Warhammer 16

She walked out of the school, no-one would care either way, and she had more important things to be getting on with than being forced to put up with the fact nothing at all had changed. She ate her sandwich quickly, and munched on an apple as she headed for the nearest entrance to the sewers.

Her scarabs had been carefully mapping them out as they made their way through them. She had told them to convert any sewage they encountered into energy, because as distasteful as the thought was, it was a lot better than having them consume buildings or something, despite the pitiful amount of energy she got in return.

She'd sent nine hundred of her now more than two thousand strong horde of critters off to other cities to do the same, and she was somewhat scared of what would happen when they were inevitably found. Given she was capable of making thousands more after only having powers for three days, she could understand if people got scared of her power, they weren't exactly the cuddliest of things around, even if she slept with one in her arms.

Finding an entrance wasn't an issue, and the scarab on the other side deconstructed the lock for her, allowing her to slip in without a problem. Once inside, she breathed a little easier, despite being in the sewers. Surrounded by scarabs, she was a lot happier than she was surrounded by people her own age in school, and what that said about her psyche she didn't want to know.

She hurried off to the base, tossing her apple core to one of the scarabs for deconstruction. A left up ahead, then straight, another left and then a right, the scarabs showed her the way and lit it with the green glow of their eyes.

When she got to the base, however, she was in for a surprise, as there were shouts and screams being heard from the other side of the door. Whipping her tablet out of her bag, she demanded to know what was going on, but before the words were even halfway out of her mouth she saw a pulsating message icon that she immediately selected.

MISTRESS, WHEN EXPANDING THE TOMB, WE ENCOUNTERED HOSTILE FORCES. HUMANS EQUIPPED WITH LASER WEAPONRY BEGAN TO FIRE ON US. I ORDERED OUR UNITS TO ATTACK, BUT WE URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR DIRECTION.

Humans with laser guns? What the hell? Even the PRT were only armed with containment foam in addition to regular guns, who would have laser weapons? New Wave didn't, they only used their powers… had she broken through into a villains lair? She couldn't think of any other heroes in Brockton Bay, especially not ones well funded enough for tinker weapons.

Pulling the door open, after a scarab on the other side had pulled back the latch, Taylor threw herself into her base. Dashing down the ramp, she grabbed the equipment she'd had the spyders make previously, tossing together a costume out of it all.

The Nightmare Shroud went over her shoulders, and it thankfully also came with a hood. The Veil of Darkness covered her face, making it harder to see her clearly, the Phase Shifter and Resurrection Orb went into her school bag, and she went through several rooms before finding the breach, passing two rooms full of generators on the way.

She glanced behind her to see the wraith hovering protectively behind her, before looking further ahead to where she could hear the zap of weapons, though she didn't see any bright green light from gauss weapons, and she wondered why.

This… what she was planning to do was risky. For some reason, her scarabs couldn't teleport with her when she used the Veil, but wraiths could… She gestured it closer to herself, and soon had the wraith almost wrapped around her. She took a deep breath and then teleported in the direction of all the noise.

xxxxx

James thought this was utter bullshit! Working for Coil was an easy gig, it was good money, and they were never given very difficult tasks to do. Hell, they were being paid a fuck-load just to sit about a base all day long, and they were given cool tinkertech rifles to use too.

Then today happened. Nothing strange at first, just Coil wanking in his special room, or whatever the fuck he did in there, and then he left for the day. Nothing special, Coil turns up once every day or two at least, and he doesn't stay very long unless he's got something he needs doing.

A couple hours later and James found himself in the cafeteria, enjoying a nice lunch on his break. His rifle was leaning against the table next to him, within arms reach for an emergency, and his helmet was on the table next to his plate, he did this every day.

Then the wall turned green and disappeared.

There'd been that one long moment of silence as the dozen mercs having their lunch came face to face with some strange sort of insect-themed robots, some small little bugs and others fuck-huge spiders with big fuck-off claws.

The moment passed quickly though, and he wasn't the only one to grab his gun and start firing at the strange things. He kept firing with one hand while he grabbed his helmet with the other and raced towards the door, firing behind him all the while.

The little bugs went down fairly easily, a few shots at most was enough to break them. The spiders though, they just shrugged off the heavy fire, and it was only a lucky shot from Terry that took one of them down.

Kurt wasn't fast enough to escape the cafeteria though, as the mini-bugs covered him like a fucking carpet and one of the big things picked him up before slamming him into the floor several times until he was unconscious.

They slammed the door behind them, bracing it as best they could. It was at times like this – namely right now – that he was glad Coil had went over the top when it came to securing the base. Separate sections could be sealed off with heavy blast doors, and the corridors were bottlenecks and death traps.

He looked at his fellow mercenaries, before Jessica growled and ripped her radio out of her pocket and spat an alert to all of the mercenaries in the base, describing what they'd seen. It was barely a minute later that another two dozen of their guys came down the corridor, everyone holding tinkertech rifles, but a few more having RPGs over their shoulders as well.

Jessica barked at everyone to get into position and ready to repel an assault. The door glowed green and James tightened his grip on his rifle, ready to unleash absolute hell on these tinkertech bots, but what he wasn't prepared for was the blasts of green light that came through the very split-second that the door disappeared.

No one was hit, but the barricades they were hiding behind disintegrated like they weren't there. The absolute flood of little bug-bots was expected, and they were 'dying' by the dozen now that they were bottlenecked at the end of the corridor.

What none of them had expected were the human skeletons of metal that charged through after them. Behind these metal monstrosities, more and more spiders could be seem smashing their way through the cafeteria towards the corridor.

Several of the machines went down in a hail of laser fire, even one of the skeleton-like ones went down, but not before smashing Jack in the face with its gun and knocking him flying. Once again, the machine didn't use the axe-head attached to the barrel of its gun, but the butt of the gun instead.

Sounds from behind made James happy, those footsteps were definitely caused by boots, and that meant more human people to stem the tide of metal death coming towards them, and that's when everything went down the crapper once again.

Something appeared amongst them, and James felt absolute terror wash over him. He'd once been near Glory Girl when she was pissed off, and while that wasn't an experience he ever wanted to have again, this was far worse.

A hissing snarl preceded the appearance of a metal snake thing with arms. It drove one clawed hand into and right through his arm and twisted, wrenching the gun from his now bloody grasp. Its barbed tail wrapped around Jessica's neck and slammed her face first into the wall, but she kept her grip on her weapon.

James saw a cloaked and veiled person in front of himself pick his own gun up off the floor and then slam it into his face. He felt several teeth get knocked loose, and felt rather woozy, but he was still conscious. Another smack across his face put paid to that, and his vision soon faded to black.

The last thing he saw was his 'team' fleeing further down the corridor away from the robot horde.

xxxxx

Taylor looked around herself with distress. The smashed and broken bodies of scarabs were everywhere! There was even a warrior down, and three spyders too. She wasn't overly concerned with the men with tinker guns, not when she checked and found that none of them had actually been killed. It seemed her previous order to avoid killing had stuck, and they were simply knocked unconscious. Several more of her spyders were holding people tightly in their grips as she didn't have any cells or anywhere to put them. Maybe she could have the spyders quickly put some together to put these people in?

Thomas Calvert paid attention to the meeting he had been called to. As a PRT consultant, he was often required to attend such things, and even when he had the option of not going he still went. As a consultant, he had access to some of the less classified files of the PRT, but these meetings often let some information loose that he otherwise wouldn't have easy access to. Granted, he could have the Undersiders get in and grab it, but every time he'd tried that in a dropped timeline they had failed, though he did get just a little more info each time.

This meeting was rather interesting to him personally, Tinkers were a commodity and he didn't have one of his own yet. His own weapons were purchased from Toybox, and at quite the hefty price too. If he had a Tinker of his own, then there was so much more he could do, and materials were always cheaper than the final product.

Unfortunately, apart from the mass deconstruction of the Boat Graveyard, they didn't have very much to go on. The little robots had come from the South-West, but that didn't mean much as most of the city was in that direction. None of their watchers at the junk yards had seen anything, and no exotic materials had been brought into the city that they were aware of.

Whoever this Tinker was, they were good. They had somehow managed to keep their initial creations secret long enough for them to begin producing professional looking tech on a large scale. Thomas had seen some early Tinker work, and while impressive in its own right, it was rather crude compared to the things they could make with the proper tools and materials.

These tinker-bots showed all the signs of an established Tinker, but their actions were more akin to a fresh trigger just starting out. Was this two people working together, one Tinker to make the robots, and another – possibly another parahuman – commanding them? Perhaps with some sort of mass control ability to have them work in sync?

He frowned when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Sliding it out of his pocket underneath the table, he saw that it was his mercenaries calling him for some reason. Instinctively splitting the timeline, he stayed sat in one and excused himself in the other. In the one where he answered the phone, he stepped outside the door to take the call.

"Yes?" He said.

"Sir, the base has been breached. Some sort of tinkertech robot army came through the wall of the cafeteria in sector 2-C. We've lost almost a dozen men to them already, but they're not yet advancing. Orders, sir?" Colin, the mercenary leader informed him, sounding calm, but Thomas could still hear the shake in his voice he was trying to hide.

"Describe them." He ordered the man.

"There's a few different types, some little beetle things, some horse-sized spider ones with claws, and some skeleton robots with disintegration lasers of some sort. There's also reports of a snake-like one ghosting through walls but I haven't seen that one myself." He relayed to Thomas. "They've only used their guns to destroy barricades so far, not people. They've gotten physical with the men and bashed a few heads in, but no actual shots on humans so far."

So either the guns didn't work on people - perhaps some sort of limit to the weapons' capabilities – or this was a heroically inclined Tinker. Given they'd cleared up the bay of old wrecks, he was inclined towards the latter himself.

"Go after them." He told the merc. "Don't give them time to consolidate their forces, if they knew about the base then we need to know what they've got if we're going to stage any sort of effective counter-offensive. Anything on the Tinker who made them?"

"Maybe, some of the men are saying someone wearing some sort of cloak teleported in with the snake robot. They have some sort of fear aura, if James is to be believed, and several shots from both regular and laser guns went straight through them as if they weren't there." Colin grunted, pausing to order the mercs into position. "Can't tell if they were male or female, they were fully covered, and the only physical description we have of them is 'taller than average' so far."

That didn't help much, 'taller than average' didn't really narrow the search down much. An approximate age would have been more helpful, as while most triggers were teenagers and those in their early twenties, that wasn't always the case.

Coil kept in contact with Colin as they began their assault against these robots. The background noise was telling in its own right. He could hear his own mercenaries' laser fire, as well as them calling out to each other in the battle, but their opposition might as well have been silent for all he could hear over the phone.

Colin gave him a running commentary of the fight as it was going on. The two sides were almost at a stalemate at the moment, the robots throwing hundreds and hundreds of those small robots that had claimed the Boat Graveyard at them, alongside almost a dozen of the spiders. The tide turned against them almost ten minutes after the assault had begun, with two dozen metal skeletons charging into the room, disintegrating their cover and ramming them into walls with their sheer weight.

xxxxx

In the other timeline, it was Emily Piggot who answered a phone. Her expression fell further and further as the conversation went on, until she snapped at whoever was on the other end to send a fully equipped squad 'dammit', and to call for Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Assault, and Battery while they were at it.

"Problems, Director?" Thomas couldn't help but needle her.

"It would seem we have a lead on our enigmatic Tinker, and they're not as heroically inclined as we might have been led to believe." She informed them, before clicking several times on her computer, bringing up an audio file that she had just been sent.

'You have reached the PRT, how may I help?'

'I-I'm stuck in some sort of underground base somewhere under the downtown area. There's men firing at me with tinkertech laser weapons and I need help.'

'Miss, we don't look kindly on prank calls-'

'This ISN'T a prank call, I swear!'

'Miss, you are claiming to be in an underground lair and under fire from people with laser guns, please excuse me if I find your claim to be somewhat unbelievable.'

'What the hell can I do to prove this isn't a prank? Track this phone, that should at least show you that I'm underground, shouldn't it?'

'Miss, it is illegal to track phones in that way-'

'I'm giving you permission! Please, just check it for me.'

'Very well, Miss, but please do be aware that if this is a joke then you will face criminal charges.'

'I don't care, I just need help! Please-'

There was a skidding or scraping noise on the phone and the voice got more distant as the girl screamed. The PRT employee tried to speak several more times, but didn't get a reply, before the audio came to an end.

Unfortunately, at about the same time in the other timeline, Thomas could see PRT troopers gearing up and climbing into a van, with another two vans already filled with troopers. He saw Assault and Battery arrive – they must have been close by already – and he knew that this was his loss. That didn't mean he didn't have any plans for if this sort of thing ever happened.

In that other timeline, he had the men continue their all out assault, as much of a loss as it was, while in the other he sent out a message to the mercenaries on his phone, 'Abandon sector 2 and seal it up'.

His base could more accurately be called several smaller bases that were all connected together. Each of them could be separated from each other and run independently, with their own generators, small cafeteria, and a minor armoury apiece at the very least. That also meant he could cut one of them loose and have it look like the smaller base was actually the entire thing. The blast doors separating the sections were especially thick for this very reason.

The Tinker might have forced him to abandon one section of his base, but he didn't come out of this with nothing, he now had at least a small idea of what they could do, and the PRT currently thought that his base was theirs, and that they had done something to whoever that caller was.

To Thomas, it was fairly obvious the girl who had called was the tinker that had broken into his base, and he had to admire the sheer balls she had to call the PRT on him when she had broken in there. Thinking of the phone call, she had never actually stated why she was in his base, nor how she had gotten in there, so her call had been completely honest as well, if misleading.

At least now he had a voice sample to use, a teenaged girl if he wasn't mistaken. If he got access to some of the street cameras near the schools in the area then he might be able to find someone of the appropriate age. After that, he could have one of his newest acquisitions Tattletale work her thinker magic on the video and audio.

Obviously, he would only have her do it in one timeline, he couldn't have her knowing too much about this new cape before he'd secured his hold over her. Goodness knows, little Lisa might actually think to manipulate her against him, and he couldn't have her thinking she had a chance of escaping him.

He kept the other timeline running until the PRT arrived at his base and actually managed to find their way in. Pinned between the robots on one side and the PRT on the other, his mercenaries stood little chance of getting out of there, and reinforced themselves against the PRT forces when the machines retreated, sealing up their exit with a combination of collapsing the breach and filling it with some sort of rapidly generated concrete to cover the gaps. He'd learned all he could from that timeline, now to see what he could do with that information.

xxxxx

Taylor looked at the phone for a moment, before regretfully sliding it along the floor of the room she was in. Ordering her units to fall back, taking their fallen with them, she immediately had the spyders and scarabs start dismantling the generators in her base and the metal reinforcing the walls. She wanted to leave nothing behind if she could help it.

With that in mind, she tapped into the resurrection orb she carried to try and revive her fallen machines. The orb glowed as it enhanced the self-repair abilities of her nearby units, and the warrior regained its feet, as did two of the spyders. The third spyder, unfortunately, must have had its repair system damaged as it remained a casualty of the battle.

It, and the numerous fallen scarabs, were recovered as they retreated. Once out of the room they'd broken into, she had her free scarabs begin to fill the room with concrete. Not the most subtle way of slowing them down, but concrete was quick and simple to produce.

She needed to get back to Winslow though, her absence would be noted on a register, if nothing else, and she didn't know just how easy it would be to track her by the phone call she had made. Hopefully the cheapness of the phone meant the audio quality would be terrible and help hide her voice some.

Mentally picturing a map of Brockton Bay, Taylor despaired for where she could safely build an underground lair. She had chosen this place specifically because there was no endbringer shelter here, so where else…

She'd have to go deep, deeper than endbringer shelters went, but where should she place the entrance?

Where should the new base be?

[ ][Base]Beneath her home should be good enough, no?

[ ][Base]The Boat Graveyard could work, even if there's no wrecks there any longer.

[ ][Base]Somewhere else in the sewers should work, this was just really bad luck.

[ ][Base]An abandoned warehouse, cliché, but hopefully effective.

[ ][Base]Write in.

With that decided, Taylor made the choice to expand her currently limited combat units. When they got to their new base, and dug out a replacement for her current base, then they were to begin construction of another 76 Warriors and 16 Immortals. It was time for her to actually have some sort of force projection she could use, getting caught flat-footed like this had really opened her eyes.

Now, how to get back to school before she missed her next lesson…

Assault, otherwise known as Ethan, wandered up to Armsmaster, who had a cord coming out of the wrist of his armour that was plugged into a computer. Though he wasn't emoting it particularly clearly, Assault had known the man long enough to be able to see the mounting frustration within him.

"So, got anything, Armsy?" He asked.

"Nothing, the hard drive was wiped before we arrived." Armsmaster grunted back at him. "What little I can retrieve doesn't provide anything either, the best I can do is tell you when it was active and how long for."

"So our new Tinker didn't leave any evidence for us?" Assault mused.

Armsmaster snorted, actually snorted, before replying. "Look around you, does this look remotely like a Tinker's base of operations to you? Especially one with the design aesthetic the collector robots demonstrated? There's no manufacturing hardware, no stockpiles of components, nor any actual tech beyond what can be purchased commercially."

"What about the half a dozen tinkertech guns the PRT guys found in the little armoury?" Assault added.

With one hand, Armsmaster detached a PDA from his armour and rapidly tapped something on the screen before handing it to Assault. Ethan looked at it, and saw exactly the sorts of rifles that the PRT had collected from the base. He looked at the top of the website and raised an eyebrow.

"Toybox' website?" He whistled. "Now that's a surprise."

"One that almost confirms this isn't our new Tinker's base, Toybox refuse to sell to anyone who has access to, or is, a Tinker." Armsmaster informed him. "They don't want any of their products to be reverse-engineered at all, and Dragon has been shut down dozens of times, no matter how many cut-outs she uses to try and get her hands on some of their technology."

"So it's a completely different person's base?" Assault shrugged. "That's an odd coincidence, how many underground bases could there be in Brockton Bay?" The E88, ABB, Merchants, New Wave, and even the PRT were all above ground as far as he knew, as was Faultline's Crew. It was only really the Wards base that was underground that he could think of.

"Found anything?" Battery asked, entering the room.

"Like I just told Assault, not on this computer." Armsmaster told her. "However, there are several things we can tell." He paused just long enough to retract the cord into his armour. "All signs of combat are two floors down from here, and there is an obviously newly made wall there too. Could you smash your way through it?"

"I can." Battery agreed, before leaving to do just that. Assault and Armsmaster followed just after her. As they wandered through the base, Assault kept an eye out on what was going on. He could see a number of PRT personnel taking photos of everything before collecting loose equipment and taking it with them.

Closer to what Armsmaster had called the combat zone, there was several patches of rather fresh blood, or at least it was still fresh enough to still be sticky. There were gouges taken out of the walls here and there, and signs of fire from the laser rifles that had been collected from the armoury.

The 'newly made wall' stood out like a sore thumb, it was blank concrete where the rest of base had metal-clad walls, and it was completely smooth. That there were cracks in the flooring around it only made it stand out more.

"You have a theory, Armsy?" Assault asked.

"Yes." Armsmaster nodded. "The phone call wasn't from just anyone, but a parahuman, quite possibly the Tinker who took the Boat Graveyard, and they were expanding their own base. They accidentally breached this one at this location, and the inhabitants responded with force to the incursion. As this base was empty when we got here, we can only assume that both sides retreated. This new wall was likely put into place to slow the opposition down."

"Our new Tinker?" Ethan questioned.

"I have a theory that their speciality might be rapid construction and deconstruction. It would fit what we've seen so far." Colin, Armsmaster, suggested. "Those Tinkers with broad specialisations tend to be capable of more varied applications than others."

"Like yourself?" Assault asked, but received no reply.

The two of them waited while Battery charged up, before she began to punch her way through the wall. It took her several hits, but the concrete wasn't particularly thick, so it wasn't long before she had smashed a large enough hole for a person to step through.

Armsmaster was first through the gap, but Assault and Battery were right behind him as he looked around at the large, empty space he found himself in. He wandered over to the nearest wall and began examining it, while the two others began to explore the other rooms and corridors attached to it.

Battery soon found the entrance into the storm sewers and returned to Armsmaster to report it, coming back just as Assault did to let him know that all of the other rooms were just the same as this one, completely bare of anything at all.

"My theory seems stronger." He told them. "These walls were covered by something that isn't here any longer, and they appear to have completely cleared out whatever base they had here before we arrived. Given the time frame involved, they must have moved quickly."

"So is this a dead end then?" Battery asked.

Armsmaster shook his head. "I think I'll go back to that audio file of the girl who called us in here, they are likely the other involved party here. This base… probably Coil's, he's the only one the PRT is aware of that uses mercenaries armed with tinkertech weaponry. He probably has more bases elsewhere if he abandoned this one as quickly as he did."

"So tracking down a young girl who got into a fight with a villain and retreated?" Assault shook his head. "Yeah, I can see that going sooo well."

xxxxx

Taylor clutched tightly to the wraith as it sped through the sewers, speeding along faster than a motorbike would down the highway. It didn't take long for it to get her to the nearest entrance to Winslow High, and she was a bit shaky when she was let down. Part of that was the speeds they'd been going, but part of it was coming down from an adrenaline high. She had been shot at, and just the experience itself was… a strange mixture of terrifying and exhilarating.

"Thank you." She murmured to the wraith, stroking its broad shoulders with one hand.

She grabbed her school bag, only to stop in horror, realising she'd forgotten to remove the Veil of Darkness and Nightmare Shroud, the Resurrection Orb and Phase Shifter were also in her bag. She tore the shroud and veil of her body before stuffing them into her bag, pushing them right to the bottom and under her books and stationery.

She also had some spare cash on her, those guys had been carrying a fair bit of money on them…

She felt a little guilty for taking their guns and money, but she couldn't keep hold of them, and they had shot at her first without even a question. Heroes wouldn't do that, but she wasn't quite up to date on the local villain scene. She had Computer class and World Issues this afternoon, maybe she could do a little research in Mrs Knott's lesson? As long as she got the work done, the teacher wouldn't mind her doing her own thing.

She got out of the sewer and headed back into Winslow, she'd made good enough time that there was still several minutes left before class was to start, but she might as well head there early, it was a better idea than looking for trouble and hanging out where the trio could find her was looking for trouble.

She arrived at the classroom just as Mrs Knott was, probably having come from the classroom. She let Taylor into the room and gave her that lessons' assignment to work on. It was less than five minutes until the end of lunch, but she started working on it.

She ignored the bell when it went, as well as her classmates streaming into the room. She focused on keeping her head down and getting her work done, and so it was no surprise that she found herself finished and with more than twenty minutes left in the lesson.

What should Taylor look up online?

[ ][Internet] Check PHO, that place always has the freshest news.

[ ][Internet] Create a PHO account and announce herself to the world.

[ ][Internet] Look up local heroes and villains, see if she can identify whose base she stumbled into.

[ ][Internet] That tinkertech looked quite uniform and professional, is it possible to buy online?

[ ][Internet] Write in.

xxxxx

Her last lesson of the day, World Issues, something that Taylor absolutely hated. It wasn't the subject, no, it was the teacher. Mr Gladly, Mr 'G' as he preferred, was an absolutely terrible teacher in her opinion. Oh, he knew his subject, on the rare occasion that someone actually asked him a question, he could always give an answer, but his teaching methods and attitude absolutely stunk.

He loved group work – perhaps because it meant less marking for him to do? - and he treated the class like they were five, rewarding them with candy for correct answers and always acting all cheery and happy. The nickname he insisted on, Mr. G, made it look like he was trying to still be a kid himself, and it did him no favours.

No one in class respected him, no one really liked him, but he was just such a pushover to both the gang kids and the popular ones that he was kinda tolerated by his students. That last fact did absolutely nothing for Taylor, she was bottom of the pile and Mr Gladly listened to everyone else over her whenever anything happened, even when he saw Madison fill her hair with spitballs, or cover her chair in juice.

She hated it, and simply endured his lessons, waiting for them to be over. Today was no different, even if the topic was 'Tinkers of the World and their effect on technological advancement', apparently inspired by her consumption of the Boat Graveyard.

Her group, due to her own ideas, talked about how Tinkers actually harmed scientific advancement, due to their technology being so superior to modern stuff, yet even they couldn't explain how to replicate it to a normal person. It took the wind out of the sales of regular people, who simply couldn't match them, and when someone did discover something the usual way, there were always people claiming they were actually a Tinker pretending to be normal.

After school, she made her way out of school with all haste, not hanging around to hear the trio or their hangers on try and hassle or insult her. She found it easy to ignore them if she just focused on her machines now, easy to push them aside and think of metal and resources.

Heading to a different shop, not the one she had gotten her last phone from, Taylor mentally went over what she'd looked up in her spare time earlier. As it turned out, there was a villain in Brockton Bay known for hiring mercenaries and arming them with tinkertech weaponry, though no one seemed to know what Coil's power was, or even if he was a parahuman at all.

Coil had a short list of criminal charges attached to his name, but no one had any idea what he was really doing. Speculation ran wild, as his mercenaries were all ethnicities, he wasn't particularly involved in the drugs trade, prostitution, or… well, anything really. He seemed to pop up, make a mess of the heroes and occasionally the other villain groups, and then disappear again. There was no rhyme or reason for his actions that could clearly be seen, and neither was there an obvious source of funding, tinkertech was expensive after all.

She wasn't particularly comfortable with such an unknown hanging around her home city. Granted, she wasn't happy with the Nazis or Asian supremacists either, and no one liked the drug pushers at all. Still, Coil wasn't as big a group as any of those three, so maybe there was something she could do about him herself.

On the bus, she pulled her tablet out of her bag and began issuing orders to her small forces. The Immortals were divided up, a group of ten in her primary base beneath her home, for her own bodyguards, and eight groups consisting of ten warriors and one immortal, two of each such groups in each of her four bases.

As for the eleven wraiths she had… well, she needed to find out where Coil's other bases were, if he had any, and they could phase through solid matter like it wasn't there, so she told eight of them to begin reconnaissance throughout the city. Coil had one underground base, let's see if there were more.

The other three she kept close at hand, just in case she got into a situation that proved troublesome. She had her 'costume' in her bag, the Veil of Darkness and Nightmare Shroud, but she didn't have any sort of weapon, and she wasn't exactly a master martial artist or anything.

She looked over the weapons that her spyders could construct, but she already knew they were far too heavy for her to lift herself, much less use effectively. Some of them were designing power armour for her use, so maybe once that was done she could use a weapon…

What weapon should Taylor be equipped with?

[ ][Weapon] Gauss Flayer, it's good enough for her warriors…

[ ][Weapon] Gauss Blaster, a bit beefier on power, but also heavier.

[ ][Weapon] Gauss Cannon… she'd have to use it like a shoulder mounted rocket launcher, but it packs a punch.

[ ][Weapon] Staff of Light, standard weapon of Necron Lords.

[ ][Weapon] Warscythe with built-in Gauss Blaster, only the best for the mistress!

She sent that off to the spyders, so they knew what to manufacture when her armour was also ready for production. She hoped it wouldn't be too long, as while she had initially wanted to put off her first appearance at least a month, giving her time to really get everything ready, accidentally breaching Coil's base had sort of accelerated her schedule. She very much doubted he was going to wait for her to be ready before coming after her in revenge, she wouldn't have been happy to have someone break into her base and escape so Coil likely wasn't happy either, and who knew what resources he could call upon.

She kept her focus on her tablet as the bus went past several stops before it was near the shops, whereupon she got off the bus and headed towards the first phone shop she saw. Like her last phone, the one she bought this time was pay-as-you-go and also right on the cheap end of the scale, but that left her with a fair amount of spare cash too, so she looked around for what else she might want to buy.

She considered getting some paint for her constructs, perhaps make them less terrifying in appearance, but she reconsidered that. While it wasn't particularly heroic, her machines had a theme going, and she didn't want to force her own idea of what a hero should look like onto them, just look at her current 'costume'. It was an all-concealing black ensemble, and if her power armour followed the theme, she would look like a cloth-garbed metal skeleton herself!

Other than that, there wasn't anything in particular she needed right now. Her hero-ing needs were pretty much being met by her constructs… and she really needed to think of a name to collectively call her machines, referring to them as 'constructs' or 'machines' all the time felt a little derogatory.

What should Taylor call her machines?

[ ][Name] Necrons, that's what they are, though she doesn't know that.

[ ][Name] Necrontyr, their old name, much more noble and official sounding.

[ ][Name] The Robot Death Army, hey, it is descriptive…

[ ][Name] Mecha Marines, that sounds cool.

[ ][Name] Write in.

Well, she had already come up with her own cape name, Khepri, after the Egyptian stylistic elements she'd seen on her guys, so it was about time they got a name of their own, and she refused to think of them as unfeeling mechanical constructs, they all had personalities of their own.

With nothing else that she needed to do, she headed home. She wasn't going out tonight, the whole thing with Coil's men had been enough action for her right now, and it had highlighted just how unfit she was. The fight hadn't lasted very long at all, but seeing those mercenaries react as quickly and efficiently as they had made her think about her own abilities in a fight.

She briefly considered joining a gym, but decided instead that she'd probably have her spyders construct a gym in her home base, there was nothing there particularly complicated, so they should be able to set that up without a problem. The plus was she could use it whenever she wanted, however long she wanted to use it for.

It was as she got on the bus that she began to wonder if her guys knew any martial arts or anything, though she thought it unlikely. The only close combat units she had available to her were wraiths, flayed ones, and tomb spyders, and the last two had some nasty claws they used, and the former were not human-shaped so she didn't know what they could even teach her.

She muffled a laugh at the mental image of a wraith in a karate gi teaching her to 'feel the flow of battle' with a long moustache being twirled in one claw. She didn't want to be seen as a crazy person, and so she focused back on her tablet, frowning at the numerical value that had been assigned to her current resources.

The Boat Graveyard had given her so much, yet she couldn't help but feel she'd wasted it creating so many scarabs. A thousand of them had stripped the ships bare, nothing left, in an hour and a half – and that had probably freaked out a lot of people – and now she was down to less than two hundred units left. At least her generators were up and running, all ten of them.

The fifteen hundred scarabs she was sending on a mining expedition… well, she didn't really know anything about mining, nor was she aware of where the mineral deposits around the world were, so she would just hope to get lucky there and find something worth plenty of resources. That was the best she could do.

She really wanted to go after Coil, prove that she could be a hero and take him down, but she wasn't ready yet. Once she had non-lethal weaponry and her own power armour… maybe then she could actively do something instead of stumbling into his base like an idiot. She was still feeling rather stupid about not having a scarab or wraith ensure she didn't expand her base into something else already there, imagine if she had accidentally dug into the aquifer and flooded her own lair? Her scarabs may have gotten washed away, or smashed against the walls, or anything!

She got off the bus at her stop and went into her house, abandoning her bag on her bed before saying hi to Nekhbet, her first scarab, and the one with the most personality so far. Leaving her bag where it was, she picked him up and headed down to the basement.

As she didn't yet have any eternity gates set-up – the spyders were looking into making them without the requirement of a complete monolith – she had hidden a doorway down to her home base in her basement. It was hidden behind a set of shelves that she could just squeeze behind herself, so it wasn't out in the open, but a concerted effort to look for it would find it.

Behind the doorway was a literally mile deep shaft. Perhaps she'd been a bit excessive when she'd told her scarabs to dig that deep, but… well, she wasn't going to be hitting any basements, endbringer shelters, or villain bases at that depth. Unfortunately, however, the staircase going around that deep shaft consisted of more than eight thousand steps. Luckily, she had the foresight to have a wraith carry her all the way to the bottom, as while it would be good exercise, it would also be exhausting.

She knew that destroyers, heavy destroyers, and wraiths could all fly – and she wondered if she could repurpose that technology to make some sort of grav-lift thing – but she wondered if there were any true flyers she could make, rather than just 'skimmers' as destroyers were described.

She sent a message to her 'head' spyder on the tablet and received an instant response. Apparently they knew of some separate bits of technology that could be combined to make a true flying unit, and she watched on the tablet as the spyder rapidly assembled a large, robotic wasp thing, one that it titled an acanthrite. They would look further into it at her discretion, but looking at her current resources, she tabled that for later, there wasn't enough there for experimentation.

Deciding to look into that more later, Taylor tried to enjoy the rapid descent courtesy of her wraith that flew straight down the shaft, not bothering to use the stairs around the edges. Of course, being in almost freefall for a mile wasn't what Taylor would call fun, though she'd probably enjoy it more if she was in control of it herself rather than being carried, but she didn't currently have any flight capabil…

She was so stupid. Her Veil of Darkness allowed her to teleport, the bottom of this shaft should be within her range as well, though she supposed it was a good idea to keep some sort of shaft for ventilation if nothing else, she didn't want to suffocate when she visited one of her bases after all.

Grumbling under breath about how she had left that in her bag upstairs, she sent another wraith off to get it for her. With that on hand, she could get around much more easily than being carried everywhere by a wraith, even if she kinda liked it in a way.

xxxxx

Taylor spent several hours overseeing the research and checking up on her guys that had received damage from Coil's mercenaries, but they were all proud to carry their 'scars' in memory of their first battle, even the spyders who weren't really meant for combat, and the excitable scarabs that had survived that encounter intact chose to keep their battle damage.

Teleporting to the top of the shaft, Taylor slipped the Veil into a pocket and headed to the kitchen to prepare some supper for her and her dad. He wasn't home yet, she hadn't expected him to be. While he was only contracted for work five days a week, a total of forty hours all told, he almost always worked overtime, making sure he got the Dockworkers all the work they could get.

She cooked, ate, did her homework, and went to bed, ready for tomorrow and what it would bring.

When morning came, Taylor got into her new routine. She went downstairs and made breakfast for her and her father, before checking on her Necrontyr – she didn't know precisely where the name came from, but as necro was to do with death, and they looked like skeletons, it was appropriate – but whereas before she'd used her tablet to give them their orders, now she used her Veil of Darkness – which she had decided to keep on her at all times – to teleport down to her base below her house.

Her spyders had finished designing her armour, and she had told them to make it for her last night, along with a weapon she could wield. She hadn't seen it yet, and she was excited to see what it was that they had made for her, what she would be wearing when she went out as a hero.

When she saw it, she wasn't surprised that it looked like her regular warriors in appearance. The differences were that it was shaped and sized for herself, and there were linear actuators at the joints. She wasn't a machine like her Necrontryr were, so she needed the actuators to make her as strong as they were, not to mention how heavy the armour itself was. If it wasn't powered armour, she probably wouldn't be able to move in it.

She had the spyders help her put it on, and marvelled at how it felt like she wasn't wearing full all-concealing armour. Yes, she could feel the metal against her skin, but it didn't feel like it was resisting her movements, moving as she moved.

The spyders presented her with weights made of necrodermis, the material they used to make pretty much everything, and something that Taylor knew she couldn't lift with her own two arms. This weight she managed to pick up with one hand, and she barely felt it.

She tried running across the room, backwards and forwards several times. Unfortunately, while the power armour did counter its own weight, it didn't grant her any increase in speed. If she wanted to get faster, and improve her stamina, then she would have to start exercising.

A spyder handed her a weapon, while another held another version of it. The lethal version had a green chamber on it and a wickedly sharp looking blade, whereas the non-lethal version she now held in her hand was blue as opposed to green and the blade was replaced with a studded baton-like end.

Taylor, once again, knew that she wouldn't be able to wield this warscythe with her regular human strength, but in her power armour it was like twirling a plastic sweeping brush. She held it in both hands and went through the very little she new of 'staff' combat. Jabs, sweeps, and strikes… that was pretty much it actually.

She was pretty sure she'd be able to find some sort of kata online, probably a video as well. Actually… with that in mind, she pulled out her tablet and, yes, she could actually see a wi-fi icon in the corner of the screen, and there was an icon for an internet browser too!

Selecting it, she quickly loaded up youtube, and found numerous videos labelled 'staff combat', 'staff kata', and loads more. The internet really did have everything, but for now she gave her spyders instructions to look through it and collate all the most highly-rated and recommended ones while she was at school.

Before she used her Veil to teleport near school, as she'd missed the bus spending her time down here, she double-checked that her wraiths had replaced their poisons for sedatives and paralytics before asking the spyders to search the internet for the nearest landfill site, and if it was close enough they were to dispatch the scarabs to claim it. Once claimed, they were to use the new resources to create non-lethal weaponry for the rest of her forces.

With all that done and out of the way, Taylor had two spyders help her out of her armour and set it aside, along with the Nightmare Shroud and all of the other equipment aside from the Veil of Darkness, which she kept on her. She pulled on her school shoes, and once she'd had a wraith check an alleyway near to Winslow, teleported to school.

xxxxx

Everyone who saw Taylor that day was rather surprised at how cheerful she was. She was known as the depressed loner, the 'target' of Emma Barnes and Sophia Hess, and the girl that no one wanted to get close to, if only to avoid the attention of the ones that targetted her.

Sophia Hess was a strong, athletic girl, who gleefully beat down on anyone that crossed her. The fact that the faculty did nothing to stop her, not even the token effort they did with the gang members, stank of something strange.

To see her favourite punching bag so happy, well people first made sure that nothing had happened to either of her regular tormentors. When it was found that both Emma and Sophia were in school as normal, and neither looked particularly upset themselves, then rumours began to spread through the school.

There were the regular rumours that were always spread about Taylor, that she was a druggy that had just gotten her latest high, that she was a hooker that had earned a lot last night, that she had joined a gang that allowed her to lick their feet clean, and so on and so forth. In addition to that, there were a few much more mild rumours as well, that she'd gotten lucky and found some loose money, that she had a boyfriend now, and more besides.

She kept the smile on her face through her first two periods of the day, but when she left her class after that she found her way blocked by a gaggle of girls, all of them orbiting around the trio that weren't even bothering to pretend they weren't targetting her. She could already hear their 'whispers', but she didn't let it bother her, not now that she was a cape, that she had people – even if they were machines – that believed in her and supported her whole-heartedly.

Rather than turn in on herself as she would have done previously, she brushed past the girls at the outer edge of the huddle that was blocking the corridor. She wasn't particularly forceful in pushing them out of her way, but the sheer surprise of her doing so must have been quite shocking as they didn't resist her at all.

If she'd have looked back, she would have seen the thunderous look on Sophia's face as she was ignored, and the dropped jaw of Emma as she was completely dismissed by Taylor, likr she wasn't even there. Madison kept looking between the two of them and Taylor, not sure what was going on.

Taylor found a corner to secrete herself away and pulled out her tablet, checking on the progress of her Necrontyr. Her spyders had apparently used the internet to find 'Authorised Landfill Sites', and proceeded to send out two hundred and fifty scarabs to claim it for resources. As the resource counter went up, it also went down as the spyders constructed the non-lethal weaponry needed to equip her warriors and immortals, the lethal weaponry being stored away for now. Taylor didn't know why she would need the lethal option, but she would store them away for now… perhaps she should see about setting up some armouries in her bases?

For now, she was more concerned with finding Coil's bases. There was a map icon on her tablet that she touched, which brought up what was obviously a map of Brockton Bay, probably downloaded of the internet. There were several options at the side, and Taylor chose to look at the 'underground' option, to see what her wraiths had discovered.

Immediately obvious was the sewer tunnels, of which there were two sets. One was labelled 'sewage' and the other was labelled 'storm'. There were several other locations that were shown, four of which were her own bases, one was labelled as 'Coil 1', and there was another which she labelled as 'PRT' after checking what was above ground there.

That still left a few that she didn't know what they were. A few of them were just labelled 'cavern' as there wasn't anything connecting them to the surface that she could see, and then there were the endbringer shelters which she labelled as such.

What caused her to pause though was that, mere feet from the place labelled 'Coil 1', there was an entire complex several times the size of the initial base. In fact, the entire thing was about as large as an endbringer shelter, and given the number of people each one of them was supposed to support for several days, that was saying something.

She didn't know what was in there, obviously, as her wraiths were only checking for empty space rather than the contents of those spaces. She'd ordered them that way to minimise the chance of them being seen. If they only poked out enough for their optics to see how large a space was, then there was less of them there to be seen by anyone else.

Moving on for now, however, there were a number of areas below ground that she didn't know what they were. She ignored anything that was a single room – probably just a basement somewhere really – but that still left plenty of places that could be a base, a lair, or pretty much anything else.

Still, given the large complex that 'Coil 1' was attached to, she was fairly sure that was where his lair was, now all she had to do was decide what to do about it.

How should Taylor proceed?

[ ][Coil] Assault the base after school, you have over a hundred troops now, that should be enough.

[ ][Coil] Wait for the weekend, nothing is likely to happen over the next three days.

[ ][Coil] Let the PRT know where he is, maybe a team-up is in the cards?

[ ][Coil] Instead of the PRT, perhaps New Wave would like to get involved?

[ ][Coil] Write in.

With that decided, she put her tablet back into her bag for now and finished her lunch. She was quite pleased with how things were going at the moment, she was about to strike her first blow against the criminal elements of her home city, she had a powerful ability that she could use for good, and she had just stood up to her bullies!

Okay, so maybe brushing past them in a corridor once wasn't really 'standing up to them', but it was a start, and she had seriously had enough of being pushed around by them. The school faculty hadn't done anything about them, even when they put her in the hospital, the police had found nothing at all – no witnesses apparently – so now she needed to take her life into her own hands if she actually wanted it to go anywhere, but what could she do…

Wraith 7, as it referred to itself and the other Necrontyr called it, continued to phase through the earth surrounding the base that its creator had labelled 'Coil 3', a segment just like the first one, and hunted for the appropriate cables. It had already identified power cables, but that's not what it was after. It was looking for whatever cables carried data to and from the outside world.

In truth, the wraith did not believe that they would discover any true secrets of their current foe, but even finding out where the data was being sent, or even who to, would be a boon to aid their inevitable assault against the human. All the mistress had been able to find on the 'internet' was an image of the man in a black bod-stocking with a snake image printed on it. A rather ridiculous outfit, the wraith believed, as it served neither as protection nor as intimidation, unlike the mistress' armour which served as both.

The necrodermis shell that the mistress had had constructed would safeguard her soft body, and the power flowing through it would make her stronger than any but the 'brutes' of this world. The sight of it would instil fear in their enemies, even without the Nightmare Shroud, as the internet was very clear that symbols of death – such as skeletons – were primary causes of fear in the human races' psyche, as were faceless minions. It, however, did not comprehend the widespread fear of 'clowns' nor their fascination with cat pictures and videos.

Ah, it looked like it had found something here. One of its claws was phased through a wire that was 'pulsing' inconsistently. Nothing a human would be able to comprehend, but it implied that some form of data was being passed through the cable as opposed to simple power. It signalled a tomb spyder of its location, and waited while it and several scarabs burrowed a tunnel to its location, avoiding the locations marked as empty space below ground.

Once there, the spyder settled in to duplicate and memorise every pulse sent along the cable. It wouldn't help much if the data was encrypted, but perhaps suggesting to the mistress that she should purchase discs for the most common operating systems the humans used when she was on her way home would assist the spyders in their attempts at comprehending human technology further, they were already working at parsing the language codecs found online.

The wraith left the spyder to its task, returning to its own task of mapping out the underground of Brockton Bay. Co-ordinating with the now nineteen other wraiths, though three remained guarding the mistress, it meandered through the underground, updating the map as it went. There wasn't much left to explore, the wraiths travelled quickly and co-ordinated with each other well.

That did not mean they knew who owned the various locations however, though several of them could be inferred with current information. There was a small space below the 'Palanquin' club, that was obviously the domain of Faultline and her 'crew'. The area below the PRT building was now known to be where the Wards resided after one wraith caught sight of a bedroom there which had the costume of Shadow Stalker hung up in the wardrobe. They had found nothing indicative of the Merchants, ABB, or E88, but they were currently working under the assumption that none of them used underground bases like Coil did.

That would be logical, as the Merchants used what was already there and repurposed it, the ABB with Lung as their leader didn't really go for the subtle approach, and the Empire was well-supplied with regular weapons – not tinkertech – and so were presumably living like regular people were, which made it much harder to identify them or where they may live. It was the likes of Coil that was the outlier.

The PRT was government funded, but where did some relatively unknown villain get access to enough funds to construct an entire underground base, stock it with the cutting-edge of non-tinker equipment, and then also keep a number of mercenaries on retainer and arm them with expensive tinkertech weaponry? Either Coil had a power that allowed him to accumulate wealth, he was born into wealth, or he had some serious backing.

Of the three, the former was deemed most likely. A thinker power of some description would allow him to either predict or directly manipulate the market and gain the wealth he obviously had. It would also be potentially subtle enough that the speculation on whether Coil was a parahuman or a regular man would make sense, it wasn't like being super-smart was as visible as breathing fire or tossing boulders around like they were styrofoam.

The wraiths wanted Coil dealt with, preferably dead, before he could become a threat to the mistress. She had told them to observe for now, and they would follow her commands, but they still wished to be given the order to rend him limb from limb, to tear him apart in as gory a fashion as they were capable. They did not understand this hesitation, the man was a villain, she gained nothing by leaving him be, and every day he still lived the possible threat he presented could only grow.

Still, the mistress told them to wait and watch, and they would obey the mistress.

xxxxx

Taylor kept an eye on her tablet, waiting the last few minutes before her afternoon classes. Her scarabs had completely devoured the landfill site they'd found, and she didn't know how far away the next nearest one of them was. She was reluctant to send her scarabs off blindly, spreading herself too thin and rapidly had proved to be her downfall when she'd accidentally broken into Coil's base.

Could she have won the fight if she'd stayed? Quite possibly, but she would have probably lost a lot more as well, and there was also the chance that she could have gotten hurt without her armour too. She was resolved to fight alongside her Necrontyr in future, as she refused to just sit back and command them. She remembered several quotes her mother had mentioned when she'd Taylor about her time with Lustrum when she was younger.

She refused to sit back and let others take risks for her when she could be right there with them. Yes, they were machines, yes she had created them, but that didn't make them any less a being in her eyes. The scarabs were cute and friendly, her immortals devoted, and her wraiths protective. If that didn't indicate some form of personality, some form of life then she didn't know what did.

She had almost cried over the body of the spyder lost in the initial fight with Coil's mercenaries. It hadn't been the first spyder, the one she had most contact with, and she felt rather saddened that she didn't know that spyder particularly well. She didn't want what was basically a stranger sacrificing themselves for her, especially as right now she was basically doing nothing against the ones who had 'killed' them.

She clenched a fist, promising to herself that she would bring Coil down. Until then though, she had school to deal with, and she would do her damned best in class, she was fed up being pushed around by other people, she was going to take control of her life. Step one of that was righting the absolute mess that was her teenage life. She couldn't do much socially, Emma had pretty much destroyed any chance she might have at that, but she wasn't going to let the redheaded bitch drag her any further down.

Slipping her tablet back into her bag, she headed off to lesson just as the bell went. She saw her tormentors outside the classroom door, waiting for her it seemed, but she didn't slow down, no, she pushed past Emma and Madison – Sophia was too strong to be brushed aside but they weren't – and went into the classroom. She set her books out on the desk and prepared to take notes on the lesson.

The trio entered the room soon afterwards, Emma especially looking absolutely livid. Madison just had that 'confused puppy' look again, and Sophia was looking at her like… actually, Taylor didn't know what that look was, but she found it distinctly unpleasant, and resolved to teleport to one of her bases from school. There weren't any cameras around to see her go, so that wasn't an issue.

She endured the lesson, but rather than focus completely on where her tormentors were in the room like she had previously done, she knuckled down and did her best to complete the work. She did make a mental note to ask her spyders to collect together all revision material and study techniques they could find online, and which were most effective. If she had a resource, she was going to use it.

She kept her head down the entire lesson, ignoring the now expected spitballs in her hair, and the pencil shavings that were dumped on her. No one else cared what the trio did to her, even as blatant about it as they were, and she refused to give them the satisfaction of a reaction, she'd tried that before and it didn't work. She just kept going with the lesson, trying to learn as much as she could. If she could get her grades up, she might be able to test out of the classes, though she'd have to check up on that later on.

When the lesson was over, she rapidly packed up her things and shook her hair to dislodge everything that had been put there, pencil shavings cascading to the ground and a few of the spitballs falling out. She picked up her bag and left the classroom straight away, before heading to the stairs.

She went down a floor and, hidden behind the stairs themselves, used the Veil of Darkness to teleport to her base beneath her home. A short flight in the arms of a wraith later had her in the shower getting clean. She didn't spend long in there though, and soon enough threw herself onto her bed and cuddled with Nekhbet, her first scarab. She remained like that for a good hour, taking comfort in his hard metal body against her chest, before she sat up as suddenly as she had thrown herself down.

She might not be ready to take on Coil in his own base just yet, but until she got to that point there was nothing stopping her patrolling the city like a regular hero did. The only question right now was where should she go? Almost everywhere in Brockton Bay suffered from the gangs, so it was only a matter of deciding where she should strike first.