40-41

She didn't like Los Angeles.

It was too loud, too bright, and too shitty for how beautiful it looked.

But most of all, it was too damn packed with people. It was hard as hell to find a place to park their cars in a normal city without someone unwanted snooping around them, but in a place like LA?

She had to bribe private junkyards just to park somewhere relatively safe.

She also didn't like doing a job for free, but like it or not, she owed Summoner.

The location was odd, but Gregor had done his research, contacting some of their old clientele that still hung around LA, and this was a neutral ground according to the grapevine.

So with yet another sigh, she carefully maneuvered the car to the side within the tight alley, turning to the right to point the nose at the gigantic garage door that broke up the line of trashcans on either side, the plates painted a dull, dark green.

She didn't have to wait long for a small, almost unnoticeable door to open to the side, a man in a hood and facemask calmly but briskly turning and walking to her, ducking down to window height.

"Hey. New faces around here." He stated more than asked, and looked beside her to Newter, who pulled his hood back a little to give the guy a lazy salute. Shrewd eyes examined them both. "Names?" He asked, digging around his pocket for a little flip book.

"Faultline and Newter." She provided, and the guy furrowed a brow in confusion as he began to write them down.

"Newter with a W. Not neuter. New-ter." She clarified, and the man made a small 'oh' sound as he crossed the name out and wrote it again.

"Right. Parking here is forbidden, so when you leave the facilities for more than two hours, you take your vehicle with you or we scrap it for parts. You're not getting anything back in that case. No fights, business talk only in the booths. No Thinker heroes allowed in the bar, period. Honorless shits, those." He grumbled, and jerked his head to the door. "Enjoy yourselves. Or don't."

She nodded, and he walked back to the little door tucked into the alley's side.

The garage door began to rattle open with surprising speed, and she drove the car into the underground garage, her brows rising at the sheer size as she drove between support beams and parked cars without a licence plate in sight.

It had enough height and width to fit trucks in here. A full floor of parking, clean, well-lit with warm light…

She might like this place more than expected.

She found an open spot, and parked, before following the spray-painted signs of a beer bottle with an arrow next to them to find the door to the actual bar.

The first door was cold, soulless sheet metal, but the second one down the hall was nicely varnished dark wood with a little window. She was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere as she opened the door.

It was that perfect mixture between noisy enough to feel alive but not loud enough to be annoying, classy music playing in the back. Velvet couches and epoxy-wood mixed tables, wooden floorboards, smooth white walls, while the bar front was long, well lit, and the wood was gleaming as if freshly lacquered.

Despite everyone in here clearly being villains, the most she and Newter got were a quick glance from the two dozen or so inhabitants of the large bar before everyone went back to chatting and drinking.

"Holy shit, I wanna live here." Newter whistled, and she resisted the urge to flick his forehead for being unprofessional.

"Calm down. We're not even sure they're here." She calmly noted, and he nodded, eyeing the wall of drinks behind the bartender.

Renata had given very specific instructions on where to go and how to notify the person who had the package that they were ready to get it, but she was still very dubious about the end result.

How would sending a bizarre, cryptic letter addressed to the local PRT office notify anyone of anything? It would get tossed in the trash after being tested front and back for contaminants. Unless the letter checkers were Summoner's insiders…? She was never one for convoluted plots.

She huffed, and walked past the tables to a large hallway tucked in the back, a wall of doors to her right with numbers and letters and little lights beside the door handles to show which ones were occupied.

She found the booth number, and finding the light green, rapped her knuckles on the door.

"Come in." A woman's voice came from inside, and so they did.

Two plush couches, a coffee table in between.

And to the left, their package and its delivery woman.

She wore completely casual clothes with curly hair in a ponytail, the only thing giving her away as a cape being the low-tech voice changer mask clamped onto her face and the hood. The gloves were a bit strange too for this weather.

"Stop." The woman briskly said, and they paused, the door half-shut, Newter's hand still on the knob. "You're not who I'm expecting."

She nodded.

"They sent us instead. Gave us a phrase to say. Said you'd understand."

The woman leaned her head forward with a questioning hum, motioning to Newter with their hand.

Newter closed the door, and she calmly moved forward to take a seat opposite the woman.

"In the fields of Elysium, a metal titan and a statue fight for three hearts on their first meeting." She quoted. "That's the phrase we were given to prove they sent us. The package?" She urged, and the woman just stared at her, inordinately still.

Then she nodded, lifting a giant briefcase and putting it on the table.

"This. Do not try to open it. She'll know." The woman warned, and Melanie nodded, mildly miffed about the constant warnings, as if she needed them. She was a professional damn it. She didn't snoop.

Even Renata had stressed enough about the importance of this package and contingencies to make her ears bleed.

She couldn't tell if these people were all paranoid or just didn't have much faith in mercenaries.

"Anything else before we go?"

The woman shook her head.

Newter took the bag, just in case, and nodded.

Well, she just sat down for nothing…

She rose, and followed Newter outside, calmly walking back to their vehicle.

Just outside, Train's van was waiting with the rest of the team, just in case, but she doubted they'd need it.

Newter held it in his lap until they got to the van, where Trainwreck shoved the thing into a padded metal box, then they split up again to continue on their way.

The battery would be simpler to get, thankfully, if a lot more labour intensive.

Well, it would be easier this time around with Trainwreck present to haul the thing around. Last time had her enduring hours of Newter whining about his back.

Aisha wasn't really 'hard', as some of the shitty kids at Winslow might put it.

Yeah sure she could fight and scrap and she didn't mind breaking a bone here and there if she really hated a bitch, and her life was pretty shit so far, but she'd never seen anything…

Well, anything like that.

The first thing she saw on her way in was brains splattered all over a stair step, a dead gangster with a rifle in his lap leaning against them, followed by a tense minute of crouch-walking down a corridor absolutely destroyed by gunfire, hoping nobody randomly shot at her back by accident.

Then, women and girls in… varying states of nakedness, all with that look in their eyes and that sway in their movements that she'd learned from her mother meant high as fuck or in withdrawal.

Walking into a brothel wasn't gonna be fun, she knew that, but she expected gross naked fuckers and cum stains, not this shit.

Another thing that movies got very, very wrong, was how difficult it was to fucking knock someone out.

The first guy took one shot with a baseball bat she found lying around and was out cold.

The other guy had a skull made of steel or some shit, because she just had to keep.

Fucking.

Swinging.

And then he had curled up, scrambled back over a couch, waved the gun around, and started shooting around the room at random, knowing that somebody was attacking him and probably thinking they were invisible or some shit.

It was only then that she broke his wrist and got the gun out of his hand, and he still kept shouting random crap and looking for another one.

The rest was… messy.

She didn't exactly know what else to do but keep beating him the fuck up with the bat, and by the time he stopped moving, the bat was covered in fucking blood, the girls in the back were still screaming and crying and sobbing and Summoner's guys were outside yelling orders like they were cops, flashlights and lasers poking through the dust and coke powder floating in the air from where a bullet exploded a sack of it.

In the chaos, panting and shaking she turned around and… and a girl was dead.

Just. There on the carpet. Gone. There was a girl trying to stem the bleeding from the hole in her chest with her hand, but her eyes were empty and glassy already, hidden beneath her matted bangs. 

She got a girl killed because she was fucking stupid.

She should have just grabbed the first guy's gun and shot their brains out. But she just… her mind just wasn't ready for that shit, she hadn't been ready to kill. She felt that instinctive, mild revulsion just from thinking about knocking someone out with a bat, killing someone was several orders of magnitude more violence than she had even considered or thought herself capable of.

But now, a girl was dead. Because she thought this shit was like a movie and she could just smack someone on the head with a bat and be done with it.

Things weren't that clean and simple in real life. Letting a fucker like that live just… wasn't worth the risk that he'd hurt people who actually mattered.

All of a sudden, she could really empathise with the kind of shitty situations cops would get put into sometimes, whether it was on the news or the internet. She could understand why they shot so fast now in those videos, when it just looked like needless murder to her before.

The alternative to not shooting just wasn't worth it.

She just wished that learning that lesson hadn't cost a girl her life.

For a long while she just sat on a crate opposite the corridor's entrance, in the same room, and watched Summoner's guys work through the brothel, gathering the girls and speaking to them in languages she couldn't even guess at, struggling not to cry or grab a piece of glass to score lines into her arms as a self-punishment for being so fucking retarded. 

She got an innocent girl killed.

Chick didn't look much older than Emily. Brown hair, Indonesian features. Brown eyes, slight tilt in her nose, probably broken before. She doubted she'd be able to forget her face, and wasn't sure she wanted to.

She watched a man in black briefly examine the guy she'd beaten, and mutter about how his skull was broken and he was going to die anyway, before pulling out a silenced pistol and executing him on the floor where he laid.

Covering her face with her hands, she took increasingly uneven breaths as the guilt kept mounting.

She should have killed that guy herself. She felt relief for not having to do it, guilt about not doing it, and guilt about feeling relief for not having to do it.

Emotions were so fucking confusing.

By the time she decided that she had to get up and move on, just like every other time life grabbed her by the arms and snapped her bones for its own amusement, the trucks carrying the girls and Summoner's soldiers were rumbling down the far side of the street.

She watched them go, took a deep breath, sighed it out, and fixed the cheap dollar store mask she wore back onto her head.

She hadn't thought of him for a hot minute, but as she turned her power off and picked up her phone to report success to Insight, she couldn't help but wish Brian was still alive. He'd have some fumbling words of dollar store wisdom or some stupid pseudo-positive shit to say.

He'd probably try to awkwardly hug her, at least.

"Fucking asshole…" She whispered, her voice warbling with gross emotions she'd rather keep away. "Could have just gone to the Wards." She croaked out, fully aware of how hypocritical it was for her to say that now when working for a shadowy syndicate, then yanked her mask up to wipe at her eyes before yanking it down as she pressed the call button, sniffling.

She wondered if Spits would give her a hug.

Maybe she could bother Rune for one.

She let out a snort of bleak laughter at the mental image.

Eh, fuck it, she'd give it a try. Would be fun to watch the reaction, at least.

Thirty minutes and a car ride later, she was in the empty safehouse with only Rune for company, the former nazi pacing and glued to the TV that broadcasted endless emergency reports on the chaos in the Bay, and the little joke she'd made to herself kept nagging at her. She was curious, she was bored, and it might be funny.

That and she still felt like shit. Some part of her was genuinely happy that she helped rescue human trafficking victims, of course. That thought felt nice and fuzzy. She almost felt like a hero for a bit.

But the weight of failure and two lives was a lot heavier for the moment.

So, half-joking and half-serious, she got up, stretched, and held her arms open, a foot or two away from Rune's pacing area.

"Oi. Gimme a hug."

Rune paused, and turned to give her this scrunched up 'the fuck?' kinda look.

It was endlessly amusing.

"I think I killed a guy today." She blurted out, and immediately regretted how heavy her voice sounded. She grinned, and inwardly curled into an embarrassed ball of cringe because she was sure it looked fake as shit. "And a girl. Accidentally. Shit day." She explained, then tensed up because she could feel her fingers shaking and yeah just no.

And then she realized she looked really fucking tense which also looked stupid.

Man, it was just not her day today.

Rune, surprisingly, didn't say anything, just staring at her with increasing scrutiny like she was unsure if she was joking or not.

"He uh. Gangster. Was holding some chicks hostage. I didn't really-" her breath hitched, and then resisted the urge to growl in frustration at herself, instead clearing her throat. "- didn't really knock him out right. Dude started flailing and shooting at random. Broke his s-skull, trying to knock him out. He killed a girl while shooting around for me."

Rune's hard stare slackened as the girl blinked at her, breathing out a soft 'oh' noise.

"I'll let you know what I know about today's shitstorm in return? You're lookin a mite worried there." She offered, half-jokingly, starting to feel a little awkward holding her arms out like this.

Rune turned and held her hands open by her side like she was herding a cat into a corner, then moved them around uncertainly as she hesitantly stepped forward.

"Uh, I… how do I…" Rune started, full of nervous reluctance, then moved her arms to gesture at her.

Being the queen expert on not giving a fuck about people's personal space, she assumed that meant Rune had actually agreed, surprisingly, so she moved up, and hugged Rune around the waist, laying her head on her shoulder.

This was… surprisingly nice, actually.

"Uh… t-there, there?" Rune mumbled, awkwardly patting her on the back, and she snorted with laughter against her shoulder.

"Man, you suck at this."

Rune scoffed, very gingerly putting a hand on her back.

"I was in a nazi gang a week ago, fuck off. This is fucking weird." Rune hissed. "And I'm not used to hugging skinny midgets." She finished.

"Talking a whole lotta shit for someone in ass pinching distance." She hummed in teasing warning, and burst into hysterical cackles as Rune made a loud gagging sound, backing up then putting a hand on her face to push her away.

"Well, glad you feel better." Rune growled, and turned to keep pacing.

Between hysterical giggles, she managed to wipe her eyes without taking off the domino mask.

"Don't you?"

Rune paused, and her expression shifted into surprise for a moment before she scoffed in dismissal and kept pacing.

Taylor formed inside Lisa's surveillance van, ignoring the short jerk its inhabitants gave before realising it was her, taking the opportunity to curl up in the corner against the insulation padding and clamp her ears and eyes shut.

Then she dropped Evelynn, and immediately felt the headache worsen with a wince.

But it was just that. A frustrating headache.

By comparison to the days following the Alexandria incident, she barely felt this.

A minute later, someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she opened her eyes up into Lisa's domino mask, wires and screens shifting in the background as the team managers kept coordinating people in the background.

A finger tugged the hand clamped over her right ear, and she reluctantly pulled it away.

"Hey. How'd it go? You good?" Lisa whispered, and she made an affirmative grunt.

"The ABB is ours. Entirely. I've got a bad headache, but it's manageable. How are our reinforcements to the Empire going?" She whispered back, and Lisa sat down next to her, using her hand to gather her hair and brush it back.

Her eyes fluttered shut.

She missed affection, reluctant as she was to admit it, and Lisa had basically been sleeping in her office for a couple hours a day so far.

This was… really nice. She'd missed it.

"Not great. This wasn't the usual kinda fight. The PRT isn't playing around anymore. The gangs kept escalating, and the new Director thinks it's only appropriate the PRT responds in kind. We lost two guys in the fight 'cause of it. Another one's injured. We got the Valkyrie twins back with the Empire though, the distraction helped. Challenger cut off one of their legs. And… well, to rip off the bandaid, there's a new Tinker around. He fucked with everyone's comms for a bit, ours included. Armsmaster and Dragon seem to have a huge interest in him, so we're going to be getting a visit from her soon."

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a bitter, disbelieving chuckle.

"Of course we will. Why wouldn't we…"

Dragon was coming to the Bay to look for a rogue Tinker. He either had some really good shit, or something about him concerned the PRT.

"I don't suppose we can find this Tinker first?" She asked, and Lisa sighed.

"He either makes programs or is some kind of technopath. We don't have anyone who can fuck around enough with computers to get a connection to the guy. Dragon can't do it."

So they had no chance, in comparison.

"He fucked everyone's comm lines for a solid ten minutes, and we're pretty sure he hacked into some of our body cams too. A coding based Tinker is extremely rare. So… we're probably not getting him unless he comes to us."

"Open up a line of communication to him if possible. Leave a high security camera in a room, pointing at a message on the wall, bait him into hacking it. Or leave messages over random security cameras all over the bay, something like that. He's gotta be looking at us from somewhere."

Lisa paused.

"Shit, good idea. I'll pass it by the techies. So… now what?"

She took another deep breath.

A good question. Now what.

"Now, we take stock of the girls we saved. A good chunk of them will be deported if we gave them to the FBI, so we're going to give those girls a choice. The problem is making sure that choice is ethical. So I need your opinion here."

Lisa wiggled closer, and put her head on her shoulder.

"Sure thing. What's the idea?"

"My idea was to give the girls the choice to work for us in whatever they feel comfortable doing. We're going to need more manpower in every aspect. We're going to need more janitors, we're going to need more movers, we're going to need employees in front businesses, et cetera. If not, we just give them to the FBI in Boston and New York, and they figure out what to do with the girls."

Lisa hummed.

"We could just give the girls fake papers and let them go out into the world without having them work for us. I uh… I saw the operation through cameras, you know? Their living situations were stomach-churning, but our guys don't exactly scream "rescue has come", even when we're pretending to be SWAT teams. I'm not sure they'll want to be involved with us or anything to do with their old life."

She made a short negative humm.

"Paper forgery is expensive. Especially with current standards. And if they get caught with fake papers it's even worse for them, they won't get deported, they'll get thrown in jail. Or deported then thrown in jail. We already spent enough resources in helping them, I'm not going to spend a couple million dollars to give them fake papers that might fuck them over."

Lisa shifted.

"Oh. Yeah, fair. Your suggestion is good, honestly. What else?"

She shifted.

For a minute or two, she simply thought, the truck calmly driving down the roads like nothing was amiss.

Then her head suddenly shot up, an idea that was so obvious in hindsight popping up.

"...Get me to Coil. He and I are going to visit his old pal Accord. And you're going to handle the ABB getting devoured by our faction while we do that. I've told Lung who to listen to."

Lisa sighed in complete exasperation.

"You're putting way too much faith into my inexperienced ass…. And what do you mean devoured?"

She cracked her neck, another plan unfolding.

"I mean just that. Our men are from armies all over the world. Some of them were sargeants, some were drill instructors. Use them. I don't want gangsters, L-" she paused, and glanced at the console operators in the corner. "-Insight. I want soldiers. Go to ground, prepare. Our men can train them. If they won't bend, break them. I'd rather have a corpse than a man who won't listen. Teach them the new chain of command, then our ideology. 'Renata' first, you second, Coil third, Lung fourth. Ideology… you should explain that. Get Shadow Stalker to expand on it." She mumbled, then worked her jaw.

"Burn the drugs or ship them to Africa with Coil's gun trafficking network. Backstab the human trafficking network that sends Lung 'cattle', rat them out to the authorities. Do it in a way that makes it clear that 'Nexus' is giving this information out on behalf of 'Summoner'. We need to start making a name for ourselves. Tell the girls who saved them as well, obviously, word will get around with the amount of media companies we have ready to report on this. Then..." She paused, organizing her thoughts. "I'll be back from Boston in a day or so, then I'll take over the Empire in a day. They've got thirteen capes… Thirteen people in one day is a lot, but I've done ten in a day before and I could still stand. I'm also getting stronger, so it should be manageable now if I use some restraint."

Lisa nodded, pursing her lips.

"What are you going to talk with Accord about?"

"I'm going to test out if I can get a favour from him for grabbing Spree. Then… I think I'm going to have to violate my rules a bit, and Master some people of influence. Good or bad. I'm going to need them. Something's coming and we're gonna need to brace for it. Coil's got lists. Three birds." She finished, leaving the saying unfinished.

Lisa frowned.

"That's… smart. As usual. But why do you want Spree in the first place? He's a Teeth cell leader, you're gonna get the Travellers on Butcher's shitlist. And then us, if you send him anywhere in public."

She made a dismissive 'eh'.

She wasn't a cape. Butcher couldn't do anything to her.

"I just want him because there's a slight chance I could use him to exponentially increase my strength through my power's baseline abilities. A small part of it grows stronger when I kill something it considers alive. If it considers Spree's clones as alive when I kill them..." She trailed off, and Lisa blinked.

"Oh. Oh shit. Yeah, that'd be worth it…" Lisa trailed off, and a comfortable silence followed for a few moments before another sigh broke it. "I think you're putting way too much faith in me to work the ABB into shape."

She jabbed her side with her elbow, softly.

"You've been doing pretty good so far."

Lisa smiled, a small, pleased, uncertain thing, curling into her side.

"Thanks. Though most of it is Coil, I have to admit. Bastard knows how to micromanage people…"

"Shush. He's like three times your age, that's normal. You're still a pup."

Lisa snorted.

"A pup?"

"Yep. Little squirmy larvae." She said with utmost seriousness, and Lisa burst into snickers. "Just gotta wait to get your wings. Which I have some ideas about as well, if you're willing to push yourself."

"Hm?"

"When you explained to me why Tagg probably got here and Piggot got dropped, you talked a lot about the bank incident. You were kind of rambling."

"I don't ramble-"

"And then you mentioned that you used your power to dodge Genesis' tail. Remember that? You said you focused absolutely on the giant cobra tail thing lunging at your head and your power told you the tail's trajectory so you could adjust yourself out of harm's way."

Lisa's head rose from her shoulder.

"Oh. Wait…" Lisa mumbled, her expression scrunching up with confusion. "Wait, yeah. I didn't even… think about that, really. My power's never been that fast before. It's a slow bitch, usually."

She nodded absent-mindedly.

"And you also know that powers adapt to their user, sometimes. Or maybe the user just learns how to use their power in unexpected ways, or the power sort of unfolds over time. I think if we can get you in a bunch of brutal spars and you push the absolute hell out of your power, we might be able to turn you into a combat Thinker."

Lisa turned to her, wide eyed with excitement.

"Not that I want you anywhere on the frontline, of course, I'd rather chop my legs off, but the more dangerous you are, the safer you are. A strength and speed brute package with a broken Thinker power on top, and then you combine them. With a lot of effort and training…" She trailed off suggestively.

Lisa smiled, eyes practically shining.

"You are the greatest fucking thing to walk this earth." Lisa whispered, putting her hands in her hair and letting out a small laugh of incredulous joy. "If you can make me able to kick Lung's shit in, I will literally worship every fucking step you take. I'll try by myself to force my power in that direction, but when you have time, just come nudge me along and I'll- I'll fucking… I dunno. Just, holy shit. How did I not notice that when it happened?" Lisa griped, then sagged back. "We saved a bunch of people, did all this stuff, and now I'm hearing I could practically turn myself into an utter threat with some better training. Today's been fucking great, some… unlucky casualties aside."

She smiled softly, humming in agreement.

"And you say you don't ramble." She mused, and let her shoulders shake with silent laughter as Lisa turned to her and pretended to put her in a chokehold, grunting stuff about mean old sisters as she half-heartedly resisted her.

The added pain to her headache was worth that rare moment of levity.

"... Man, you really know how to raise my mood just to tackle it down to the floor again, don't you?" Lisa murmured, glancing around the warehouse, at the dozens and dozens of wide-eyed women and teen girls being checked over by their medics.

It was a sea of chairs, tiny beds, boxes, trays and IV stands.

And a lot of tense silence, because the building could only have so much insulation and drawing attention by having a seemingly abandoned warehouse full of talking and crying would probably get them all in trouble.

It led to some particularly tense corners where her men were torn between enforcing silence and not being too firm or aggressive with the girls, something that, obviously, for men who killed for a living, they seemed to be very awkward about.

"Why are we here though…?" Lisa asked, following behind her as they briefly examined each girl, Taylor disguised as Renata through Evelynn.

Being able to taste the absolute swirl of emotions drowning the air around her was unpleasant, but it actually fed her a little bit as a demon, and it helped give her a realistic outlook on what to expect.

"Perspective. Being in our ivory command towers too much will eventually turn us into things like Coil. That thing you said earlier bothered me. 'Unfortunate casualties'." She quoted, and saw Lisa cringe out of the corner of her eye.

"Okay, bad way to put it, but, they were just that."

She nodded. "Of course they were. I'm just trying to make sure that what the word 'casualty' really means sinks in. See the girls, see our men, realize what 'casualty' really means and let it sink it. I'm gonna need commanders the bigger we get, and some lessons have to be given early. So lesson one of many, I guess; when you're in command, you have to be present to get a real perspective, see what it's really like on the ground floor. To understand. Or else you start thinking in numbers and goals and before you know it, you're effective, undoubtedly… but so out of touch that you will eventually become heartless or even cruel, and make mistakes. Big ones. This problem lessens with scale, because you can reach a point where it simply isn't possible to be on the ground floor, but it's a good thing to keep trying."

Lisa was silent as they walked through.

The main reason she was saying this was that Taylor simply could not Master everyone under her into perfect obedience, regardless of their morals. It wasn't worth it, and it wasn't going to be, especially as things grew in scale. Just next week they'd be getting another squad of twenty more men to add to their little army.

And in the case of a battle against some alien god-like creature, it would be unfeasible to Master everyone. She needed influence and keys to power.

Lisa stopped dead in her tracks behind her, and she paused, turning to her, then following her laser-focused gaze full of numb revulsion.

There was a child in the corner, talking to a soldier in some Indonesian language with an IV in her tiny arm, curiously pawing at his rifle as he let her, covering the trigger with his hand.

"She'll be alright." She said with full conviction, putting a hand on Lisa's shoulder.

Lisa nodded, taking a shaky breath.

"Yeah. Just… How could anyone…"

Oh, Lisa wasn't worried about the girl, she was just experiencing disbelief over humanity's capacity for cruelty.

She almost felt nostalgia for when such sights could still surprise her, however many aeons ago it was.

"Some people are just monsters in disguise. Come on. We've got people to organise, and I have information about a certain organization to share with you."

Lisa slowly relented to her gentle tug, likely due to realizing they were going to talk about something as important as Cauldron, and they walked off to the upper office.

Now, how to tell Lisa the world might end in less than a decade without freaking her out...

Fuck.

For her appearance to Accord, she picked something simple but endlessly elegant to mould her appearance after.

A sports car.

Odd as it sounded, it seemed like a good idea for a man like Accord.

So, she picked Evelynn, and began to meticulously mould her appearance.

Pale pink skin faded for a pitch black, utterly smooth expanse, glossy as if freshly waxed ceramic, reflecting every tiny mote of light that hit her. Feminine curves smoothed into complex eddying curves and waves and lines, every figure shape curving in artful ways to give off the impression of smoothness and motion, logic be damned.

The end result was a faceless black thing that vaguely looked like a pitch black glossy slate of moving, polished glass, naked save a single tie coloured in a flat, slightly lighter black.

"Thoughts?" She asked, flexing and adjusting her fingers, toying with the lines and trying to find a mix of beauty, grace, and danger.

Coil fixed his suit tie a milimeter to the side, and side-eyed her, trying his best to not turn his neck and wrinkle the collar of his suit even the tiniest bit.

"He appreciates whites, natural colors, and gold far more than black, but the figure and cleanliness alone should win him over. Your indecency won't be registered because you're too inhuman looking to be considered in any such standards. The way you move will make him very interested in you. You do not even breathe, which is perfection he can't even ask of himself. So, if we were here to talk, he would no doubt practically beg you to join his Ambassadors. And would draft whatever plan you asked for simply because he appreciated your nature and would like to build rapport. We could make him an ally very quickly and easily. He's a fairly simple man when one gets to know him." Coil quickly explained, then turned his eyes up to the small mirror in the car, obsessively looking over his mask and the folds of the fabric.

The annoyances of having no shapeshifting.

It was mildly interesting that Coil was trying to nudge her into the previous plan of not Mastering Accord, whether he was aware of it or not, but she couldn't care much about the question of whether or not the man did actually have a heart. Too late for that.

"Unfortunately, I don't have time for allies. I need subordinates that can pose as such." She mused, and settled on a nail shape, something elegant but just sharp enough to give the suggestion of danger, perfectly seamless, as glossy and reflective as the rest of her.

"Anything else before we go?" She asked, and Coil took a deep breath.

"No."

She nodded, and got out of the car.

Coil did the same, much, much slower, then spent a couple seconds correcting a tiny irregularity in his socks, one being higher on his ankle than the other, then carefully smoothed out the wrinkles that made on his inordinately tight suit.

If the material was not designed to smoothen wrinkles on its own, meeting the man would have been infuriatingly slow.

As they were, they simply walked through the immaculate underground parking lot, wound around to an equally unnaturally clean alley, and entered the skyscraper through the back door.

A couple minutes of confirming dates and times of arrival with his secretary, a quick rundown on Accord's expectations of them, and they were walking out of an immaculate elevator lined with gleaming bronze.

She took point, hands relaxed but still against her sides as she measured each step to the mechanical beat of a metronome, then stood before the silver-embroidered door that led inside to Accord's office, silent and still.

A few seconds later, a tiny beep came from Coil's watch, and she opened the door to get her entrance right on the millisecond the minute ticked over.

She liked Accord's style.

Two of his Ambassadors stood to either side of his desk, a man in a suit, utterly immaculate in a way that almost distracted her, and an equally appealing woman in a gold dress so tight it might as well be vacuum-sealed onto her body, golden ropes and ribbons twining around her upper body in graceful lines to make it seem less like golden body paint, most likely.

White and cream-coloured marble wavered around the floor and walls, immaculate leather on the furniture. Not much, if any scent, besides a small hint of lavender from the woman and something vaguely sea-like from the man.

She walked in, flickering once to get them used to the pattern, and was pleased to note only one of the three to be suspicious of the flicker and by extension, her.

A gigantic mahogany desk stood before Accord, who took a gloved hand and spread it to the two armchairs before his desk, his eyes nailed to her with a disturbingly powerful dose of interest in the air.

At least she knew she had his approval, for what little time she needed that.

Her new approach was perhaps overaggressive, but Accord was not as clean as he liked to appear. It did not grate on her conscience.

Confirming no eyes were on her back, she slowly moved her hands behind her as if to cross them and flickered again, precisely three seconds after her first flicker, establishing a pattern and easing the current parties as she walked forward.

Three peeled seeds the size of small lemons withered in the open air within her hands, dissipating a myriad toxins into the air, scentless and colourless, silent. 

In the three seconds it took her to reach the chair across the enormous office, little was left of Zyra's seeds but the faintly blue-glowing core.

A flicker, and they were gone, back to her original body.

"On time as well. I must admit I did not…" Accord trailed off, and from the side, a distortion in the air snapped to life for a moment before flickering out as all four people in the room besides her slumped over, unconscious.

She flickered the antidote into her hand, a tiny little plant sack full of liquid with a hollow spike on the side, and jammed said thorn into Coil's neck like a syringe, squeezing it dry before flickering it back into her base form's hands.

Zyra's Legend was such a cheat. She had such variety in her plants. It was harder to remember what she couldn't make, than what she could make.

She didn't waste time waiting for Coil to wake up, instead walking around the desk, carefully removing Accord's mask, pricking his cheek on one of his fancy metal quills, licking the drop, then peeling his eyelids up.

Anticlimactic, really, but she much preferred that, and with Accord apparently sharing in Coil's paranoid patterns, there were no cameras in the room.

Her eyes flashed gold.

Mastering Accord was a simple matter of locking some of his useful emotions down, like his appreciation of order, symmetry and aesthetic, while taking the idea of herself, that sleek-black thing in his mind, and inflating it far and above them.

It was more draining than she'd like, but she was getting better at Mastering people. No superfluous overuse of power, like with Bakuda and Lung. She used a little extra just to make sure, but she didn't hammer herself out for it.

She would have to be a surgeon rather than a butcher, regardless of her bullish definition of 'diplomacy'.

Mastering Accord's two Ambassadors while Coil staggered upright and reoriented himself took considerably less time, as neither of them felt particularly strongly about anything beyond themselves, which… oddly fitting.

Merely seventeen and a half minutes since entering, she pulled back from the unnamed male Ambassador, and switched Runes just to be cautious before flickering to her base form to rifle through her pockets and get her phone.

Another flicker, and she was back to Evelynn, quickly updating herself on current goings-on, some important minute-to-minute things and some others which she'd mostly ignored until she had to pay attention to.

The girls they'd rescued had been pushed very hard to give an answer to their proposition, because they were on a tight time constraint to get things moving without bogging themselves down, and with most of them being shipped out to Boston, a few streets down from where she was, and New York, right now, they had a couple confirmed acquisitions that had stayed behind with them.

As Coil lifted his mask and rubbed at his face, blinking rapidly to wake himself up, she dove deeper into the report for a moment.

Of two hundred and seventeen women, and a few men, surprisingly, a whopping twenty two decided to stay with them.

She'd expected maybe ten. Max.

Four wanted to be soldiers, which… hm, wasn't a bad idea, honestly, if they could follow orders without being driven by drugs. She'd need organic military growth too, even if that wording made her wince.

Seventeen of them just wanted stable, safe work for an actual wage and relative freedom, and three of them wanted to keep working like they had before. Which she was sure her men would be pleased about, speaking from experience in Runeterra, but she'd have to ask Lisa to make sure those women actually wanted to keep doing that kind of work instead of being groomed into thinking it was their place or some vile shit like that.

She trusted Lisa, but she'd rather have that off her conscious.

She wrote a quick text as Coil gathered his bearings enough to dig into the back of his tight suit for another three little balls of antidote, carefully locked inside tight little plastic containers that he slowly and carefully lined up on Accord's desk, taking his time.

"If you have your hand-eye coordination, I'd rather you sped this up a little. We have a lot of shitty people to hit today." She murmured, moving through another report, skimming the important bits.

A 'lot of shitty people' was kind of underselling it. There were so many horrible, influential bastards in Boston alone it was kind of depressing to read. Coil had given her a stack of people she could take, instead of a small group. Lobbying groups hurting people for profit, fraudulent investment firms, all sorts of politicians and financial criminals who were at the relative top of the foodchain… it was sad to think that Runeterra, a magical-medieval society for the most part, had less corruption in day to day life life than Earth Bet.

Coil jabbed the unconscious woman, his free hand palming at her throat in a way that reminded her quite easily that he was a megalomaniac freak. It wasn't sexual as much as it was him relishing that he could do it to someone he'd never be able to touch normally.

The urge to jab him with a dose of agony surfaced, but he took his hand away relatively quickly, pulling the syringe out and moving onto the second one that he had for Accord.

Her eyes went back to the reports.

It was frustratingly laggy, but with some hacker apparently lurking around the Bay, her tech team had made some bizarre solution that seemed to make the app's network even more impenetrable and isolated than ever before at the cost of a huge delay.

Another couple seconds of further reports loading, and she read up one directly from Lisa.

Imp had bounced back well from her little trip, but she was a bit more closed off than usual and Lisa was half-complaining about how she was having to play base therapist because of her power.

Which was still incredibly useful because she now knew that Imp regretted not killing the guy who caused that accident.

It was a bit… no, it was honestly fucking tragic that Imp was even in this life to begin with, being only fourteen, but at least she probably wouldn't have that many qualms with assassinating a few horrible people here and there if and when Taylor asked her to, and was already sorting out what she wanted to do with her money. 

Honestly, she wanted to pair the girl up with Lisa on a semi-permanent basis. They seemed to resonate oddly well with each other.

Rune was still undecided, Spitfire was recovering from a bullet that grazed her thigh while helping extract one of her teams during the police fight…

Everything seemed good.

The woman in gold stirred first, and Taylor flickered her phone back to her real self as she dropped the transformation, cocking a hip and putting her hand on it from sheer habit as she turned to look out of the window.

Coil carefully took out a burner phone, as secure as it could be made with mortal hands, complete with servers running entirely off one of their underground fronts and interacting with as little of the open internet as it could manage to send encrypted, trap-spring data packs, whatever that meant, and laid it in front of Accord's limp form on the desk.

It had their requests, now turned to orders, in it, as well as two contact lines.

She let Evelynn drop for a moment, revealing her current costume, which was just an adjusted kit from one of her soldiers made to fit her.

She checked her wrist watch, fingers itching to have a gun in their grasp just to be safe.

11:16 AM.

"Let's go. Schedule's got wiggle room, but I want to be done with this quickly." She said, and flashed back to Evelynn, already shifted into the form she used to walk into the building.

As the sound of shuffling cloth came from behind them, they walked out without another glance.

Seven minutes passed as they walked back out, through doors and checks and various expressions of meaningless wealth.

Almost ten minutes later, as she closed the door on their car and Coil began to drive, she flickered her phone into her hand, refreshed the app, and clicked on the first message.

Accord worked fast.

He would be a great 'ally', considering the tone of the message. She hadn't even messed with him that much, yet he spoke to her like an exemplary employee would to their boss. Just the right amount of deference while knowing their work, and enough supplication while also exuding confidence.

She'd have to move him in the future, but for now, he could sit here. That type of transition was more than she could handle in one day, or even a few days.

The tone and speed also meant her Mastering work was getting less choppy, which was good. He wasn't as unhinged as Bakuda.

A moment of navigating the menus as she flipped through Runes according to sightlines, possible, albeit paranoid, dangers, and her need to focus, and she called Trickster.

It hadn't even finished the first ring before he answered.

"We're getting close but we're drawing a lot of-" He began, immediately.

"I've got him." She interrupted, and he went silent. "Three nine six, one fortieth avenue. Along the coast, near the old container yards. That's the HQ of Spree's particular cell. Exact personal address, if he even has one, we don't know, but if he's not fighting he's usually hovering around there. Plan is the same. Find, teleport, neutralize, run. You'll be implementing some improvements we will draft you soon. Accord's work. Follow to the letter. Any questions? Complaints?" She asked, mostly rhetorically, and shifted her appearance to a middle aged woman as Coil took a slow drive through a tunnel, practically peeling off his mask in the process with hurried fingers and hitting the button to flip the licence plates to another set.

"Following Accord's maddening instructions… just like the good old days." He mumbled, then a shuffling noise as he likely shook his head. "None. All clear."

"Alright. Good luck. And try not to make Sundancer use her power unless you have to." She said, and cut the call.

Her last request was both practical and somewhat emotional, because Marissa's power was very distinct and incredibly attention drawing which she did not want, but she also wanted to keep in mind the Travellers' temperaments and personalities. They might be Mastered, but for once, it was not because they were too evil to bother redeeming, and Marissa did not want to use her power to hurt people for the most part.

She already felt bad enough, keeping them Mastered and sending them on errands, but there wasn't exactly an alternative until she somehow managed to kill the Simurgh.

The request might just be a small balm on her mind to remind her she had taken her standards of evil from 'serial murderers, human traffickers, and genocidal white nationalists' to people who committed financial crimes, corruption, and a whole host of other immoral practises, but it helped.

Besides, if terrible rich people were going to commit a dozen types of financial crime and cover up a million felonies, she'd rather they were doing it to benefit her instead of themselves, and she'd be able to cut down on their most erroneous behaviours to keep them and the innocents below them relatively safe.

How the hell these people hadn't been found out and taken entire sections of Boston companies down with them, she could only guess was due to even further corruption, or negligence.

Really, with how easy it was for Coil to find so many criminals in the upper echelons of one city, one would think the government would have done the job of sweeping through the bastards ages ago.

As she mentally refreshed what she knew of their first target, Coil drove with relative grace, even as he hastily and angrily stuffed his mask into one of his suit pockets.

She took the time to watch her surroundings, both to see what the good parts of Boston were like, and just in case.

Boston was…

Almost literally just Brockton Bay if it had money and less desperation baked into every tile and brick. It was like the before and after of a deep-cleaning video she'd find on websites when she was fourteen and trying to find a distraction.

She wondered how long it might take to make all of Brockton like this.

If she could manage it before the world ended, of course.

The car drive to their targets was not exactly a long one.

The convenience of already being in the richest, most peaceful part of the city, she supposed. All the rich and influential lived within the same couple blocks of each other.

"You're sure these men deserve it?" She asked, for the last time, because she didn't have the time to read up on their targets' absurdly extensive list of supposed immoralities.

"Yes. Michael Atlen, for example, our next target, used police and hospital connections to arrest a young journalist investigating him on trumped up charges. The officers beat her an inch away from a coma for "resisting arrest", while the footage of the arrest mysteriously vanished from the records through an 'error'. Then a hospital employee, unknown, 'misplaced' the journalist's medication and 'accidentally' put her into a vegetative state for the rest of her life by giving her the exact worst medication possible for her condition. She was twenty eight. I believe I know your standards for 'evil'. You will find no misunderstood men in this list." Coil replied as he changed gears, eyes cold with that unfeeling determination she has grown used to.

She chose to trust him, if only because he was Mastered.

Even if she knew that in the future, they… might have to do some similar things, depending on how things went. Depending on what was at stake.

She hoped she wasn't going down the wrong road, doing this. Despite her lived experience, she could only hope that she could limit the morally bankrupt actions of herself and her organization to a minimum, but with the world literally hanging over her head, she wasn't sure how much of those shiny morals she could keep, battered and bruised as they were.

It was one thing to make a militant organization with an ideology, not unlike a popular militia, and it was another thing to try to take over the American Government by yanking at its rotting, bloated strings, one piece at a time.

She flopped into the seat with a sigh, rubbing at her forehead, blinking tiredly at the mid-day sun.

They mostly knew where everyone was and would be, but two of the ten targets were nowhere to be found, so they were going to end up with a little less control over Boston than she'd like.

One was the CEO of an electricity providing company, which would make it easy for them to hide their electricity usage, and the other was the owner of a chain of restaurants that would be very useful for a lot of drug trafficking and money laundering.

It was a shame they couldn't find them, but they'd show up in time. And now that she had teleport points here, it would be much easier to return.

Regardless, she could not complain by any measure, even if she'd just spent hours bouncing from one penthouse, office building or suite to another, then to the car and back.

Coil wordlessly ducked out of the wealthy district, going as fast as the law would allow them to get out of Boston.

She spent her time thinking.

That was when an idea rose, and she jerked her head up.

"Stop. I need a brain scan."

Coil turned to blink at her in complete bewilderment, before hurriedly glancing ahead and slowing the car.

"Of- who?" He asked, haltingly.

"Me."

His brows furrowed further.

"Private?"

"Yes. Just… have an idea, need to know something first. Know anyone or do we ask Accord?"

She had to know if she had a corona pollentia before she could continue on that… highly risky train of thought.

Coil nodded.

"Shouldn't be more than an hour. I know a place. Do you want me to go now?"

"Yeah, drive."

He nodded, and took a left turn down an alley.

She cracked her neck as she hurriedly ducked out of the machine, and quickly walked off to the sectioned area to put all her gear and weapons back on.

She could see Coil talking with the back-alley doctor in the glass partitionment to the side, who looked very confused.

She quickly put everything on, as much as putting on sixty pounds of gear could be quick, and walked over, yanking the door open before ducking in, trying to ignore the scent of cigarette smoke and dust as she flickered into Evelynn.

"Ah, hello! So, these are-" The man began, and she ignored him, staring at the pictures on the lightboard.

"Do I have a gemma pollentia or not?"

The man snapped his mouth shut, and made a dubious sound, getting up with a groan to point to one of the pictures, at a small section of almost purple-blue at the back of her head, contrasted by the blue hues of the rest of the internals.

"Short answer is yes! Long answer is also yes, but it seems to be dead and inactive, somehow. It's not receding, or being absorbed, or necrotic, so don't worry, there's just zero activity. The Corona Pollentia is the part of the brain that controls a power and gives one access to them, however, when it's activated during a trigger event, it swells and connects to the brain in a more complete manner. We can tell whether one is activated or not through the veins. Such rapid expansion leaves a lot of trails, even months later. So, you did go through a trigger, which means that you are a parahuman, and this little piece of biology was activated at some point, but now it's just completely dormant. Which is… actually quite bizarre. But your power… the veins are connected but the lack of activity makes me think its somehow not connected, but that would mean you wouldn't have a power at all… hm..." He mumbled, scratching the side of his chin.

"This is… pretty fascinating. I'm just a man with a removed medical licence, but I know my way around a parahuman. Only a Case 53 had something even close to being as odd as this. Maybe your power just doesn't need the gemma pollentia to activate your power? But that goes against…" He trailed off, mumbling again, his grey, greasy hair swinging as he jerked his head from one picture to the other.

Well, there went her short-thought plan.

Killing Butcher before driving back wasn't going to be that easy, it would seem, because she… was a parahuman? Her power just… didn't exist? Or… wasn't connected?

Yeah, that made her previous plan a recipe for disaster. She was already not exactly the most stable human she could think of, if she got Butcher in her…

When could she have triggered though?

She briefly thought back to the locker, how there was a small flash of something incomprehensible and vast, a glittering cosmos of mirrors, before it was almost yanked away.

At first she didn't think much of that sense of her sense of self and perception being suddenly yanked in another inarticulate, non-euclidean direction, but now…

Did she actually trigger in the locker? Did the old summoner who blindly picked her as his successor somehow… what, intercept the connection?

She knew it was likely his attempt to break through the fabric of reality itself to reach her that killed him and wiped most of his memories from himself before she inherited them, but still, it was a bit of a revelation to her that even if that old bastard hadn't stumbled onto her, she would have still walked out of that locker with powers.

She took a deep breath, and turned away, waving Coil over.

She wasn't worried about the doctor. He'd be long since dead if he had a loose mouth, with the kind of people he worked with, and he didn't have much other than an MRI scan or whatever that piece of equipment was called and did.

The drive back home was pensive, on her end.

She would have loved to just nuke Butcher out of the face of the earth, and get rid of the bastard, but it would have to be done some other way.

Her mind stuck to him, or her, whichever it was, for the entire ride back.

She had ideas. A lot of them.

She doubted any of them were good, but she just might have to work on some of them regardless.

"Find some alley I can duck into and teleport without anyone seeing." She said, and thumbed at her phone.

The fading purple sways of Teleport hadn't even finished fading into the air before her phone started to buzz, and she furrowed an annoyed brow, walking up the stairs and swinging the door open to the ground floor of their current, temporary HQ.

Immediately, she paused, tensing at the inordinate amount of tension and alertness she saw in her men spread throughout the warehouse.

Most of them didn't even turn to her, precisely because she was decked out in the same gear they were, but the few she'd Mastered quickly noticed her and gestured to their headphones, either tapping or pointing at them.

Resisting the urge to groan, she took her phone out, and accepted the call.

"What's the problem now?" She asked.

"Our mystery hacker is way, way, way fucking better than we thought. Yes, I know you're listening, take that as a compliment. Anyways, long story short, he's blackmailing us. Which is just so heroic of them." Lisa snarked.

She paused, taking a deep breath.

She was doing a lot of that these days…

Reigning in her frustration was tough, and it was equally tough to guess how much this person knew.

They kept the most important things out of the app and away from cameras, like Noelle and civilian ID's, but that was still a lot of fucking information this person had, whether they were a tinker or a technopath.

Should she have been more paranoid and just nuked her entire communication system?

"What does he want? Money, fame, a job, a favour?" She listed, trying to think of ways she could get rid of this hacker.

If she had a name and a face, she could literally just go and execute them right now, theoretically. Getting that would be unlikely however.

"Apparently, they want to talk to you specifically. Name-dropped you. As in, your old civilian name. T-H. They said they used to know you." Lisa asked, voice dead flat serious.

She froze, eyes widening.

That- no.

No fucking way.

Why? How the fuck. What the- just- what?

" Emma? " She hissed in angry disbelief, turning her back to the rest of the room, and Lisa gasped in realization.

"Wait, that-"

The line cut in static, and a second later, the static cleared, to silence.

"Is that you?" She asked, voice utterly blank, struggling not to crush her phone in her hand.

A swallow.

"Uhm, no?" A male voice came through, and her head jerked back in surprise fast enough to give her a mild case of whiplash. "Uh, just so you know, this is a private line now, so we can talk freely. So… yeaaaah? Hi, uhm. It's- been a while?"

She still couldn't quite get her brain to compute the words and place the voice, but after a very long moment of awkward silence, she suddenly remembered.

"Greg?" She asked, in complete disbelief.

He cleared his throat, something in the background click-clacking incessantly.

"Y-Yeah. Hi! You've uhm, changed a lot! I mean, I, uh- s-sorry, this is just. It's hard to think about you talking like an RTS C&C commander, when just a while ago you were with us in the… kinda losers club. And your powers seem sick! I keep losing signal and you keep teleporting, and there's a bunch of other grab-bag stuff I can't quite place and- oh, right, uh, sorry for spying on you, took me a while to place that it was actually you- "

Holy shit he hadn't changed one fucking bit.

"Greg, stop rambling." She snapped, and he stopped, surprisingly.

She let out a sigh.

Good news was that this wasn't really something that serious. She expected something a lot worse than Greg.

Bad news was that the hacker was Greg. He wasn't exactly the type she wanted to work with.

"Alright, let's cut to the chase for a moment. I don't know why you told me any of this. Like, who you are, for example. You realize you just lost all of your negotiating power by telling me that, right? I'm a teleporter. I know who and where you are and I can teleport right to you and kill you in seconds if I have to." She said, voice cold and dead serious.

Greg gasped, as if he just fucking realized, and she wanted to shut the phone and slam her head into a wall.

God, he was so fucking dumb! How the hell did he get a power?

Wait, how the hell did he trigger? When?

Irrelevant.

"Uh, okay, uhm, please don't do that?" He squeaked out in a wheeze, likely realising what kind of situation he was in and Taylor wanted to slap him for being so goddamn stupid. "Look- I just wanted to act tough for a second, I- I don't know how to negotiate! I traded pokemon cards, not- military information or whatever the hell you guys are doing, okay? I was like 'oh okay I'll act all broody and mysterious and tell them I know everything and act tough and maybe I can get them to take me seriously and wire me to this Sam chick who I'm almost completely positive is Taylor' but then this Insight girl thought I'm blackmailing you! I know- I know you've changed a lot, so I'm a lot more nervous, s-sorry. Just- I wasn't trying to blackmail you! Honest!"

She rubbed at her face.

"Look, Greg, what did you even want? We wanted to have you onboard anyway because a technopath is useful."

Greg cleared his throat again, followed by an equally nervous mumble.

"Okay, so- I'm not a technopath, I just have a tinkering power around making programs. I might have- done a lot of stupid stuff. I- I had just gotten my power, I had a gaming computer with a lot of fricking power, then I got excited, and then I started digging a little too deep and I might have ended up hacking like three national agencies and the NSA and the PRT and and long story short I'm ninety percent sure Armsmaster and Dragon want to grab me and arrest me for breaching into national agencies and then use my crimes to make me their Tinker slave until im old and gray because holy jesus fuck the sentences for cyberhacking are so much worse than I thought." He rushed out with a wheeze, followed by a nervous laugh like he was trying to lighten the situation up for himself. "So, uh, I was thinking of trading? Thought you were my best option if I was right, because, well, we used to be friends, t-though I do get that that's- probably not the case anymore, with... whatever happened." He weakly finished, sounding quite regretful of... something.

They never were friends, but she didn't care to point that out to him.

She sighed as she turned and began to walk up to Lisa's office, tilting her head up and seeing her… 'little sister' leaning off the railing and staring down right at her with a quirked brow.

"Now that, I can work with. What's your proposal?" She asked.

"Oh! Yeah, okay, so! I was thinking, I can, give you like this super, super secure, much better version of the app you're using, something not even Dragon can get into, working off its own subnetwork of parallel servers like its own separate internet, pretty much, and In exchange, you give me like, a way out? Or, pay me? I mean- I- I'm kind of freaking out, you know?" He said, voice wavering with a hysteric giggle. "I just- I just got all these ideas and I got curious and then next thing I know Dragon's trying to track me down- and holy fuck my mom is going to skin me if I go to juvie for a decade. Or federal prison. Some guy got thirty years in two thousand and four for doing the same I did! Look, I just- I just want to be- safe. I want to be safe and I want to be paid for whatever I give you, that's it. Mostly safety! I can make a lot of money easily anyway, but being safe from a manual sweep from Dragon and Armsmaster… seems like the kind of thing I can't exactly program my way around. So, that. And- I don't want to be too… close, I guess, to you guys. You seem like you're doing some really serious spec ops Call of Honor kinda crap and I don't wanna get the death penalty for directly working for you so just, uh, pay me and I deliver stuff, like, what's it called- commission! Commissions? Yeah. Keep me safe and pay me when I give you stuff and uh. Don't tell me anything. I don't wanna know. Yeah, that- seems good. That's alright?"

She frowned, slowing her walk.

Reeling herself back a little, she had to stop and think about the fact that Greg was literally just a kid. He sounded like one too. A nervous teenager who lived in videogames and media more than real life, until very recently. And one that was absolutely terrible at negotiating. He practically had no chips on his side but her morals.

It seemed like it was quite the common theme in the bay. Kids getting powers and diving in far deeper waters than they ever expected.

"Alright. We can arrange that. What kind of safety do you mean, however? Giving you and your mother safety without her knowing about any of this is going to be nigh impossible. Stationing a couple coats around your house isn't going to cut it if the two most famous Tinkers this side of the world are out for your head." She plainly stated.

Greg's breaths turned audible, and she moved her ear away from the phone with a slight grimace of disgust.

"L-Look, I- I can't just tell her! Why wouldn't it… okay no, it wouldn't work. Fuck. " He whined, and she heard his chair roll backwards, the keyboard sounds stopping to be replaced by audible stomps as he began pacing. "Can't we… I- I don't know, like, give her a fake job offer in like a, security company, and then tell her she has to change all her legal documents to accept it? And then we just give her and me a new ID and you guys can make me a blackroom to work from, move us across the Bay or something?"

She hummed dubiously as she began to climb the steps.

"Surprisingly intelligent suggestion, and it might work, but I think we can both agree that's rather far-fetched to do without her getting suspicious or realising something is off. If you're that much of a pussy and can't tell your mom about what you did, and refuse to try, we can probably try that, but I don't think it will work. I suggest just coming out with it now. It will be much, much, much harder to do later, and it'll hurt a lot more."

Lisa just stared at her from the railing as she ascended.

"I… okay. Yeah, I- I know that…" Greg mumbled, sighing into the mic again, and she grimaced a little.

That was so annoying.

"I… okay. I'll- I'll tell her. Just, get us a safe place, fast, please? I know you guys have bugs in the PRT and we don't know when Dragon's gonna come here, but it might be tomorrow! So, just, get us a nice place to live and hide. Uhm, blackbox basement for me to work in. Your techie guys should know what that is. How fast do you want to do the trade? I'll tell her- today?"

Well, that was surprising.

Maybe he did grow up a little.

"Do that. Call us back, normally, and we'll have you two settled in… two days. Don't back out of an agreement you made, Greg. And do not get bright ideas about putting in any backdoors in the app you'll make. We'll know, and while you may be able to hide from Dragon and Armsmaster, you can't hide from me. Alright?" She asked, making her voice unnecessarily soothing and tired at the end to give off the impression this wasn't so much an implicit threat as much as it was something she had to say.

Assuming Greg was even smart enough to read between the lines.

"Uh, y-yeah. I uhm, I know you've… killed people. Don't worry about me trying to uh, what's the word… 'play you'?Aa-anyway. I'll- go now. I'll tell her today, and I'll call back-"

"Yes, Greg, we just said that. Calm down instead, you're rambling again. Call us back later." She said, and he mumbled something affirmative before the call ended with a tiny beep.

She took her phone off her ear, exhaled through her nostrils, and walked up to Lisa, bending at the waist and staring down at her men as they continued running around and stripping every bit of tech they had on themselves in neat lines.

"Eclipse protocol?" She asked, and Lisa chuckled.

"Only you would fucking remember how that shit is called. Yeah. One of the sargeants knew what to do the moment I told him, word spread quickly. Communications are practically all dead until this 'Greg' kid is done fucking with our stuff. He your friend?"

"Not really. Just someone I kind of knew from high school. Was... about as much of a loser as I was. Videogame nerd, not really attractive, pretty meek... Doesn't really matter."

So much had happened in a day, and it wasn't even afternoon yet.

"I don't know why, but I have a really bad feeling." Lisa mumbled. "This is too… convenient. I can't help but think Cauldron might be behind this, but…"

She sighed.

"Simurgh paradox." They both said, their words overlapping with the same exhausted tone.

"Yeah. Don't know if I'm being paranoid or not. What I do know is that I'm almost positive Cauldron is trying to fuck us over somehow even if they're not slinging Alexandria over here to kill us. I'm confident they're feeding the PRT information. They have way too much information on you. Just an hour ago, they wrestled the girls' case away from the FBI, because despite you having made no appearances yet, they somehow have you confirmed as a Master cape, which gave them jurisdiction to check the girls for Master influence."

She scowled, feeling her teeth grit.

"How much do they know?"

Lisa shrugged.

"Most of it is on documents, so we don't know. From spoken words we overhard; they know you exist, they know you're dangerous, they know they can't find you, and they know you have a 'weak' Master power. That's basically a step away from "kill on sight", as far as the PRT goes. They're terrified of Masters, and this Director is a forceful, hateful motherfucker. The entire PRT is going through Master Stranger procedures every other day, starting this morning."

She shifted, thoughts racing, a mild headache caressing her frontal lobe with blunted razors.

The PRT knowing she was a master was a tremendous fucking setback. She had done all this stealth and shadow games precisely to make it seem like she did something more than just force everyone to work for her. To show off the image that if she had so many people behind her, she must have something else about her. Something more.

Which she did, but she didn't have the damn time to be making friends and allies with the scum of parahuman society.

"Did the story get out?"

Lisa nodded.

"Yeah. Or it should, by tomorrow. This literally happened while you were finishing up in Boston. The journalists got all the information 'leaked' to them, and many of them were in our pockets, so their articles are a bit more positive than the big ones. I'm sure it'll hit national news for a day or so. People for some reason or another like to root for an anti-hero, and a criminal mastermind doing the government's work and giving the result to them on a silver platter, dismantling a large branch of a human trafficking ring out of the goodness of his heart? They'll eat it up for a little while until the news cycle moves on. People's inherent disdain of the government will make this even more popular. Won't last, but you got your debut, I suppose. Summoner will be semi-famous by tomorrow. "

She nodded.

It was rather anticlimactic, but no new cape could usually get the exposure of being on national news, even if only for a day or two, for their debut.

She was still miffed about being out in the open, but it couldn't be helped with how things had progressed. She had to abandon her love of the dark and step into the light, to some extent.

The agents she'd sent out all over the US should be ready for her next publicity stunt, so to speak.

Tomorrow, the empire, then, fixing something nobody in the world had been able to, so far.

She hated having to word good deeds like that, but it was what it was. The PRT did the exact same thing.

Cynical opportunism was the standard.

"Did the girls at least make it out alright?"

Lisa hummed an affirmative.

"As far as we can tell, yeah. No strange 'losses'. Too big of a situation for that. And none of our guys got arrested either. They should be driving the trucks back as we speak, though a few of them are struggling to evade authorities."

She let herself smile, just a tiny bit.

She'd need the armour suit she made with Zyra's plants sooner than expected.

"Oni Lee?"

"He's rooming with Printer and the little army we have around her at the moment. Extra security. They like him."

Printer?

Oh, Noelle.

A bit dehumanizing, but she assumed it was more of a security nickname than a cape name.

"Interesting name. Anyways... how many men did you send over to whip the ABB thugs into shape?"

Lisa waved her hand dismissively.

"Just ten, so far. Figure we need to start small, and we can't afford to use too many of our valuable soldiers on training new ones when we're still like this. On the bright side, we have a lot more places to hide our stuff and people, even if people are starting to ask questions."

Hm, that was going about as expected.

"Alright. If we have nothing else to do but wait for tomorrow, I'm going to set up some things for Greg, then spend the rest of the day exercising and ripping life out of our guys on the training mat. Need to keep a lot of juice in the tank." She said, just to break the quiet, and Lisa hummed.

"Ripping life...? Oh, yeah, the, green stuff… energy? Good idea."

Grasp of the Undying, but she hadn't told her that.

"Lifegrasp, as I like to call it, without being overdramatic about it. It's slowly making me tougher, but I need something larger to beat on. When we've got some peace, and he can stop pretending to be nursing his wounds from the 'betrayal' in private, I'll start fistfighting Lung. He should improve my progress by… a lot. " She emphasized, and deciding to relax on the paranoia a little, switched Runes and took off the helmet, holding it by her fingers as she watched things down below, unwinding for a short moment.

It was getting really sweaty in the helmet.

"Well, we can talk later instead of sitting here, thinking about what to do. We're sleeping together tonight. Missed it." She said simply.

Lisa smiled, hip-checking her butt.

"How romantic. And no I'm not flirting."

A moment of silence.

"We still haven't gotten that apartment, you know?" Lisa noted.

"I don't think we ever will, to be honest. How does an evil underground throne room sound instead? With spiked torchholders."

"Dork."

"Ass."

"Yes, it's quite nice." Lisa hummed, laughter in her voice, turning to slap her own ass with an audible, crisp sound.

"So uncouth." She said, wrinkling her nose, ignoring the horny teenage urge to turn and stare at said ass.

Then her brain blanked because she had no idea what Legend that even came from. Who the hell said uncouth? Jarvan? Leb- Yeah it was Leblanc. Tricky bitch.

"Holy shit you're such a grandma." Lisa quietly exclaimed, shoulders shaking with laughter as she bent forward, practically laying on the railing.

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." She hummed, lips twitching upwards.

"Are we sure you're pretending? Want me to walk you down the basement to the training mats? Did you take your medicine?" Lisa cooed as if talking to a senile pile of dust, barely containing her snickers.

"... I kinda walked into that." She grumbled, smiling.

"Yep."

Her phone rang, and she raised a hand in a stop gesture as Dillan, her usual beating partner, gasped for breath across the mat.

She'd gotten a few uses of Grasp out of him before he started acting woozy. He was pretty lively for a man who was almost forty.

She walked over to the corner, where a pile of their equipment was, and dug her phone out, not expecting anything too groundbreaking with the state of their comms.

A single message by Lisa.

Rune's in.

She smiled, and put the phone back.

Dillan groaned.

"Oh come on, can I rest?" He asked, wiping his sweat with his shirt, revealing his abs for a moment.

Her eyes jerked down and stayed there for a moment until the shirt dropped.

Her self-directed annoyance flared up again.

Holy shit she had to get laid, this was getting so fucking annoying.

She'd gone through dozens of puberties but she still had kind of forgotten how animalistic her brain was when high on hormones.

With a physical shake of her head to push the thought aside for later, she wandered back to the mat.

"Come on. I'll give you pardon from base chores if you can last five more hits." She stated, getting into a loose, half-crouched stance with her arms limp almost to the floor, a stance that probably made no sense to the man across her like the other half-dozen she'd cycled through so far.

He huffed, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

"I'd say you're being overconfident before, but now... I don't know who taught you to fight, but I'd kill to get them to teach me. Do you know how humiliating it is to get fucked up this hard by a girl half my age? My ego's dying over here." He said, voice half-joking, and she mentally raised a brow at how personable he was getting, chatting like this.

She'd have to discipline him down the line if this kept up. More chores? An actual beating? Hm...

"Also, five hits with the green fire-like thing, or normal hits?" He asked, getting into a stance.

She tilted her head, considering it.

She was greedy.

"Green hits. Then I'll hit you with little fireballs again."

She had to, to raise her personal mana. Manaflow Band only activated and increased her mana pool if she hit someone with a spell, no matter how strong or weak.

He sighed, and took the first step, signalling the start of their fight.

She was kind of cheating because no matter how hard she fought, she didn't have a heart. The summon core would just keep her blood flowing in a bizarre mimicry of the organ, but there was no sensation of a heartbeat itself. It kept her going a lot longer for some reason.

With the thought of endurance, she remembered what she had to do tomorrow, and frowned.

She hoped she had enough juice in the tank for the Empire tomorrow, because fighting with a headache was making it quite a bit worse. That, and she had a really bad feeling about trying to do a full sweep of the Empire in a day.

She trusted her gut enough to assume the worst, within plausibility.