7.2

7.2

Monday, 2nd​ May

Roaming around the PRT headquarters while waiting for other things to happen was a strange morning choice, but knowing the number of important things you had booked in had instilled you with so much nervous energy that the idea of going for your usual morning jog had been cast out of the realm of possibility. Instead, you'd had a quick breakfast and headed into work as quickly as possible.

Tinkering was out of the question. You had a plan worked out for your tinkering future, at least in the short term, and you'd dropped into the workshop to inform Flashdrive to bring in his costume portability invention at some point in the next week, but you were going to double down on getting some scanning done. If you could investigate what showed up – if anything – distinguishing between parahumans and non-parahumans in various medical scans, that would help you on your path to potentially deliver Tritium a long term solution to her problems and potentially to help start you on the road to diversifying your tinkering.

Right now the entire set-up had been geared towards information gathering and communication, and while there was definitely value in that you knew that there was more. Almost every tinker you'd ever heard of had been able to push into things with real battlefield utility, for better or worse, and you wanted to start getting to that if you could; after all, you hadn't forgotten about the need to develop some kind of tinkertech restraining apparatus, and that seemed like it would only come once you'd made the next step into actual, battle-field ready equipment.

In any case, you'd set yourself up a timetable and made a plan: getting the scanners finished by incorporating the biological information available from past studies, potentially with a few pieces of independent research too if that was required, followed by getting some automated construction underway, and then finishing off aiding Flashdrive. Simple.

Unable to actually begin any of those projects, you'd pinned the rough timeline sketches to your table and made your rapid exit before the urge to pick up a screwdriver overtook you and consumed the entire morning. You had neither the time to spare on such a thing, nor the desire to allow it. For better or worse, you were determined not to miss your appointments.

Deciding on that, however, condemned you to a dull morning. Even putting in a request for some of Tritium's files upon arrival had taken under fifteen minutes, and you weren't going to see the results from that for at least twenty four hours while clearance was granted (or, in fact, denied, though you had been assured by the secretary that such an outcome was unlikely).

With what little tinkering work you could do started, you sent off a message to Regent. After the previous day's engagements, he had looked a little worse for wear and though you trusted Doctor Webby to take care of him if anything had actually gone wrong, it felt best to check instead of just assuming that things turned out alright. Trust, but verify.

Penumbra: Hey. Just wanted to check in that you were doing okay.

Regent: Doing fine, just hanging out. Free day.

Penumbra: Things go okay after I left yesterday? I noticed you didn't seem 100%

Regent: Was fine dw

The conversation continued in a similar manner for a few minutes but you didn't push too hard. While his relaxed demeanour told you a lot, the reality was that Regent didn't seem nearly as laid back as first impressions might imply.

Sure, he wasn't uptight. But uptight and free-wheeling were different things, and while he certainly didn't take things very seriously you had noticed that Regent did appear to have some very hard lines. His reaction to your offer of empowerment and his willingness to drop everything leave if Cinereal had tried to force him into getting overcharged had been enough to demonstrate that.

Unlike your own temper which, while you admitted it was hot, took a little while to get stoked, Regent seemed to operate on a flicked switch protocol. Everything went absolutely fine with him until he decided that a boundary had been crossed, in which case he would simply go scorched Earth. There was no such thing as moderation with him.

Surprisingly, that was easier to deal with than some other people you'd known in life. Once you got the idea that something was pricking on his last nerve, it was fairly obvious and once you retreated from it he seemed not to take it too personally. Everything with him was situational, and while you knew that he still ribbed you from time to time about the way the two of you had first met you wondered if it was something he even had in him to hold grudges. It seemed too long term a priority for someone who lived so very much in the moment.

No wonder he got along with Scrivener; a boy who, for all intents and purposes, had the power to make priorities switch from moment to moment.

Penumbra: Hey, I'm going out on patrol on Wednesday if I can find someone to supervise. Still don't know the city well enough to go alone. You want to come along? Trying to get the team back together.

Regent: Sure, lmk when its lined up.

Click to expand...

One of the benefits of someone being easy going was that you could kind of just force them to be part of your team. Alec had been pretty simple to deal with, to be honest; he'd agreed to come to Atlanta without any caveats, he'd agreed to go out on patrol basically whenever you asked him to, he'd saved civilians when he could have probably gotten away with doing otherwise, and while you wouldn't risk his ego by telling him, his power hadn't really presented you with much of a problem during the Casino heist either.

While the PRT handbook didn't contain information on the topic, you were pretty sure that it would be considered bad form for one parahuman to tell another something like that. Villains probably did it – you could imagine Lung gloating about being unkillable to some hapless hero quite easily – but for a heroic Ward, it seemed uncouth at best.

Aegis would probably die of shame if he found out you'd even entertained the thoughts in the first place.

Firing off a similar message to Rachel, you got conformation from her too. While you weren't sure where she was – you got a feeling that she had been spending more time at the animal shelter than her contract specified – she was generally pretty quick to respond to her phone. It seemed that while she may not have been the fastest or most polished reader, she could sound things out well enough to understand the basic gist and it wasn't beyond her to message back with a Y or an N for yes or no respectively.

Whether she'd ever be interested in more eloquent communications, you were pretty doubtful, but honestly, she didn't need it. The day you got a full paragraph response from Rachel's number was the day you started enforcing Master/Stranger protocols; or running to try and rescue her form whatever horrible situation she'd been dragged into.

You weren't really eager to get involved in a Hookwolf Midnight War 2.0, but you weren't going to shy away from it either if worst came to worst. Like Anchor had said after the concert, that was simply the life of the hero.

Finishing up your communications, grateful once again for your helmet making such things vastly easier even if finding somewhere quiet not to be overheard talking to yourself could be inconvenient, you checked the clock.

Midday. That meant the appointment was closing in.

You weren't really sure what to expect from therapy. The idea of laying down on a leatherette couch, a single pillow propping up your helmeted head, and being told to talk about your feelings seemed at once too banal and too ridiculous for it to be real. Not to mention, you thought that with everything that had gone on since becoming a cape, you'd handled things pretty well on your own terms without any support beyond your family and friends.

Psychological help wasn't a bad thing, but it seemed like something that you just didn't really need. Maybe if you had seen anything particularly traumatic, or been in real danger, you'd have a different perspective but it seemed insensitive to people with far less problems to act like the things you had been through justified therapy. You'd never even bled on a mission, unless you counted the droplets you'd coughed up from Fog's mist, or the blood from your headache nosebleed during the Coil arrest.

That last one couldn't even count, really. You did it to yourself, and there had been no long term harm from it.

Therapy just seemed unnecessary, more than anything else.

So when you knocked on the door marked Listening Room 1, you were already prepared for an hour of absolutely nothing valuable.

For the umpteenth time since transferring to Atlanta, a voice came from within inviting you entrance, and you took it.

The room inside was relatively benign. The walls were a sort of warm white, the kind you recognised from the inside of your new home when you moved into the city, and there wasn't much in the way of decoration. A small, round table with a pitcher of water and a few glasses was sat between a few chairs – spaced evenly in a triangle around the centre-piece – and in the background there was a large window over the top of a desk holding a computer identical to the one in the medical offices. Thick blinds covered the window, casting bars of light down across the room.

Seated in two of the three chairs were two individuals that you recognised conceptually, though you hadn't met them before. Their names – Dr Guattari and Dr Hulme – had been written on the appointment slip that Melder had given you last week, and the identification tags attached to loops around their necks confirmed as much.

Hulme appeared to be an older man, older than Dad but not old enough to be considered a senior citizen, you thought, with a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose and not very much in the way of hair perched on the top of his head.

Guattari, by contrast, was a largely built woman with rounded cheeks and thick brown hair, a pleasant smile on her face that seemed neither false nor truly elated, and a youthfulness to her appearance that was of precisely the kind of you knew to be deceptive. Some people just looked like they looked like they were younger than they were, without actually appearing younger at all.

Forced to put it into words, you knew that it would sound silly, so you kept it to yourself. If you had to guess, you would have put her somewhere around the age of forty-five, though a younger looking version of that age.

'Hello,' she said, voice lower than you expected and with a light accent. You couldn't place it – somewhere European. French maybe, or Italian. You hadn't really heard enough accents from Europe to be able to distinguish with any level of confidence. After the events of the nineties, the continent had been more or less shattered and while you knew from Mom's books and your world history classes in school that things hadn't always been that way, it had become an insular place over the course of your lifetime. Not much came in, and not much came out. Learning much more about its modern incarnation was a project for only those with special interests.

'Good to meet you.' You answered back, keeping your voice as neutral as possible.

'Please, take a seat.' Hulme offered, equally even. 'There is water, if you would like.'

'I'm fine, I think.'

'That's fine.'

Conversation picked up as you sat down, finding it mildly amusing in a kind of childish way that you were clearly the tallest person in the room.

None of the conversation went the way that you had expected.

'This is something of a preliminary session,' Guattari had told you. 'Just so we can get to know you, you can get to know us, and you can decide how you would like to proceed. You don't have to tell us anything you wouldn't like, and nothing you tell us will leave this room without your permission.'

Questions came in thick and fast, though you were surprised how long they let you speak about things that seemed to have very little meaning. No, you hadn't done any form of therapy before and you didn't really know what you expected from it. No, you didn't really mind discussing how you had triggered, but you didn't want to go into detail. You weren't really sure what you were needed to see them about. You didn't really have plans for the future beyond joining the Protectorate after you finished with the Wards. You had some friends, but most of them were parahumans too.

While you spoke, the two of them occasionally took notes, but you couldn't really see what they were writing. From what you could tell, Hulme's notation was more voluminous; his pen didn't really stop moving and he turned pages with some regularity. Guattari seemed less focused on the paper and when she noted something the dramatic arcs her pen took suggested either some flourishes to the handwriting or something in the way of quick illustration.

Time passed by more quickly than you had expected it to. The clock, positioned on the wall between the door and the desk at the back of the room, had a very quick ticking sound to it that you had been easily able to ignore for the most part, but you found its thudding intruding on your attention more and more as the time passed.

'I'm going to be rather honest with you,' Guattari spoke, setting her papers down on the table. Illustrations indeed. 'Doctor Hulme and I have rather different approaches to therapeutic treatment. Different issues sometimes require that, and I wouldn't say that either approach is necessarily wrong but you may find that you have your own preferences. That's fine. So, we're going to put the choice to you.'

'The choice?' You asked.

'Yes,' Hulme sat forward in his chair, closing his notebook and placing it down next to Guattari's papers. 'The choice. The relationship between a client and their mental health professional is a rather personal one, or at least it can be, and therefore it is generally considered best practice to keep things one-on-one unless there's a good reason otherwise. The choice, therefore, is between us. Should you choose to work with me, we would meet once weekly with any further escalation of frequency determined based on the results of our first sessions; these would last one hour, and would continue for a preliminary course of six weeks before we decide on a firm path for proceedings.'

'And should you choose to work with me,' Guattari said, 'things will be more flexible. The mind is a robust thing, and youknow yourself better than anyone else. I would suggest we meet once a week as well, but with perhaps more flexibility with the timetable, and in some cases, I would be suggesting actions to take during those time slots rather than specifically meeting with me in person. Since it's less structured, there's less need for a re-consultation period, and so this would just continue indefinitely rather than a six week period.'

You weren't sure how to think about it. Based on your expectations, you had thought that you were going to be given strict appointments to meet; that's certainly how it sounded with Hulme, at least, so there was something that met your expectation. Guattari's procedure seemed much looser. Certainly, you didn't consider yourself a film buff but you didn't think you remembered anyone going to see a therapist and being given such a long leash.

The thought of making a choice was intimidating too. Whether you felt like you needed it or not, you were going to have to do something and you didn't want to lock yourself into the wrong choice. And besides that, the idea of picking one or the other in front of them both just seemed disrespectful. While they seemed very different people, and you obviously wouldn't have decided to hang out with either in your personal life, neither of them seemed unpleasant enough to deserve an outright rejection.

'Do I have to make a decision now?'

'Of course not!' Guattari laughed, sitting back in her seat. 'You can take as long as you need, and submit your choice to either of us directly when you've made the decision. Remember, the choice is yours and neither of us will be upset regardless of the decision you make.'

You looked to Hulme, who nodded deeply, his chin almost meeting his chest, but who didn't appear to have any dispute with the statement.

Leaving with both of their official PRT numbers logged into your database, you had a lot to think about and not much time to think about it in.

It was strange. The entire experience wasn't much like you had thought it would be. Obviously there had been no therapist's couch and nobody had asked you how something made you feel at any point, but there had just been a lot of recounting. Even though you hadn't said much more than what had happened in your life, particularly over the last few months, and asked a few questions about your private life, you felt like a wrung-out sponge. Your head was light, and you desperately wanted to eat something and lie down.

As you made your way back towards the Ward's room, you tried to push the majority of the thoughts to the back of your head. You would have time to think about it another day, when your schedule was less packed.

Entering the Ward's room was a quiet affair. With early afternoon drawing in, people were present, but it wasn't exactly a heaving place at the best of times. Rachel and Alec were off doing whatever it was they were doing to fill in their time, and the relatively small contingent of Wards compared to Brockton Bay meant that even if there was just one person out on patrol – not common, given the danger of the city, pairs were preferred – and one person on console, that was enough to make sure that there wasn't exactly a party going on elsewhere.

'Hey there,' you said as you entered, voice a little sore. Maybe you should have taken some of the water, but you hadn't wanted to pause the session to get a drink. 'Are you busy?'

Melder, on console yet again, turned over his shoulder. 'Not really. Nobody seems to be doing anything right now – not that surprising, though. What's the problem?'

'Not really a problem,' you said. 'Just wanted to ask something.'

A gestured hand, and you had permission; rapidly, you explained the situation. Planned patrol, wanted someone who actually knew where they were going, but it would be accompanied by your squad from the Bay.

'I can do it Wednesday. I'll be heading out with Cinereal as part of her burning on the weekend, so I'll be out of touch for that. Wednesday is probably best.'

'Wednesday's fine, thanks.'

'Anything else?'

You shook your head and turned around. Maybe it was rude to just get what you wanted and then exit, but you still felt a little drained from talking to the doctors and if you wanted to get home and have enough time to prepare for heading out with Dad, there wasn't much time to mess around.

Without Melder reminding you, you had almost forgotten about Cinereal's battle with the Planarian. You wondered what it looked like, if anything at all.

The obvious assumption was just that it was a Case 53. Monster capes, as you knew people called them, were actually not as uncommon as some people thought but were certainly less common than other people feared. If you trusted the anxious and the conspiratorially minded online, there were half a dozen Case 53s out there for every hundred people and they represented something dangerous and evil.

Reality was, as far as you could tell, that they were just people. Maybe something went wrong for them when they triggered, or maybe they were the victims of some other evil and particularly bizarre parahuman, nobody really knew and you couldn't speculate, but there was very little evidence that they were particularly numerous or particularly evil. From what you had been able to find from your research, both for Gladly's class back when you had still been cursed to attend Winslow and from your own investigations into powers, there were probably only about five or six hundred Case 53s in the world – maybe a few less than that, even – and you could probably count the number of them who had gone into villainy on one hand.

At least, villainy significant enough for people to care.

In fact, between Newter and Gregor from Faultline's Crew, you'd met more Case 53s, even if briefly, than more people ever had, and while you couldn't exactly describe mercenary work as heroic it was hardly explicitly evil either. Your own sample size, though small, was absolutely villain-free.

So if the Planarian was a Case 53, that wasn't the only problem it had. And if it wasn't, you weren't really sure what the alternatives could be.

Shaking your head free of such thoughts, you pushed your way out of PRT headquarters and began flying home.

You had a lot of questions on your mind lately. The conflict with Inheritance at the concert had shaken some of the dust loose in your head, and questions were coming up that you wanted answers to. Even Dragon's call the day before had reminded you about her issues, and your concerns over the Birdcage. It was something that had been lost in the move and you hadn't really had much opportunity to follow it up, but that didn't meant that you didn't care.

Yet another thing to add on to the to-do list when you got a chance.

With Dragon in mind, you thought over her offer again. Speaking to Dad about it hadn't taken too long; as far as he was concerned, you answering some questions for money was a massive improvement on you patrolling the streets and potentially getting into dangerous situations even if you had the ability to survive them, and you had his support to go ahead with things.

The only concern you had was in dealing with the headaches. You couldn't deny that Percentile could do a lot of good, but you were the one who was going to have to deal with the downsides afterwards, and if something happened locally that would command your attention, you would rather not have been recently popping the tinkertech medications that made your migraines tolerable.

'Call Dragon.'

Your helmet reacted and within a moment, you could hear the ringing. One full ring later, it answered.

'Hello Penumbra.'

'Hi Dragon.'

'Have you made a decision already on our offer?'

Straight to business, but you couldn't really blame her. For all you knew, the tinker was currently in the middle of something else extremely important and you had interrupted her, and after all, she had been the one to make you the offer. It wasn't like you were in the habit of calling her up just to chat with no other motivation.

'Sort of. I wanted to know if I could maybe adjust things a little.'

'In what was? We can try and account for things.'

'Nothing major, I just wondered if, since I can usually tell when the headaches are starting to get really bad, we could maybe have an agreement that I can call the questioning off for the day if I feel like it's getting too much. I don't mind a little headache, but the last time I really pushed things I ended up losing a full day just to recovery. The idea of that doesn't really sound too great again.'

While you had expected a brief moment of thought, you weren't prepared for exactly how brief.

'I would have to speak to Narwhal, of course, but that should be acceptable. Likely, she would want to ensure a baseline number. Can we agree for now on five questions guaranteed, and then additional questions up until the point of pain from then on, as a beginning position?'

Considering that offer, it seemed to fall pretty much in line. You could ensure five questions and it was pretty unusual for any fewer than that to cause you a concern; in fact, you couldn't remember the last time that only five had caused major problems. The arrangement was probably enough to ensure they actually had information coming in on the important things without completely taking you off the board every time they called.

'I think so. Once you've checked with Narwhal I'll be able to say yes or not, but for now we can consider that agreed.'

Talking for a little longer to iron out the details – Saturday seemed a good choice: you were going to be home anyway, studying, for the majority of that day and if you weren't being totally blind sided by a thinker migraine you could make sure that you were almost certain to be available whenever they called. Hell, the distraction from school work might even make it more of a reward than work.

Once you got home, you changed out of your costume and threw a sandwich together out of some of the things you found in the fridge. Sometimes, you just needed to eat a combination of whatever existed rather than caring about whether it went together or not, and so the specifics of the sandwich were lost to time, but it tasted acceptable and filled some of the space that the previous two hours had carved out of your insides.

Briefly, you considered the possibility of showering before you napped, but you eventually decided it could come before you woke up. There was still a little over two hours until Dad was due home, and you'd be able to shower up then before the two of you headed out for an afternoon together.

And so, your hit clunked against the pillows with a defiance of the daylight hours, and you slept heavier than you had any right to.

Waking up not even two hours later with drool dried across your cheek, you squinted your way into consciousness.

Naps had a way of either refreshing you entirely or making you feel as though you had just stumbled out of a cave in the desert, thirsty and lost both body and soul, and unfortunately this had been the latter; a check of your phone told you that Dad was probably due home in ten minutes or so, and you crawled into the shower with the grace of a sedated mole and managed to get yourself in semi-presentable shape.

Hot water had a way of waking someone from any state of stupor, and by the time you emerged from the shower the mirror was covered in a thick layer of condensation through which you could barely see the whorls of steam that evaporated from your skin. As you made your way back to your bedroom, you heard the door open downstairs and knew that Dad was back; he would want to shower himself before you headed out, so the timing couldn't have been better, and you could use the interim period to get dressed and then have another snack.

Shortly after, your predictions had proved correct and you ate the last half of your toast just before clambering back into Dad's car.

'Good day at work?'

'Pretty good. Things are going better than I thought they might when we moved.'

'But you said you were okay with moving!'

'I was! Doesn't mean I expected for things to click so quickly, though. As you grow up you realise that there's a lot of things in life that you have to be okay with even if you don't really love it. You still have to be open to the idea that it turns out well in the long run.'

Hard to deny that much; you yourself had been close to cold feet a few times in the run-up to the move, and thus far nothing had gone dramatically wrong. In fact, you could be fooled into thinking that Atlanta was a more relaxed city than the Bay. If it weren't for the fact that peace made you suspicious, you could even have gotten away with saying it out loud.

The two of you pulled up to the community centre a few minutes before the event was due to start, and found the doors already open.

What you had seen online when researching the event was positive. Atlanta was a big enough city that even one community centre didn't really serve everywhere, and there were other such facilities scattered throughout the urban sprawl, but this particular one held crafts and arts events with some regularity. An opportunity for local artists and tradespeople to sell some things, teach miniature seminars, get new people interested in joining industries that they wouldn't really see elsewhere, and generally provide a sense of community spirit.

You and Dad ventured around the place, trying out different things one after the other. You refused to have your face painted, a little too old for it in your own mind, but you did well enough at the painting for yourself; not exactly the next Cézanne, but good enough that you didn't think you had embarrassed yourself.

Surprisingly, it was Dad who took to the woodworking a little more than you. Something about it just didn't really work for you – either it required skills that you just hadn't honed, or there was something about your own grasp on the blade that didn't co-operate. By the time you left, though, Dad had managed to whittle a sort of improvised head shape. Left featureless, and combined with his none-too-subtle wink, you could tell that he was trying to emulate Penumbra's helmet and you resisted the urge to give him a firm shove in the shoulder. There was no more sure-fire way to ruin the afternoon than by launching him accidentally through a wall.

Before heading back home, he'd taken the opportunity to pick up a beginner's set of knives and a few blocks of different wood from the stall being run by the woman who had given you your initial instruction. She had eyes the colour of the mahogany she was selling, and seemed friendly enough; you hadn't been able to catch her name, but her logo of an axe dividing a tree below the name Grigori Wood works stuck in your head. Maybe something to look into for Dad's next birthday, if you could buy anything further and the hobby stuck.

Returning home had been an even more relaxed journey than the way there. Dad seemed as tired as you were, despite your nap, and you chatted absently about things little and large; sometimes it was nice to spend an afternoon with someone you cared about and not having to consider fights or subterfuge.

When you got home you ate together, nothing particularly noteworthy but something to keep you both from being awoken by hunger in the night, not that such a thing was particularly likely given the double snacks you'd had earlier in the day. Still, you found it easier than was perhaps normal to shovel down another bowl of pasta, and when the two of you retired to bed there weren't any leftovers – Dad would have to make himself up an actual lunch for work the next morning.

Throwing yourself into bed, you set an alarm and checked PHO just in case Tritium had gotten back to you.

She had.Tritium: Good of you to check in on me, but I don't really need it. We can talk but keep the questions brief. My personal life stays personal. There's a lot of risk out there as an independent and we can't all afford to get involved in stuff without even preparing for the worst. What do you want to know?