Earning Her Stripes (Worm AU fanfic)

[Barbaric_Bob]

And butcher fifteen? Sixteen? Managed to get the entire gang arrested in less than a single night, the others will NEVER let her live it down

 

[Avernus]

Heh, screwed over by arrogance; if March!Butcher hadn't been so high on "I'm invincible!" nailing her like that would have been far harder. It's awful hard to grab somebody with a teleport power if they actually try to stay away from you after all.

Kind of ironic given that her original success in wounding Monochrome was because the latter thought she was invincible.

 

[Ack]

Earning Her Stripes

Part Forty-One: Long Term Solutions

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Monochrome

"Okay," said Madison. "That's done. But …"

She looked down at Butcher, who was leaning hard to see around the suit, then sighed and wrapped her other gauntlet right around the villain's head. Butcher struggled, raking at the metal with her nails and screaming muffled obscenities, but to no avail. I was mildly impressed by her command of invective, but given that I'd grown up around Dockworkers, not overly so.

"But she's only prevented from teleporting, yeah," I agreed. "How are we going to deal with the rest of her powers without her running off and grabbing a bunch of hostages to force us to take that collar off her?"

"I'd be concerned about your sudden insight into the villainous mindset, but I was thinking exactly the same thing." Madison's tone took on a faux-thoughtful aspect. "Do you think Director Piggot would object a lot if I just pulled this one's arms and legs off and stuffed her in a crate until we're done?"

"Tempting," I allowed. I wasn't totally joking; I had actually felt like doing something similar, once I found out what March had been up to. "But she'd probably be forced to take notice."

"What if we just broke a few bones? They heal, right?" Her grasp on Butcher's arm shifted, and a large metallic thumb pressed on the elbow joint. I heard a grunt from Butcher, cut short, that may have been pain.

I rolled my eyes. "Not even that. It would be classified as 'mistreatment of a prisoner,' and they'd probably make us let her go or something." I couldn't help noticing that since Madison had gotten her Tinker abilities, her mindset had definitely shifted toward brute-force solutions, even when she was joking. I figured it was a power thing. When all you've got is a hammer, et cetera.

"Fine." I got the distinct impression that she'd just rolled her eyes. "Be a spoilsport then. See if I care. So, how are we gonna keep Miss Edgy McEdgelord from wrecking people, and things, until we can lock her down? Keep in mind before everything goes to shit, I did offer a perfectly workable solution."

That was when the idea occurred to me. I held up a finger while it was sorting itself out, then I nodded to myself once I'd roughed out the main aspects. "I think I know how." Clicking my radio button, I added, "Firebird, I'm gonna need the loan of a disc for a bit."

"Copy that. Be with you in a minute."

"Awesome." But I still needed something else. As I looked around, I saw a parking sign that looked like just the thing. It took no effort at all to pull the metal pipe up out of the concrete it was set into (the trick was to reinforce it and twist it free of its seating first), then I started to bend and shape it, using my own head as a model.

In reality, it only took about thirty seconds before Armsmaster's overbuilt cycle (and after associating with Madison, I knew what the term really meant) swept around the corner, with Emma riding on the back. They pulled up alongside us and Emma jumped off. Armsmaster climbed off the bike next, and I got the impression he was eyeing Butcher dubiously.

"First, why is she not using her powers? Second, why have you destroyed that sign?"

I took note of the fact that he'd asked the questions in a tone that was more curious than censorious. "Good steel stops dimensional shenanigans, and I'm pretty sure that includes being able to see someone's vital organs through solid matter." I'd figured that one out when Butcher called Madison a 'son of a bitch,' evidently taking her for a guy inside the suit. "And this here's for the disc I'm borrowing from Firebird."

Such was the teamwork and trust between us that Emma didn't even question me. She just unclipped the left-hand disc from her wrist and handed it over. "Okay," she said. "I'll admit that I'm definitely curious about what you need it for."

"Thanks. You'll see in a sec." I took the disc and slid it into the framework I'd made, crimping the metal to keep the good steel in place. Then I took it over to where Madison still held Butcher by the head and arm.

Butcher hadn't stopped struggling or swearing and was doing her best to pry Madison's hand off her head, one finger at a time. Unfortunately for her, even when she managed to move one finger (which was pretty damn impressive by itself) she couldn't keep it off while she worked on the next finger.

Taking hold of her free hand, I pulled it down next to her; as strong as she was, her resistance meant nothing to me. I wanted her hand to move, and it moved. Then I motioned for Emma and Armsmaster to stand behind Madison and nodded toward where Madison had Butcher's head in her hand. "Okay, you can take your hand away now."

Once her head was clear, Butcher glared at me, her hair disarranged and her eyes full of fury. "And you! As soon as I get out of this—"

The rest was cut off as my field deployed automatically, locking me away from the world. That didn't matter; I knew what I needed to do. Lifting up the frame, I slid it down over Butcher's head; my vision and hearing returned as soon as the disc cut off her view of me.

Once it was in place, I used a judicious crimping of metal to make sure it wouldn't come off any time soon, then looked at her thoughtfully. "Does that look close enough to her face to you?"

The whole idea of the frame was to pin the disc to her face so that she wouldn't be able to see anyone, and therefore be unable to harm them with her powers. It wasn't supposed to be a perfect solution, just one that would hold her long enough. I didn't want her being able to hurt innocents—or my fellow heroes—simply by swivelling her eyes sideways.

"Let me check." Armsmaster stepped to the side and waved his gauntleted hand through the space next to Butcher's head. A moment later, he jerked it back with a full-body wince. "Yes, yes, she can still use her powers."

"I will kill you all," growled Butcher from behind the disc. "Or you can kill me. I win, either way."

I spared a glance to where Armsmaster was taking his gauntlet off. The skin of the hand underneath was reddened, but not bleeding. Okay, good. Not an emergency, then.

"There's a lot we can do to you that won't kill you." Madison's tone was implacable. "I was joking before, but if you keep that shit up, you're going to take away the softer options, just saying."

I looked the disc over. It was curved back slightly on all sides, but it needed to be flat to her face for this to really block her peripheral vision. "Hold her arms."

"You got it."

"Wait," Armsmaster said as he pulled his gauntlet back on. "What are you going to do?"

"This." I grabbed the back of Butcher's head with my left hand, and put my right palm in the middle of the disc. Then I pushed, very carefully. I didn't want to crush her skull like a pomegranate, after all, no matter how much she'd earned it.

Her nose, however, was another matter altogether.

I felt the cartilage crunch just before she let out another grunt of pain, and I twisted the metal holding the disc onto her face so it was nice and tight. It was also pressing hard on her freshly broken nose, but I found that I honestly didn't give a damn.

Butcher had a different opinion on the matter. "Moth'r'fuck'r!" she managed from behind the disc. "You d'd th't 'n p'rp'se!"

"Yeah, I did." It wasn't like I cared enough to hide it. "You'd do worse to me if you could. This is me making sure you can't do it to anyone until we can work out a better counter."

"Monochrome …" Armsmaster didn't quite sound like he was warning me, but nor did he sound happy about what I was doing.

Madison stepped in before I could speak. "What the hell do you want out of us? Butcher's the equivalent of an armed IED, and she will kill as many people as she can if she gets the chance. We're your only chance to shut her down before things get worse. If you tie our hands now and she gets free, any damage she does is on you."

"I do understand." His tone was strained. "But if she can get in front of a public defender and level a charge of being tortured once in custody, that's going to make things very problematic for the Director." And, he didn't have to say, the Director would make her displeasure known to all involved; specifically, Armsmaster and us.

Emma sighed. "We both know the only reason she doesn't have a kill order is because of that bullshit power she has. I've spoken to people in the legal system who are very firmly of the opinion that if she even tries to bring a case like this, it'll get tossed with prejudice. So, with all due respect, we'll take the chance."

"So, what are you going to do?" He gestured at Butcher. "You can't exactly keep her like that forever. She'll need to have her nose set at some point, not to mention eating. And the moment her hands are free, she will be pulling that contraption off her head."

Butcher interjected with something that sounded like, "Fucking right," but I couldn't be sure. The disc interfered with her speech quite a bit; I wondered if I'd damaged her sinuses at the same time. Not that I really cared, but it was something to consider.

"Oh, we're aware," Madison agreed. "So, I'm gonna build something to fix the problem before she can do that. It won't deal with all of her powers, but it will definitely remove the worst threats."

"How are you going to do that?" Armsmaster tilted his head. "Negating several powers at once usually requires an extremely versatile device. Your creations, overall, do one thing extremely well, but are less effective on the versatility side of things."

The battlesuit tilted its head to one side. "I'd be offended if you weren't correct," Madison allowed. "But as the one thing this is going to do is 'fuck up Butcher's day', it's all good."

I could hear the frown in Armsmaster's voice. "You didn't answer my question as to how you're going to do that."

Madison chuckled, the vocal modulator transmitting the amusement across quite well. "You'll see."

She tapped her foot on the ground twice, the signal that she was about to take off. I jumped up onto one shoulder, while Emma leaped up and used Armsmaster's bike as a springboard to make it onto the other. Before Armsmaster could voice any further protest, her thrusters had cut in and we were powering skyward.

<><>​

Grue

Brian was beginning to wonder if running to the PRT to get away from Butcher had been the smartest play after all. Since entering the building, they hadn't quite been placed under arrest, but they were in a room with a guard at the door, and nobody important had dropped by to talk to them. Paranoia spiking, he looked around for gas vents or other ways the PRT could surreptitiously knock them out but couldn't find any.

Of course, that could be because the PRT were better at hiding things than he was at finding them.

Rachel had been allowed to keep her dogs with her, which was good. Someone in the PRT had probably figured that this was a non-negotiable point, so they'd just set the requirements that the canines needed to remain dog-sized and dog-shaped for the duration of their stay. It didn't stop her from being antsy about the rest of her dogs, but she hadn't gotten too aggressive about it quite yet.

Alec was also twitchy, mainly because he didn't have a gaming console to work out his excess energy on. Lisa had spent most of the time talking in muted tones to Aisha. Brian tried to focus on being happy that they were getting along instead of trying to kill each other, as opposed to being worried about what plots they were inevitably hatching, though he wasn't entirely successful.

When the huge screen at the far end of the room flared to life, it came as a relief to break the tension. Alec had already investigated it and speculated on how awesome it would make the gaming experience, but as there had been no way to make this actually happen, he'd gone back to idly spinning around and around on his chair.

The picture on the screen was just as sharp and clear as Alec had predicted, though as it showed Director Piggot's image, it still left a lot to be desired. "Good afternoon," the Director said, quite clearly looking at them via hidden cameras. The surround-sound was damn good too; she could easily have been in the room with them. "I have good news and bad news for you."

Brian was about to ask for the bad news first, on the principle of getting it out of the way, but Alec got in ahead of him. "What's the good news?"

Piggot's expression creased slightly, suggesting a potential smile. "You will be pleased to hear that your plan worked. Butcher is in custody, and the Teeth have been captured as well. I'm coordinating with the BBPD to corral the non-powered members of the gang as we speak."

"Whoa, okay." Brian had been expecting something a lot more ambiguous than that. "How did you capture Butcher? Especially with March's powers involved?"

The suggestion of amusement left Director Piggot's expression. "I didn't say she was in our custody, just that she was in custody. The Real Thing have her, and they say they're going to neutralise most of her offensive capability. Do you have any idea how that could be done?"

"Well, maybe … no. But what if … no. Crap." Lisa's shoulders slumped. From the expression on her face, she desperately wanted to be the one to answer that question, but she just didn't have enough data to come up with a workable solution. Along with Alec and Aisha, Brian was clueless and he knew it, while Rachel just didn't seem to care.

Piggot's eyes seemed to flick from point to point, as though looking at each of them in turn, before she nodded. "I see. Well, now for the bad news."

"What, that wasn't it?" blurted Aisha.

"No, it wasn't." Piggot gave another grim smile. "The bad news is that your four associates are specifically responsible for Butcher receiving a problematic power-up, and they've since willingly delivered themselves into our hands. We were indeed prepared to protect you against her if it came to that, but if the Real Thing continue to be as ridiculously effective as they have been in the past, such protection would no longer be necessary. Which, you may have already figured out, flips the entire paradigm on its head."

"Wait, what?" protested Brian. "No. We were leaving town. If Butcher hadn't come after us, we would've been gone! It's because of us that she's been captured!"

"And it's because of you that she's exponentially more dangerous than ever before." Piggot's tone was relentless. "Swings and roundabouts. One fortuitous turn of events does not excuse a whole array of criminal activity, and I'm not even counting the robbery spree on the gang stash houses over the last day or so."

Aisha chose to jump into the conversation again. "Hey, it wasn't their money anyway. Is it still robbery if you're stealing from a thief?"

The Director didn't hesitate. "Yes. It really is."

Lisa sat up straighter. "If you were going to arrest us, you would've done it already. So, you want something else from us. You just wanted us to squirm a little before you pulled the big reveal."

Piggot's expression twitched, souring slightly. "Ever the Thinker, Tattletale. Yes, I have a proposition for you."

Brian glanced at the others, then back at the screen. No troopers brandishing guns had burst into the room … yet. "We're listening."

The Director took a deep breath. "If history is any guide, Brockton Bay is facing a villain incursion to fill the gap left by the Empire Eighty-Eight and the ABB. I've been applying the screws one turn at a time to make it less and less attractive for criminal gang activity, but there's still wiggle room for people to come in and try to establish themselves. Between gang clashes, going up against my troopers and Protectorate capes, and violent crime in general, people are going to get hurt. I'd really rather cut it off at the knees before any of them get properly established."

"And that's where we come in." Lisa didn't sound thrilled at having made this deduction.

"What do you mean, that's where we come in?" Rachel, unlike Lisa, was definitely not on the same page as the Director. "The fuck is she talking about?"

Brian thought he knew. "Director, it sounds to me like you want us to work for you behind the scenes, causing enough problems for these villains that they choose to leave town of their own accord."

"That's precisely what I would be asking of you." Piggot folded her hands in front of her on the desk. "It's a task to which you would be exceptionally well suited."

Now that it was out in the open, Brian wasn't quite sure which way to go on it. He glanced at Lisa, and his heart sank. The expression on her face told him that she was seriously thinking about it, which almost certainly meant they'd be going along with the idea.

"You've got to be shitting me." Rachel looked around at everyone else. "None of you is thinking about doing it … right?"

Lisa stirred, raising her head. "If we agreed to do it, there would be conditions. Guaranteed immunity to prosecution for all past crimes, for starters. A signed contract. And we'd all have to agree on it."

Brian was already thinking about security for himself and Aisha. Working directly for the PRT would have to look good on his record for CPS, right?

"I know what my condition is." Alec raised a finger (fortunately not the middle one). "And it's totally non-negotiable."

Oh, shit. Shoving his dreams aside, Brian tensed. What idiocy is he going to come out with? From the look on Lisa's face, she was similarly worried.

"I'm listening." Director Piggot may as well have been presiding over a board meeting of high-flying executives, for all the concern she showed. She hadn't even flinched at the 'guaranteed immunity to prosecution' requirement.

"I get to go head-to-head against Armsmaster in Battlemaster: In Extremis, and I get to keep a recording of the game for bragging rights." Alec sat back in his chair, looking pleased with himself.

Brian blinked. Lisa blinked. Even the Director blinked.

"I … that can be arranged." Piggot collected herself, and Brian got the impression that the game would take place if the Director had to hold Armsmaster at gunpoint to do it. "Is that your only condition?"

That broke the spell. "If we're doing this, then I totally got a condition," Rachel grunted.

"Yes, Hellhound?" The Director even managed to sound polite about it.

Rachel glared at the image on the screen. "I'm Bitch, not fuckin' Hellhound. And I want all the stray dogs in the city. And someplace to keep 'em. And money to feed 'em and keep 'em vaccinated and clean up their shit. Can you do that?"

The Director paused for a moment. "So … you want to run the dog pound, is that it?"

Lisa cleared her throat. "Not quite. Bitch would be in total control of the operation. No second-guessing or overriding her on any part of it. You'd have to get rid of anyone who might think they know more about dogs than she does, because if you don't, she definitely will. Also, no more putting dogs down just to free up room." She looked over at Rachel. "That sound about right?"

Grudgingly, Rachel nodded. "Yeah, what she said. All the dogs, and I run the show."

Now Piggot was making notes. "I believe there are a few markers I can pull in with the mayor's office. This can be achieved. Next condition?"

Brian lifted his chin. "Well, my sister and I …"

<><>​

Blockade's Workshop

Taylor

The building was large and airy, which was good, because molten metal generated a metric ton of heat. From what I could tell, it had previously been some kind of warehouse, but bore the distinctive signs of having been reinforced and secured by Madison's tech. Emma had told me about the early days when the Merchants had literally been able to force their way in through the wall; this was, in every way, a totally different proposition.

Madison, now out of the armour, finished what she was doing with the forge and turned to face Emma and me, where we held Butcher between us. "I'm going to need to take a mould of her upper face."

This was potentially the most dangerous part of the situation. Butcher's eyes weren't inherently dangerous—no laser vision or blaster beams, here—but if she got a clear line of sight on Emma or Madison, she could do them severe damage in the time it took for me to shut her down again without killing her. And if I were dealing with her eyes, someone else would have to watch her hands, which were even more deadly again.

Madison's description of her as an armed IED was nothing less than the truth. There were numerous ways she could hurt the unwary, and a single slip could allow her to cause untold damage. Worse, she wanted to kill us all, and we couldn't do the same to her.

"Okay," I said after a little thought. "I got this." I glanced at Emma. "Or rather, Blockade suits up, you got this, and I got you."

Emma's head came up as she figured out the plan. It was weird that we were more in tune than we'd ever been before we got powers. "That should work, yeah."

Madison nodded and gestured at a bowl of off-grey gunk sitting on a nearby table. "The stuff's right there. It'll set in five minutes, but it needs to be undisturbed until then." She headed for the Mark 2 suit. "Give me thirty seconds to suit up, and we'll be ready to roll."

"Gloves?" asked Emma, looking at her hands then glancing at me.

"Probably a good idea to take them off, yeah," I agreed.

Once her hands were bare—it was usually easier to wash stuff like that off skin than out of cloth—Emma took up the bowl. In the meantime, Madison had ensconced herself within the suit, and I'd carefully unbent some of the framework that held the disc in place. Emma came over to stand in front of Butcher, and I reached past the murderous teenager to take her by the arm, while maintaining a careful grasp of both Butcher's wrists in my other hand.

"Okay," Emma said. "Ready?"

"Wait." I looked at the gunk. "If she's standing upright, it'll just slide off her face, yeah?"

"Shit, yeah. It's not that sticky."

"Okay, then." I moved Butcher over next to the table, then tapped her gently behind the knees so that she fell backward with a muffled yelp. Carefully, I guided her down so her shoulders were supported by the table, and I still had a good grip on her wrists. "Blockade, can you hold her head still?"

"Sure thing." Madison tromped over and waited until I had hold of Emma's arm, using my power to reinforce her, then carefully slid the frame holding the disc off Butcher's head. Reaching down, she took hold of Butcher's head between one massive finger and thumb, effectively immobilising it.

I had made a mess of Butcher's nose, and the front of her face seemed bruised in general, but this was nothing to what she'd done to many innocents, so I figured a little turnabout was fair play. She glowered up at me—my eyesight and hearing blinked out a few times—then turned her attention to Emma when I didn't react. "I'm going to kill you," she promised. "You're gonna die screaming."

"Anything?" I asked after a moment.

"Kind of an irritating itch," Emma reported. "No … wait … now I'm really pissed off. But I can handle it." She sounded mildly annoyed, like Dad after a frustrating day at the Association.

"Why the fuck aren't you screaming and dying?" shrieked Butcher. "I know I'm using the powers right this time!"

Emma reached out and grabbed Butcher's nose; with a wrenching crack, she reset it. "Because we're just that good. Now, hold still." Holding the bowl in one arm, she scooped up a large handful of the gunk and prepared to apply it. "Oh, and you might want to close your eyes."

No matter how Butcher struggled and protested, it was to no avail; Madison's suit was in the ton-weight range as far as strength was concerned, and she had leverage on her side. Me, I was just 'strength: yes,' whether there was leverage involved or not. The gunk went onto Butcher's face, covering her from mid-forehead down to the bridge of her nose, filling her eye sockets from top to bottom and side to side.

Five minutes later, following Madison's instructions, we lifted away the now-solid cast and carefully placed it to one side. Butcher unfortunately lost her eyebrows and eyelashes in the process (for an unflinching mass murderer, she certainly put up a fuss about it), but that was a minor price to pay.

With the disc back over her face (we didn't need to re-break her nose, so long as she didn't pull anything) it was just a matter of waiting for Madison to use the cast to create a mould, which she did with expert ease. One short pour of good steel later, followed by the attachment of a much more elegant framework (so sue me, I'd been pressed for time and materials), and we had a form-fitting blindfold for Butcher to wear. Once Madison also put together a pair of good steel cuffs with hand covers, we were in business.

"Nice," Emma observed as she replaced the borrowed disc on her bracer. "Can't teleport, can't see to use her ranged powers, can't power things up to explode."

Madison nodded. "That's the general idea, yes."

The downside of refining Butcher's restraints was, of course, that she could now speak unimpeded. "You realise, you can't keep me like this forever. Once I get out of wherever you assholes put me, I'm gonna come looking for you. If you die, I win. If I die, I still win." As she spoke, she wrenched uselessly at the cuffs that secured her arms firmly behind her back. They clanked gently, but nothing else happened.

I glanced over at Madison. "Still time to make a gag for her before we take her back to Director Piggot, just saying."

She snorted. "Didn't say I wasn't thinking about it."



End of Part Forty-One

 

[Therandomestpersons]

"I … that can be arranged." Piggot collected herself, and Brian got the impression that the game would take place if the Director had to hold Armsmaster at gunpoint to do it. "Is that your only condition?"

Click to shrink...

Armsmaster: So run it by me again, why do I need to do this?
Piggot: it was literally his only condition that you play the game against him, and that he can record it. "For bragging rights" according to him.
Armsmaster: …was it included that he has to win the game?
Piggot: He didn't specifically say that, no.
AM: …Was a date specified?

 

[twilightwanderer]

Me, I was just 'strength: yes'

Click to shrink...

More like 'physics: optional'

 

[Avernus]

More of March's arrogance making her act stupid (it fits her personality yes, but still...) She's ignoring that if she dies and someone else becomes Butcher she won't be in the driver's seat even as much as she is now; she'll just be one "voice" among many. But even more so she's ignoring that with a little imagination and ruthlessness she's not all that hard to neutralize once captured in the first place - as both canon and Blockade's comments demonstrate. But even with Blockade's heavy-handed comments she's still throwing out pronouncements about how she'll kill them all as soon as she gets the chance and that death won't stop her instead of not announcing how dangerous she is to the people who've' captured her.

Her ego and narcissism won't let her consider that she's basically arguing hard for her captors to inflict something on her that exemplifies the phrase "you'd be surprised what you can live through". Not surprising of course, even before getting Butchered we saw that she'd never consider that her actions might have consequences or that other people have agency. So she'd never consider that she's basically arguing for them to do something like permanently blind her and stick her in a Good Steel box somewhere. Now, I don't expect anything like that to actually happen, it wouldn't really fit the tone of the story; but in a darker story she'd get to find out that law enforcement and "heroes" are quite capable of being every bit as ruthless as her when they feel the need.

 

[Ack]

More of March's arrogance making her act stupid (it fits her personality yes, but still...) She's ignoring that if she dies and someone else becomes Butcher she won't be in the driver's seat even as much as she is now; she'll just be one "voice" among many. But even more so she's ignoring that with a little imagination and ruthlessness she's not all that hard to neutralize once captured in the first place - as both canon and Blockade's comments demonstrate. But even with Blockade's heavy-handed comments she's still throwing out pronouncements about how she'll kill them all as soon as she gets the chance and that death won't stop her instead of not announcing how dangerous she is to the people who've' captured her.

Her ego and narcissism won't let her consider that she's basically arguing hard for her captors to inflict something on her that exemplifies the phrase "you'd be surprised what you can live through". Not surprising of course, even before getting Butchered we saw that she'd never consider that her actions might have consequences or that other people have agency. So she'd never consider that she's basically arguing for them to do something like permanently blind her and stick her in a Good Steel box somewhere. Now, I don't expect anything like that to actually happen, it wouldn't really fit the tone of the story; but in a darker story she'd get to find out that law enforcement and "heroes" are quite capable of being every bit as ruthless as her when they feel the need.

Click to shrink...

She's arrogant enough to believe that even if she dies, she'll still be capable of taking over the driver's seat again.

As far as she's concerned, the others haven't because they aren't her.

 

[Barbaric_Bob]

if only there was a biotinker somewhere that could turn her into an undying vegetable blob and then drop her into a real steal orb into the mariana trench

 

[TheCuriousGuest]

So... All Armsmaster needs to do is 'agree' to play a game at some point in the future, once he's got an efficient plan and minimized his required actions?

Shame they don't remove her tongue to prevent her assaulting their ears.
Hopefully they just permanently sedate her and/or perform some brain surgery to de-power her.

 

[Avernus]

Hopefully they just permanently sedate her and/or perform some brain surgery to de-power her.

Click to shrink...

The latter likely wouldn't work, her Shard would just count that as death and transfer to some other Parahuman. The former on the other hand might work.

She's arrogant enough to believe that even if she dies, she'll still be capable of taking over the driver's seat again.

As far as she's concerned, the others haven't because they aren't her.

Click to shrink...

That fits given that she was arrogant enough to court getting Butchered in the first place. If ego had gravity she'd be a black hole of self absorption.

 

[Ack]

Earning Her Stripes

Part Forty-Two: Meanwhile …

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Uber

"Holy shit, have you heard about this?" Leet looked up from where he'd been browsing PHO. "Says here, Butcher's been sighted in the Bay."

"You're shitting me." Brendan's interest in schooling the trash-talking little shit on the other side of the screen abruptly waned. His thoughts went immediately to his bug-out bag, then he started wondering if Leet had kept his up to date. "Maybe it's time we got out of town."

"Maybe." Leet jumped up from the chair, sending it rolling backward. "Or maybe we make it so she leaves town before she fucks everything up." There was a manic energy in his voice that Brendan had heard before; it had never turned out well.

"What did you have in mind?" That was always a good question to ask when it came to Leet. Sometimes, when he heard his own ideas coming out of his mouth he would slow his roll; other times, Brendan had to do it for him. And once in a while, he needed to be reminded that he'd already done something like whatever he was proposing. "And what game are we going to be working from?"

Leet shook his head. "Nope, no game." He put up his finger before Brendan could interject. "This isn't a game thing, or even something we can put on the show. It's pure self-defence. If we can chase Butcher away before she gets settled, we're gold. Otherwise, we'd always be looking over our shoulders."

"I think it's a bad idea." Brendan weathered Leet's look of betrayal with the same ease he'd done it every other time. "Best case, you accidentally kill her and you become Butcher. Worst case, she somehow figures out that you're fucking with her, and she kills us."

"The fuck?" Leet managed to say those two words with such emphasis from his body language and hand movements that his meaning still would've been understandable by someone who was blind, deaf and entirely ignorant of the English language. "You're not listening, dude. Best case is, we chase her the fuck out of Brockton Bay. I'm not gonna, like, hit her with an eighteen-wheeler or shit like that. It'll just be small stuff, like walking into doors and tripping over her own feet."

"And how are you even going to do that?" Leet had come up with some stupid plans in the past, but they'd always been based around one of his inventions. Brendan figured that said as much about the inventions as they did about Leet himself. "Zap her with a bad-luck ray?"

"Well, yeah, actually." Leet eyed Brendan suspiciously. "Have you been reading my notes or something?"

"Yeah, like I'd even touch them. Half the time they're either radioactive or contaminated with something that doesn't exist on the periodic table, and the other half the time they're about as legible as … wait." Brendan's brain finally caught up with what he'd just heard his buddy say. "Bad luck ray? Really? How fucking stupid of an idea is that?"

"It could work. You know, maybe." When Leet was being defensive, he hunched his shoulders, almost folding in on himself, and today was no exception. "I've never done one before, that's for certain."

"Yeah, because it's a stupid idea. If it's even possible." Brendan paused; he didn't actually like yelling at Leet. Maybe it was a better idea to guide him into realising that it was a bad idea, a little bit at a time. "Okay, fine, let's assume it's possible. What made you think of it, anyway?"

Leet hesitated, then glanced at Brendan. Apparently finding some kind of encouragement there, his closed-in stance opened up a little. "Um … I was actually reading the capefics on PHO, and there was one where we were kinda heroic, and I made a bad luck gun and a good luck gun, and we wrecked the Slaughterhouse Nine with them. So, um, I was thinking that maybe I could make it work in real life …?"

Brendan ran his hands through his hair, trying to figure out exactly what to say in response to that. Capefics bear zero resemblance to how powers actually work, you colossal moron! came to mind, but he was actively trying not to sound too harsh, so he did his best to tone it down a little … or a lot. "Okay, so do you have any idea how to make this work? And will it use a principle you've already used?"

His heart sank when Leet brightened. "I'm pretty sure I do, yeah. And no, I've never done a luck effect. Plus, we'll be able to use it from right here in the base, so we don't have to go near her."

"Well, that's definitely a bonus." It was more than that. The more Brendan thought about it, the more he considered it to be the keystone aspect of the whole stupid idea. If Leet could employ his ill-conceived venture out of sight and out of mind, they could get it over and done with, and clean up the inevitable flaming wreckage afterward without anyone (especially Butcher) being the wiser.

Sometimes, he wondered if the reason Director Piggot and the local PRT had never mobilised to capture and incarcerate them was due to the entertainment value of the after-action reports of their many (many) screwups.

"Well, it's mainly because we aren't going to be targeting her now," Leet continued, warming to his theme. "She's already here, and she's probably got a base set up and everything. I want to make things inconvenient to her from the moment she gets here, so she just gives up in disgust."

"Wait." The dark foreboding that usually hung over Brendan when Leet was about to try something particularly ill-advised came back in full force, and it even brought friends along for company. "Attacking her then? Like, time manipulation? Didn't you swear to me on bended knee that you weren't going to do that anymore? Especially after what happened between Uber-3 and Leet-9?"

"Dude. We agreed never to bring that up again. Anyway, nothing's going to happen like that." Leet rolled his eyes, apparently going for carefree nonchalance, though the fact that he'd crossed his fingers for luck didn't escape Brendan. "Anyway, this isn't about generating alternate timelines. It's about directing an attack back through time. You know, using the thing I worked up for the ChronoCop episode we never actually worked out how to do."

"Yeah, well, that's because you couldn't figure out how to get the time-folder small enough to fit into a gun. Pity, though. It would've been cool." Brendan paused, pulling his mind away from his appreciation of the classic game. "Wait, you never trashed it after that, uh, thing we never talk about?"

"Like I said, it doesn't generate alternate timelines. Plus, once I make something, it's made. If I'd trashed it, I'd never be able to rebuild it. So, I just put it away." Leet headed over to a set of cupboards and started rifling through them. "Judge Dredd helmet … Spartan rifle … Ghostbusters ghost trap … come on, where is it?"

"Ghost trap? We never did a Ghostbusters episode, did we?" Brendan picked up the black and yellow striped device and examined it. It looked like some of Leet's better work, too.

"Nah, I think Leet-6 left it behind when he went back to his home alternate. He said to never open it, but wouldn't tell me why." Leet opened a different cupboard door and kept searching. "Ah-ha! There you are, you sneaky little rascal! Come to papa."

Well, shit. He found it. Brendan's initial hope, that Leet's perennial lack of organisation would kill this idea aborning, had been categorically shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave. Not unlike the fate he foresaw the two of them suffering if this idiotic venture went anywhere nearly as badly as had happened in the past.

"So, uh … how exactly are we going to do this?" He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for by making the inquiry, but he had to keep himself in the loop somehow. Otherwise, the bad shit that was currently chugging down the track toward them like the juggernaut of doom—all acceleration, no brakes—was going to catch him in the back of the neck at the worst possible moment. If he could see it coming, he figured, he'd have half a chance of ducking and covering at the right moment, and maybe even dragging Leet out of the line of fire too.

Well, it was a plan, even if it wasn't a great one. Or even a good one.

"Okay, so here's the dealio." Leet gestured with the hand that wasn't holding the time-folder. "Building this into a gun is no longer necessary. Besides, I need to design the luck reservoir, as well as the filter and projector. Which reminds me. Are you okay with me tapping you for bad luck?"

"Me?" Brendan frowned, entirely unsure as to where Leet was going with this. "Why do you think I've got any bad luck? Seriously?"

"Dude. Don't play dumb." The look Leet gave Brendan said quite clearly, 'we both know what I'm talking about'. "The number of times my inventions have crashed and burned, there's got to be a serious source of bad luck in my vicinity. Process of elimination says it's you."

What? Brendan had heard the phrase 'could not believe my ears' before, but now he was living it. If either of them was afflicted with bad luck, it was Leet. How could his buddy not see that? "You're pulling my chain, dude. You honestly think it's down to me?"

"Well, who else could it be? Anyway, we're getting off track." Leet hustled over to the pile of disassembled parts that he'd salvaged from the last dozen or so fiascos. "Time to put your talent to good use for once. As soon as I build the luck siphon and the reservoir, I'll start tapping you for bad luck while I finish up the console and integrate the time-folder into it. Think you can hold still long enough to let that happen?"

"But—" Brendan cut off his own protest, and thought fast. It was totally an embarrassment, sure, to be thought of as a source of bad luck when anyone with half a brain could see what was really going on. But if he was correct, and Leet was just shit at what he did, then the bad luck projector would do exactly jack and shit once it was turned on. Which meant they would be safe from not only Butcher's wrath, but also any actual malfunction from the device. After all, if it didn't work, then it couldn't explode … right? "… okay, yeah, hook me up."

"Ar-right!" Leet set to work with a will. Sparks flew as he soldered the smaller components, then welded the larger ones. To Brendan's dubious eye, the 'luck siphon' that he assembled seemed to include a number of parts strongly reminiscent of the vacuum cleaner that had mysteriously vanished a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, when a Tinker was involved, any disappearance of electronic equipment was to be treated more as a suspicious circumstance than a mysterious event.

"How intrusive is this going to be?" Brendan asked, fully aware that it was something he probably should have checked on before agreeing to being the subject of the 'luck siphon'. "Because if it involves inserting it into a body cavity, I'm out."

"Nah, nah." Leet put the final touches on the device, then turned to him. "Here, just point the open end toward yourself. If it's within a few inches, it should suck up the bad luck just fine." He offered it to Brendan, who noted that (among other things) there were now lines of LEDs running up and down the length of the tube joining it to what he gathered (from context) was the reservoir. When Leet pressed a switch, it began to warble softly, with undertones and overtones that raised the hair on the back of Brendan's neck … or maybe that was just his presentiment of doom kicking into high gear. "Okay, get to collecting that bad luck."

Accepting it gingerly, Brendan eyed the aperture. "How will I know how much bad luck it's collected? And what happens once it's full?" He didn't believe for a second that bad luck was something that could be simply collected. However, it was evident to him that the siphon was determined to grab something, and he'd experienced enough explosions as a direct result of Leet's tech underperforming (and sometimes overperforming) that these questions were absolutely essential to ask up front. Usually from a safe distance.

Leet gestured toward a dial set in the side of the reservoir. "Oh, it'll beep and shut itself off. If it doesn't, just hit the red button there. Or was it the green one?" He frowned, looking from one to the other. "I know I was building in an emergency dump system, in case the bad luck concentration got too high. Or was that the pull-handle there?"

Peering closely at the dial, Brendan saw that the needle was quivering far to the left of the scale. Instead of numbers, there were instead words and phrases to mark (he figured) how much bad luck had been gathered.

THAT'S ODD

OH DAMN

SERIOUSLY?

YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME

WHAT THE HELL?

OH, FOR FUCK'S SAKE

JESUS CHRIST, NOT AGAIN

FUUUUUUUUUCK!

Click to shrink...

It hadn't quite gotten up to 'That's odd' yet, even when he gave the siphon an experimental wave over himself, so he figured it was safe to relax for the moment. If the cockamamie contraption failed even to charge itself with whatever it considered to be bad luck, maybe Leet would give up on the idea of attacking Butcher. Not getting in her way, and keeping his head down, seemed a vastly wiser choice than pointing some of Leet's tech at her and suffering the consequences of either success or failure.

Among other things, Brendan hadn't forgotten that the Butcher had the ability to shoot around obstacles to hit her enemies dead centre, ten times out of ten. He was good at what he did—he'd be the first to admit that—but she had him beat in that regard, by a solid country mile. Not to mention the other downside of fighting her: if she was killed, her killer became the new Butcher. It was theoretically possible to beat her without killing her, but nobody had managed that yet, and he certainly had no idea how to do it.

"One of these days, you're gonna have to start writing notes for this stuff." He wasn't quite sure how many times Leet's tech had malfunctioned due to its hapless inventor pressing a bunch of buttons in precisely the wrong order, but it had to be more than a few. Of course, sometimes it just blew up because it had apparently gotten bored with being in one piece, but there wasn't much Brendan could do about that.

"Sorry, dude. No can do. If I stop to write stuff down, I lose my train of thought." Leet shrugged and went back to the construction of the other half of the bad luck contraption. This was what he'd called the filter and projector, the latter of which incorporated the time-folder. To Brendan's vague relief, it looked solid and non-portable, which meant they probably weren't going to be lugging it out of the base and going in pursuit of Butcher with it. There were lots of blinking lights on it, though, as well as a large screen.

Brendan held Leet in the highest regard—there were no bro's like gaming bro's—but he couldn't resist rolling his eyes at that. Might actually improve your stuff if you did lose your train of thought from time to time. It certainly couldn't make it worse.

"Actually," he ventured as a thought occurred to him. "Why do you never set up a camera where you could replay the footage and remind yourself what buttons did what?" It would certainly bypass a lot of the fiascos (and lost eyebrows) that they'd undergone of late.

Leet turned and gave him a long-suffering look. "Now why didn't I think of that? Hell, we've got the Snitch to watch over my shoulder and all. I could even give a colour commentary to make sure I didn't forget anything." He threw a baleful glance across the workshop to where their little hover-cam sat in its charging cradle.

Now Brendan knew he was missing something. "So why don't you?" If there was a good reason, he sure as hell didn't know what it was.

Leet sighed expressively. "Because when I do that, even if I can't see the camera, malfunction rates go way up. It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or something. I even tried with cameras that turned on at random, so I didn't know they were operating. But no matter what I tried, it was always the same. If the process was recorded, something went fucky with it. So, I stopped trying." He turned back to the luck filter and set to work once more. The tension in his shoulders matched the bitterness in his tone, so Brendan decided not to pursue the matter any further.

When the device in his hand didn't seem about to blow up, short out or otherwise pose a risk to life and limb, he left off passing it over himself and waved it around in the air experimentally. Nothing much happened until he chanced to direct it Leet's way, whereupon the needle jumped and started to rise. Blinking, he pointed it back at himself, and the needle stopped again. Aimed at Leet once more, it caused the needle to rise again.

You're shitting me. Is this the reason his tech fails on the flimsiest excuse? He's actually afflicted with bad luck? It's really a thing?

By now, the needle was past 'Oh, damn' and heading for 'Seriously?', and didn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. Brendan was torn between equal and opposite urges: on the one hand, he kinda wanted to see what happened once the reservoir was filled with whatever the siphon was drawing away from Leet; on the other, he wasn't sure that he really wanted to. The third option was to tell Leet exactly who it was drawing 'bad luck' from, but that would probably just serve to piss his buddy off and cause a scene, and he didn't want to do that at all.

Self-preservation vied with the urge for entertainment, and entertainment won out.

"Uh, so what were you going to do with the bad luck anyway, once you got it? I mean, exactly?" He made sure to keep his tone light, so Leet would take it as simply making conversation, rather than an interrogation. "Hit her with a huge burst of it all at once, have a meteorite land on her or something?"

"I was thinking that at first, but then I decided to go a different way." Fully back in the groove now, Leet kept working even as he answered the question. "I'll start tuning it backward in time, hitting her with random bits of bad luck here and there."

"Right, right." Brendan kept experimenting with the gently warbling device, waving it around in the air, then at himself, then back toward Leet. Whenever it was pointed directly at the Tinker, the LEDs rippled faster and the needle rose on the dial, passing by 'You have to be kidding me' and 'What the hell?' as he watched.

"Nearly done here," Leet reported, his voice muffled as he was head and shoulders inside the cabinet enclosing the luck filter and projector. "How's it going with your bad luck?"

"Oh, it's pulling it in hand over fist." Brendan kept his tone level, while he thanked his lucky stars that there were no cameras to see him hovering the end of the siphon about two inches off Leet's butt. At this range, the needle was closing in on the red-printed 'Fuuuuuuuuuck!' at a ferocious rate of knots. "It'll be full up real soon."

"Oh, good. I knew there was a reason my stuff kept failing." Just as Leet edged backward out of the cabinet, there was a beep from the luck reservoir.

Brendan hastily turned the siphon so it stuck straight up in the air, well away from both of them, so by the time Leet turned around, there was no proof of what he'd been doing. "Yeah, totally. No idea why I didn't see it before."

"Well, you were too close to the problem, weren't you?" Leet puzzled over the luck reservoir for a few moments, then gingerly pressed the green button. The warble changed note, and Brendan got ready to duck and cover. But nothing else happened, so he allowed himself to relax a little.

"Yeah, probably. So, what happens now?" Brendan handed the siphon back to Leet, and watched as the Tinker disconnected the head from it, then plugged the hose into the side of the cabinet that housed the filter and projector. "What else do we have to do?"

Leet shrugged. "Nothing. Now we fire this bad boy up, and start inflicting bad luck on Butcher." He flipped a row of switches, and a bunch of vertical light displays lit up, starting at red but transforming to green one after the other. "Luck filtration up and running. Everything looks good."

Brendan wondered what 'luck filtration' actually did, but wasn't inclined to ask. "How are you going to actually target Butcher?" was what he said instead. That was also a valid question, as far as he was concerned.

"Oh, uh, I got a photo of her. Once I let the guidance computer have a look at it, it'll pinpoint her anywhere within twenty miles. To make it easier, I'll calibrate it so it only locks onto capes." Leet tapped buttons, turned knobs, and pushed sliders. "And there we go! It's got a lock. So I'll warm up the time-folder, turn it back just an hour or so, and zap her with a ranging shot. Just a teensy bit of bad luck."

"Sounds like a plan." Brendan moved closer, interested in seeing how this would go. He watched as Leet fiddled with the controls, and the time-date stamp on the top corner of the screen rolled backward.

"Okay, then. Let's do this thing." Leet drew a deep breath and let out a gusty sigh, revealing that he was a lot tenser than he'd been letting on. He pressed in a button, then manipulated a couple of controls; in another moment, a picture sprang up on the screen, showing Butcher pacing across a paved area, with people all around her. Brendan recognised them as unpowered members of her gang, the Teeth. "I'll just give her a touch of clumsiness …" A knob turned gently under his fingers, and the warbling of the luck reservoir ramped up slightly.

And then the view swivelled, and Brendan saw the costumed woman coming at Butcher, sword reaching out for her. "Oh shit! Cut it off! Abort!"

"Wh—" Leet began, but Brendan was already acting. He'd seen how Leet had focused the projector in on Butcher; knocking his buddy's hands aside, he twisted the knob and slammed the slider all the way to its stop. Leet pushed him back. "What are you doing? Are you nuts?" But it was too late: the image on the screen had already flickered and changed.

Brendan outweighed Leet by several dozen pounds, but the shove forced him back a step anyway, and his elbow connected with one of the buttons on the reservoir. A sharp buzzer sounded, and the warble went to ultrasonic after passing through a sonic phase that felt like it was shredding Brendan's eardrums. The next thing that happened was a sharp pop inside the console, and a very familiar plume of smoke began to rise in the air.

"I had to do it." Brendan gestured at the now-dead screen. "She was in a fight against another cape." He hadn't actually recognised the costume, but it had to be one, with a military uniform and a rabbit mask involved. "If the other cape killed her and you were responsible, you'd be Butcher now."

"Oh. Yeah." Leet grimaced as he prised off a panel. "Yup, thought so. Time-folder's screwed, and the bad luck projector's slagged as well. So much for that." He looked over at the reservoir. "And you managed to hit the emergency dump just after you broke lock on her and fixed it on some poor random asshole in Brockton Bay. So, they got all the bad luck in the world, in one big hit."

"Shit." Brendan actually felt bad about that, then he remembered what Leet had said before. "And it was calibrated to only lock onto capes?"

Leet's eyes opened wider as he processed the ramifications of that. "Yeah. Yeah, it was."

There was no way in hell they were ever going to be mentioning this on their show, not after fucking over some random cape so badly. "Any idea who it was?"

"All I know is what I saw on the screen, just before the projector blew." Leet gestured at the console, then mimed an explosion. "A fuck-off big chunk of concrete, going right through someone's house."

Brendan blinked. "Huh. How do you think it managed that?" Every way he tried to figure it out, he ran into a solid blank.

Leet shrugged, looking just as much in the dark as Brendan was. "Fucked if I know."

And not another word was spoken about it.



End of Part Forty-Two

 

[Melody2006]

Huh.... so that's how coil got f***** over.

 

[Pheonix_Fired]

That... Makes SO much sense! Get FUCKED COIL!!!!! HAHAHAHA!!!!

 

[Therandomestpersons]

So that's at least twice now that Coil has been fucked over by the powers of probability manipulation. Comedic.

 

[Ack]

Earning Her Stripes

Part Forty-Three: Negotiations

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Director Emily Piggot, PRT ENE

Emily laced her fingers together, laying her hands flat on the desk in front of her. It seemed an inadequate gesture for the situation at hand, but it was the best she could do for the moment. She was used to rapidly-developing circumstances—cape powers were an ideal means, if the word could be used in such a fashion, for making things go from bad to worse in an exceedingly short time—but this one had spun out of control faster than even she could keep a handle on.

Fortunately, the presence of the Real Thing had reeled matters in again, almost as fast. Without them, even the awareness that Butcher and the Teeth were pursuing the Undersiders toward the PRT building wouldn't have done her a damn bit of good. Fighting the Teeth was almost impossible with the Butcher running rampant across the battlefield, and fighting the Butcher herself involved a whole sheaf of problems on top of that.

Yet they'd not only engaged her without loss, but they'd stopped her and the Teeth. The latter were in PRT custody, while the Butcher had been taken away by the Real Thing, then returned just moments ago. Now, in her office, she had the three members of the independent team explaining the current situation to her, while the rooftop guards kept an eye on Blockade's suit and Butcher herself.

Still, she sat and listened to them, for the very good reason that things could've turned out a whole lot worse. Armsmaster had been on site, and had made sure that nothing got out of hand; though from his report, there hadn't been a hell of a lot he could've done to stop them if they'd decided to overstep the rules. As it was, there'd been a couple of times he'd had to speak up when it seemed they were about to go too far.

On the upside of matters, the PRT had come out of the incident with a new, deniable asset. Fleeing the Butcher, the Undersiders had come straight to the PRT building; under cover of truce, certainly, but they had still come. In the aftermath, once the threat had been categorically shut down by the Real Thing, Emily had put a proposition to them: work for her behind the scenes, discouraging new gangs from settling in the city, and she would allow them certain concessions.

Immunity for prosecution from prior criminal activity was something she'd anticipated and already decided to agree to, while the other demands (though unusual) had been surprisingly law-abiding. The most onerous was Rachel Lindt demanding oversight of all stray dogs in the city, and the funding to care for them, while the most bizarre was Regent requesting a one-on-one game challenge with Armsmaster. (As far as she was concerned, Wallis would sit down with the boy even if she had to threaten to withhold his Tinker Budget to make him do it.) All told, it was doable, and cheap at the price.

It was also well outside standard PRT practice, but the ENE department may as well have been the Wild West as far as the rest of the PRT was concerned. As with Anchorage, the only real limit on her purview was how much fallout occurred in the aftermath of her efforts to keep the cape criminal element in their place (which, in her opinion, was at least five miles outside city limits). Thus, her 'softly, softly' approach to throttling criminal activity within the city had garnered exactly zero official attention.

The activities of the Real Thing had raised a few queries, but that was mainly because they'd been quite loud in their pursuit of the gangs. They were irritating, but at least (for the moment) they solved more problems than they caused. Of course, it would be nice if they could bring the 'problems caused' meter down to zero.

To date, in her experience with capes in general, that was a pipe dream, so she wasn't going to hold it against them.

"So, you're saying she's blindfolded and manacled." She wanted to make sure she had things right. "And this is somehow preventing her from using her powers to devastate everyone in the vicinity, blow up the building, then teleport away?"

"Correct." Even outside her (admittedly formidable) suit of power armour, Blockade radiated an air of unstoppable certitude. "You're aware that good steel doesn't allow for dimensional shenanigans. The manacles and blindfold are made of it. She can't see or project her offensive powers through it, teleport out of it, teleport with it, otherwise affect it with her powers, or reach past the hand-guards to touch anything that's not good steel."

That seemed remarkably comprehensive to Emily. She tilted her head. "And this is without involving actual technology that needs to be maintained? Just the standard properties of the metal itself?"

Blockade shrugged. "In the same way that you can rely on a tank's armour to protect you against rifle fire simply by having several inches of steel between you and the rifle."

Back in the day, Emily had been in almost that exact position more than once, so she simply nodded. Then she paused; this next part would be less palatable. "We can't keep her like that forever, you understand."

Firebird took up the conversational ball. "Oh, we get it. People have rights. There are legalities to be observed. Unfortunately, the people who came up with those rights had no concept of Butcher's level of pure bullshit offensive power. What's a basic human right for anyone else is an open invitation to destroy everything around her and escape, for her."

Monochrome nodded. "So, we have a dilemma. We obviously can't kill her, both for legal and practical reasons. Simply releasing her is equally off the table. Literally cutting off her arms and legs, and gouging out her eyes, would be a horrific human rights abuse, while at the same time being perhaps the most practical way of ensuring she can't attack people willy-nilly. Likewise, leaving her blindfolded and manacled without any kind of respite is also a human rights abuse, but technically reversible." She gave Emily a level stare, as if to challenge her to somehow cut the Gordian knot.

"Why only 'technically' reversible?" Emily looked from Monochrome to Blockade.

Blockade sighed. "Because until I can design a lock using only good steel that can both fit on a set of manacles and isn't vulnerable to being picked by a five-year-old with a hairpin, the only way to secure such things against Brutes is for Monochrome to snap them into place and remove them again. She's literally the only person on Earth with the strength to make good steel even flex, let alone bend or break it."

Emily needed no time at all to figure out the connotations of what the Tinker was saying. "So if we take Butcher off your hands, we wouldn't be able to remove her restraints even if we absolutely needed to."

"And we're not equipped to keep her as a prisoner except in the extreme short term." Firebird folded her arms to make her point. "The way I see it, we have exactly two options, neither of them easy or good."

"Let me guess." Emily had been around the block more than a few times, and she could spot oncoming bad news with the best of them. "First option: we try to fast-track a Birdcage sentence, which just kicks the can down the road to the point that in three months, we've got a bunch of dead capes and a terrifying new version of Butcher facing off against Glaistig Uaine. Whoever wins that particular head-to-head, it ends badly for everyone. Second option: I try to get permission to keep her permanently in restraints, which only needs one obstructive bleeding-heart back in Washington to scupper. Did you have a third option that I hadn't thought of?"

Blockade waggled her hand from side to side. "Maybe I can Tinker up some sort of teleport portal to another Earth, where humans never evolved. Wrap her up in restraints she can break out of, kick her through, close the door behind her. That's the only other option I can think of."

"And we're back to human rights abuses," Emily noted without heat. "You're right, of course. There is no good option available to us. The least bad option is that I take her off your hands, restrained as she is, and send a request up the line for permission to lock her down in some way that'll actually stick."

Firebird grimaced. "Easier said than done. My dad's in the legal profession, and he says laws are always about thirty years behind the times. Sure, they can adapt current ones—that's why wire fraud legislation involves the term 'carriage service'—but to get comprehensive new laws into play, covering new situations, takes decades. This is why it's still nigh impossible to prosecute internet scammers operating out of foreign countries if they're paying off their local authorities."

Emily exhaled, slow and measured. "Alright. We take her as is. I'll push for emergency authorization to keep her restrained. But if Washington refuses, we may have to let her go under standard protocols."

Blockade, arms crossed, scowled. "Then you'll have to deal with the fallout when she carves her way through half the city." Despite being the smallest person in the room, she spoke with complete confidence, as if the matter had already been decided in her favour.

Firebird's lips pressed into a thin line. "And if that happens, I assume the PRT will do what it does best—cover its ass?"

Emily met her gaze without flinching. "That's not my priority. My job is making sure we don't get to that point."

Monochrome, who had keeping quiet for the moment, spoke up. "Then you'd better get that authorization moving. Before someone in Washington decides they care more about optics than public safety."

Emily didn't need the reminder. She tapped the intercom. "Get me a secure line to Washington. I need to speak to the Chief Director. Now."

Blockade shifted her weight, clearly still displeased. "If they screw this up, we're fixing it our way next time."

Emily didn't respond to that. There was no point; she already knew the truth of it. As the line connected, she leaned back, running through her arguments in her head.

Nothing in this job was ever simple.

Tell me something I don't know.

<><>​

A Few Minutes Later

PRT Department 1, Washington DC

Alexandria

Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown placed her phone on the desk and leaned back in her ergonomically perfect office chair. Closing her eyes, she let out an aggravated sigh. If it's not one thing, it's another.

She'd heard about this 'good steel' substance in Emily's reports before now, but there were many (many) Tinkers under her command, so it hadn't jumped out at her. Now, however, three different aspects of Emily's direct call had grabbed her attention and were looting its pockets for lunch money. First, good steel was apparently capable of both preventing teleportation (useful, but not world-ending) and blocking vision-based Thinker powers. Second, it was reportedly impervious even to powers that could bypass all other forms of protection. And third, none other than Butcher Fifteen (Fourteen having been killed and subsumed by that little shit March out of New York) had been captured and was being held incommunicado by way of simple restraints forged from this metal.

That wasn't the problematic aspect. She was intrigued by good steel, and indeed Emily had pledged to send the sample Armsmaster was currently studying down to DC, but right now she was facing a far bigger problem. Specifically, what the hell to do with Butcher.

Emily Piggot tended toward self-sufficiency in her department of the PRT, to the point that Rebecca could count the number of times she'd asked for outside assistance over the last ten years on the fingers of one hand, and still have a couple left over. This time, she was definitely kicking the problem upstairs for the PRT higher echelons to deal with.

Rebecca knew damn well that getting annoyed at Emily for adhering to the chain of command in this instance was more than a little hypocritical, but she didn't give a shit. Had Piggot pulled a cowboy move and been caught breaking regs in any significant way in the process of solving this, Rebecca would've made a show of coming down on her before letting everything go back to business as normal. As it was, she now had the unenviable job of finding a solution herself, instead of yelling at Emily for doing it for her. Thanks a fucking bunch.

A thought crossed her mind and she picked up her phone then sent a text away, thumbs flying over the electronic keyboard. Is it possible to move good steel through a Doormaker portal?

The answer came back a moment later. Not unless Monochrome is reinforcing it.

Reading it, she raised her eyebrows. Well, that's interesting. One type of dimensional shenanigans covering for another. The downside of that, of course, was that the only way to bring a good-steel-bound Butcher through to Cauldron and put her on ice that way would be to read Monochrome in on the existence of Cauldron itself. Which could be a problem, since the girl came across as being less than fully accepting of authority. Worse, she was one of the few capes on Earth Bet (as noted by Contessa) who could match or beat Rebecca in matters of pure brute strength, and her powerset made it virtually impossible to take her down by surprise.

Well, no use crying over missed opportunities. She cleared her phone screen, then dialled in a number from memory (mainly because she had them all memorised). Elsewhere in Washington, she knew, a phone would be ringing within the Department of Justice. Such was the influence of her position, she knew, it would not ring for long.

"Hello, Rebecca. I'm assuming this isn't a social call."

"You're correct, Charles. A hot potato has landed in my lap, and I need your help wrapping it up and putting it on ice forever." She smiled as she spoke; not because there was even one amusing thing about this situation, but because it was possible to hear the expression in the tone of voice.

"Sounds expensive." Charles was ever the opportunist.

"Perhaps not as much as you might think." She stopped smiling, because it seemed to be sending the wrong message. "When I say 'hot potato', I mean the type with a ticking timer attached to it. It's in everyone's best interests to find a viable solution."

Something in her changed tone must have gotten through to him. "I'm listening."

So she told him.

<><>​

Monochrome

"Well, that's done." Emma watched as Madison climbed back into her powersuit. Two guards, each armed with foam sprayers, had escorted Butcher into the elevator. From the nonstop stream of profanity—she had a little talent in it, but I'd heard better—she wasn't a fan of the idea, but it wasn't really her call. "What now?"

"Go do our thing, and wait to see which way the powers that be in Washington jump, I guess." I shrugged. "They've got all the information. Director Piggot gave the Chief Director chapter and verse. Whatever call they make, it's not on us."

"What about the Undersiders?" asked Madison.

I shared a glance with Emma, then looked at the suit. "What about them? They screwed around, exacerbated the situation, and now they're under PRT orders. Personally, I'd prefer they be there, doing that, than stealing shit and spreading chaos. And we get more benefit from them running interference for us than just sitting in PRT holding."

Madison seemed to consider that, or at least she didn't say anything for a moment. "Yeah, okay. Good point."

As she tromped out from under the marquee, I jumped up onto one shoulder and Emma scrambled onto the other. The handholds were there for us to grab, and I waited until Emma had a firm grip on hers before I slapped the back of Madison's helmet. "Let's do this thing."

The suit's thrusters lit off and we rose into the sky, heading out over the city.

Even though the two major gangs were now defunct, there were still supervillains left in Brockton Bay. Uber and Leet had apparently broken out of holding and hadn't been recaptured yet, and there were a few other minor villains floating around who had suddenly found themselves the only fish in a reasonably large pond.

The problem was that as a team we were great at putting the hurt on a visible opponent, but our detective skills were somewhat lacking. I considered asking Director Piggot if we could borrow Tattletale to help track the bad guys down, but decided to leave it a few days until the ex-Undersiders had settled into their new role a little more. Given the recent uproar, it was likely the remaining villains were keeping their heads down anyway.

Ideally, they'd be making plans to move out of town (like the Undersiders had been intending to do, before their Butcher encounter) so that problem might even solve itself. We could only hope.

In the meantime, we'd be doing patrols loud and proud alongside other teams such as New Wave (and the Protectorate and Wards) while the ex-Undersiders (I was going to have to find out what they were calling themselves these days) did their sneaky shit on the quiet.

It was a plan, anyway.

<><>​

Armsmaster

"And there's no other way to do this? Really?" Colin didn't want to think of what he was doing as complaining, but he hated being pushed into a corner.

"No. There is not." The Director's expression might as well have been carved out of granite. "I've already put Livsey's, Lindt's and Laborn's requests into action. Vasil's is up to you. One sit-down computer game with a teenage boy, and we get him as a deniable asset. It doesn't even matter if you win or lose. I fail to see the problem."

He recalled a conversation he'd had with Challenger early in his career, about fighting young villains. Nobody wants to fight kid capes, she'd advised him. If you win, you've just beaten up on a kid. If you lose, then you've just had your ass kicked by a kid. There's no way to come out of it looking good. Nothing in his experience since then had proven her wrong.

"What if this is just a ploy to make me look bad?" It sounded weak, but he kept talking. "If I win, I'm Armsmaster. A well-known Tinker. People will say I had an unfair advantage. And if I lose … well, there'll be all of the above, but I'll also look stupid into the bargain."

"I. Don't. Care." She tapped a nail on the desk in time with the words. "If you win, be nice about it. And if you lose, lose with grace. But you are doing this."

"I have Tinkering to do."

It was his last-ditch effort, and her expression told him how it was going to go before she ever spoke, though he wasn't prepared for what she actually said. "Not without your Tinkering budget, you don't."

Disbelief flushed through his system. "You're actually making that contingent on … this?"

"I am, yes."

He searched her face for any indication that she might be joking, but even his best body-language software came up with a null reading. "You can't be serious."

"I assure you, I am." She placed her hands flat on the desk. "We have here a chance to turn a net negative into a net positive. The Protectorate and the PRT are good at what we do, and so are New Wave and the Real Thing, but the Undersiders can do things that we can't. Or perhaps you're not familiar with the concept of the phrase 'force multiplier'?"

"Of course I'm familiar with it." The admission was jerked out of him before he could even think about it. "You're saying that four teenage criminals are a force multiplier?"

"Yes." Her tone was deadly serious. "They'll be performing intel gathering, recon and harassment on any capes sneaking into the city. The rest of us will come in with overwhelming force, but that will only be made possible by what they do first. You'll know exactly who the opposition is, where they are, and when they'll be most distracted. But in order to do this, we need the Undersiders, and in order to have the Undersiders, you need to sit down and damn well play a computer game."

He wasn't very good with subtext, but he was pretty sure there was something in there about not being such a whiny crybaby.

There wasn't much he could say that wouldn't prove her point, so he simply nodded. "Yes, ma'am. When and where?"

Her smile almost reached her eyes. "Conference Room A, right now. He's waiting on you. Everything's already set up."

"Wait … now?" His eyes widened. "I've never even played the game before!"

The dismissive gesture gave him the strong impression that she no longer cared, if she ever had. "I understand that you're a fast learner. Dismissed."

Stumbling out of her office, he closed the door behind himself. "Did you get that?" he asked, subvocalising the words.

"Sure did." Dragon's avatar popped up in his HUD. "I made popcorn. Ready when you are."

"You … ah … you couldn't give me pointers, could you? Maybe take over for me?" He didn't know she was a gamer, but she was really good with computers, so he figured that was a fair bet.

Her eyes widened. "Why, Colin Wallis! You're my best friend, but I could never help you cheat like that!" He got the impression she was enjoying this far too much. "Sorry, hon, but you're gonna have to win or lose this on your own merits. Now, get going. Your teenaged nemesis awaits."

"That's what I'm afraid of." Grumbling to himself, he headed off down the corridor.

He knew there'd been a reason he disliked the Undersiders.



End of Part Forty-Three

 

[Pheonix_Fired]

RETURN TO THE SHADOW REALM AND DO NOT GIVE ME FALSE HOPE FOUL NECRO-!
Wait...
Is this...
IT IS!!!!
IT'S ALIVE!!!!!
PRAISE BE!!!!!!

 

[Lictre]

Nobody wants to fight kid capes, she'd advised him. If you win, you've just beaten up on a kid. If you lose, then you've just had your ass kicked by a kid. There's no way to come out of it looking good.

Click to shrink...

He's looking at it the wrong way. The video game isn't a FIGHT, it's a GAME! If he wins, the younger player can look at what he did as an example for improving. If he loses and congratulates his opponent, he's helping the younger player build self-esteem, and (hopefully) demonstrating good sportsmanship. If he treats this as a game and handles things well, it's hard for him to LOSE!

Of course, Armsmaster is pretty well known to be rather focused and for not being the best example of social behavior.

 

[Barbaric_Bob]

oh, what game are you playing?
Monopoly?
oh shit, bloodline feuds are about to begin
which was Alec's plan all along to merc his old man

 

[Ack]

Earning Her Stripes

Part Forty-Four: The Shape of Things to Come

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



PRT ENE Building, Conference Room A

Regent

Alec glanced up as the conference room door opened, and a guy walked in. Moderately fit, wearing a button-up shirt and pressed khakis, the newcomer looked entirely unremarkable, right up until Alec noticed the blue-and-silver domino mask and the carefully shaped beard. "Well, hey," he said. "You actually showed. I was beginning to wonder."

"I knew he'd be here." Tattletale was leaning back in a chair with her feet up on the table, legs crossed at the ankle. "Director Piggot can't afford not to have us scoping out problem capes for her." She tossed Armsmaster a grin. "Let me guess. She threatened to pull your budget?"

While Alec was no expert at body language, the way the muscles twitched in Armsmaster's jaw confirmed Tats' supposition. "I'm here now. Let's get this over with."

"Sure thing." Alec waved grandly at the other chair, which already had a second controller resting on it. "Though I was kinda looking forward to you showing up in full armour."

Armsmaster stopped and gave him a medium scowl. "While you've been racking up your gaming hours and learning every last nuance of how to play, I've been building and rebuilding my equipment, when I'm not training hard to make sure I'm at my best for stopping crime. My armour gauntlets are good, but they provide little to no tactile feedback for controls of that size. I'm already going to be at a distinct disadvantage here; there's no good reason to make it worse for myself." That said, he took up the controller and sat down.

"Ah. Right." Alec paused, then asked the one question he hadn't thought he ever would, when it came to Armsmaster. "So … you know how to use it?"

The Protectorate hero examined the controller. "I spent the last ten minutes looking up the use of these devices before coming over. As I understand things, one of these joysticks controls movement while the other controls facing. As for the rest of the buttons, I presume they allow your on-screen avatar to perform acts such as crouching, jumping, using weapons and the like, but I suspect it's different for every game."

Alec nodded, mildly impressed. "Yeah, that's pretty well it." Deciding that it probably wouldn't look great for Armsmaster to have no idea how to play before he got a thorough ass-whipping, he held up his own controller and ran through the controls. "Left joystick for movement. Right joystick for facing. A for jumping, X for interaction with stuff, like grabbing guns and ammo. Right hand shoulder button for shooting. Left hand shoulder button for activating the scope. Accessing menu. Accessing stored items. Swapping out weapons." He paused. "There's combos you can use to do more complicated stuff, but that's enough to go on with."

Armsmaster's face took on a look of extreme concentration as, one by one, he went over the controls, touching each one and repeating Alec's words under his breath. Twice more he went through them, then he looked over at Alec. "Will you be using combos?"

Tats caught Alec's eye and grinned. Irritated at how fast she'd picked up on his discomfort—this was supposed to be a fun way to low-key stick it to the Protectorate, not a gaming tutorial—he shook his head. "Not straight away. I'll show you the combos before I start using them."

The game started off as he'd initially anticipated. Even restricting himself to the basic moves, he was streets ahead of Armsmaster, not least because he had muscle memory on his side. While the older man had to visually check his controller to use one button or another, Alec had no such limitations and could play rings around him.

And then Armsmaster started figuring things out. At one point, he actually got a kill-shot on Alec from an unexpected direction, getting his score on the board for the first time. Alec was still faster, smoother, and quicker on the draw, but Armsmaster had begun to use tactics that occasionally allowed him to get the drop on Alec.

Worse, it became harder to sneak up on him, because he was using the facing joystick more fluidly as he got used to the interface. When it came to a head-to-head fight, Alec took him down most of the time, but Armsmaster actually seemed to know what he was doing with the slow and patient stuff. The benefits of having done it in real life, Alec figured.

<><>​

Monochrome

There were three ways I could get from Downtown to Lord's Port (or vice versa) in a hurry, these days: running, either on the ground or across the rooftops; jumping and gliding the distance; or catching a lift with Madison via the Blockade suit.

Of course, I preferred the latter option. While the suit thrusters were loud as fuck, and everyone knew we were coming, it allowed us all to arrive together. Also, I was pretty good at making an entrance, but a multi-ton set of power armour coming in for a landing blew that clear out of the water.

The cops had set up a perimeter around the Brockton Bay Central Bank by the time we landed, but they'd been nice enough to leave a space clear for us. (Or rather, Madison had radioed ahead, and they'd cleared a space, because the alternative was to see how a cop car fared against a multi-ton powersuit. The general consensus was 'badly'.)

Emma and I jumped off as her thrusters cut out, landing easily on the ground. Along with the cops, there were a few other capes around; the closest was Glory Girl, who seemed to be hanging out with a couple of the Wards. I smiled and headed in that direction.

"Hey," I said. "Good to see you again. So, bank robbery?"

She returned my smile. "Likewise, and yeah, bank robbery. I'm pretty sure there's not even any capes involved. Just idiots with guns, and a really bad sense of timing."

"No kidding." Emma had joined us by now. "Nice to see you, G. G. Anyone hurt yet?"

It was a pertinent question. If the bank robbers were inclined to hurt or kill hostages, we'd have to go in now, but if they were holding off, we could afford to let the situation stew until they maybe gave up of their own accord. The money was not an issue: Dad had explained to me that financial institutions were insured against robbery. The welfare of the victims in the bank was the main thing to worry about.

"Nope." Glory Girl rolled her eyes. "Someone said they saw people wearing Teeth outfits. My guess is they're trying to raise some cash before they leave town, and they're used to having Butcher along."

Madison tromped up behind us. "And let me guess. They didn't expect this kind of response."

A worrisome idea occurred to me. "Or, they could have another aim in mind."

Glory Girl peered sideways at me. "I don't even know what you're referring to, but I still don't like the sound of it."

I opened my mouth to explain, but just then the bank doors opened. One of the Teeth, wearing full gang regalia, stepped into the opening, holding a bank teller with his gun pressed against her head. "Okay, you assholes!" he yelled. "We want Butcher an' the others back, or we kill every last fucker in here! Let 'em go, an' we let these ones go! Fuck us around, an' this shit happens!"

With his last word, he gave the woman a vicious shove, sending her staggering forward to the edge of the steps. Then, just before the bank doors closed, he levelled the pistol and shot her in the back. Red bloomed across her chest as she tumbled down the steps.

Glory Girl started moving at the same time as I did. By a minor miracle, nobody opened fire, but I was sure that every cop on the scene had just memorised that man as someone to be shot on sight. Reaching out, I grabbed her cape as she lifted off; at the same time, I cut my effective mass and wind resistance to zero, so she wasn't hampered at all by my presence.

We landed side by side on the steps, and she turned to look at me with surprise. "What the hell? I got this."

"The Teeth don't play by the rules." I put one hand on Glory Girl's arm and one on the woman who'd been shot, and exerted my power. Though badly injured, she was still alive, staring up at us pleadingly. I knew how she felt. "Where's Panacea?"

"Just around the corner." Bending down, she scooped up the woman, and that was when the Teeth opened fire on us. The bank windows starred, but didn't shatter, as bullets whipped past us. I'd placed myself between Glory Girl and the bank, so some of the shots must have hit me, but I felt nothing. It seemed that they either really wanted the woman to die, or they'd recognised me as the one who'd taken Butcher down.

Either way, the asshole move did them no good at all, because Glory Girl lifted off again with me in tow, heading for Panacea. I was pretty sure I saw bullets bouncing off both her and the woman we were rescuing; as Alan Barnes could attest to, being shot at ten times durability was still no picnic but it was definitely survivable.

Three different force fields went up as we passed over the police line. Shielder's was the strongest, but Lady Photon and Laserdream's added some protection as well. The assholes stopped firing at that point; I just had to hope they weren't going to take out their frustration on their hostages.

Panacea was waiting where Glory Girl had said she'd be, though Glory Girl hadn't mentioned the camp chair and the folding camp bed. A couple of police officers stood nearby, clearly guarding her. She stood up as we came around the corner, a novel discarded on the ground. "Ah, shit. Who did something stupid?"

"Teeth being assholes." Glory Girl carefully laid the woman down on the camp bed. "GSW in the back, through and through."

"Assholes, check." Panacea grabbed a clicker on her belt and clicked it once, then laid hands on her patient. "Okay, Vicky, I got this. You two go save the day. I'll be here to fix your mess after."

"On it." Glory Girl took hold of my arm; I allowed her to do this, of course. We took off and flew back toward the ongoing confrontation. I'd heard no more shots, but that didn't mean anything. A gang called the Teeth would absolutely have knives.

"Does she always set up like that?" I was asking more from basic curiosity than anything else.

"When we get the time, yeah." We landed next to Emma and the Blockade suit. "So, how the fuck are we going to get them out of there in a way that doesn't kill all the hostages?"

I glanced at Madison's suit, then at Emma, who looked back at me. A memory stirred in my head of reading one of Emma's dad's old comics from back before the days of actual superheroes. "I think I might have an idea …"

<><>​

Regent

When the gaming session finished, Armsmaster was still way down on the board, but that was to be expected. Nobody (except Victor or Uber) could expect to become a gaming sensation in just an hour. What had surprised and (kinda) impressed Alec was how well he'd done overall, and how many times he'd pulled off moves that Alec simply hadn't expected.

"Well, that was fun." Alec got up and stretched. "Good game. You don't totally suck."

"Hrm." Either Armsmaster hadn't heard the comment as he studied the controller, or he was deliberately ignoring it. "I hadn't quite realised how versatile these things were. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt one for use in the workshop."

"Wait, you can do that?" Alec was taken aback. Game controllers were game controllers. Using them outside that context wasn't something he'd ever thought of.

"It's a command input device." Even with the game over and the screen dead, Armsmaster was still handing the controller, working the joysticks and clicking the buttons in what could almost have been a meditative ritual. "What you're controlling with it is immaterial. I could run so many processes in my workshop with one of these."

"So that thing could really help you Tinker?" Alec peered at it, trying to visualise Armsmaster plugging it into his workshop equipment.

"With a few minor modifications for improved sensitivity, certainly." Armsmaster produced a multi-tool out of his pocket—because of course he carried a multi-tool, even out of costume—and popped the back off the controller. "It won't take that much, to be honest. All I need to do is tighten up a few of the tolerances, then program my equipment to accept the appropriate inputs."

Alec cast about for the silliest question he could ask, because why not. "So, uh, you gonna reprogram your bike to use the controller while you're riding it?"

Ignoring Tattletale's muffled snort of laughter, Armsmaster reattached the back to the controller. "Don't be ridiculous." He stood and slipped the multi-tool back in his pocket. "I'd only use one for that if I had it on remote."

With a nod to the both of them, he turned and left the room, leaving Alec blinking in his wake.

Alec turned to Tattletale as the door closed. "I was kidding."

She shrugged and smirked. "He wasn't."

<><>​

Lady Photon

"Okay, so you've got my attention." Sarah looked over the group assembled before her: Eric, Crystal, Vicky, and the members of the Real Thing. "What's this about?"

"We're going into the bank and dealing with the Teeth." That was Firebird, the nominal spokesperson for the city's newest (and most spectacularly over-achieving) super-team. "Laserdream and Shielder thought you should come along too."

Sarah glanced back toward where the rest of New Wave were discussing the matter with the police on site. "If you've got a plan, maybe you should run it past them?"

"No time." Monochrome spoke with authority. "They'll argue and come up with reasons why it won't work, because they don't know our capabilities. In the meantime, the Teeth are getting antsy."

"It's true." Blockade's voice, even muted, was deep and resonant. "I've got them mapped out on IR, and they're starting to look twitchy. If we're gonna save lives, it's gotta be real soon."

Sarah would've been the first to admit she also did not know the capabilities of the Real Thing. But they had comprehensively kicked the asses of every villain they'd gone up against, with the singular exception of March.

That oversight had been remedied when they had a rematch after she became Butcher, and they took her down in fine style. Butcher was widely known to be very hard to hold on to, but she clearly hadn't escaped yet, because here they were.

She made her decision. "Okay, fine. What's the plan?"

<><>​

Glory Girl

"Ready?" asked Monochrome. She held out her arms in front of her. Firebird grabbed her left arm, while Vicky took her right arm. Firebird had explained that it was easy to tell when Monchrome was exerting her protective power, because the protected item went black-and-white. This happened now; it was odd seeing her skin and costume in grayscale, though she didn't feel any different.

"Ready," reported Firebird.

Vicky echoed her half a second later, then added, "Let's do this."

"Okay, then. Hang on to your sphincters." Blockade reached out with one enormous metallic hand, wrapping it halfway around Monochrome's (admittedly slender) torso. Vicky felt herself being lifted up like she was weightless, even without the use of her flight power. Turning on the spot, Blockade drew his arm back like he was about to throw a paper plane, only the 'paper plane' was composed of three teenage girls.

When he whipped his arm forward, Vicky didn't feel any acceleration at all, but suddenly she was hurtling toward the bank windows a lot faster than she'd been expecting. They hit the bullet-hole-pocked glass and went straight through, though oddly enough the glass held together around them and didn't shatter altogether. Once inside, they slowed dramatically, and Vicky felt herself being pointed toward where a couple of the Teeth had a commanding view of the room. One held a submachine gun, and was just beginning to raise it.

She let go of Monochrome's arm and kicked in her flight power, arrowing toward the pair with her fists clenched. Even if she wasn't pulling whatever bullshit power stunt Monochrome had done, she still covered the distance in less than half a second and knocked the gun out of the asshole's hands before he had a chance to point it, much less pull the trigger. She considered the fact that she also broke his wrist with the same move to be a bonus, not a flaw. A muffled gunshot sounded behind her, but she was still busy with her own opponents.

A second gunshot, much louder, drew her attention; she realised that the second member of the Teeth she was facing had just tried to hastily draw the pistol he'd had shoved into the front of his pants. His shriek of agony rivalled that of his comrade as he collapsed, blood staining the front of his already-filthy pants. Vicky finished retrieving the pistol and folded it in half, then turned to see where she was needed next.

Instead, it was all under control. Aunt Sarah hovered up near the ceiling with Crystal and Eric, layering force fields over the hostages so no stray bullets were likely to hurt anyone, while Monochrome and Firebird were just polishing off the last of the twenty-some Teeth.

As she watched, Monochrome grabbed the last two and hurled them across the room. They went out through the hole in the window, where the police were presumably waiting to scrape them off the sidewalk and charge them. Firebird, on the other hand, was standing over a pile of groaning would-be hostage-takers without a hair out of place, fitting a throwing disc back on her arm.

"Uh … okay." Vicky rubbed the back of her head. "That actually worked a lot better than I thought it would."

Firebird looked around. "Oh, good. You got yours. Wait, is that guy okay?"

"Probably not." Aunt Sarah swooped down toward the crotch-shot man. "What happened to him?"

Vicky looked down at him dispassionately. "GSW. Self-inflicted. I was just making sure everything else was okay before I got distracted with helping him."

"Yes, well now you can get the idiot to Amy." Aunt Sarah raised her eyebrows expectantly. "Well, get a move on. She won't thank you if she has to spend extra time healing him."

<><>​

Monochrome

I watched as Glory Girl scooped up the stricken man and flew him out the same hole we'd come in by. The window glass hadn't shattered into a million pieces of shrapnel because I'd reinforced it on the way in, but Lady Photon and the others had enlarged the hole slightly as they followed us into the bank. "I thought Panacea worked on a strictly cash basis," I ventured. "Can't see a member of the Teeth having the money to afford her services, or being willing to pay for them."

Lady Photon sighed. "The BBPD and the PRT have her on retainer. She gets called in for things like this, and they pay her per casualty. Extra for life-threatening injuries. I'm still not sure how Brandish got them to agree to pay for the bad guys too, but I swear that girl's going to be a millionaire by the time she's twenty-one."

"Nicely done." I looked around the bank as the force fields faded away, and raised my voice. "Okay, is anyone hurt, or can you see anyone who's hurt?"

There was a general shaking of heads as people gradually climbed to their feet. They were looking around as though trying to figure out which of us to thank for saving them, which I couldn't really blame. The Real Thing had been kicking ass over the last few weeks, but New Wave had been doing it for literally years, and before that as the Brockton Bay Brigade.

"Well, that's good." Lady Photon scanned the room. "But I could've sworn I heard another shot, just before Vicky's guy. Somewhere over there."

"Ah, yeah, that one's on me." Emma sounded a little sheepish as she pulled back a fallen banner to show a dead man, flat on his back. Not only was he one of the Teeth, but he was vaguely recogniseable as the one who had shot the bank teller. The word 'vaguely' was important, because the pistol in his mouth had blown off the top of his head. It had happened so quickly that his finger was still tangled in the trigger-guard.

Laserdream flinched away. "Ew, gross!"

"Let me see!" Shielder tried to crowd closer. "I wanna see!"

A hastily-formed force field blocked him off. "Not until you're older, young man." Lady Photon raised an eyebrow in Emma's direction. "What happened, Firebird?"

"I saw him with the gun, so I bounced a disc to smack it out of his hand. But I miscalculated; it knocked the gun into his mouth just as he pulled the trigger." Emma grimaced. "My bad. I know we all wanted him for trial."

I carefully didn't respond. Emma never miscalculated with her discs. Madison and I both knew that what she hit was what she meant to hit.

Not that I was gonna say one damn word about it to her. The guy had been scum. He'd deserved exactly what he got.

I wasn't as good at reading body language as Emma was, but I fancied I spotted a tiny hesitation before Lady Photon responded. "Well, yes. Unfortunate, but accidents happen. In a way, it's almost a good thing."

I blinked. "It is?" I didn't even need to act out my honest confusion.

"Mmm-hmm." She turned and started toward the bank doors, where the police were just now starting to enter. I followed. "The rest of them will be held responsible for his death, due to the felony murder statute. But that one would've gotten all the media attention for shooting the teller, and every ambulance-chaser in the region would compete to beat his trial up into a media circus of the highest degree. The publicity would make the Teeth even bolder about getting Butcher back. But he accidentally eats his own gun during a hostage rescue? Barely a footnote. Not even a martyr. They'll fade away."

"Huh," Emma mused as we exited the bank. "I never thought about that."

Uh huh. You grew up in a household with a lawyer, you big fat liar.

Not that we could make a habit of ganking bad guys, but just once, and for this particular asshole, it was satisfying as fuck.



End of Part Forty-Four

 

[Pheonix_Fired]

Thanks for the chapter! Keep up the good work!

 

[TheMidnightRook]

This happed now; it was odd seeing her skin and costume in grayscale, though she didn't feel any different.

Click to shrink...

happened

 

[Ack]

happened

Click to shrink...

Dangit. Good catch.