of the things Renick (and by extension, Director Piggot—Lawrence wasn't stupid) wanted to know was exactly how the team got their information; "they've got Thinkers" was a little vague. Another was to settle the question whether or not the elusive Purity was working with them. And finally, any hints as to the cape name of the hydrokinetic would also be good.
Lawrence decided that he'd cross those bridges when he came to them. Right now, he needed to dial the number and pretend to be interested in the offer. Of course, if their Thinkers sniffed out his intent and called him on it (as they'd be totally justified in doing), he would back off just as fast as he could.
Calling up the keypad on his phone, he tapped in the number, one digit at a time. It rang exactly once before it was picked up. "Hello, Management speaking."
"Hi, yeah, this is Browbeat," he said. "I've been thinking about it, and I want to work with you."
"Excellent," she said, even sounding like she meant it. "Just in time, too. We were planning on doing a mission tonight, and your capabilities will suit the parameters right down to the ground. Can you be ready by nine?"
"Nine?" He blinked and looked at his bedside clock. It was barely four in the afternoon. "Uh, yeah, sure. I can do that."
"Good to hear. Where would you like to be picked up from?"
He thought quickly. Either they didn't know his real name and address, or they were pretending not to in order to lull his suspicions. It was an article of faith that Thinkers loved to show off. If Management knew more about him, she almost certainly would've dropped a hint by now.
"There's a bus stop at Evanston and Craddock," he said. "You know of it?"
"We can find it," she said. "Costume most of the way up, but try to be inconspicuous."
He nodded from habit. "I can do that." Already, he was considering how he was going to sneak out. He figured this could be really cool, or it might be a total catastrophe.
"So, uh, who are we going after?" he asked as an afterthought.
"We were thinking of shutting down Uber and Leet. Don't be late."
The call ended, leaving him staring at the phone.
Uber and Leet? Oh, boy. The odds of 'catastrophe' had just improved considerably.
Leet
"And that's the show for today. See you next week. Hopefully Leet's eyebrows will have started to grow back by then."
Uber looked over at him, and Leet mustered a smile. "Haha, yeah." Reaching out, he turned the camera off. "Seriously, did you have to remind everyone that I lost my eyebrows again?"
"Trust me, they don't need reminding." Uber smirked. "There's a site online that tracks the results of your tech malfunctions. Pretty sure that's going to be updated as soon as this episode gets posted."
"Great." Leet rolled his eyes sarcastically. "Remind me again why you hang out with a loser like me?"
"Well, because you're not a loser, for one thing," Uber told him seriously. "You're my buddy. My bro. We're a team, and don't you ever forget it."
"So how come we're never laughing about stupid stuff that happens to you?" Leet was feeling a little mollified, but not totally.
"Oh, there's an Uber's Greatest Hits site, too." Uber snorted. "All the times I face-planted because I was aiming my focus at the wrong technique at the wrong time. It's just that what your stuff does to you tends to leave marks."
"Tell me about it," groused Leet. "Okay, so you're gonna edit it and put it up now?"
Uber nodded. "Yeah, I'm going to just look over it and do any touch-ups that it needs. Want to give me a hand?"
"Nah." Leet chuckled wryly and shook his head. "You're the one who's good at that, and we both know it. I'm going to go look over the next project, see what I need to do to make it roll."
"Right, right." Uber paused in the middle of putting the headphones on. "Remind me again, what was that one?"
"Jeez, dude." Leet rolled his eyes. "I can't believe you've forgotten. We're going old school."
"Ah, yeah." Uber grinned, and they shared a high-five. "I can't wait to see how they react to us doing—"
Glory Girl
On a Rooftop Opposite
"Pac-Man?" Browbeat looked incredulous. "Really?"
"Really." Vicky, wearing a dark brown wig over her golden curls and a pair of heavy goggles to obscure her features, nodded in confirmation. "That's what they said. Leet will be working on a Pac-Man setup, and there's a strong chance that it'll be operational enough to give us trouble if we don't shut it down hard."
Specifically, Lisa and Taylor had come up with the Pac-Man diagnosis, while Taylor had given an eighty-seven percent chance for the system to be online. Vicky was gradually coming on board with the idea of working with no fewer than three different Thinkers, one of whom was an ex-supervillain, but some of the stuff they pulled off still looked like black magic, pure and simple.
We haven't got anything like this back in New Wave. Maybe that's our loss.
"But how do you even know that?" Browbeat's question followed what Vicky's thought process would've been, not so long ago. "And how did you even manage to get the layout of the base?"
Taylor had explained this one to her, though she couldn't pass the explanation on to Browbeat for obvious reasons. If I'd know it in the future, my power can look ahead and tell me about it now. Still, it had been weird as fuck to watch a handful of toothpicks get tossed in the air and fall into a precise building layout on the table.
"Well, you know how Watchdog's got those Thinkers that sit around and give various hints and ideas for the way things are likely to go?" There'd been a TV spot on them recently, though it had understandably glossed over a few details.
"Yeah …?" Browbeat sounded doubtful.
Vicky snorted with amusement. "This is nothing like that. Our guys aren't guessing. They know their stuff. And you and me, we've been picked as the best people for the job. You know, in case you were wondering why we don't have anyone else along."
"That had crossed my mind," Browbeat confirmed. "But what if it's too much for us? What if shit goes sideways and one of them gets a lucky hit in? I mean, they always say, don't ever attack a Tinker in his base."
Did I ask this many questions? Vicky suspected she knew the answer to that one. "Chill. Just because we're the only visible ones, doesn't mean we're the only ones on site. We have backup. The big hitters are ready to come in and level the place if need be. It's just that we'd rather not do that to a building full of Leet's tech." The percentage chance of something bad happening if they did wasn't high, but it was in the double digits, and Vicky didn't like that.
"Okay, good to hear. So, what are we waiting for?" Browbeat was starting to bulk up, muscles bulging out everywhere as he exerted his power.
"The right time. In about three minutes, Uber will be distracted and Leet won't be watching the monitor screens. That'll give us enough time to bust in before they know we're here." She was seriously starting to wonder how she'd managed before joining this new team.
"Okay." He nodded, apparently accepting her words. "Hey, I've got an idea. Management said you've got a hydrokinetic on your team. Why don't they just flush the entire base out with water? Short everything out and neutralise Leet's stuff before we ever get inside?"
"Sources say Leet's stuff is likely to react unpredictably. Some of it might actually explode. This is the most effective, risk-free way of slapping the cuffs on them."
He shook his head. "How do they even know that?"
Vicky snickered. "Thinker bullshit is bullshit, I guess?"
Browbeat gave her a dirty look. She knew how he felt, but damn it was good to be in the know.
Leet
The shell of the Pac-Man rover looked bare, almost skeletal, but that was because he didn't have the exterior hologram activated. He reclined on the laid-back pilot seat, fiddling with the settings of the teleport mechanism. When Pac-Man ate things, they had to go somewhere, after all, and there wasn't enough room in the chassis to store more than two or three people. Also, if they were in the chassis, they'd be in there with him, and he didn't much feel like being beaten up by the general public.
As it was, instead of a hover-field or anti-grav tech, he was going to have to depend on wheels to get around, because he'd used up a lot of the fancy options early on. Gloomily, he anticipated a future where he'd be hard put to build a simple walking mech without powering it via steam or something.
But that wasn't today. Today, he was working on an icon of the computer gaming age. Uber would be a 'ghost', herding the participants in his game around the force-field maze they were going to set up. Anyone 'eaten' by the Pac-Man rover would be teleported back to the basement of this building, where Uber and he would release them from, once the game was over.
He hummed loudly and tunelessly, ignoring the incessant beeping from the monitors in the corner. If it was something important, Uber would deal with it. He had Tinkering to do.
When the door to his lab smashed apart into several large chunks, followed by a flying figure, he was surprised, but not so much that he couldn't act. Leading with her fist, she flew directly at him. Straight at the mouth of the Pac-Man rover.
There was no time to form a coherent thought, much less work out a plan of action. But his finger was already on a very important switch.
He flicked it.
Browbeat
A Minute Earlier
With her hands under his arms, Aeglea (he had no idea what the code-name meant, but she'd said it was a classical reference) carried Lawrence down to the side door of the building. He poised himself to kick it in, but she grabbed it and ripped it clear out of the frame.
Okay, then. She's definitely stronger than me. But he still had no idea who she might be. There just weren't enough independents running around for a teenage Alexandria package to go unnoticed.
But right now was not the time to start worrying about that sort of thing. Now was punch time.
He moved in through the now-open doorway, keeping low despite his current bulk. Aeglea drifted in beside him, a few feet off the ground. They headed down a corridor, alert for any sort of security measures. Leet wasn't exactly in the top tier of Tinkers, but it didn't take much to build something crude and nasty.
He spotted a security camera and pointed it out to Aeglea, who promptly ripped it out of the wall in a shower of sparks. Still, no alarm had been raised, which meant the gamer duo were either out and about, or just not paying attention.
When they came up to a door, Aeglea made a little half-bow and gestured to it; your turn. Grinning, he smashed a kick into it with all the power his current bulk permitted. It was enough; the door gave way and swung open, hanging half off one hinge.
Within was a combination living room/gaming area, which matched with the pencil-drawn building plan Aeglea had shown him (where she'd gotten it, he had no idea). Seated at a computer console was none other than Uber, headphones on, watching something on the screen. As Lawrence and Aeglea entered, he apparently noticed something amiss, because he turned his head toward them. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to shout.
Already keyed up, Lawrence launched himself across the room and tackled the supervillain clear out of his chair. As fit and muscular as Uber was, Lawrence had packed on twice the bulk, and they slammed into the floor with bruising force. Well, bruising to Uber; Lawrence's skin-level force field cushioned him nicely, so he wasn't even winded.
As he flipped the villain over to secure his hands behind him, Lawrence registered Aeglea flashing across the room toward another door; behind that, as far as they knew, was where Leet did his Tinkering. At this point, it was a gamble whether or not Leet had heard them. To paraphrase a saying Lawrence had heard once, it was better to assume he had and be wrong than to assume he hadn't and be wrong.
The doors crashed into pieces, and Aeglea disappeared within. That is, she didn't fly out of sight; she flew into the room, and between one instant and the next … vanished.
"What the hell?" muttered Lawrence. Flipping the prepped zip-tie over Uber's hands, he ripped it tight. He was under no illusions that it would hold the man long, but hopefully it would be long enough.
Leaping to his feet, he headed toward the smashed-open door. "Aeglea?" he called out. "You okay?" While calling out might alert Leet to his presence, he absolutely wanted Aeglea to know he was there, in case she tried to punch his head off his shoulders by accident.
He didn't hear her voice calling out. What he did hear sounded so out of place that he didn't recognise it for a moment. But then he saw the massive rounded yellow thing trundling toward him, the huge mouth opening and closing rhythmically, and he knew what it was supposed to be.
wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka
Oh, shit. She wasn't kidding. "Pac-Man?" he said out loud, incredulously. "Really?"
It surged toward him, and he jumped backward out of the way. "Only the greatest video game hero of all time!" Leet's voice sounded from somewhere within. "Om nom nom, motherfucker!"
"What'd you do with Aeglea?" Lawrence dodged back again. Grabbing up a chair, he heaved it at the huge yellow monstrosity as it followed him. The mouth snapped at the flying piece of furniture; when it opened again, the chair was gone.
"Don't worry," Leet assured him, even as the Pac-Man turned to pursue Lawrence again. "She's safe. She only got eaten, that's all."
"What do you mean, 'only got eaten'?" Lawrence wrenched the wide-screen TV free of its attendant cords, and heaved that at the monster next. Just as the chair had disappeared, so did the TV.
"Hey, have a bit of respect," Leet complained. "Those things are expensive!"
"Really." Lawrence dodged back again. Trying to run around the monstrosity wasn't doing any good at all; it could swivel in place faster than he could get around it. "My heart bleeds. Bring Aeglea back, now!"
"What, so two of you can beat on me? Yeah, that's gonna happen." The Pac-Man trundled toward Lawrence again. "C'mere, you. 'Get in mah belleh!'"
"And that's a totally different franchise, you realise that, right?" Lawrence evaded another snap from the huge yellow mouth.
"Leet!" shouted a feminine voice as light flooded through the room. "Stand down! Browbeat, are you okay? Where's Aeglea?"
Lawrence turned to look, then had to shade his eyes. "Dunno! He said his thing ate her!" And that was when he had his brainwave.
"Fuck!" squawked Leet, the Pac-Man jittering between Lawrence and the newcomer.
In that moment, Lawrence took his opportunity. Darting over to where Uber was still struggling with his bonds, he picked the man up and heaved him bodily at the Pac-Man monstrosity.
The Pac-Man froze, just for half a second, long enough for Uber to vanish inside … a hologram? That's covered by a hologram? Lawrence didn't have time to think about it; gathering himself, he leaped after Uber, into the thing's mouth.
It didn't snap at him; instead, he passed through the hologram, just as Uber had, and landed in a cramped control cabin, on top of both Uber and Leet. Leet, still trying to push Uber off him, looked up as Lawrence loomed over him. "Oh, shit."
"Uh huh." Lawrence shoved Uber aside and took hold of Leet's shirt front. "Shut this thing down right the fuck now, and bring Aeglea back from wherever you put her. Or I'm going to see how many pieces I can break it into, with you inside."
"Okay, okay," whined Leet. "Geez, enough with the threats of violence." He flicked a switch, and the hologram faded away, the power winding down. "I give, I give."
Lawrence didn't release Leet as he looked around. "So where's Aeglea?"
Vicky
Stupid, stupid, stupid. I flew right into the trap.
Vicky backed up to one end of the room—a basement, if she were any judge—and flew full-speed at the door. Six inches before she would've impacted it, she hit the force field instead. It didn't stop her instantly, but compressed, squeezing tighter and tighter until it rebounded, flinging her away into the centre of the room.
This didn't surprise her; exactly the same thing had happened, the last ten times she'd tried to bust her way out of the room. It did, however, irritate her. Kinetic redirection took her one big strength and turned it against her.
I guess Leet set it up so if he teleported a dozen people down here, they couldn't just break down the door and get away.
Her next big worry was about Browbeat. The guy was still a rookie, and he was facing Leet's tech all alone. God knew what else it could do. Though the chair and the big-screen TV (sadly, broken on impact) that had fallen out of midair where she'd appeared indicated there was something still happening. She just hated being left out of the action.
As soon as the guys realise that something's gone wrong, they'll move in. But it would be great to bust my way out of here before I actually need rescuing.
Drawing back her fist, she prepared to throw another punch at the door. It wouldn't do anything, she knew, but maybe she was wearing the field down or something—
—and then the force field vanished.
"Fuck yes!" Grabbing the door, she ripped it off its mountings and tossed it to one side, then flew up the stairwell thus revealed. It took just a few moments more of smashing doors until she found the same area where they'd seen Uber.
The room looked a little messier than before. A basic spherical framework on wheels sat in the middle of the room, with Uber, Leet and Browbeat all piled up on a built-in control seat. Kayden, off to one side and beginning to let her glow diminish, looked around as Vicky flew in. "Ah, there you were. I was beginning to wonder."
"Yeah, me too." Vicky pointed at the framework. "Please tell me that was supposed to be the Indiana Jones rolling boulder." Because if it isn't ...
"As if!" sputtered Leet. "Pac-Man's a classic!"
Vicky facepalmed. I got eaten by Pac-Man? Ames is gonna laugh herself sick.
Later
Hebert Household
"Well, I have to admit, Browbeat came through with flying colours," Danny said, carrying the tray of drinks out to the living room. "He held up his end of the fight, and figured out the solution."
"While Vicky got eaten by Pac-Man," Annette said with a giggle as she took one. "Thanks, Mr. H."
"Now, now, be nice," Amy admonished her with a smirk. "He was probably just after some fast food."
"Oh, ha ha," Vicky retorted, rolling her eyes. "I just didn't expect a teleport, okay?" She accepted a glass as well. "Thanks."
Dinah raised her eyebrows. "I believe I might have mentioned something about being no-sold?"
"That you did, hon." Andrea reached over and ruffled her hair. "It was a good call. He supported his teammates, and pulled off a win."
Taylor raised her glass to the others in a toast. "Another villain gang off the streets, however temporarily. Next up, the Empire."
Janet and Kayden raised their glasses with everyone else. "The Empire."
There would be preparation to take care of, but Danny had faith in the team.
Together, as Dinah had put it, they were stronger than the sum of their parts.
End of Part Nineteen
Part Nineteen: Expanding the Team
[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Taylor
We converged back at Kayden's apartment, where Theo met us at the front door. "She's sleeping," he whispered. "How did it go?"
Annette grinned broadly and gave him a high-five with the hand that wasn't holding Amy's. "Operation Fleeing Goblin was a total success, bro," she told him with a broad grin. "Lung bought into it; hook, line and sinker. Then Janet trapped him in a water bubble, and Vicky played whack-a-Lung until he ran out of air."
He let out a sigh of relief as the rest of us trooped past him into the apartment. "The plan worked, then. I thought it would, but you never know until you try."
"You two gave us the best run-down on how he'd react and how to draw him in," Lisa said. "Between your knowledge of his motives and Annette's tactical know-how, this was definitely your win as well."
I thought he was about to answer that, but then his eyes went to Kayden. She was perfectly fine, thanks to Amy, but her costume was still a little scorched here and there. "Mom!" he said, still keeping his voice down but with concern evident in his tone. "Are you okay? Did he get you?"
"I'm fine," she assured him. "He tagged me a little bit, but it just made the plan work even better, and Amy fixed me afterward." She smiled broadly. "You should've seen him swimming around in that globe of water Janet had him in, like the world's biggest, ugliest goldfish. And every time he stuck his head out …"
"Pow!" Vicky whispered the word and mimed a swing of her fist. "Most fun I've had in ages."
Dad turned to Janet, who'd been quiet for the whole ride back. "You okay?"
"Yeah." Janet nodded. "I think I am. Working with all of you, taking menaces like Oni Lee and Lung off the streets, this is good. We're actually making a difference … right?"
"Oh, we absolutely are," I assured her. "This is what teamwork is all about. On our own, no single one of us could've done what we did tonight, or even when we took down Oni Lee. Working together, especially with someone like Dinah to manage our capabilities, we're capable of far more than the sum of our parts."
"What Taylor said," Dinah agreed. "I know some of you might be used to more freewheeling cape fights, instead of the paint-by-numbers stuff we're doing these days, but …"
"Oh, God, no." Amy rolled her eyes dramatically. "Those fights were nightmares. I had no idea who was going to get hurt, or if I was going to be able to get to them in time. The way we're doing it in this team? It's a dream come true. One, two, three, done."
Andrea tilted her head. "So usually it's a case of just go up to whichever bad guy doesn't have someone on them, and hope they don't have a power that'll totally no-sell what you can do? That's no fun."
"Also that they're as tough as they look, so I don't accidentally splatter them all over the nearest building," Vicky added. "For a while there, I'd actually wait until someone got hit by someone else, then figure out how hard I needed to hit them from that. Not the best strategy, just saying."
Lisa grinned. "So then you had Brandish yelling at you for being too hesitant. Which led in turn to stuff like the Great Bus Debacle."
Dinah cleared her throat quietly as Vicky facepalmed. "As much as we all want to hear that story—I know I do—it's getting close to my bedtime, and I'm pretty sure everyone else wants to go home too. So I just need to ask this question: does anyone have a problem with the way we took Lung down tonight? Any suggestions, queries, or objections? Ways we could've done it better?"
I knew why she was asking that—her power needed all the input—but it still felt a little odd to have her taking the lead when she was the youngest person in the room by a couple of years. I shook my head, then glanced at Lisa and Vicky. Neither of them seemed to have problems.
"None whatsoever," Kayden said. "You're batting a thousand, so far. I can't guarantee it will stay the same, but right now I'm not going to try to fix what's not broken."
"Yeah," said Andrea. "Just watching from the outside, you guys are like a well-oiled machine. Nobody has to do it all, and everyone's got a part to play."
Dinah looked around the room, observing each of us in turn. Whatever she saw must have satisfied her curiosity, because she nodded. "Good," she said. "Tomorrow night, we'll decide who we're going after next; the remains of the Empire, or Uber and Leet. Also, I have a feeling we need to recruit, so we can talk about that too."
"What?" I asked, remembering only at the last moment to keep my voice down. "Recruit? We're kicking ass. Why do we need more people?"
Dinah met my gaze with certainty in her eyes. "Because there are people out there who can no-sell us as we are. I don't intend to let that happen."
Almost by instinct, I took out a six-sided die and flicked it into the air, then held out my hand to catch it. While it was still airborne, I told it to bring up a number relating to how correct she was, with one being 'least' to six being 'most'. It smacked onto my palm, with six dots staring back at me. "Ah," I said. "Right."
"Understood." Dad nodded to Dinah. "Taylor and I can drop you home. Janet?"
Andrea fielded that one. "My spare bedroom's still clear."
Janet nodded. "Thanks. I still need to get a place of my own. I don't like living on charity."
"Pfft. You're one of us now. It's not charity. It's teamwork. This is me doing my part." Andrea hooked her head at the door. "C'mon. On the way, you can tell Annette and Amy and me how cool it was to put Lung through the wash cycle."
"Uh, I can give you a lift home, Ames," Vicky offered.
Amy glanced at her, then back to Annette. "I'm good. Let Carol know I'll be home shortly."
One by one, we filed out the door again. As the last one out, I paused and nodded to Kayden. "We kicked ass tonight."
She smiled back tiredly. "We definitely did."
<><>
Hillside Mall
Two Days Later
"Excuse me, is this chair taken?"
The teenage boy looked around from his study of the crowd in the busy food court; a girl two or three years younger than him was standing there. "Uh, no, it's not," he replied, a little awkwardly. Social skills were not his thing, which was why he was people-watching in the first place.
Letting her take the chair so she can sit with her friends is obviously the polite thing to do.
"Thank you." However, to his surprise, she pulled the chair out and sat opposite him. "Can we talk?"
His attention, until then half on the crowd around them, snapped fully on to the girl. She had brown hair, and looked twelve or thirteen or so. Not anyone I know. Belatedly, he realised that she had no food with her; he had bought fries so he wouldn't appear out of place while he observed the crowd, but she had none at all. She specifically wants to talk to me. Is this some sort of prank? "What's going on? Who put you up to this?"
"Nobody," she assured him. She didn't seem to be bubbling over with mirth, as he would expect a prankster to be. "I just want to talk to you about something that we have in common."
"And what might that be?" He kept his voice neutral and tried to keep his face the same way.
If this is a gang recruitment, I'm outta here. If she's trying to pick me up, I'm definitely outta here.
"Powers."
Her delivery was calm, smooth and devastating. One word that rocked him back on his metaphorical heels.
Did she just say—
"What?" His voice sounded thin and reedy in his own ears.
"You heard me." She glanced around, not obvious, a flick of the eyes to the left and right. "I'm not going to say it again, but it's what we have in common. You've only recently gotten them, right?"
He nodded jerkily. There was no sense in trying to lie. He hadn't given himself away—his powers were hard to spot in action, by definition—so she had to be some kind of Thinker. "The—the PRT knows about them," he said. Maybe that would give her the message to back off.
"But you're not in the Wards yet." It wasn't a question. She knew.
"I … no." He was bad at social situations. Having some kid just come up out of nowhere and start talking about what should be the biggest secret of his life … he had no idea how to handle it. Saying as little as possible was his go-to, and even that wasn't working.
She leaned back in her seat. "Are you sure you want to even join them? You're not a combative person by nature. You prefer to be in the background. Would you really be comfortable wearing a costume alongside them, being in the public eye like that?"
She was leading up to a point; that much, he could figure out. Exactly what her point was, he wasn't sure yet. He corrected himself: I know where she's going with this, but I don't want to think about it.
"You're trying to poach me out from under them, aren't you?" he asked, keeping his voice down. It wasn't hard to figure out, and he'd never been stupid. She'd laid out all the clues, probably to see how he reacted.
"I am." Her tone was steady and up-front. The expression on her face remained polite and friendly; two strangers chatting in a mall to pass the time.
"… wait." He frowned. "I doubt you came here from out of town to recruit me, so what team do you belong to?" He wasn't aware of any teams in Brockton Bay that had a twelve-year-old as part of their number. "Am I your first recruit?"
If I am, that's a hard nope.
She chuckled. "No. We've been operating in the city for a while now. I spoke to the others and they agreed that we don't have many medium-heavy hitters. Thinkers, yes. Heavy-heavy hitters, yes. But nothing in between. Plus, you've got other capabilities that I think would make you a worthwhile recruit."
Now he was totally lost. "What's your team name?"
She leaned back in her seat. "We don't have one. We operate in the shadows."
Talking to her was like grasping fog. "So, what have you done recently?"
Lowering her voice, she leaned forward again. "Empire Eighty-Eight. Merchants. Coil. ABB. That's what we've done."
He blinked, staring at her. It was true that since losing Kaiser and Hookwolf—the details on the villains' deaths were still sketchy—and having Cricket, Stormtiger and Alabaster arrested by the PRT, the Empire had been left dramatically on the back foot. Nobody quite knew what Purity was up to, though rumour claimed that she was still seen occasionally, flying around the city.
He'd also heard that the Merchants had gone down hard, that Coil had been arrested after being dragged bodily out of his flooding underground base, and that the ABB had been picked off over three nights, the bound and unconscious capes left for the PRT to find. Up until this point, he hadn't connected all these arrests together. If true, then this was massive.
But was it true?
Could she be just running a scam on him?
She nodded, as though reading his thoughts. "I get it. I'm just a kid to you, making bold claims. You're going to want some sort of proof, right?"
"It would be good, yeah." He didn't like being pushy, but sometimes it was necessary.
"Good. You're thinking. I like that." Without taking her eyes off him, she raised her hand and snapped her fingers. A moment later, two girls walked past the table on her side, coming from two different directions, each one dropping a folded piece of paper on the table. They strolled on, not even bothering to look back, as he stared.
"What was that about?" he asked.
"I'll show you in a minute." She had her phone out now. Turning the screen toward him, she started a film-clip playing. "We don't have footage for Kaiser or Hookwolf—those were kind of ad hoc affairs—but here's the Merchants."
In the footage, he watched as water poured out of the doors and windows of a house. It looked like a movie, only the quality of the imagery wasn't good enough. In the next moment, Skidmark burst out the front door in a wash of water and sprawled on the road. Then he got up, threw a coloured field at the asphalt under his feet, and began to skate off … right up until he ran face-first into a fine-stranded net that had been strung across the road. It wrapped around him, tighter and tighter, until the villain was completely bound up.
He blinked. "Whoa …"
The girl grinned and tilted her head. "There's more." She turned the phone so she could see what she was doing, and flicked up a photo. "Whirligig." Similarly wrapped up, the Merchant lay in a pool of water in what looked like a back yard. "Squealer." This time, it was an alleyway, with the Tinker bound in a fishing net.
"That's impressive." He frowned. He and water had a … contentious relationship, considering his Trigger event. "How did you do the water thing?"
"We have a hydrokinetic." She flicked to another photo, of Lung lying face-up in a pool of water, unconscious. The villain lacked his trademark metal mask, but the dragon tattoos were hard to miss. "She's very, very good at what she does."
"Jesus." He rubbed at his forehead. "Okay, I get it. You're not just pulling my leg."
"No, I'm not." She picked up both folded pieces of paper, holding them between two fingers. "Quick question: what's your favourite ice cream flavour?"
Unprepared for the hard left turn in topic, he floundered briefly. "Uh, mint choc chip. Why?"
"In a second." She grinned. "Give me a number between one and a hundred."
"Uh, uh, eighty-seven." He glared at her. "Why all these questions?"
In answer, she passed him both folded notes. He opened the first one, to see the number 87 looking back at him. His breath caught in his throat, and he slowly unfolded the second one. Written on it were the words 'mint choc chip'.
Carefully, he turned the notes over, looking to see if other numbers or flavours had been written on them. Nothing. Finally, he looked back up at the girl, half-expecting to see her seat empty. She was still there.
"We have Thinkers," she said simply. "Sorry about the second-rate magic act. I wanted you to be sure that I hadn't faked the notes somehow."
"You have Thinkers," he repeated. "Most Thinkers can barely predict the weather. How …?"
She shrugged. "I'm a management Thinker. I can see who the best person for any given job is, and advise them on how to do it best. That's how I found them and built this team. And that's how I found you. So, are you interested?"
This was going too fast. "Um … can I have a while to think about it?"
"Sure." She slid a card across the table. "Call this number if you decide to take me up on it."
He picked it up and examined it. The word MANAGEMENT was printed on it, along with a cell number. "So … you're calling yourself Management?"
Shrugging, she waggled her hand from side to side. "It's more of a job description than a code-name right now. We're very costume-light at the moment."
"Uh … okay." That didn't fit any superhero team he'd ever heard of before, but she had said that they operated in the shadows. "Thanks."
"You're welcome." She got up and pushed the chair in. "Have a good one."
He sat and watched as she walked out. Slowly, he ate his fries as he continued to people-watch, but his heart wasn't in it anymore. The pieces of paper were still in front of him, still bearing the number and the ice-cream flavour.
The girl had been so certain of herself, so centred. He wished he could be like that, and knew he never would. Even before his powers, he'd had a tendency to step back, to second-guess himself. The one time he had acted on an impulse, he'd nearly died.
Again, he read the name on the card. He'd thought when he got powers that … well, not that he'd learn the secrets of the universe, but things about the cape aspect of society would make more sense to him. And in all fairness, some of it had. But this encounter, with a bunch of heroic capes acting outside even the understood guidelines of how superheroes operated, had thrown all that on its ear.
When the fries were finished, he got up and headed outside. There was a bus waiting at the stop, so he boarded it. All the way home, he wrestled with the problem. What do I do?
He didn't want to be a flashy hero, out in public, going after bad guys in the name of justice. The few times he'd costumed up and gone out, it had been more from a sense of obligation and to test out exactly what his powers could do rather than a need to punch evil in the teeth. This new team didn't show up as people who wanted him to be loud and proud with his abilities, but they still wanted him for his abilities. Which meant they'd want him to get into fights.
It was a problem.
Getting off the bus, he walked the one and a half blocks home, still ruminating over the dilemma. His mother was in the kitchen when he came in the front door. She called out a greeting which he automatically returned, then headed upstairs to his bedroom.
Closing the door, he kicked his shoes off, then reclined on his bed. His phone was in his pocket, where it had been all this time. Slowly, he pulled it out and dialled a number from memory.
It rang twice, then a familiar woman's voice answered. "Good afternoon, Browbeat. Did you have any more questions, or have you decided to join the Wards?"
"Neither," he said. "I'm looking for advice. Another team, one that's not in the public eye, has approached me, in my civilian identity. Somehow, they knew I was a cape. They showed me evidence that they were involved in the capture of the Merchants and of Lung, and they claimed responsibility for the Empire Eighty-Eight and Coil as well. What do I do?"
There was a pause, then a man's voice came on the line. "Browbeat, this is Deputy Director Renick. Have these people threatened you in any way, said anything about outing your secret identity?"
"N-no," he replied. "It was all very polite and civilised. She—the girl—called herself Management, but said it was more her job title than her code-name. I didn't feel threatened at all, the whole time."
"Hmm." Deputy Director Renick paused for a moment. "I want you to listen very, very carefully …"
<><>
Taylor
As the bus with Browbeat in it pulled away from the stop, I headed down the street with Dinah and Lisa to where Dad waited with his car. He'd been in the food court with Andrea, just play-acting a couple doing couple things (though in my opinion it was more than play-acting on both sides) to keep an eye on the action.
I climbed in first, so Dinah could sit in the middle with Lisa on her right. Nobody said a word until seat-belts were clicked and Dad had pulled out into traffic. We didn't think we were under surveillance, but there was no such thing as being too careful.
"So, how do you think it went?" asked Dad.
I'd already rolled the dice. "No matter how Dinah approached it, we had at best a forty-one percent chance of him stepping up. But I've got an eighty-four percent chance of him contacting the PRT, and them advising him to join us as a mole."
Lisa nodded. "That's my read, too. If we hadn't acted, the slackening in overall crime would've had him hanging up the mask inside a year. As it is, we get a member who thinks we don't know about his little secret."
"Well, that's two of you," Andrea observed.
Dinah shrugged. "I told him my power picked him as the best person for the job. I didn't tell him that the job was 'mole'."
"And you're certain we need him?" Dad's tone wasn't overly pleased. I could definitely understand why.
"Yes." Dinah nodded. "We need a mid-range melee person. Plus, he can be bulletproof, he's less likely to require Amy's assistance because he can patch up minor wounds, and he has other capabilities which I personally think will be useful in future."
"You know, Vicky's good at the melee stuff; plus, she's also bulletproof," Lisa offered. "She can do everything you just said except the patching up of injuries. Besides, she can fly and he can't."
"We've been over this," Dinah said, her tone just a little acerbic. "Vicky won't always be available, and when she gets enthusiastic she's been known to break things. Browbeat's a lot more reserved. Besides, we can use him to feed Director Piggot the information we want her to have about us."
I scratched the back of my neck. "Okay, so if I get this right, Browbeat thinks he'll be working with us as a secret mole for the PRT, and the PRT thinks we don't know about him being a mole. So the only people in the know is us. Are us. Whatever."
"Sounds about right, hon," Andrea agreed. "Personally, I still think we should've tried to recruit that Vista kid. She does not look happy on the bottom end of the totem pole."
Dinah shook her head. "She's not mentally ready for something like that."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Thirteen point five six one percent chance of agreeing, twenty-two point one nine three percent chance of pretending to agree and taking it to the Director. Sixty-four point one three seven percent chance of just turning us down altogether." These were also rolls I'd done in advance.
"Long story short?" said Lisa. "She's a good little soldier, and she'll always be a good little soldier."
"Even though she'd be happier in our team." Andrea sighed. "Well, maybe she'll change her mind at some point."
Dad cleared his throat. "Well, there's no perfect solution for her situation, so let's leave things alone on that front for the moment. On the other hand, it might be an idea to decide what level of secrecy we're going to be using with this guy. He wouldn't know Dinah from any other girl of her age, but there's zero chance he won't recognise Amy and Vicky unmasked, and Kayden is pretty obvious as Purity when she lights up."
"That's a good point," I said. "Let me get together with Dinah and Lisa, and see if we can't figure out how to work this."
Dinah grinned. "Strategy engine …"
"For the win," Lisa finished.
"Darn tootin'."
<><>
Browbeat
Lawrence pulled out the card Management had given him, and studied it. He wasn't at all sure that he liked what he was about to do, but Deputy Director Renick had assured him it was entirely innocuous. Or as innocuous as infiltrating a teenager into a shadowy cape team could get, anyway.
Renick hadn't tasked him to find out secret identities or sabotage their missions, which was good, mainly because he would've refused. His entire job was to watch and assist, and report back with his view of how the team operated.
One of the things Renick (and by extension, Director Piggot—Lawrence wasn't stupid) wanted to know was exactly how the team got their information; "they've got Thinkers" was a little vague. Another was to settle the question whether or not the elusive Purity was working with them. And finally, any hints as to the cape name of the hydrokinetic would also be good.
Lawrence decided that he'd cross those bridges when he came to them. Right now, he needed to dial the number and pretend to be interested in the offer. Of course, if their Thinkers sniffed out his intent and called him on it (as they'd be totally justified in doing), he would back off just as fast as he could.
Calling up the keypad on his phone, he tapped in the number, one digit at a time. It rang exactly once before it was picked up. "Hello, Management speaking."
"Hi, yeah, this is Browbeat," he said. "I've been thinking about it, and I want to work with you."
"Excellent," she said, even sounding like she meant it. "Just in time, too. We were planning on doing a mission tonight, and your capabilities will suit the parameters right down to the ground. Can you be ready by nine?"
"Nine?" He blinked and looked at his bedside clock. It was barely four in the afternoon. "Uh, yeah, sure. I can do that."
"Good to hear. Where would you like to be picked up from?"
He thought quickly. Either they didn't know his real name and address, or they were pretending not to in order to lull his suspicions. It was an article of faith that Thinkers loved to show off. If Management knew more about him, she almost certainly would've dropped a hint by now.
"There's a bus stop at Evanston and Craddock," he said. "You know of it?"
"We can find it," she said. "Costume most of the way up, but try to be inconspicuous."
He nodded from habit. "I can do that." Already, he was considering how he was going to sneak out. He figured this could be really cool, or it might be a total catastrophe.
"So, uh, who are we going after?" he asked as an afterthought.
"We were thinking of shutting down Uber and Leet. Don't be late."
The call ended, leaving him staring at the phone.
Uber and Leet? Oh, boy. The odds of 'catastrophe' had just improved considerably.
<><>
Leet
"And that's the show for today. See you next week. Hopefully Leet's eyebrows will have started to grow back by then."
Uber looked over at him, and Leet mustered a smile. "Haha, yeah." Reaching out, he turned the camera off. "Seriously, did you have to remind everyone that I lost my eyebrows again?"
"Trust me, they don't need reminding." Uber smirked. "There's a site online that tracks the results of your tech malfunctions. Pretty sure that's going to be updated as soon as this episode gets posted."
"Great." Leet rolled his eyes sarcastically. "Remind me again why you hang out with a loser like me?"
"Well, because you're not a loser, for one thing," Uber told him seriously. "You're my buddy. My bro. We're a team, and don't you ever forget it."
"So how come we're never laughing about stupid stuff that happens to you?" Leet was feeling a little mollified, but not totally.
"Oh, there's an Uber's Greatest Hits site, too." Uber snorted. "All the times I face-planted because I was aiming my focus at the wrong technique at the wrong time. It's just that what your stuff does to you tends to leave marks."
"Tell me about it," groused Leet. "Okay, so you're gonna edit it and put it up now?"
Uber nodded. "Yeah, I'm going to just look over it and do any touch-ups that it needs. Want to give me a hand?"
"Nah." Leet chuckled wryly and shook his head. "You're the one who's good at that, and we both know it. I'm going to go look over the next project, see what I need to do to make it roll."
"Right, right." Uber paused in the middle of putting the headphones on. "Remind me again, what was that one?"
"Jeez, dude." Leet rolled his eyes. "I can't believe you've forgotten. We're going old school."
"Ah, yeah." Uber grinned, and they shared a high-five. "I can't wait to see how they react to us doing—"
<><>
Glory Girl
On a Rooftop Opposite
"Pac-Man?" Browbeat looked incredulous. "Really?"
"Really." Vicky, wearing a dark brown wig over her golden curls and a pair of heavy goggles to obscure her features, nodded in confirmation. "That's what they said. Leet will be working on a Pac-Man setup, and there's a strong chance that it'll be operational enough to give us trouble if we don't shut it down hard."
Specifically, Lisa and Taylor had come up with the Pac-Man diagnosis, while Taylor had given an eighty-seven percent chance for the system to be online. Vicky was gradually coming on board with the idea of working with no fewer than three different Thinkers, one of whom was an ex-supervillain, but some of the stuff they pulled off still looked like black magic, pure and simple.
We haven't got anything like this back in New Wave. Maybe that's our loss.
"But how do you even know that?" Browbeat's question followed what Vicky's thought process would've been, not so long ago. "And how did you even manage to get the layout of the base?"
Taylor had explained this one to her, though she couldn't pass the explanation on to Browbeat for obvious reasons. If I'd know it in the future, my power can look ahead and tell me about it now. Still, it had been weird as fuck to watch a handful of toothpicks get tossed in the air and fall into a precise building layout on the table.
"Well, you know how Watchdog's got those Thinkers that sit around and give various hints and ideas for the way things are likely to go?" There'd been a TV spot on them recently, though it had understandably glossed over a few details.
"Yeah …?" Browbeat sounded doubtful.
Vicky snorted with amusement. "This is nothing like that. Our guys aren't guessing. They know their stuff. And you and me, we've been picked as the best people for the job. You know, in case you were wondering why we don't have anyone else along."
"That had crossed my mind," Browbeat confirmed. "But what if it's too much for us? What if shit goes sideways and one of them gets a lucky hit in? I mean, they always say, don't ever attack a Tinker in his base."
Did I ask this many questions? Vicky suspected she knew the answer to that one. "Chill. Just because we're the only visible ones, doesn't mean we're the only ones on site. We have backup. The big hitters are ready to come in and level the place if need be. It's just that we'd rather not do that to a building full of Leet's tech." The percentage chance of something bad happening if they did wasn't high, but it was in the double digits, and Vicky didn't like that.
"Okay, good to hear. So, what are we waiting for?" Browbeat was starting to bulk up, muscles bulging out everywhere as he exerted his power.
"The right time. In about three minutes, Uber will be distracted and Leet won't be watching the monitor screens. That'll give us enough time to bust in before they know we're here." She was seriously starting to wonder how she'd managed before joining this new team.
"Okay." He nodded, apparently accepting her words. "Hey, I've got an idea. Management said you've got a hydrokinetic on your team. Why don't they just flush the entire base out with water? Short everything out and neutralise Leet's stuff before we ever get inside?"
"Sources say Leet's stuff is likely to react unpredictably. Some of it might actually explode. This is the most effective, risk-free way of slapping the cuffs on them."
He shook his head. "How do they even know that?"
Vicky snickered. "Thinker bullshit is bullshit, I guess?"
Browbeat gave her a dirty look. She knew how he felt, but damn it was good to be in the know.
<><>
Leet
The shell of the Pac-Man rover looked bare, almost skeletal, but that was because he didn't have the exterior hologram activated. He reclined on the laid-back pilot seat, fiddling with the settings of the teleport mechanism. When Pac-Man ate things, they had to go somewhere, after all, and there wasn't enough room in the chassis to store more than two or three people. Also, if they were in the chassis, they'd be in there with him, and he didn't much feel like being beaten up by the general public.
As it was, instead of a hover-field or anti-grav tech, he was going to have to depend on wheels to get around, because he'd used up a lot of the fancy options early on. Gloomily, he anticipated a future where he'd be hard put to build a simple walking mech without powering it via steam or something.
But that wasn't today. Today, he was working on an icon of the computer gaming age. Uber would be a 'ghost', herding the participants in his game around the force-field maze they were going to set up. Anyone 'eaten' by the Pac-Man rover would be teleported back to the basement of this building, where Uber and he would release them from, once the game was over.
He hummed loudly and tunelessly, ignoring the incessant beeping from the monitors in the corner. If it was something important, Uber would deal with it. He had Tinkering to do.
When the door to his lab smashed apart into several large chunks, followed by a flying figure, he was surprised, but not so much that he couldn't act. Leading with her fist, she flew directly at him. Straight at the mouth of the Pac-Man rover.
There was no time to form a coherent thought, much less work out a plan of action. But his finger was already on a very important switch.
He flicked it.
<><>
Browbeat
A Minute Earlier
With her hands under his arms, Aeglea (he had no idea what the code-name meant, but she'd said it was a classical reference) carried Lawrence down to the side door of the building. He poised himself to kick it in, but she grabbed it and ripped it clear out of the frame.
Okay, then. She's definitely stronger than me. But he still had no idea who she might be. There just weren't enough independents running around for a teenage Alexandria package to go unnoticed.
But right now was not the time to start worrying about that sort of thing. Now was punch time.
He moved in through the now-open doorway, keeping low despite his current bulk. Aeglea drifted in beside him, a few feet off the ground. They headed down a corridor, alert for any sort of security measures. Leet wasn't exactly in the top tier of Tinkers, but it didn't take much to build something crude and nasty.
He spotted a security camera and pointed it out to Aeglea, who promptly ripped it out of the wall in a shower of sparks. Still, no alarm had been raised, which meant the gamer duo were either out and about, or just not paying attention.
When they came up to a door, Aeglea made a little half-bow and gestured to it; your turn. Grinning, he smashed a kick into it with all the power his current bulk permitted. It was enough; the door gave way and swung open, hanging half off one hinge.
Within was a combination living room/gaming area, which matched with the pencil-drawn building plan Aeglea had shown him (where she'd gotten it, he had no idea). Seated at a computer console was none other than Uber, headphones on, watching something on the screen. As Lawrence and Aeglea entered, he apparently noticed something amiss, because he turned his head toward them. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to shout.
Already keyed up, Lawrence launched himself across the room and tackled the supervillain clear out of his chair. As fit and muscular as Uber was, Lawrence had packed on twice the bulk, and they slammed into the floor with bruising force. Well, bruising to Uber; Lawrence's skin-level force field cushioned him nicely, so he wasn't even winded.
As he flipped the villain over to secure his hands behind him, Lawrence registered Aeglea flashing across the room toward another door; behind that, as far as they knew, was where Leet did his Tinkering. At this point, it was a gamble whether or not Leet had heard them. To paraphrase a saying Lawrence had heard once, it was better to assume he had and be wrong than to assume he hadn't and be wrong.
The doors crashed into pieces, and Aeglea disappeared within. That is, she didn't fly out of sight; she flew into the room, and between one instant and the next … vanished.
"What the hell?" muttered Lawrence. Flipping the prepped zip-tie over Uber's hands, he ripped it tight. He was under no illusions that it would hold the man long, but hopefully it would be long enough.
Leaping to his feet, he headed toward the smashed-open door. "Aeglea?" he called out. "You okay?" While calling out might alert Leet to his presence, he absolutely wanted Aeglea to know he was there, in case she tried to punch his head off his shoulders by accident.
He didn't hear her voice calling out. What he did hear sounded so out of place that he didn't recognise it for a moment. But then he saw the massive rounded yellow thing trundling toward him, the huge mouth opening and closing rhythmically, and he knew what it was supposed to be.
wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka
Oh, shit. She wasn't kidding. "Pac-Man?" he said out loud, incredulously. "Really?"
It surged toward him, and he jumped backward out of the way. "Only the greatest video game hero of all time!" Leet's voice sounded from somewhere within. "Om nom nom, motherfucker!"
"What'd you do with Aeglea?" Lawrence dodged back again. Grabbing up a chair, he heaved it at the huge yellow monstrosity as it followed him. The mouth snapped at the flying piece of furniture; when it opened again, the chair was gone.
"Don't worry," Leet assured him, even as the Pac-Man turned to pursue Lawrence again. "She's safe. She only got eaten, that's all."
"What do you mean, 'only got eaten'?" Lawrence wrenched the wide-screen TV free of its attendant cords, and heaved that at the monster next. Just as the chair had disappeared, so did the TV.
"Hey, have a bit of respect," Leet complained. "Those things are expensive!"
"Really." Lawrence dodged back again. Trying to run around the monstrosity wasn't doing any good at all; it could swivel in place faster than he could get around it. "My heart bleeds. Bring Aeglea back, now!"
"What, so two of you can beat on me? Yeah, that's gonna happen." The Pac-Man trundled toward Lawrence again. "C'mere, you. 'Get in mah belleh!'"
"And that's a totally different franchise, you realise that, right?" Lawrence evaded another snap from the huge yellow mouth.
"Leet!" shouted a feminine voice as light flooded through the room. "Stand down! Browbeat, are you okay? Where's Aeglea?"
Lawrence turned to look, then had to shade his eyes. "Dunno! He said his thing ate her!" And that was when he had his brainwave.
"Fuck!" squawked Leet, the Pac-Man jittering between Lawrence and the newcomer.
In that moment, Lawrence took his opportunity. Darting over to where Uber was still struggling with his bonds, he picked the man up and heaved him bodily at the Pac-Man monstrosity.
The Pac-Man froze, just for half a second, long enough for Uber to vanish inside … a hologram? That's covered by a hologram? Lawrence didn't have time to think about it; gathering himself, he leaped after Uber, into the thing's mouth.
It didn't snap at him; instead, he passed through the hologram, just as Uber had, and landed in a cramped control cabin, on top of both Uber and Leet. Leet, still trying to push Uber off him, looked up as Lawrence loomed over him. "Oh, shit."
"Uh huh." Lawrence shoved Uber aside and took hold of Leet's shirt front. "Shut this thing down right the fuck now, and bring Aeglea back from wherever you put her. Or I'm going to see how many pieces I can break it into, with you inside."
"Okay, okay," whined Leet. "Geez, enough with the threats of violence." He flicked a switch, and the hologram faded away, the power winding down. "I give, I give."
Lawrence didn't release Leet as he looked around. "So where's Aeglea?"
<><>
Vicky
Stupid, stupid, stupid. I flew right into the trap.
Vicky backed up to one end of the room—a basement, if she were any judge—and flew full-speed at the door. Six inches before she would've impacted it, she hit the force field instead. It didn't stop her instantly, but compressed, squeezing tighter and tighter until it rebounded, flinging her away into the centre of the room.
This didn't surprise her; exactly the same thing had happened, the last ten times she'd tried to bust her way out of the room. It did, however, irritate her. Kinetic redirection took her one big strength and turned it against her.
I guess Leet set it up so if he teleported a dozen people down here, they couldn't just break down the door and get away.
Her next big worry was about Browbeat. The guy was still a rookie, and he was facing Leet's tech all alone. God knew what else it could do. Though the chair and the big-screen TV (sadly, broken on impact) that had fallen out of midair where she'd appeared indicated there was something still happening. She just hated being left out of the action.
As soon as the guys realise that something's gone wrong, they'll move in. But it would be great to bust my way out of here before I actually need rescuing.
Drawing back her fist, she prepared to throw another punch at the door. It wouldn't do anything, she knew, but maybe she was wearing the field down or something—
—and then the force field vanished.
"Fuck yes!" Grabbing the door, she ripped it off its mountings and tossed it to one side, then flew up the stairwell thus revealed. It took just a few moments more of smashing doors until she found the same area where they'd seen Uber.
The room looked a little messier than before. A basic spherical framework on wheels sat in the middle of the room, with Uber, Leet and Browbeat all piled up on a built-in control seat. Kayden, off to one side and beginning to let her glow diminish, looked around as Vicky flew in. "Ah, there you were. I was beginning to wonder."
"Yeah, me too." Vicky pointed at the framework. "Please tell me that was supposed to be the Indiana Jones rolling boulder." Because if it isn't ...
"As if!" sputtered Leet. "Pac-Man's a classic!"
Vicky facepalmed. I got eaten by Pac-Man? Ames is gonna laugh herself sick.
<><>
Later
Hebert Household
"Well, I have to admit, Browbeat came through with flying colours," Danny said, carrying the tray of drinks out to the living room. "He held up his end of the fight, and figured out the solution."
"While Vicky got eaten by Pac-Man," Annette said with a giggle as she took one. "Thanks, Mr. H."
"Now, now, be nice," Amy admonished her with a smirk. "He was probably just after some fast food."
"Oh, ha ha," Vicky retorted, rolling her eyes. "I just didn't expect a teleport, okay?" She accepted a glass as well. "Thanks."
Dinah raised her eyebrows. "I believe I might have mentioned something about being no-sold?"
"That you did, hon." Andrea reached over and ruffled her hair. "It was a good call. He supported his teammates, and pulled off a win."
Taylor raised her glass to the others in a toast. "Another villain gang off the streets, however temporarily. Next up, the Empire."
Janet and Kayden raised their glasses with everyone else. "The Empire."
There would be preparation to take care of, but Danny had faith in the team.
Together, as Dinah had put it, they were stronger than the sum of their parts.
End of Part Nineteen
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