53 -||

The process itself was far more involved than just sitting there and waiting.

While the man worked on the ink, she worked on the energy within it, grasping the mana and assigning purpose and knowledge, to turn them from odd squiggly lines into words of creation.

It was the theoretical difference between reading each individual letter in a paragraph, one by one, out loud, without pause, and reading the same paragraph normally with proper intonation and taper, in a smooth, baritone voice.

How one connected things and the ideas and knowledge attached to them shaped them just as much as their physical shape did.

In less complicated terms, it was assigning a purpose and identity to the symbols. The difference between a letter being a curvy line, and an actual letter. Nothing changed about the odd shapes, but if one knew how to read them, they could make or ruin empires.

Doing this was infinitely harder in her own body, with practically no mana within it. It was like trying to pick up a cinder block with one's pinkie while exhausted.

Possible, maybe, but only just.

Her skin felt like it was frozen and boiling at the same time, and her teeth were grinding, trying to distract her from both the pain on her skin, and the scraping ache in her head.

And she hadn't even activated it yet. All she was doing was assigning basic restrictions by prodding and shifting the energy within the runes.

Eventually, the first part of many was done.

The first runic circle curled around the base of her spine, sharp, angry shapes that seemed to twist like hissing snakes before her eyes on the mirror, fixed at the start of every blink, and went on, repeating.

The frame around it was an ebbing, weaving blanket of ink, sparse lines mixing with thick swathes of fabric, nigh-microscopic runes lining the edges.

Contain, shift, limit, expunge, move to circuit one, close, open, and another hundred words for which there was no equivalent to in English, not without each being a paragraph.

"Stop. Back up a bit." She said, and without question, Ito leaned back, wiping his tattoo gun.

She focused on the runes, nudging them into place, back and forth, gently putting the circuits together with the care one would when arming a bomb.

Except this bomb was not tied solely to her mana core, the pitiful thing. No, she tied it directly to the summon core as well, because with the option of infinite mana at her fingertips, why would she restrict herself?

Ten minutes later, eyes closed, sunken into her own senses, she took a deep breath, and pushed a tiny surge of mana into the activation rune for the entire band of runes. Tearing off the bandaid, so to speak.

"GNghRK-?!" She choked, eyes flying open, slapping a hand over the rune circle at the small of her back, and barely restrained a shout in her throat, teeth crashing into each other, grinding to dust as her eyes bulged.

Her nails curled to claw into her flesh, and she ripped her left hand off to not ruin the tattoo, instead taking short, gasping breaths as the sensation of a chainsaw made of glass scraping at her flesh took over any and all thought.

The pain meant the runes were working, at least.

So she grit her teeth with a garbled groan of agony, and stayed on the bed, convulsing, neck tendons straining, veins bulging, her arms and legs writhing without purpose as her body demanded her to move, to jump and run from whatever was hurting her, to exert itself to numbness to escape.

She turned over on her back, stomach clenching and cramping, then turned back onto her stomach, nails dragging thick lines through the old chair.

Ito was saying something in a hurried tone, but his head was a black dot in her periphery, so she could neither hear him over the sound of her own clipped, ragged gasps, nor read his lips.

The light was also a black dot.

It was pulsing.

Half her vision was just black spots. Was she about to faint?

She blinked, and turned her head to the side, pulling her lips back in a snarl, spittle flying out through her clenched teeth as she curled up into a foetal position, and resorted to an old trick she'd learned during her stint as Singed.

Multiplying to distract from the pain.

Seven times two, fourteen. Seven times three, twenty one.

So on and so forth, her mind's attention swerving between the blender made of jagged ice shards scraping her sanity down to the bone, and the multiplications, like an out of control car.

She'd gotten to two-hundred and twenty four when she realized that the pain was subsiding, and quickly.

She blinked the sweat out of her eyes, dripping off her eyelids, and took stock of the sore tendons and muscles all along her body.

Everything hurt. Her throat felt like she'd tried to swallow sandpaper.

Her sports bra stuck to her like a second skin, and her military black pants were rolled up almost to her knees from her thrashing, tilted oddly at her waist, revealing the waistband of her underwear.

Shakily, she uncurled, blinking at the picture-covered wall, panting like a raspy flute.

Her fingers weakly and clumsily pulled at her pants to fix them as she scooted up, and took a moment to rest, focusing on the pain and how quickly it was fading.

It took another minute for it to subside almost entirely, leaving behind only an ache like someone had tied her nerves to a live wire, sharp and jumpy.

That's when she dove into the rune band, eyes closing in favour of focusing on the sensation of the intrusion on her body, a self-placed parasite and boon.

Everything was stable. Her body's mana circuits were just too damn tiny, that's why it had hurt so fucking much. It was the equivalent of trying to run a hose's worth of blood flow through a tiny capilliary. Whether it burst or not, it would hurt.

Her mana circuits… she couldn't really bother with developing them naturally. She'd love to practise magic again the proper way, but it would take too long. She had to get faster results, more immediate ones. She'd try the other methods if she had time.

Her eyes opened, with effort, and she swallowed dryly, forcing her head to roll to the side.

Ito was sitting on the floor, head in his hands, her design paper between his elbows as he leaned on the table.

"Go- od- " She started, and cringed at the voice crack, trying again. "Good job." She rasped, and Ito's head jerked up, blinking at her in surprise.

"I… apologise. I don't- I can't understand what I did wrong." He mumbled, brows furrowed in a heavy scowl, turning back to the paper.

"You did it right." She rasped, and allowed herself the luxury of a Heal, the sound startling him and fixing… most of her agony.

Oh, that felt so much better.

He stared for a moment.

"That was supposed to happen?" He quietly asked, incredulous.

"Yeah. Didn't expect it to be this painful though." She grunted, lifting a shaking hand to wipe the sweat out of her eyes again, then to turn and stretch her skin, to inspect the tattoo on the mirror arm hovering over the chair.

It was glowing a soft yellow-white. Odd, but she chalked it up to its power source.

"Come on. Don't have all day." She grit out, and shifted, sitting properly in the chair again.

He stared even more, face expressionless.

"You want me to keep going."

"Yes." She snapped, directing a glare full of daggers at him.

He tensed, but nodded, quickly getting up.

"I called Coil. I thought I'd just injured you. Someone's on their way."

She grunted.

"Okay. Come on, don't waste time."

He nodded, fiddling with his tattoo gun again, before swiftly sitting down, and picking up his pencil with his other hand, digging it into her skin and dragging it along to make a guide for himself to follow.

He was ambidextrous.

Huh.

Oni Lee teleported into the studio at one point, scaring the absolute fuck out of Ito, but after a tense few moment and a grunted command, he called Insight, and handed her the phone.

"Lee? What's going on?" Lisa asked, clearly worried.

"It's me. I'm fine. False alarm. Tattoo trump power just hurts." She summarised, and Lisa huffed.

"Okay, that's why you were so hung up on getting a tattoo. Another thing you didn't tell me. How bad of a pain are we talking about?"

"'I think I chipped a tooth trying not to scream' bad. I'll get over it. This is important." She mumbled tiredly.

Ito got back to work on the frame lines, scraping the skin over her spine raw with his pencil.

Lisa was quiet for a moment.

"Are you sure this is necessary? You don't sound like you're having fun. And it's already noon. You've been there all day pretty much."

"Pain is temporary. These are forever." She responded stoically, and Lisa snorted.

"Okay, miss stoic. Just uh… don't go overboard, I guess?"

"Hnm. How's reading going?"

Lisa went quiet for a moment.

"It's… man, it's… a lot. And I'm still only in the section where it explains powers. I don't know how much you know, but it's some… pretty existential stuff in it. I can't believe our powers come from honest to god fucking aliens. "

"Mhm. She explained that to me on that valley. Another thing I never told you, but there you go. Anyway, we'll catch up when you get deeper in. Love you. Bye." She mumbled tiredly.

"I- uh. Love ya too?" Lisa half-asked, seemingly startled by the simple words.

"Hm."

She ended the call.

Oni Lee took the phone.

And Ito got back to work.

"Lee." She rasped, resisting the urge to swallow again.

It would just hurt more.

Everything hurt. Her teeth, her back, her eyes, her head, her tongue because she fucking bit herself. It was bleeding a little.

Her willpower and mental energy were in the trash by now.

She'd spend half the day feeling like her spinal cord was getting stabbed, shredded, burned, frozen, and crunched into a pretzel.

She just wanted to pass out by now. Or bite down on her pride and let herself cry a little.

Lee stared at her.

"Help me get dressed." She croaked, and he simply stepped forward, helping her upright before regarding the silk suit for a moment, then inspecting his own, barely visible underneath his usual costume, and copying the lacework to get it snug over her form.

A humiliating ten minutes later, she stumbled upright with a pained hiss, her arm slung over Lee's shoulder, leaving the chair she'd been stuck on for the past twelve hours.

Ito didn't seem to be having fun either, massaging his fingers that seemed stiffer than rock with a pinched grimace of intense discomfort and pain.

Just in time, Heal came back up, and she instantly cast it.

The world went dark, and it took her a moment to realise her eyes had slid shut.

She forced them open, and lifted her arm stumbling away from Lee to stand on her own.

Those lights were fucking burning her eyes at this point.

"I'm leaving. Need to do some things. Go back to training with Lung, Lee."

Oni Lee nodded, and as she took a moment to relax and breathe, she opened her eyes to see him fading into ash.

Ito glanced at her and the faint puffs of ash on his floor with a deeply curious look.

"ABB's working with Coil now?" Ito asked, expression still pinched in pain.

"No offence, but don't ask questions." She said, slow and steady, trying to avoid aggravating her headache. "Coil'll pay you triple. Good work. I'll be back eventually. Have a good… night?" She asked, looking around for a clock.

"It's ten PM, so yes."

"Hm."

With that expressive goodbye, she picked Evelynn, flew in her usual fashion, and picked a random roof nearby to test her new additions.

Subtlety could eat shit, at the moment. It wasn't like any heroes were flying around.

She came to a stumbling shuffle on a gravel lined roof, feeling uniquely vulnerable in the most uncomfortable way as she dropped Evelynn.

Exhaustion helped her ignore the feeling.

She closed her eyes, taking stock of the complex systems etched into her back, raw and stinging, Ito's ointments apparently worthless for the kind of pain she was experiencing.

The first circle around the vertebra of her tailbone, practically half an inch above her asscrack if she were to be crude about it, was just a battery of sorts, an artificial mana core far bigger than her own, not without months of work.

And it would keep growing, because it would always be drawing mana from an inexhaustible supply to gorge itself and stretch, further and further, like a… stomach.

The summon core was a cheat even without the Legends included.

From there, the runic circle cracked apart into incomprehensible spiked circles, spirals made of hundreds of tiny letters, swoops and swirls, geometric shapes that twisted the eye, tiny functions intertwining to form a variety of spells. Mutilations of physics, each combination making something different, then metaphysical concepts and ideas given form.

Aesthetically, she just looked like some kind of nutjob who'd gotten a myriad demonic tattoos covering her entire back for the hell of it.

Until she used them and they started glowing obnoxiously, probably.

She pulled on a couple components that she'd grouped together for mental ease of use, and rather than using her own mana circuits to guide and direct the blast, she used the runic exits running along the underside of her forearms, made up of tiny, clumped together runes, like chain links made to carry lightning.

For a moment, she held the spell there, humming away at the underside of her wrist and vibrating something immaterial inside her palm.

Then she let go.

Fire roared to life, an uncontrolled cone, eight feet tall and twenty long, spewing over the side of the building, before she quickly activated the sizing hexes on her left shoulder, concentrating the spray into a thin, swirling spray of flame like a self-contained tornado, just ten feet long and three wide.

Her hand began to burn, so she activated another spell, concentrating it around her wrist and palm, an invisible barrier hovering a millimetre over her skin and shielding her from the searing heat.

Fire was just heat and energy, then a simple conjuration of plasma to react with the former and carry said heat efficiently.

She let the spray die out, before the fading light made it apparent enough to anyone in a mile long radius that there was fire spewing around on a rooftop with her as the source.

She picked another collection of actions and reactions, clumps of restriction and inflammation, removal and addition.

With a wave of her hand, a deafening crackle-buzz like that of a severed powerline finding a puddle to electrocute filled the air, pale white arcs lashing out angrily at anything even mildly conductive, torching lines of gravel black, sending handfuls scattering off the edge.

Oops.

Another combination, another clump of runic effect.

Conjuration, and the essence of an idea, this time.

A flick of her wrist, and a needle-pointed spear of ice erupted out of the ground with a deafening crackle, diagonally facing into an imaginary enemy.

Another clump of runes, something simpler in concept but just as hard in execution.

Telekinesis.

Just to test, she pushed out a wave of force in a spheric pattern, sudden and harsh.

Gravel burst away from her as if she was at the center of a blast, but mostly remained on the rooftop.

She directed it, tightened and reduced the surface, aimed it at a loose brick, her body still as a rock as her mind did all the heavy lifting, and pushed.

The brick shattered in two, and hit the building on the opposite side of the alley below her in pieces. No other brick was scuffed.

Her head… didn't pound, because her heartbeat was not a beat. It was just a steady pump, like a water pump sucking in blood for circulation. Summon core's doing.

No, it was instead more like her head sustained a steady, sharp pain, a papercut to the brain.

Nothing nearly enough to debilitate her, but it sure made it hard to focus. Or think.

Just a bit more, she reasoned… she had to be sure this was worth it.

Besides, it was… novel, almost fun, to be doing something so familiar in an unfamiliar body.

Her own.

Even if Telekinesis wasn't the flashiest thing in the world, in a fight, she could dance around people like an eel with this. Push strikes out of their trajectory, jerk Blasters' arms around to prevent them from even directing their powers at her, tripping them up, throwing grenades or Twisted Fate's cards while still dashing and ducking around… the simple ability of having mental arms to control the field and her opponents made things slip under her control in a very pleasant manner.

Very good.

She picked Evelynn, the moment of truth, to see if her memory fit reality.

There was a reason the summon core absolutely had to go to a mage, or a demigod, if they could get in contact with one. It was why Ryze was supposed to carry it until they could get it into the hands of someone like Zilean, the strongest mage to ever exist in Runeterra's history, a nigh godlike figure.

Neither worked out, because they both perished, but the reason they had been picked as prime users of it was simple.

A normal person could use the summon core, well, normally.

But a mage could cast spells through the Legends they inhabited. Just like a Qi master could project their Qi into the Legend they were using, they could channel through them.

And so, for the first time since Evelynn's formation, two thousand years of life, give or take, Taylor swept her hand, and a wave of gentle flame erupted out of her palm. Nothing glowed, nothing seemed to cast, but in a phantom sensation in the back of her mind, it did.

Basic elemental magic was just that, however. Basic.

She activated the runic symbols near the top of her back, the clumps of runes derived from Domination, mixing the essence of conquest, destruction, and primal superiority, with an idea shaper rune.

Then she drew in the rune clusters she used for the lightning.

She opened her palm, and pushed, palm facing up so she could see.

A ball of red lightning bucked and screamed like tearing metal, hovering mere inches above her skin, attracted not to metal nor water, but to life, a malignant, hungry monster, eager to devour and annihilate. Its light bathed the whole rooftop red. 

She let it fade, trying to blink the light spots out of her eyes.

She picked another bunch.

Domination and Precision, mixed with a few Inspiration runes, some ideas, and a mental projection of a concept…

The spell came to life, through her spine and into her chest, then outwards, an invisible wave.

A subtle influence, unseen and unobtrusive. An aura of authority, the kind of presence that made one want to immediately shut up and listen.

Nobody here to test it on.

She picked another, focusing on a construct, mixing every type of magic she had carved into her back.

A ghostly orb, an imitation of an eye, flickered into life before her, and her vision expanded. A cantrip of light reflection and visual expansion.

It was like… where her eye socket rendered her vision into darkness the mind tended to ignore, instead, there was a thin blur, and then another eye, currently staring into her other two from a few feet away.

She directed the ghostly eye like a limb, without much thought, and it flew up, fifty feet, a tiny pale blue light, giving her a bird's eye view of the city, and most importantly, herself.

Dismissing it, she activated another set of runes, glowing through her silk suit on her back, a bright, hungry red. Simple body fortification.

A faint blood-red aura seemed to emanate from her skin, leaving smoke-like trails behind as she moved.

She picked up a pebble, put it between her pointer finger and thumb, and switched back to her real self, her real body, the one only nominally stronger than a regular person.

Then she squeezed.

The pebble broke without much effort, crumbling to pieces as if it was merely a dry clump of dirt.

She picked another one up, aimed at the hills, swung her arm back, and whipped it forwards, a wide arc that made an audible, sharp whistle through the air.

The pebble vanished instantly in the night with only a millisecond-long, piercing whistling noise.

She wasn't even sure where it ended up, honestly.

She tried a few more things like some lashing flame whips, shaped spears made of lightning that she didn't dare throw lest half the city hear her destroy a random rooftop, but truly, the most important part of it all, was the power source of everything.

Because the runes were sucking in mana directly from the summon core, and not her, she had an infinite supply of mana to spend. She had a primordial bundle of creation in her chest, and so far, she had only been using the most surface part of it, its ability to inject and summon souls like contructs over one's skin.

She still couldn't pass a certain threshold of mana draw due to the binding material, aka, her flesh, however. It was too weak. Something she could fix with Grasp of the Undying filling her with lifeforce, and a bit of Qi training. 

Aside from the active benefit, it was an added layer of security since if she overused her Legends, she would still have a fighting chance to live with these. Any fight was a contest of resources, plain and simple, but now if her main resource ran out, aka, her time with Legend usage, she wouldn't automatically get flattened by any two-bit parahuman.

She was about to fly off to go visit Amy, when a thought rose.

Why not try a few more things?

A certain classic came to mind.

It took a lot more concentration to form this specific spell. Conjuration, again, but she hadn't designed the runes on her back for making summons like this. It was a rough, cobbled together result, without a personality nor a proper priority list, neither any informational witholdment. It couldn't learn nor grow.

When it came to summons, it was practically nothing but a distraction instead of a sentient creature.

But, it was tough, strong, and deadly.

A tedious few seconds later, she gestured with her arm, a calm, raising motion, palm up, and from the dry concrete of the roof, a featureless, shadow-less luminescent white battleaxe rose, as if being raised by strings.

It was such a… incongruent sight, something so magical and otherworldly, placed on something as mundane and depressing as a rooftop covered in shitty graffiti. It just didn't fit into this world, and she wasn't sure how to deal with that feeling other than ignore it.

She observed it as it stood statue-still.

It came up to her hips, and with the way it glowed, soft but eye-catching, it was practically a giant, semi-sentient lamp. A strong punch from a brute could easily take it out.

She could make it stronger, but it became a game of diminishing returns at some point.

Besides, this was rather pointless... She'd have the same results by using Telekinesis on a real axe, it would just take a ton more concentration to do it. That was the sole improvement.

She grasped its amalgam of a mind, more of an empty shell, with her own mind, and pushed a command into it. Or rather, an action, torn from her mind and inserted into its own.

Without the tiniest hint of life, it turned itself sideways,and swung in a wide, whistling arc, before straightening then going still again, waiting for another command, frozen in place mid-air.

She directed it to attack the roof, filling its mind with directory information from her memories, everything she knew about wielding and using battle axes.

After a small delay, it flipped itself around to point the spike on the back side towards the ground, wound up as if held by invisible hands, then slammed into the concrete with a deafening crack, down to the hilt, before spinning in a flourish to remove itself from the roof, spraying brick dust everywhere, and continuing its momentum in a blade-first downwards chop that made the rooftop minutely shake and her ears ring with the metallic clang that followed as the blade bit deep.

She grimaced in discomfort, and dismissed the axe, letting it fade into motes of light.

The ringing left quickly.

The possibilities were… not quite endless. Time was a big constraint. She could fit an entire grimoire of spells on her body if she took the time to minimize and clump the runes together into packages within packages, but that would take a long time that she didn't have.

She'd pick and choose a little more carefully when it was time for the next upgrade, but this was a good baseline.

Part of her was annoyed at that, while another was relieved she wouldn't have to go through another torture session too soon.

After a long, long yawn, she rubbed at her eyes, and picked Evelynn again, flying off to go meet Amy.

She had some things in mind for the girl to get started on.

"You look like shit." Amy said the moment she saw her, sitting on the folding table, eyes upturned while her lips were glued to the edge of her coffee cup, cradling it gently.

"No I don't." She said tiredly, and plopped down on an ammo box in the corner of the common room, her armour clanking loudly, elbows on her knees.

"Sure. I know that look." Amy mumbled. "Thanks, by the way. I… I think."

She tilted her head.

"For what?"

"The whole… unmastering me thing. Whoever of you did it. Are you like a leader or something?"

"No. Not a leader. Also you don't sound too sure about that 'thank you'."

"That's because I'm not." Amy said quietly, and after a lengthy silence, didn't seem interested in elaborating.

"Hm. Well, I'm here to give you your first project, of sorts. If you feel like you're up to the challenge."

Amy stared at her blankly, the backrest of the safehouse a dark, dreary blandness of space yet unlived in.

"I'm not making anything until I have some answers. What happened to Heartbreaker?" Amy asked, face curling into a very subtle sneer.

"We Mastered him to make him fix his victims. Once he's done, we'll kill him."

She said that, but there was… going to be a lot of middle management involved first.

Amy nodded, lips pursed.

"What happened while we were gone? I looked up the things you said." Amy said, giving her a vaguely wary look. "You're apparently the new USA-wide boogeyman now. Why? No, I know why, I mean just…" Amy gestured vaguely, frustrated. "What happened? The city's all weird now."

"When you were taken, we tried to call a truce to deal with Heartbreaker potentially being around here. Not exactly The Truce, the one for Endbringers and the Slaughterhouse 9, but a truce, in line with it. One of his kids had escaped here, then the kid went missing, and then you and Victoria got caught on camera swerving out of your path to fly off to nowhere. We assumed it was Heartbreaker, and were right." She started, rushing through the explanation impatiently.

"We had a meeting at Somer's rock. All the gangs and independents too. Your family was lied to by the Director that we had kidnapped you and were trying to use the truce to stall for time. Then they set up a perimeter and tried to grab us. Everyone from the current Protectorate, Dragon, New Wave, and some Boston teams. So… I crippled everyone and killed Tagg for breaking the Truce. We'll heal them if they fight in the next Endbringer fight."

Amy slowly nodded, shifting in her seat and eyeing her with a newfound caution.

"Can I touch you to confirm you're not lying?" Amy asked.

"Knock yourself out. Don't try anything sneaky, you'll just die for nothing, fair warning." She said, and quickly unlatched her gauntlet, tossing it aside, then throwing the glove under it on the ammo box as she walked over, and extended her hand.

Amy eyed her strangely.

"You know what I can do. I assumed Heartbreaker told you after you said you Master villains."

She nodded.

"Can't have trust between two people if neither takes the slightest plunge. Besides, I'm sure you won't do anything. If only for your own well-being, at least."

Amy took her hand, eyes not leaving her face.

"Did you lie about anything you just said?"

"No."

Amy nodded, and went to pull her hand back, before pausing.

"Did you lie about anything you said yesterday?"

"No."

Amy dropped her hand, and put it back around her coffee mug, taking a quick sip.

Huh. So even biological power-senses could be fooled with enough experience in the art of deception. Interesting.

"So, what do you want?" Amy asked.

She nudged a chair to face her with her foot, before dropping into it, ignoring its creak of protest.

"For starters… I want you to not have a mental breakdown and ruin our city. Tall ask, but Insight put aside one of our usual therapists for you if you want it. Should be in your inbox."

Amy's eyes dropped to the table,, shoulders drooping with shame and frustration.

"I'll think about it."

"That's all I suggested. Now, if you are feeling up to working, we've got a whole building to ourselves for laboratory use. Renting it off Medhall since their recent downsizing left it vacant. And what I'd like you to do, first of all, is tell me if you think you can cure cancer."

Amy blinked at the mug, then up at her, with a hint of anger.

"You- your first job for me is to cure cancer." Amy said, deadpan.

She furrowed a brow, and nodded.

"Yes."

Amy hissed something under her breath about 'same old shit', then glared at her weakly.

"Fine, where's the patient?"

She blinked.

Amy blinked back.

She shook her head.

"Kid, you're a bit dense, or you need more coffee. I didn't mean 'cure someone's' cancer. I meant cure cancer. For everyone. Make a cure. Something that can be produced either by a self-sustaining mechanism or a laboratory, which we can sell for just enough money to where it's not costing us money to make and sell and distribute yada yada, for no profit to our pockets."

Amy's glare doubled.

"That's not going to work. Scalpers and pharmaceutical companies will take it and price gouge the fuck out of it."

She sighed.

"Yes, that's the nature of the beast, unfortunately, and why charity never works. To combat it, all we can do is just provide better service than anyone else for a lower price. Not hard to do when your goal isn't profit margins. Besides, we get something out of it regardless. How do you think the world would feel about Nexus if we suddenly started selling a cure to cancer that works for what is, essentially, pennies? Through you of course, but still. We might not make any money off of it, but it would be worth it from the reputation gain alone. Practicality aside, we'd also just…" She slowly calmed down, and shrugged, letting a small smile grace Jarvan's face. "Be doing a good thing. Good for the soul, to help people." She shrugged.

Amy's glare lessened, to a considering stare.

"Oh. Okay, that… might work. I can do it, probably. Might take a long while. Like, a month or two, maybe. And I'd need a few samples of each type of cancer."

She felt relieved to hear that, actually.

"A month is nothing. How come you didn't make it already?" She asked, genuinely curious rather than accusatory.

Amy's expression soured significantly.

"I had to hide my abilities from the PRT. And well, the world. And… family stuff got in the way too. It's complicated. Also the PRT once falsified a child abuse charge against someone's guardian in Atlanta because the kid was a biotinker. Well, sorta. The kid and his mom didn't have the best relationship, but it wasn't child abuse. But the PRT is an arm of the government so they usually get away with doing whatever the fuck they want. The only instance they didn't get away with doing shady or immoral shit is apparently two weeks ago with you." Amy said, then handwaved the topic aside. "Back on topic, they jailed the mother, took the kid in as a Ward, and then the kid vanished. Never had a public appearance, just exists on the registry. I'm not going to speculate, and I don't think they killed him or anything, but…"

She nodded thoughtfully.

"But you'd rather not find out for yourself what happens when the PRT abuses its power to get people out of the way. Got it."

"Yeah. Nevermind the fact that curing cancer would put me on the crosshairs of every pharmaceutical company in the world, and it's not a conspiracy theory that they'd assassinate me because they do it fucking regularly. All the time, capes and normal people find a cure for a profitable illness, or they make a breakthrough, then mysteriously disappear or fucking die." Amy growled, obviously frustrated.

It sounded like a conspiracy theory, but Amy seemed certain enough, and she didn't know this world well enough to discredit or accept it. All she gave was a goading humm.

Amy huffed through her nose. "It would also give some people the idea that I need to get killed because I'm too dangerous. People could probably connect the dots, someone would figure it out and start ringing the alarm bell. One piece of shit with a gun just needs to follow me to school one day, and I'm fucking dead because of some vigilante or gangster, because I'm no longer the harmless healer, but a touch-based biotinker. 'Yes she cured cancer but she can also give the entire world cancer and how can we trust she won't snap one day?" Amy grumbled, before taking a sip of her coffee.

"Huh. I think I get it. That was a lot. Glad to see you getting things off your chest."

Amy grimaced in shame.

"Well, better get on it. Cancer's not gonna cure itself. Address for the lab is in your inbox, some of your guys can drive you. Or teach you how to drive, I don't know, whichever you prefer. Not like you need a licence anymore. The joys of being a- somewhat harmless outlaw."

She was about to flicker away and go deal with some other such business, before Amy's shout of 'wait!' had her pause in her tracks.

"Wait, wait wait. I need to heal people too." Amy said, taking a greedy gulp of her coffee, then putting it down as she got up to match her. "Like, in a hospital. People are dying every day and I've been missing for two weeks or something. And it's a good chance for me to get live samples of various cancer types. And… I need to do something normal. Something I know. This is all just- moving too fast. I feel dizzy without feeling dizzy." Amy said, then frowned. "That sounds fucking retarded." Amy whispered to herself as if in self-realization.

Panacea cussed out a lot.

Slowly, she nodded, pursing her lips.

"Overwhelmed."

Amy shot her a confused glance.

"Overwhelmed is the word you're looking for. Dizzy without being dizzy. Anyways." She flexed her back, cracking her knuckles. The phantom pain of the tattoo was still bothering her. "Once the National Guard leaves, we can try to set up a big escort for you to go to whatever hospital you please. Would you mind wearing our symbol as well as the whole… medic costume?" She gestured vaguely.

Amy squinted.

"The red flower thing that your guys have on their shoulder?"

She nodded.

"I'm- not sure I want to do that. I mean, guys in black with guns following me around is going to be obvious enough, but… I don't know. I want my physical image to be the same. I want to be seen as more of a partner than your minion or employee." Amy said, pensive.

"Ah. Good call, makes sense. Anything else?"

Amy licked her lips.

"When am I getting paid or getting any kind of independence around here?"

"Give it a while. Forging documents the right way is hard, takes a week or two. Then there's the fact that, no offence, you're still not exactly the most trustworthy of our members, and proportionally, you're one of the most dangerous people in this city. Give some time for trust to grow. We're not trying to control you, but you'd understand why we'd get very nervous about you wandering off on your own without a few bodyguards at the absolute least." She emphasized, calm and reasonable.

Amy sighed, long and frustrated.

"Kinda sounds like what a controlling asshole would say because it's understandable and it makes sense. But it makes sense, so it still works. For now." Amy said, expression sour.

"Trust takes time. On both our ends." She nodded goodbye, and left.

Straight to Heartbreaker, a couple blocks away.

"... This is it. This is everyone you remember Mastering. And everything you know about them." She said, not asked, fighting the urge to tear the paper and strangle the man until his eyes popped out.

"Afraid so." Nikos replied, unbothered.

She directed her gaze back to the paper.

Bank Teller. Mirroswood? Miroswood? Minnow's Wood? Don't remember the village. Might have been a small town. Plain face. Brown eyes. Told him to go on a killing spree in my name. Get creative.

Mariette. Got her on a sidewalk in Las Vegas. Bright red hair, middle-eastern features, curly black hair, glossy. Don't remember anything else. Her ID card was a deep blue. Immigrant family, tourist. Currently the nosy wife of a local police chief to get us information on stings and patrols.

Severe-looking Airforce officer named Gregor in Montreal. Some central big area, can't remember. Russian? From some slavic shithole. Told him to steal a fighter plane and crash it into the World Trade center or the Guild HQ if I died or got sent to the Birdcage. Either or.

So on, and so forth. There were fifty entries. The three sole pages in sight ended with 'another fifteen or so I can't remember much or anything about. Maybe twenty.

Most of it was just… shit. Nothing useful. There were some good entries with enough detail for the government to probably find them, like that airforce officer, but it was mostly just 'some dude, around here, kinda white, told him to go kill cops if something happened to me'.

And she was stuck with him for another few weeks.

She sighed, annoyed.

"Get in the car." She said, and jerked a thumb to the door behind her.

Wordlessly, he went.

Seeing Noelle was the first time she'd seen Heartbreaker express anything more than idle boredom.

Fear was a much more welcome twist to his features.

She practically had to frog march him forward as he dug his heels in and his breaths began to deepen and turn choppy.

Noelle's recently 'trimmed' body was still well over ten feet tall, and had shifted to something like an articulated ribcage, using the rib bones to walk around like an upside down spider. Horrific masses of animals, humanoid shapes, and ribbons of slimy skin dragged on the floor, growing over the gargantuan bones.

The size of her form wasn't colossal enough to be petrifying, but the sight still was more than enough.

The girl's eyes were as empty as ever. Not bad, not good. Calm, in limbo.

The eyes on her body were the complete opposite. Frantic, bloodshot, wide eyed with madness and murderous hatred, focused on her.

Her condition would need some genuine study, honestly, but Coil had confirmed that he had tried to cure Noelle with Amy and another half-dozen ways in an old timeline, and it hadn't worked, so her options were still not exactly vast.

"How are you holding up?"

Noelle stared blankly, taking slow breaths to contrast the shuddering, chittering rasps and gasps of the animalistic soup of flesh crawling over the bones.

"The same. The TV is a welcome addition. Stimulation satisfies something in my head." Noelle said, much more understandable and articulate than last time. Her eyes moved to the Purity clone triad behind her with a faint sense of interest, then to Heartbreaker with a bored sense of impatience. "The same?"

She nodded.

"Five clones."

Hm.

"What is happening?" Heartbreaker asked, voice carefully controlled to mask his mounting terror.

"Noelle, if you could?" She asked, uninterested in explanations, her hand tightening on the back of Nikos's neck, keeping him in place.

Noelle nodded, and with a horrific set of cracks, like the joints of a titan popping all at once, the jointed rib-bones scraped forward with shocking speed, lunging.

Heartbreaker only had time to let out a shrill, high-pitched gasp of horror before two ribs extended like mandibles, curled over his shoulders,and violently yanked him into the main mound of flesh in the center of the 'ribcage' that faced the floor, the animals and eyes seemingly melted over the bones all focusing on her with eerie intensity.

With a disgusting series of sounds mixing with Nikos's muffled scream, he vanished into the slimy, membranous folds.

Then, silence.

She picked Evelynn, and waited.

One clone popped out, another, so on and so forth.

The usual kinds of deformities. Face on the side of the head, limbs backwards, limbs mixed with other limbs, extra limbs where they shouldn't be, one who just had sixteen fingers on one hand.

She mostly focused on overpowering the clones quickly, but in the background, she could hear the Purity clone triad talking to Noelle. Idle chit-chat she couldn't decipher while focusing on her main task.

Once the fifth was Mastered, she straightened.

Nikos himself was spat out, and after a moment of being limp, gasped awake, projecting a pure, traumatised, visceral disgust, one so strong it would drive a man to scrape his skin off just to feel clean again, only to keep scrubbing to the bone, maddened by it.

He immediately vomited.

She noticed the clones were far less disgusted about Noelle, than their original. Odd.

She didn't dwell on it. Her day was exceedingly long already.

She flickered to her real self, and turned to the first clone, barely cleaned enough with the water hose to open an eye at her.

"State your power."

He stared, gargled, then tapped his neck.

"Throat deformity?"

He nodded.

She turned to Tria.

"Go grab some pen and paper for him, be back quickly."

Tria nodded, and flew off.

She turned back to the clones, looking to the second one.

"State your power. We need someone to Master large amounts of individuals to our cause and organization, for context."

He gathered himself, blew out air through his lips to get the water out as it trickled down his face, and straightened.

"I make templates. What kind of person I want, their ideals, their fervours and passions and beliefs. I make people, and replace what's in people's heads with what's in mine. It takes a long time to make one template though because people are complex things. For numbers, it would be easiest to make a basic archetype, and let them branch off and grow from there, but it is essentially killing the person and replacing them completely. Need skin contact. Ten seconds, maybe?" He wondered, voice warbly and rough.

She hummed, squinting.

Powerful. Quick. Ish.

A little too grim for her liking, though. It gave her some mental comfort to think that she wasn't killing everyone she mastered, just changing them for the better and giving them a good purpose to serve. This power would strip that away.

Then again, was she really going to be having a moral panic over genocidal Nazis and sex trafficking gangbangers getting killed via mastering?

No, no she wasn't. She'd save her morals and grief for people who deserved it.

"You pass. Take the robe and wait until I'm done with all of you. You'll go up to the showers above to fix your deformities after."

The clone nodded, and turned to the girls.

Duo had closed her eyes completely, almost childishly, but held out a white bathrobe with her hand, which the clone stumbled over and took with his functional hand that wasn't a ball of fingers, awkwardly draping himself in it.

"What the fuck was that? What is that thing behind me?" Nikos demanded loudly, ragged, voice still thick with the urge to vomit, his shivering back facing Noelle. 

"None of your business. Stop being annoying. I've half a mind to cut your tongue off." She snapped, and he kept panting, the room plunging into silence.

She let her hatred of the bastard get the better of her. Embarrassing.

She sighed, and turned to the third clone, the one whose face was to the side.

He turned so his shoulder was pointed at her, so his grotesque face could look at her.

"Power." She calmly said.

"Tha-f-gjhjuuh- nghrath-" The clone said, then raised a hand, testing vowels and syllables. Ten seconds later, he cracked his jaw, and raised his eyes.

"I can mmmm-ake someone mad. En. Raged. Only at a specific perth- pers- person. Though. They'll hunt them to death, die trying. Both need to be- in sight. If thhhe target escapes, they might. Die of rage anerism- aneewrissm- aneury-sm. Aneurysm. Unlikely. Pothible- posh- possible." The clone said, voice thick and low like a century old cigarette addict.

She furrowed her brows.

Very powerful. If he could direct that at specific figures, she could create hell on earth for her enemies, with eternal, hyper-dedicated pursuers who would do anything to kill them. Even better if they were familiar with the target.

"Can you turn it on and off?"

The clone tilted its head back, then seemed to get confused, before leaning forward and giving a stilted, broken nod.

"Fine, you pass. I'll shove you into the ABB, try to find some use for you. Next, power." She said, hurrying along.

The fourth one was fine, just that his spine seemed to be as curved as a snake, like incredibly severe scoliosis.

His features were uneven and bulging, but, details.

He took a moment to think, standing still and leaning to the left from his deformity.

"I flip people's perceptions to the opposites. The more stressed, urgent, or alert they are at the moment, the easier. Friends turn into foe and foe turns to ally. A dangerous enemy turns into a mild annoyance to be brushed aside. Strength becomes weakness. Underestimation, overestimation. Not permanent, fades rather fast without my attention. Maybe two or three seconds. Medium range. Need sight to use it. If they know how my power works, they might be able to resist the effect somewhat."

She took a moment to think about it, and shook her head.

"I'm moving you into the ABB. I'll make your features vaguely… asian." She finished awkwardly.

He nodded with his whole body, water spraying off his very unappealing naked body with the jerky, odd motion.

Then she paused, and grimaced, before turning to look up at a blank-faced Noelle.

"Uh, Noelle? Mind turning away?"

Noelle stared.

"I've literally eaten people alive. Whole." Noelle deadpanned.

"... Sure, but you don't need to see middle aged, deformed naked rapists. Your future self will probably thank you. Just turn away."

Noelle's features formed a confused frown, despite there being no such emotion in the air, but she complied, shuffling her hulking body to turn away.

She cleared her throat, and turned to the fifth clone.

Then she paused, because there was another one left.

She hadn't exactly been counting when Noelle started spitting them out.

Noelle made six clones?

Probably an accident...?

She wasn't going to complain either way.

The fifth one looked just like Nikos. His deformities were subtle. His bones were all uneven. Some longer, some shorter, a few missing. Some were curved. But he could stand tall, albeit crooked, and he did.

"I'm him, but better." The clone said, simply.

She raised a brow at the boast.

"Overselling your abilities?"

"I'm not. He needs some time, line of sight, and then a bit more time to settle those emotions, tie them to certain things, condition people properly. It's why most of my- most of his sleeper agents had to be moved to a hotel or their home for a night or so. He can lure people away, draw them and enslave them, in just a few seconds, but to do it right, to have proper, devoted slaves, he needs to know more about them and he needs to adjust things. Why do you think he asked the Dallon girls such personal questions right away?" The clone asked.

She hummed.

"And how are you better?"

"I'm like him." The clone said, and pointed to the second clone. "Just infinitely better. I can… sort of prepare these things, in my mind. What loyalties, where, what emotions tie to which idea. Then I just need to touch someone for a few seconds. The more extensive the changes, the more time. I might need about thirty seconds to make you your own slaves, but they'll be done properly. If you mass produce clones with a blank mind, he's the better option, because he can implant things into them. Leave them generally… empty. If you want to change existing things, I'm the best at it." He said, confidently but simply.

She thought for a moment, then slowly nodded.

"Second clone." She said, and he turned his head to her. "You're going to be on clone Mastering duty. Details later, but you'll be working with Noelle here a lot. Your templates being capable of leaving blank canvases behind sound perfect for making clones capable of easily becoming their own people while still being loyal and having information. Takes half the existential dread away too, I'd say."

"Agreed." Enna blandly said from the side.

The second Nikos clone stared past her at Noelle, raised his hand in an awkward greeting, then dropped it.

She turned to the third clone.

"ABB. Local asian gang, like I said. Going to be fighting for them, causing chaos et cetera. Fourth, you're going to be on mastering duty going through the local gangs' chaff to be put under Nexus's control. There are around twelve thousand members to work through combined. Maybe thirteen after we deal with a small druggie gang soon."

His face dropped.

"Twelve thousand. Maybe thirteen." He repeated, annoyed. "That's going to take ages for me to go through.

He was right to be annoyed about the number. That was about four percent of Brockton's population. Three point five maybe?

It was a shockingly high statistic for being involved in gangs, even if it sounded low when said out loud. 

She nodded.

"Can the fifth and sixth maybe help me?" He asked.

Both she and he, turned to said person, the sixth clone, who had been silent the entire time.

The half-formed arm that seemed to be dangling down from his stomach like an omphalic tube twitched as he curled in on himself a bit.

Gross.

"My power's the exact same as Nikos', just better. I can just affect two, maybe three people at a time, if they're close enough together where I can focus on all of them without my eyes drifting apart. Not as precise as the fourth one's, and a lot slower, but I can probably work on two or three people at once. So, yes."

She nodded.

"Alright, you're on the same duty as him then. Insight, my second in command, will give you folders with what this is all about, what we want you to do, what ideals and morals to follow, et cetera. Let's get you into a bath. Follow Enna." She said, and gestured to the woman.

Tria returned right then with a paper and pen for the first clone, who took it, and clumsily put the paper against his palm to write.

While the other clones shuffled off, he struggled for a bit, before turning the paper towards her.

In scratchy chicken scrawl, it read; I can make a clone. Shape it as anyone I want, including imaginary people. I am conscious of the clone and myself at the same time. We are one and the same. If either of us dies, the one remaining turns back into the original.

She furrowed her brows.

That was a strange power, and practically completely unrelated to Nikos's. Odd.

"If you make a woman clone, and you die, does the woman turn into you then, and you can just keep going normally, and split yourself into a man and a woman again?" She asked.

The clone thought for a moment, then nodded, clumsily.

"Sounds… absolutely phenomenal for information gathering missions and the like. Practical immortality so long as you don't both die simultaneously. You're going to be joining the ABB too. Mokutan, and an unnamed clone, along with your two other… clone-mates. Go get yourself settled, I'll be up in the showers to shapeshift you in a bit. And, all of you-" She raised her voice, stepping back to face them. "-pick new names, and do not what Heartbreaker would do, even to your enemies, or I will just kill you. Alright? Mastering people is one thing, but don't treat people as meat to fuck and abuse, or I'll hang you by your entrails."

The clones all nodded with… varying degrees of dexterity.

She gestured to the side.

They waddled off towards Enna and Duo as they handed out items of general dignity to cover themselves with, and led them up to the showers.

She joined them after a couple minutes of sitting on her phone and assigning a handler for Heartbreaker, switched to Lulu, and thirty minutes later, she was done.

The three of them assigned to the ABB had features ranging from Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese, while the other two just had their hair colours changed to black and their faces shifted to something completely different to Nikos's appearance.

After that, she let the Purity squad settle them in and send them on their way.

In the meantime, she Teleported to one of her nearest waypoints that lay outside the city.

Specifically, to Boston.

It took an entire hour for Accord's schedule to clear enough to meet her, even with forewarning.

Which spoke to how busy he was, since it was nearing midnight.

She took that time to check up on the Travellers.

To her immense relief, they seemed to be doing fine. Krouse and Marissa seemed to be in the worst mood, but aside from that, she caught them in a moment of relaxation, playing videogames in their safehouse and bickering.

Not even an injury in sight after fighting the Teeth for almost a week and a half now. Impressive.

Eventually, she went back to Accord's building, slinked into a familiar, opulent office, and materialized in front of him.

The spike of irritation he felt, immediately, let her know he didn't appreciate her timing, but the man was anal about the slightest things, and now that he was Mastered, she could hardly care to baby him by walking a certain way and other unnecessary actions.

She wasn't that interested in him to begin with, not right now, because to his side, was his newest, scruffy addition.

Blasto.

Seemingly having cigarette withdrawal jitters, bouncing his leg up and down as he scowled deeply at her and Accord, incessantly tugging at his sparkling clean labcoat as if its existence offended him.

Jaw-length hair hung around his neck, and she had to admit, that he looked strangely similar to Heartbreaker, if just a bit less handsome, with more intense features. Deeper eyes, bigger brows, thicker, more elongated lines across his skin, with stubble that looked like sandpaper.

"Sam." Accord greeted, and Blasto side-eyed him.

"Didn't know you were into purple Case 53's with a stripper side job." Blasto dryly commented, and Accord's frustration spiked tenfold compared to her entrance, genuine disdain budding forth to fill the air.

"If you could kindly introduce yourself to him, it would be very appreciated." Accord said to her, voice just a tad off its usual baritone with a forceful, grinding undertone. 

Well, that was one way to say 'please Master this clown and get him out of my hands before I kill him'.

She obliged, humming, drooping her eyelids low as she sauntered over to Blasto, Evelynn's hips swinging.

His eyes, predictably, immediately drew themselves to said hips, leaning back in surprise as she spun in place, and dropped herself onto his lap sideways, one arm going around his shoulders..

"Uh, whoah. Hi." Blasto said, blinking at her for only a moment before his eyes lowered to burn holes into her cleavage, his hands immediately dropping onto her waist and legs, feeling her skin.

Hm. Well, this whim went a bit too fast and far already. She wanted to skin him alive for some reason.

But she was the one who decided to take this approach.

Evelynn was probably influencing her mind from the overuse. Small bits of bleedover probably added up over time.

That was immensely frustrating. Fuck. Why did she do this?

"My eyes are up here~" She cooed, tracing his collar with a pointy nail.

Why did she say that?

Her mind filled with images of those claws plunging into his throat, the spray of warm crimson that might blast her in the face as she yanked them out, that perverse delight.

His eyes didn't move.

"I've made my choice." Blasto said, staring even harder as if to spite her.

Something about that was funny, but it was buried under her frustration.

She was tired, she spent half the day getting tortured, and the other half running around, updating herself on Nexus and its operations and assets.

And then she came here to tie up a loose end, only for Evelynn to bleed over her thoughts like a ruptured pustule.

Fuck.

Wanting to get this over with, and most importantly, immediately deviate from Evelynn's character before she sank even deeper, she grabbed his chin with force, jerking it up, and brown eyes shot wide, meeting hers.

She pushed into his mind, and he went still.

"I insist. He'll be there by early morning." Accord said, feigning politeness as the reason, and not that he wanted to get rid of the man as soon as possible. "His acquaintances like Rotten Apple and another woman whose name I can't quite care to remember will come along with all of his… temperamental equipment."

She hummed, eyes half-closed, thoroughly enjoying the overly expensive wine he pulled out to treat her with.

It was nice to relax after such a long day. Usually her way of relaxing was just passing out because she physically couldn't go further. Wine was a treat.

"You're sure you don't need him?" She asked through the wine still coating her tongue like a rose's kiss, finding it odd how willing he was, to throw away an asset when he was in the middle of a gang war. A gang war that was cooling down, but still a gang war.

"Yes. I have it all handled. Besides, he has given us a machine to produce disposable critters to take the brunt of the damage during our altercations with The Teeth, so we have no further use of him here until repairs are needed. Please do keep him close to your side." Accord said.

Unsaid was the, "and away from mine", but not unheard, not to her.

"I'm right here." Blasto exclaimed, shooting them a dirty look as he watched the trucks full of his equipment start their journey off towards Brockton in the distance, forehead practically glued to the window.

"Unfortunately." Accord said, then nodded to her, spun on his heel, and retreated to his desk. "Maroon, if you could escort him."

The woman, one of his Ambassadors, performed a perfect half bow, hands steepled, then walked towards Blasto.

"Don't make trouble for them, just go to Brockton. I'll be waiting for you. You will be sharing a laboratory building with Panacea and myself until further notice." She said, and he tore his eyes off the window to nod at her, straighten his coat with a sigh, and follow Maroon out of the building.

He paused after three steps to give her a double-take.

"Wait wait wait, Panacea? She's a villain now? The fuck?" Blasto asked, befuddled. "Why would she have a lab? Is she doing like, medical research? How would-"

"Blasto, shut up and walk." She dryly deadpanned, and after a long, anticipatory silence, he spat out a frustrated sigh, and walked off with Maroon.

She got up, put the glass on Accord's fine table, and stretched.

It did nothing to help with the phantom pain of the tattoo, still lingering about within the confines of her spine.

"Farewell, Accord." She simply said.

"Farewell." He replied simply, attention on the sleek laptop he was opening on his desk.

With that, she Teleported back to Brockton, specifically, Lisa and Coil's office.

Both turned to her.

Before they could get a word out, she raised her hand.

"Blasto's on his way here. Did you check the base out?" She asked, and Lisa nodded.

"Yep. It's a little too large and the inspection team said it needs a ton of modernization work to be safe and comfortable, as well as being 'rather unsettling, creepy and dreary', according to them, but structurally? They said they've never seen anything like it. They were geeking out over it, rambling about fragmentation stone something-something. So I guess all's good. We won't even need heavy construction for the place. Well, maybe just for the vents because they're really big and really steep and they lead up to, like, a semi-open train dock station which is apparently hard to secure without taking over the surface area of the Trainyards too. Just saying." Lisa finished, half-accusatory, mouth jumping a mile a minute, downright smiling.

Her brows raised. Lisa seemed to be in quite high spirits.

She smiled back, and nodded at her to continue.

"We won't be going to surface, we'll just secure the vent exits. How long do you think till we're ready to move into the base?"

Lisa see-sawed with her hand.

"Well, depends how much we want to have in that base. It's secure, yes, but it's not exactly suited for habitation at the moment. The plumbing alone is going to take a month, and that's with us paying a premium for them to hurry the fuck up and keep quiet. The vents should take about the same, but we're going to have to guard the crews up on the Trainyards above too, because we don't want people snooping around to figure out why there's people bothering that graveyard of wagons." Lisa gestured around.

Her smile withered for a thoughtful grimace.

"Shit, a month? Really?"

Lisa shook her head.

"Well hold on, let me finish. We can move in there, like, right now. Would only take a day or two to move most of our super important assets in there. Getting power down there isn't that hard, since everything will just run off generators that're gonna spew the fumes out through the exit vents. Or we could try using that Tinkertech battery collecting dust next to Printer. And about plumbing and stuff… well, to put it bluntly, that's kind of a luxury. None of us need it. We can make due with giant water trucks, porta potties, shower units, and bottled water. It's going to be a bit makeshift and shabby for a bit, but it'll work just fine. It's practically a villain's lair at this point, not a luxury resort."

She raised her head up to regard the ceiling, thoughtful and a tad confused.

"Oh. Then what's stopping us from moving everything in there?" She asked, not really getting the point that Lisa was trying to make.

"One very important thing that sounds minor but isn't. The fucking internet." Lisa jerked a thumb to her and Coil's monitors. "Pretty much everything we do to keep things running smoothly are done through a private internet network from an ISP that Coil owns, with a fallback second internet provider in case our own ISP has an outage. Greg's working on securing it right now as well. Getting the internet cables from place A to place B requires a lot of digging, and a lot of stupidly annoying fucking bureaucracy that we somewhat have to follow to not raise too many eyebrows. If we move everything into the new base today or tomorrow, there's not going to be any internet in there, and there's not going to be any kind of phone signals, radio, nothing. It's practically a Faraday cage down there, it's so fucking dense and deep, so we need internet." Lisa huffed.

She hummed, putting her hands on her hips.

"So it's just communications that are the problem… We could still move the most important bits in there, like uh, Printer and the battery, but yeah, I see how that would make things very inconvenient. How long until the base could have internet without alerting any nosy inspectors that we'll have to bribe or blackmail into silence?"

Lisa turned to Coil.

Coil paused in his typing, seemingly thinking.

"Two weeks, if we pay a premium for overtime and overwork, as well as additional bodies. It'll cost tremendously however and draw a lot of attention."

"How much? And what are our finances like?" She asked.

Lisa snorted, pushing her chair away with her foot, but not before dragging Alexandria's binder off the desk, like she was physically afraid of leaving it out of arms reach.

"Coil's just a penny pincher, we're fine."

Coil scoffed.

"Just because your parents never taught you how a piggy bank works doesn't mean I'm a 'penny pincher'. And just because our finances are great currently doesn't mean we should be wasteful. For the work to finish in two weeks would cost twelve million. Three million at a normal pace, which is anywhere from one month, to two. The gambling website one of our programmers made is likely to bring around eight hundred and ninety million when it reaches a year old-"

"See? Pennies. We're literally making more than a billion a year, mostly untaxed. Fuck off Mr. Scrooge, just pay them to speed up." Lisa huffed.

Coil's brow twitched.

"I agree with Lisa. Just pay them. Speed is more important right now." She added.

Coil's lips thinned, but he nodded.

"It'll be ready in around two weeks then." Coil relented.

She gestured to the binder in Lisa's arms, changing the subject.

"Which page?"

Lisa pulled on the bookmark to peek at the number, bending forward as if to hide it from Coil.

"One twenty. I'm not even halfway through the 'power section' yet. You're going to have to read this yourself, it's… kind of mindblowing. In an existential, eldritch horror kinda way." Lisa hummed, then let the binder shut. "Also it's so fucking heavy I can only read it on a desk or something, which is annoying. Has this woman never heard of a fucking USB stick with a notepad file in it?" Lisa grumbled, giving the binder a look like it personally offended her.

She snorted with laughter, stepping forward to poke the side of Lisa's head with a nail.

"You just can't appreciate a good book. Young'uns these days…" She fake-grumbled, smiling.

"I'm sure the cavemen that were alive back when you were a kid would also say the same about you and cave wall scrawlings. Simple, efficient charcoal lines! What's with all these newfangled squiggly things on sheep skin?" Lisa shot back, miming distaste as she made shooing motions at the binder, smirking, shoulders shaking with laughter.

"Truly, I am blessed, to be working with such mature individuals." Coil butted in, intoned with the voice of a crypt ghoul, eyes deader than a fish as they continued staring at the screen, the sarcasm in his voice so thick that it physically carried the weight of his despair across the room.

"Oh fuck off you bald fossil." Lisa shot back, without much bite to it, then turned to her. "Also, still no updates on the Kill List. Which is where they post up Kill Orders, by the way. Like an internet bounty board. So, you're still free. Bad side of that is the National Guard's gonna stick around for another day or two, the PRT is bunkered up for a war, both of which mean that our plan to raid the Merchants and destroy them to finally finish taking over this shithole, is stalling. Which is also giving the PRT more time to assign dysfunctional morons to this place on the heroes' end. Want to push through anyway and take them down, or lay low for another day or two?" Lisa asked.

She shook her head.

"Just lay low. This is a good chance for me to catch up with everything that's been piling up, and let the dust settle without crossing swords with the National Guard. In the meantime, I had a question, somewhat unrelated. How do we control the narrative around us?" She asked, and Lisa gave her a questioning look.

"PR stuff. If we let the news do its thing, we're still going to be seen as villains, no matter what we do, short of killing an Endbringer or something. When we pulled that ABB raid, we only had one channel giving us a somewhat positive slash neutral take, and you didn't show me any more because you thought they were too negative, remember? So, I feel like we need to have a better way to get our voice out there to the common people, at least of Brockton. And let's be honest here, the country mostly gets its opinions based on what the TV tells them to think, we just don't have local news here because they shut down last time someone shot at them while they were doing a report. My dad used to tell that story." She said, a tad bittersweet over the subject of those ancient-feeling memories.

Coil stopped typing, and turned to her in his chair, his gaze intense and focused.

"The media in this country is controlled by six companies. Those six companies, are in essence, an illusion made to hide the fact that there are only two companies that own and control those six companies. They'll separate themselves on arbitrary lines to attract and appeal to different demographics and tell them what they want to hear for viewership and social gains, and pretend like they're all opposed to each other, but largely it's just two conglomerates competing and putting their differences aside to stomp down any possible third party that might give them competition when the time comes. At the crux of the issue, is that about four men control the entire country's news ecosystem. If you want your voice heard, go Master them." Coil dryly said.

She raised a brow, challengingly.

"And do they deserve it?"

Coil stared.

"The two CEOs are both megalomaniacs whose entire purpose for running almost half their companies is to control the population through shovelling shit into their eyes to take their attention away from their financial crimes. They publicly shame and reveal personal information about their business rivals or any whistleblowers, post articles with addresses of individuals to intimidate them under the guise of 'journalism', whistleblowers and witnesses to potential trials against them regularly die from 'accidents' and 'suicides', and both of them have connections to a child sex ring facilitated by the main branch of The Elite running back almost fifteen years, and which still exists. One has suspiciously ordered that nothing regarding said ring is to be reported on their stations, but has, to my knowledge, not been a part of it, and the other one is a client of them. Their Vice Presidents are more obscure, but they're not clean either. If you remember the types of men I gave you a list of, in Boston? Those businessmen, local politicians, and the like, few as they were among the dozens?" Coil asked.

She nodded, intrigued at how deep this seeming rabbit hole went.

It was almost fascinating to hear of all this. It seemed so alien and far-fetched. Runeterra was such an infinitely simpler world, outside the politicking of Noxus' upper caste soiling the lot.

"If they deserved it, by your standards, these men do so even more." Coil finished.

She hummed.

"Give me an informational package on them. For better or worse, I trust you and your research. Seems like you wanted to control them at one point yourself, no?"

Coil bitterly nodded, and turned back to his keyboard.

"Once, yes. They were too well-connected and powerful for me to reach, back then. Now, I doubt it. I'll send a missive to your inbox. We'll send some people to find and follow them, I'll let you know when you can go Master them, once we have a concrete time and place where they will be. They're much harder to find than their Boston lessers." Coil mused.

"Just two people?"

"Four, technically, since Vice Presidents of corporations also hold a lot of power, but mainly two people."

She nodded.

Last on the list…

"Do you remember when I sent a bunch of our men on a roadtrip across the country?" She asked, and Lisa slowly furrowed her brows more and more, before shaking her head.

"Hm, figures, actually. Just did it without telling anyone but the quartermasters."

"The what?" Lisa asked incredulously, highly amused as she turned to her with a shit-eating grin.

She paused.

"The… management team?"

Lisa snorted with laughter.

"Tsk, shut up, you goblin. You know why I said that." She fake-grumbled, referencing the half-lie she once told Lisa about how her power worked and where it came from, and Lisa sobered up quickly with an understanding nod, lips still fighting a smile.

She… should probably tell her the full truth, one day. It was hard to even think of.

"Anyways, I only told them, and it was a long time ago, so, figures. I sent out five of our men to take trips to old locations where the Slaughterhouse 9 attacked. Specifically, when Gray Boy was involved, and specifically, where he had the most victims. And I think that I have a way of turning those torture fields off. I want to go do that while I have time. Probably tomorrow."

Lisa stared, before her eyes widened.

"Oh shit, it's that blue ball thing, right? From when we first met?" Lisa asked, excited.

She nodded, switching to the Rune of Sorcery, and summoning the Nullifying orb in her palm.

"Damn, the thought never even crossed my mind. Is that why you asked about media and perception and the like?" Lisa asked.

She nodded.

"I think we need like… a Nexus website. Which, yeah, I know, it sounds stupid, to make a website for ourselves to talk to the masses, but we need to present our side of the story somehow, and if the news channels of the mainstream media all suddenly start having footage of stuff we did without explanation and talking positively about us, it would ring off alarm bells in Watchdog and it would all get shut down within a week. It's a lot more believable and organic to make a website or a… something, to express what we did, how, and show proof, then let the media present it 'objectively', than to just put our propaganda on old mom and pops' TV screens. Also, I have a love-hate relationship with propaganda. On one hand, I find it mundanely necessary, on the other, it pisses me off to no end. Can't explain why, not sure." She mused, brows furrowing in confusion.

She had to do some introspection on that eventually. Another odd conflict between Runeterra and herself, a contradiction, one of hundreds still left.

Coil turned his head to her, tilted.

She ignored him.

"And while I'm not doing this to look good, it is something that would help people realize we're not the psychotic terrorists who crippled twenty heroes and killed a director with nothing but a vague accusation of a truce."

Lisa grimaced.

"Yeah that was bad for our image. At least to normal people. Most capes are far more conflicted on the topic."

She waved Lisa's comment aside.

"Not the point, just… do you think you could get our programmers to put up a website before tomorrow? I know it's rushed, but-" She pulled a hand through her hair in frustration with a deep sigh, "- everything around here is rushed."

Lisa nodded.

"They're all really good, a simple website in a day shouldn't be anything hard. They have templates and stuff. Not a nerd so I don't know specifics, but they can do it. What do you want to put on it?"

She shrugged.

"Just some pictures to show we took the fields down, and a small blurb about why we did it or something simple like that. Or at least pictures of how we took the people in the fields, out of them. I don't want to put up videos of the process or anything, it would give out information and it just feels like exploiting Gray Boy's victims for publicity to go that far."

Lisa nodded, lips pursed in thought.

"Yeah that sounds good. I'll send them a text to have it ready by tomorrow."

She hummed in acknowledgement, letting her mind race.

"What about the people that died during the raid for Greg? PRT agents." She remembered, and Lisa grimaced.

"Well… I'm not sure it'll help, or do anything but piss their families off, but we sent them all a package in the mail explaining what happened, an apology on our end and explaining that mostly, we didn't kill them, and we also sent them some money to ease the uh, burden."

She grimaced.

"Sending money and a sorry letter is a bit…"

Lisa groaned.

"I know, but what the fuck else are we supposed to do? It's done, we can't undo it. We can't bring them back."

She pursed her lips.

"I can store their souls for later. But now, or in the near future? No, we can't bring them back. I think I told you."

Lisa rubbed at her temples.

"Yeah, you did. Look, it's not great, it feels like shit, but honestly, it's about all we can currently do. If you want, you can quietly go take their souls. Three died at the oil rig from Hookwolf and Crusader, all in the same hallway where things got dangerous for them, and two in the PRT HQ from one of Oni's grenades in the lobby."

She hummed.

"Well, not terribly quietly, but I can take them. Be right back."

"Wai-!"

She picked Eve and left through the vent, up, and into the sky.

It took her a bit, but she located the souls.

Three souls, near the now-pristine metal hallway leading to Armsmaster's laboratory, stationary. One was flickering in the corner, barely holding on, its will weak and frayed, while the other two stubbornly clung to existence.

She broke the security camera with a feeler, then picked Thresh, the Chain Warden, and the souls flared to life, visible even to the mortal eye, by her mere presence.

She calmly swung her lantern in a lazy arc, the souls magnetised into it with confused, echoing exclamations of confusion, sucked into the whirlwind of caged souls with startled shouts.

Just like that, it was over, and she switched Legends and flew off before the alarm could even ring.

Cricket's soul was nowhere to be found, unfortunately. The woman did seem like the type to not fear the void of death. It was likely she just let her soul fade in acceptance.

A damn shame, but oh well. She moved on.

Ten minutes later, she found the last two flickering, unattached souls in the PRT HQ's lobby.

This one couldn't be helped, really. Stealth was out of the question because of all the guards patrolling the lobby, even if it was like two in the morning.

If she left these souls for even a day more, they would likely vanish into oblivion.

So, with a heavy sigh, she picked the same as before, using her body to hide the souls from the cameras, and inwardly groaned about her secrecy being compromised. Now they knew she had a weird, flaming skeleton guy.

The PRT guards in the periphery and down distant halls immediately turned at the shout of one of them, and grabbed their foam guns, shouting commands as they began to quickly backpedal away from her.

"Ah, my apologies, gentlemen. Wrong stop." She said, her deep, umbral voice echoing and rattling like the snickering laughter of a skeleton, brimming with amusement, and then she vanished, souls sneakily acquired with a seemingly dramatic, but purposeless, swing of her lantern before she puffed out of existence.

She returned to her HQ, and materialized in the room.

Lisa glanced at her, then the clock on the corner of her screen.

"Twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes. You're so overpowered." Lisa whisper-shouted, her frustration half-genuine, the other half being simple admiration.

She snorted, and switched to Thresh.

Lisa recoiled, eyes growing wide as she craned her neck up, yanking the binder away from the spectral flames coiling around her coat.

"Whoah!" Lisa yelped.

"Ignore the form and the horrific echoes of tortured souls audibly rattling through these old bones. In here-" She raised the rattling lantern, and with a sweep of her palm, five struggling, sickly green orbs exited from the lantern, floating over her palm in a mass of shifting faces and visions, tinted and mixed and loud. "- are their souls. Apologies gentlemen, the only afterlife that exists is me, and it's not very glamorous."

"What the fuck are you-" A garbled, echoing voice demanded from the blob of lights and orbs.

"Wait, I'm actually dead?" A scared, dazed voice sounded out.

She tightened her palm, and the voices grew quiet. Not strangled, but suppressed.

"So. I can't exactly do much with them yet. I'll put them in the 'innocent' ward, away from the others, but it'll take… a long time before I can put them into something that can move."

Lisa blinked at her, then leaned forward, fear forgotten.

"Oh wow, they're… my power's confused as fuck. It's saying some… strange things. Odd. Okay. So uh, is this… settled?"

She slowly nodded, shoved the souls back into the lantern, and switched back to herself.

"It is. Send them another letter, asking them vaguely if they'd be willing to have their family members brought back in ghostly forms, or clanking golems. Yes, sounds like a faustian bargain, but it's all I can realistically do for them. Now, I gotta call Dragon. Leaving again."

Lisa nodded, and got up to stretch.

"Nghm… alright, I'll be going to sleep, honestly. It's already like, two thirty. I'll sleep three-ish hours since the bracelets speed things up, and then get back to work. If you decide to come, don't hog my blanket again." Lisa pointed at her to emphasise her scolding, the other hand going to her hip. "Also, if I die, don't shove my fucking soul in a hobbling tin can, you hear? I want a golden porcelain masterpiece."

She snorted, shook her head, and flew off.

The deep morning air was… refreshing.

It probably helped that she was about half an hour out of the city too.

The ringing stopped.

"Hello? Who is this?"

"Ah, my favourite partner in crime." She hummed, unable to put her usual energy into it.

God she was tired.

"Oh, Executioner." Dragon said, sounding none too happy to hear from her, mostly confused.

"Yes, hi. So, this is a bit earlier than expected, but there has been a new development that makes both of our lives significantly easier. Heartbreaker can just turn off his power like flipping a switch. And I have a list from him. It's a terrible list, and honestly, I doubt you're gonna find the vast majority of them, but the most important people, those who could do the most damage, he remembers those much more, so there's a lot more info he gave us. We have generals, air force pilots, sheriffs, a few judges, et cetera. Most of them are just vague crap though. Do you have a drone to send over here so I can give it to to you? It's paper."

"Yes. Can you wait an hour for it to arrive?"

"Is an hour the best you can do? Really?" She asked, unimpressed, and Dragon huffed.

"In case you don't know, you are in another country, Executioner. I'm not sending a drone to pick up pizza from down the street, and my fastest drones are all busy."

She rubbed her temples.

"I'm not sitting here in the middle of a desolate field for an hour while your metal mosquito drags itself over the clouds from Canada. I'm leaving the notebook here with the phone on top of it, you can just track it and come pick it up. I'm literally in the middle of nowhere and it's two in the morning, nobody's going to come steal it."

Dragon was silent for a few seconds, assumedly sighing internally.

"Fine. How does this new development change our agreement?" Dragon asked.

"You need to gather them all. It's a lot fewer than expected, and even less of them are actionable or important, so we're shortening the deadline to two weeks or so. Pick them up, bring them to a field or an empty, large space that's somewhat isolated, and we'll bring Heartbreaker to you personally, to undo his power on everyone you've gathered. Bring old, previous victims too, if you can convince them."

Dragon was silent for a bit.

"And then?"

"We kill him and take his head to show the world, what little of it cares. You're not getting him into a cushy cell, I'm afraid, that much hasn't changed."

"You really don't think much of the justice system, do you?" Dragon said, mildly annoyed.

"We've been over this, Dragon. No. Brockton is a living example of why the legal system can eat shit where we're concerned." She growled in Jarvan's deep baritone, the frustration of her day bleeding over and mixing with her long-time grudges against the squalor of this goddamn city. "Look, today's not been a good day, are we done here or do you have any actual, meaningful questions?"

"Will you contact me the same way? In three weeks?" Dragon asked.

"Yes."

"Then no, I don't."

"Hm. Leaving the notebook here. Good night."

"You... Sure." Dragon said, a tad awkwardly.

She rolled her eyes, closed the call, and then dropped the notebook on the ground, before gingerly laying the phone down on top of it, and leaving.

To finally, finally fucking rest.

She might even wake up without a migraine tomorrow.

As exciting as usual. 

Less sarcastically, and far more genuinely exciting… she could undo a bit of the tragedy that the S9 had carved into this world by tomorrow. She could finally start doing what she started this all for, mainly.

Giving people hope that things can get better, one tiny bit at a time.