Interlude – 11.c

Previous Chapter                                                                                        Next Chapter

Tattletale adjusted the disc.  The screen buzzed, flickered, showed the blue silhouettes of Antares’s group frozen mid-run, and then stuttered.  A blue line made a circuit around the perimeter of the disc a few times, accelerating as it went, before the entire thing winked out.

The words that popped up in blue weren’t pointed in a direction that Darlene could see.

“Signal lost,” Tattletale said.  “I guess Parian’s group found Love Lost.”

“Foil sounded confident that she could deal with her,” Capricorn said, his voice muffled by his helmet.

“She is very good at what she does,” Tattletale said, fiddling to tune the disc to another setting.  It looked mostly like static.  “She said she can do it, and I believe her.”

Darlene wasn’t sure why Tattletale had to do that.  It sounded so insincere, but it was the backhanded kind of insincere where she could use an eye roll or a simple denial to shrug it off if ever called on it.  Back when Darlene had turned five, Papa had been in a black mood for a while.  From what Samuel had said, Papa had wanted to collect Sidney Saile, the girl from Vancouver, and he failed.  That had been when Cherie had left and with Darlene’s mom being gone, she had no immediate family except Papa.

And Papa had had the black mood.  More casually cruel than he’d ever been.  Tempestuous.  She only dimly remembered those days, like a bad dream, but she remembered some.  She’d spent a long time having to worry about getting unlucky and having her dad single her out, out of twenty or so people, and a handful of people being kind of shitty.  After the black mood, it had changed to the point that it wasn’t about getting unlucky and being that one person in twenty.  It had been about being one of the ones who got out of the way and escaped his attention.  Everyone had been scared and shitty.

Her sister and some older ‘cousins’ had gone to school.  Cherie had.  It had seemed like a fairy tale.  The girls on television and in movies had gone to school and dreamed of being princesses and singers, even Sidney Saile had. Darlene had just dreamed of going to school.  So she’d begged.  She’d fought and even went on a hunger strike, until her dad made her eat until she was sick.

The compromise had been a homeschooling network and the homeschooling network had been Darlene’s introduction to the backhanded statements, the fake smiles, the two-facedness.  Mostly it was the dads and moms, but some of the other boys and girls had learned it too.

She felt now like she’d felt then.  There were dangerous people out there who wanted to hurt her and people she cared about, a black mood spread out among a few people, and even in her happier place people were shitting in the drinking water.

Tattletale briefly met Darlene’s eyes, her fingers still busy tapping and clicking at the disc, to go through channels and adjust settings.

Darlene felt the swell of Aiden’s chest as he puffed up a fraction, the little lean forward and up, like he had to push himself and stand a little taller to speak, and her full attention was on him before he even got the first word out.  She felt his expression like she felt his own, even though his mask was blank, a circular disc with a conical beak, two beady eyes, and the cock’s comb.  Eyebrows drawn together and up.  Her own moved to match.

“Are they okay?” he asked.

“No signal.  We won’t know until they’re clear of whatever it is that’s jamming it.”

“Can I take a look?  I’m more familiar with Lookout’s tech.” Capricorn asked.

“Be my guest,” Tattletale said.  She unstrapped the shield-like disc from her forearm.  She passed it to Capricorn, who strapped it to his own arm.

Capricorn was pretty cool, but in a bit of a Chevalier way.  He’d been a hero for a while, relatively speaking, and he was still around.  She couldn’t see or feel his face because the only one she was connected to right now was Aiden, so he had a cool mystique, with an emphasis on the ‘cool’.  His personality felt like it would be painted with shades of Samuel and Juliette.

Tress probably wasn’t taking the disc because her arms were artificial.  Her body was encased in armor, and that armor had connections at the shoulders and back that had two large arms, half of a neck and half of a face extending from them.  It was like she had a giant robot version of her, but it was only a quarter of the way there, and she was living like someone who had been chopped into pieces, moving forward by crawling with the overlarge arms.  Darlene could see Tress’s face, but it was harder to get a sense of her than it was with the helmeted Capricorn.

In this moment, though, Tress was easier to read.  Worried.

“Should we check on them?” Tress asked.

“Define ‘we’,” Tattletale said.  “These kids are in my care.”

“I’d go,” Juliette said.  “I’m old enough.”

Juliette stood off to one side, wearing a Velo-brand coat and turtleneck sweater that matched the texture and color of the wool cap she wore, her hands in her pockets.  Her hair was straight, her eye shadow blue, and her expression deadpan cold.  Amias was sitting on her shoulders, leaning forward in a way that pushed the hat slightly askew.  The only thing keeping Amias perched where he was was Amias, because Juliette wasn’t putting in much effort.

Tattletale shrugged.  “Sure.  We do need to have a conversation sometime about how you want rides places, you want clothes bought for you, which is kid treatment, but you want to be considered ‘old enough’.”

“It’s the benefit of being a teenager,” Juliette said, deadpan.

“Benefit of being the not-your-mom adult in the room?  I can say no.”

“Does being really good at helping out with the cape stuff help?” Juliette asked.  “I can kill someone if you need someone dead.”

“I want to see less people dead, not more,” Tattletale replied.

“I can promise to try to kill less people if I can keep getting the best of both worlds.  Rides, clothes, and missions.”

“You’re supposed to be Imp’s headache, not mine.  Let’s just get through tonight.”  Tattletale said.  Weary, she said, “We’ll talk to Imp about it, another time.”

“We shouldn’t split up any more than we already have,” Capricorn said, his voice quiet.  “Not when they’d be happy to catch some of us alone.”

He was clicking through the channels.  It was only static and blank images.

“Mm hmm,” Tattletale made a noise.

Darlene clasped her hands together, staring down at them.  Her focus, though, was on Aiden.

“I could say I’m going no matter what,” Aiden said.

We could,” Darlene added.

Aiden put out his hand.  It took her a second to realize she was supposed to give him a fist bump.  She did, glancing his way, then turned her eyes back to Tattletale as the hands made contact.  She could feel his hand, feel her own hand, and as he continued to move his hand, moved hers to mirror.  Fist bump to high-five to finger-wiggles to backwards-high five.  Their hands flipped around to a brief hand hold, her idea, then pulled away, tips of their middle fingers brushing against palm, then middle finger, bent just enough that they caught at the tips.  A small songbird was already flying down, perching on the outstretched fingers.  It peeped, wings spreading as it flapped dramatically without taking off.

Ninety-five percent of it without looking at each other.  Darlene broke into the silliest smile, and there was nothing anyone could say to make it budge.

Tattletale folded her arms.  “I have to admit, that was cool.”

Aiden was smiling behind his mask.  He puffed up like he did, chest out and forward, trying to stand straighter.  The bird on their fingers took off.

“How many tries did that take to pull off?”

“That was the first try,” Aiden said.  Darlene wanted to bounce on the spot, but that would have bugged Aiden, so she just clasped her hands together and let the nervous energy jitter through one leg, toe of her boot on the ground, heel bobbing rapidly up and down.

“It’s cool, don’t get me wrong-”

“Very,” Tress said.

Darlene’s hands, still clasped together, thumped against her upper chest, pressing against her collarbone, arms hugged against her body.

“It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get hurt if you get into a fight,” Tattletale said.

“If someone’s going to get hurt, and my friends are there, I have to be there,” Aiden said.  “I have to.”

“Do you know if it’s a danger?” Capricorn asked, quiet.  He dropped his left arm, the disc strapped to it, dark, and held a phone to his ear instead.  He turned to Tattletale.  “What does your power say?”

“Nothing clear,” Tattletale said.  “And I’m not taking a leadership position.  I’m taking a looking-after-the-junior-members position.  My power isn’t at your beck and call.”

Capricorn raised his hands, surrendering.  His phone was in one hand.  “Sveta?  Thoughts?”

“We need to help them if there’s a possibility of trouble.”

“I’m not sure.  Some radio silence is normal.  With tinkerings especially.  Except there’s nothing on the phone either.”

“Phones being down sometimes is normal too,” Aiden said.  “In most places.”

“True,” Capricorn said.  “But you can see where I’m worried.”

“I’m worried too,” Aiden said.  “That’s Candy, Roman, and Lookout out there.  They’re some of my favorite people.”

“Tch,” Juliette made a small sound, because Aiden had mentioned Roman.

Capricorn blurred.  His entire body and the blue armor he wore became just a little bit bigger, and where his eyes were, she could see a glow.  The glow faded last, as the blurring went away.

He cleared his throat, a little louder in that than he’d just been, talking quietly.

“There’s another option.  They’re out there, thirty to forty-five minutes away, something like that.”

“Less,” Tattletale said.

“But still a trip.  We have to get there.  So think, which of them are getting into trouble where our arrival decides things?  Are they running, and we show up in the nick of time?  Or are they better off with us moving forward, possibly winning, and creating a negotiating position.”

“Hostages?” Darlene asked.

“Hostages only work if Love Lost or March even care about what we’re doing here,” Capricorn said.  “I’m thinking that they want answers or people or something else.  We can get that here and change things there.”

“I vote for that,” Juliette said.

“Mmmm.  You were just talking about killing people,” Capricorn pointed out.  His finger tapped against his forearm, where his arms were folded.  He looked at Tattletale, “Is she trustworthy?”

“There’s no way for me to answer that question without causing problems or having more headaches later.”

“That’s kind of an answer on its own, isn’t it?” Tress asked.

“Is she trustworthy?” Capricorn asked Aiden.  “Not just for this vote.  If we’re doing anything, my team needs to know.”

“Juliette’s good at cape stuff,” Aiden said.  “She says she likes watching people die.  I’d say listen to her unless people might die.”

Qué chingados…” Capricorn muttered, looking at Tattletale for confirmation, which she didn’t give.  “Can’t be simple.”

Can’t be simple with Tattletale either, Darlene thought.  Tattletale had wanted to separate her and Aiden like she was separating Aiden and Lookout, until Darlene had made her argument in the car.  Her power made Aiden safer.  If Candy was the only one with Aiden then that would be bad in its own way, because Candy egged him on.  If none of the young Heartbroken were with Aiden, then the older Heartbroken would be, and very few of them were good role models… and Aiden would be worse off in the future, because there wasn’t going to be a time anytime soon where he wasn’t surrounded by the Vasils.

Tattletale had agreed, points for that.  But she’d wanted to separate them and Darlene would remember that for a while.

“The benefit of this is it’s simpler,” Tress said.  “Mobilizing is hard, and what happens if we go all the way there, communications are dead, and we can’t find them?”

“Good point.  What about you?  Your votes?” Capricorn asked.  He turned toward the group.

“Mine?  Ours?” Aiden asked.

“Sure.”

Darlene felt Aiden blink.  Felt him make those small actions that prepared him to speak like an adult to adults.

“My birds are here.  This looks like the kind of place where I can use them.  I don’t know if it’ll work wherever we end up.”

Darlene looked around.  The university was a lot of large, spacious buildings, with sloped concrete overhangs covering walkways, outdoor ampitheaters with stone stairs instead of seats that were now covered in snow, and second-, third-, and fourth-floor aboveground tunnels that extended between buildings.  Right now, they were among the dorms.  Cradle was said to be active on the other end.

She could see how the birds would be useful.

“Let’s stay,” Darlene said.

Capricorn nodded.  “Let’s move to a better position then.”

Tattletale was looking around, taking in information.  Tress walked forward on her hands, her ‘body’ barely touching the ground, Capricorn beside her.

It was nice that they’d asked instead of telling, and it was the best thing ever that the handshake had been a thing and that everyone thought it was cool.

She felt Aiden shift how he was walking, drawing closer.  She half-turned, realizing what he was doing, and met his three-quarters of a hug with one of her own, the two of them still walking, just now with one arm around each other and their heads close together.  Her forehead touched his hard mask, and the physical contact was more of a squish than anything, because they were wearing extra layers for the cold weather.  She was connected to him and she could feel him there, the extra squeeze of the hug he attempted, even though she didn’t feel one hundred percent of it on her end.

She took in a deep breath, happy, and she could smell the shampoo he wore and the birds he spent so much time around.  There had been a time a year ago when she hadn’t talked to him much, and she was still, as Imp put it, ‘understandably fucked in the head about certain things’.  Her best ideas of how to go forward with the feelings she already had about Aiden were from raw instinct, because Cherie was a bad big sister to look up to for that stuff, and Papa and ‘the women’ were a worse adult examples.

During that time a year ago, in her ‘fucked in the head’ phase, raw instinct had been to quietly hold her breath and only breathe in if he was close, anytime she was in his company.  Smelling him had mingled with the rush of having oxygen again and the dizzying feelings that swam through her.  He hadn’t noticed, because as much as her education in things had been a flood of too much, his had been too little.  Tattletale didn’t like anyone, Imp was discreet, Bitch was too far away, and his parents had died when he was little, so he could barely remember them or their relationship.  He didn’t even like any of the shows that would teach him the little things.

Maybe that fucked up phase had been a good thing, as tragically lame as it had been, and as much as her cousins had teased her once they realized she was doing it, with Aroa and Juliette getting in her way and Candy playing on the other team, trying to get Aiden closer.  If she hadn’t needed to push herself to get closer so she could breathe and not pass out or die, she might never have started talking to him.

And then she wouldn’t be warm, her face this close to him.

“Good job on the handshake,” Aiden whispered in her ear.

“I was just thinking I was so happy with how that worked.”

“I need to focus on my birds.  But you’re awesome.”

Darlene nodded, smiling.

Aiden broke away, leaving her with only the warmth on the one side, leeching away in the cold.  He put his arm out, and a trio of birds landed on it, each with the camera collars.  With his other hand, he had his phone out, and he thumbed his way through until his phone was displaying the view through the camera.

The birds took off.  The image on the phone screen became a whole lot of darkness with occasional flecks of white.  As the birds changed course, buildings came into view.

He turned her way.  His mask was expressionless, but she felt him smile.  She smiled back.

Tattletale walked at a certain distance away from the group, her phone out.  She pressed it to her ear.

“Which building was it that had the high power draw that made you think tinker?” Capricorn asked, quiet.  He’d changed back to his blue self.

Tattletale pressed a finger to her lips, shushing him.  She pointed, and Aiden sent out his birds in that direction.  The camera showed the view, and each tap of the screen rotated to another camera.  The images were too jarring at the outset, but settled as each bird found its perch on a different building.  One to the north, one to the west, and one to the south, focused on a building with black tiles all across the exterior, and the yellow-tinted solar windows that didn’t have much color to them in the gloom.

“I need more,” Tattletale said, still on the phone.  “Details?”

There was a pause.

“Details I can use,” Tattletale said.  Her voice was tense now, which got everyone’s attention.  “That’s not the point.”

“What happened?” Tress asked.

Tattletale pressed her finger to her lips again, clearly annoyed.  “If you don’t feel comfortable going after them alone, come here.  I’ll send you the address, keep your phone handy.”

Capricorn folded his arms.  The metal made noise as it brushed against more metal, and Tattletale inarticulately waved her arm in that direction, trying to gesture for him to be still and stop.

“We’re twenty-three minutes away.”

There was a pause.

“It doesn’t work that way.  Twenty-three minutes is twenty-three minutes.  You can’t say ‘I’ll be there in fifteen’ and make it happen.”  Tattletale waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her breath fogging as she sighed, her eyes rolling.  “Then I’ll expect you to turn up in twenty-three minutes, irritable because you weren’t here in fifteen.”

“Aunt Rachel,” Chicken Little said.

“She turned up at the meeting place.  The team got taken down.  Love Lost was where March was supposed to be.  No sign of March.  Because she’s here.”

“She overheard?  Saw something?  How do you know that?” Capricorn asked.

“I know.  The good thing is that March isn’t where Foil and Parian are.  The bad is that someone else is, and the people we’re up against are confident in their abilities.”

“A trap?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said  “Right now, we’re surrounded.  Nine to ten parahumans and three unpowered are here, already in position.  One to three more are on their way here as reinforcements.”

“Aunt Rachel’s on her way here too, right?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said.  “Battle mode.”

“We’re choosing fight over flight?” Capricorn asked.

“They won’t let us fly,” Tattletale said.  “Battle mode, I am not joking.”

Blue lights began to appear around Capricorn.  Tress shifted position, dropping to all fours and bracing against the ground while the long arms with the slender hands moved.  One provided some light cover to Aiden, Darlene, Juliette and Amias.

Darlene reached into her coat, pulling out a mask.  Imp had supplied them, and they were all built around a theme.  Darlene didn’t even remember Jean Paul, but apparently that was the style that they were matching to.

It made Imp happy, at least.  Darlene looked at her mask, which had silver forming a kind of tiara shape, extending up the nose across the forehead, and down the temples, where they curled around to the cheekbones.  The lips on the mask were silver, the eyes of the mask black.  She fixed her hair around it.

“We should get inside,” Tattletale said.  “Can you, Tress?”

“Yeah.  I can’t do narrow hallways, but if it’s an emergency, I can ditch these arms.”

“Can you ditch them now?” Tattletale asked.

“Let’s wait until they get in the way or slow us down,” Tress answered.

Inside.  The building at this area of the university was a concrete fixture that had a lot of stuff underground, based on the way it almost immediately had a four-times-normal -width set of stairs that went down, with stairs on the far left and right that went up to a higher level.  Artwork was mounted on the walls, people that Darlene was pretty sure she was supposed to recognize – a male scholar and a female scholar.  There were people inside, standing or sitting on stairs, and they reacted with alarm as they saw the gathered group, with Tattletale, Chicken Little, Tress, and Capricorn all in costume.

She supposed she, Juliette and Amias had masks, but Darlene had a hard time calling it costumes.  They weren’t costumes any more than normal clothes were costumes.  She had her nice coat, her velvet dress with the extra layers underneath, padding out the skirt portion, and black tights with silver-leaf pattern printed onto them.  Her shoes were another thing Imp had provided her.

Juliette’s mask had four eyes, two smaller ones beneath the main ones, and spikes that could reach straight back from the masks’s edges.  The spikes were on hinges, and didn’t actually reach directly back because the shape of her head didn’t let them, but it formed a distinct look.  Amias had been lowered to the ground, he had slipped his mask on, black with gold flecks and veins at the edges, blending in with black hair and the black toque.

“You should network,” Aiden whispered.

“I can connect us,” Darlene said, loud enough for the others to hear.  “Who wants in?  It lets us coordinate.  You saw the handshake.”

“Me,” Juliette said.

Darlene reached out, connected to Juliette, and felt the sensations bubble into existence- it wasn’t quite immediate, because background noise didn’t fill in, so it was only the parts that Juliette intentionally moved and the things that received new, less usual sensations that registered the sensations.  The feeling of the cold metal railing as Juliette slid her gloved hand down the length.

It was that ‘had to be prompted’ thing that kept Darlene from feeling things like Aiden’s private areas.  If and when a sensation stirred into her awareness, she politely ignored it.

Juliette knew the routine, and she moved and flexed everything in order, clenching hands, then feet, then forearms, calves, thighs, stretching-  Darlene locked in the sensations.

“Anyone else?”

“It’s that easy to connect?” Capricorn asked.  “What’s the upside?”

“Coordination,” Darlene said.  “We know exactly where each other are and what and how we’re doing.”

“Drawback?”

“It’s weird at first,” Aiden replied, quiet.  “But if you’re going to ask me the same thing you asked about Juliette, I trust Darlene.  I’d trust her with my life.  I trust her with this.”

Darlene’s hands drew together, clasping, then broke apart a moment later.  She didn’t know what to do with herself, hearing that.  The emotions inside her were a mess, everything a jumble.  She imagined that if he’d said something a little more, then she could have teared up or felt as warm as she ever had, depending on what it was he said.

But that was all he said, leaving her… flummoxed.  That was the word.

“So easy for you to say, huh?” Capricorn asked.

“Trust is earned,” Aiden said, and though he didn’t move his head, Darlene could feel the eyeballs slide against eyelid, turning Tattletale’s direction.  “Darlene earned it.”

“Dumb,” Juliette said.

Darlene wheeled on her cousin.  Juliette’s face was hidden by her mask, but even without the mask, even with Darlene able to feel every inch of Juliette’s face, forcing the sensations into being, she couldn’t feel the slightest of twitches or movements.

They reached the bottom of the stairs.  The base level of the building had the aroma of sweat, like gyms and pools did, and past them, rows and columns of lockers.  The group stayed together as much as they were able, as they filtered between the columns.

“Fire alarm,” Capricorn said, as they reached a central area, with hallways extending in every direction.   “Assuming they know where we are or that they’ll find out as soon as someone friendly to them passes on word, it gets the civilians clear.”

“They know where we are, don’t worry about that.  Pulling the alarm lets them know we know.”

“It gets civilians clear,” Capricorn said.  “Yes?”

“Yes.”

“That has to be worth it.”

“If you say so.”

He started forward, hesitating like he expected her to tell him not to, then with more confidence, he strode toward the little red plate on the wall.  He hauled down on the switch.

The ear-splitting noise was immediate, worse because she heard it with three sets of ears and each was positioned in a slightly different place in the group, because the building was all poured concrete, and the sound bounced around violently.

The group hurried forward.  Deeper into the building’s underbelly.

“We’re getting further from my birds.”

“It’s the best way right now,” Tattletale said.  “It makes us harder to track with tinkertech, and there aren’t security cameras down here.  Only employees with instructions to watch out and radio if there’s trouble.”

Tress spoke up.  She was making her way down the stairs, her hands out to the sides, sliding down the railings.  “If you don’t think it’s going to be a problem, and if it doesn’t affect my movements or yours, you could try connecting to me.  Don’t be-”

Darlene connected, missing outright on her first attempt, then aiming for the face and finding the connection there.

The others had been gradual, a handful of sensations at a time, as each body part made contact with something.  Tress felt like a hundred sensations at once.  Limbs as thin as pencils and as strong as small caliber gunshots were fumbling, reaching, thumping against her shell, and groping blindly for rings and switches, hauling back on cords, gripping those cords, tracing the seams of the hollow metal shell, and straining against bondage where metal bands cinched them together into groups, leaving them to rustle faintly against each other.  The longest groupings were extended out to and through the metal arms, where they strained and worked, providing a lot of the mechanical movement for the added limbs.

She felt Tress’s lips part, the words barely audible over the screech of the alarm.  “Oh wow.”

“You okay?” Capricorn asked.

Tress nodded.  “It’s… nostalgic.  The sensations of a normal body.”

“Connect me?” Capricorn asked.

Darlene threw out a hand in his direction.

Her head twisted to one side, as she tried to take in the sensations.  She’d expected a two-dimensional image and she got a three-dimensional one.

She’d felt a boy’s body, with her brothers and Aiden.  Capricorn felt like a man’s body, in a way that even Samuel didn’t, and Samuel was close to the same age.  Strong, burdened by armor, breath hot inside his helmet.  That was the Capricorn who was walking down the stairs.

Another Capricorn was overlapping that, frozen like a robot with the power switch thrown off, suspended and moving along with the Capricorn she saw.  Frozen as it was, she could feel the heat of the brain against the skull.

Here and there, feet and legs were moved instead of moving on their own.  Always maintaining a workable footing.

“Oh.  Shit,” Capricorn said.  “So that’s a thing.”

He sensed it too.  Part of the network.

“And Sveta’s… wow.”

“Don’t get lost in the network,” Aiden said, quiet.  “As neat as this always is, it’s supposed to help, not distract.”

“Good advice,” Tattletale chimed in.

“This is weird,” Capricorn said.  “Even putting the fact that my brother’s there, and Sveta’s- I’m getting new insights into Sveta.”

“Yeah,” Tress said.

“If you want to stop-” Darlene offered.

“No.  It’s just weird.  Even if I ignore that stuff… weird for other reasons.”

“You shouldn’t feel anything too weird,” Darlene said, defensive.

“You get used to it,” Chicken Little said.  He was probably happy to get to be the expert for a while.  “I grew up around powers, so I’m good at adapting to the little things.”

“Grew up,” Juliette said.  “You barely started.”

Aiden huffed.  Juliette laughed without making a sound, body shaking.  Darlene glared at her.

“Cretan and Lionwing are standing guard that way, probably with someone else.  Nursery, Lord of Loss, Blindside, any other prominent merc,” Tattletale said, indicating off to the left.  “We’re going that way.”

Opposite direction.  They picked up the pace.  The danger felt more real now, in a way that the fire alarms hadn’t driven home.

They made it about thirty feet before Tattletale stopped in her tracks.

Tattletale held up a hand for silence, which seemed insane, because the fire alarm was loud.  Hearing anything that wasn’t from someone a few feet away was impossible.

Tattletale turned at a right angle, a course that would have carried them even further from the entrance and the stairs that had led them down.

She didn’t actually walk forward.

“Cretan and Lionwing,” she said, pointing left.  She pointed forward.  “Case fifty-three, case fifty-three, and Contender.”

“Vulturehawk and Thud,” Tress said.  “Weld’s sources say they’re not from our Earth.  There’s a language barrier.”

“They’re here, in the building?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said.  She pointed right.  “Cradle, Operator Red, two of March’s underlings.  We don’t know what those underlings do, either.”

“What if we go the way we came?”

“The rest of March’s group,” Tattletale said.

“You picked a shitty way to go,” Tress told her.

“I picked a good way.  We pick and choose which group we want to bust through as we make a run for it.  How strong are Thud and Vulturehawk?”

“Strong,” Sveta said.

“And Contender’s in that group.  If he catches us, then there’s nothing we can do, unless we’re willing to abandon one of our own.”

“As the person most likely to be abandoned, I vote no,” Juliette said.

“Let’s avoid the guy with the assumed chop-people-up tech,” Tattletale said.  “Let’s avoid March.  We’ll throw ourselves at the trained, efficient killers.”

“We can make them less trained and less efficient,” Juliette said.

Tattletale hung back.  She looked at Capricorn and Tress.

The two nodded.

“Let’s go.”

“You good with this?” Capricorn asked, his head turned toward the other half of the group.

“Yeah.  Good,” Chicken Little said.

Darlene nodded her agreement.

The group broke apart as they ran past more rows of lockers, each seated in sloped concrete pads, then reunited on the far side.  The lights of the underground space were both too bright when looked at and insufficient to light the whole area.

The fire alarm shut off.  The ringing in Darlene’s ears continued, the only sound other than huffed breaths and running footsteps on hard floor.

Lionwing and Cretan were there.  White and black armor, hers modeled with a griffon aesthetic, his modified with a bull, but no clear or obvious horns.

Always amazing to see when Tattletale is accurate, Darlene thought.

Cradle was there too, wearing a tinker’s outfit with a jacket.  The entrance was blocked with Cradle’s mech.  A tall man in a flowing costume stood with a flickering line held between his fingers, like a dart or card made of black energy, visible from only the edge.

“Paris,” Capricorn said, under his breath.

Cradle audibly snarled on seeing them.  “There they are.  The job.”

“Not without being paid,” Lionwing said, not budging.

“You’re aware Tattletale is a mastermind?  Why would we pull your pay in the middle of the job?  Do the task and you will get paid.”

Paris nodded, stepping forward.  The others hung back.

“Go,” Capricorn said.  “Go!”

They turned and ran.

A dart flew past them.  It cut into the base of one row of lockers.  Where it hit, it disintegrated.  The end of the row began to tip to one side, and as it fell, it brought the rest down.  The group was forced to shift direction, to avoid putting themselves in the way of lockers toppling like dominoes.  With Capricorn leading the way, they ran on the partially collapsed shelf, which was now more horizontal where it had been vertical.

“What the hell happened?” Tress asked.  “Tattletale!

“Someone fucked with my reading.  Two someones.  Your brilliant leader called the bank or something and the mercenaries aren’t getting paid.  Good is they’re pissed and we have less to deal with, bad is it fucked with my reading.”

“She did what we wanted to do,” Capricorn said.  “Each team tries to do their job, do what they can from their end to support the other teams.  You can’t blame her.”

“I’m not blaming.  I’m stating facts.  I can’t give accurate information if certain things aren’t communicated to me.”

“Phones and discs are down,” Capricorn said.

“I know!” Tattletale shouted.  “Can-”

Something detonated off to the side.  Darlene shrieked, hands going to her ears.  Her eyes went wide as she saw the shelving unit beside them starting to fall.

Tress caught it.  Except Paris was coming right up behind.  He threw one dart, and it penetrated Tress’ arm.  Where the dart hit, the arm began dissolving, spraying off pellets that dinged and pocked the lockers where it hit.

She twisted around, aiming the spray toward Paris, who ducked low and pulled his hood down over his head.  Disappearing around a corner.

“Sidepiece is coming,” Tattletale said.

“Whoever said that is lying!” Sidepiece called out.  “I was faking it!  Do you want to see the real thing?  Let me show you!”

Capricorn was drawing out blue motes.  As he heard that, he shifted position, until his body was almost touching the motes.

They turned to sprays of water, and that water banked off of his armor, spraying hard up and out.

Tress’s one intact arm caught him, keeping him from being bowled over by the force of the spray.

There was another explosion, way off to the side.  It took a second for Darlene to realize what had happened.  The spray had caught whatever was being thrown at them.

Sidepiece cackled.

Tattletale reached back, grabbing Amias’s hand to help him run.  They passed the initial row of lockers, moving to the center of the crossroads- routes lined with lockers, benches, and places to study extended in all four directions.

Darlene felt Juliette spin around, then go stock still, trembling.

“Tress, Capricorn!” she tried to shout and it came out almost as a screech, pointing.  “Hit him!”

Paris, emerging from a row of lockers, was now frozen mid-step.

Capricorn started forward, jogging in Paris’s direction, unaware.

“He can’t move while Juliette doesn’t!”

Capricorn picked up speed.

With a gauntlet, he slammed his fist into Paris’s ribs.  Paris didn’t budge, except to sway.

Another hit to the same spot.

Then, realizing he didn’t need to be efficient, that it was about doing damage to an opponent that couldn’t defend themselves, an uppercut to the jaw, with a gauntlet around his hand.

“Pull down the lockers!” Darlene cried out.

Capricorn touched the lockers.  Then he looked at Paris, and he hesitated.

Why?

“Tress!” Darlene tried.  “Juliette can’t run until he’s dealt with!  If she starts moving now then he’ll be right back after us!”

“No,” Capricorn said.

If he was going to say anything else, he was interrupted before he could.

Another detonation.  This one came with a flare of orange light that didn’t seem to make the area brighter, because the smoke that came with it obscured as much light as the fire created.

“They’re closing in,” Tattletale said.

Aiden reached into his jacket, retrieving two birds.  “I hope you two are warm enough.  You’re all I’ve got for now.”

The birds took off, circling around the group.

There were more coming.

“Cretan and Lionwing struck a deal,” Tattletale said.

“Can you say anything that isn’t about how this is getting worse?”

“We can go that way or that way,” Tattletale pointed.  “Any way that isn’t to Cradle or March.  The lines will be thinner.”

Fire barred one of the available ways.

Toward Operator Red, then?

“There’ll be only one or two at these exits, probably,” Tattletale said.

Sidepiece, darting in and out of cover, hurled something.

A lump of something meaty that splashed on impact, the stuff that splashed igniting a second after settling.

She hopped up to a metal bench above the flame, fingers tearing at her middle, and then turned-

Again, Darlene felt Juliette freeze.

She bolted forward.

“Birds!”

The birds flew with her.  She had to pick where she stepped carefully, because the ground was on fire, which made this a game of ‘the floor is lava’.  There were bags left behind by students fleeing on hearing the fire alarm, which was ironically not making noise while there was actual fire.

‘Sidepiece’, now that Darlene could see, was a woman built like an apple that had been eaten to the core.  Her hair was styled and her mask scary.  She looked like a zombie, except she was supposedly explosive.

She was also frozen, standing on a bench above a sea of fire.

Some people were immune to powers.  Most of the Heartbroken had some resistances to being controlled or having their emotions messed with.  Darlene was hoping that Sidepiece wasn’t immune to her own fire.

Hopping up onto bench surrounding a pillar, she had to jump onto a melting plastic cart, then onto the bench that was part of the row that Sidepiece was balanced on.

One arm around her face, to keep from breathing in the smoke, she shoved Sidepiece, and Sidepiece toppled.  The woman landed at the edge of the fire, her feet in the flames.

Veins and tendons stood out, her body rigid now, while Juliette continued to refuse to let her move.

She hopped down onto Sidepiece, one more stepping stone in this game of ‘lava’.

“Come on!” she shouted, her voice high.  “This way!”

The others followed.  Capricorn lagged behind, creating water.  Paris was dodging the water until-

Juliette turned around, freezing him.  Which released Sidepiece, who shrieked like she was being burned alive.

Which… fair.

Darlene stared down at the woman, watched her thrash.  Seeing her get on hands and knees, trying to rise, Darlene kicked, heel toward head.

Sidepiece ducked her head low, the heel hitting the back of her head, but not seeming to do much.  She’d hoped it would put Sidepiece back in the fire.

“You’re so fucked.  I’m going to fuck you up, you little fucking fucker!”  Sidepiece shouted, her voice raw.  She was trying to pat out the flame.

The birds harassed her, pecking and swooping.  One got her ear, tearing at it.

And in the background, the others weren’t catching up.

No, because Lionwing and Cretan were catching up.  And the Case Fifty-Threes.  The group had tried to go one way and they’d stopped.  They started to come her way, and Cretan used his power.

It was a wave, a pulse that rippled over everything.  Where it passed, things were bent.  Rows of lockers now turned at right angles, ground bent up, requiring climbing up a two-and-a-half-foot ledge, and off to Darlene’s left, a hole in the wall showed a tunnel, with a tiny version of Cretan upside down on the far side.

That tiny Cretan turned toward her, then began charging down the tunnel, swiftly growing larger.

No no no

Water gushed, aimed down the complete wrong direction, and yet somehow it passed into the tunnel, gushing in spirals and throwing the bull-costume mercenary around inside the confined space.  Some water sloshed out on Darlene’s side.

“-clidean space,” Tattletale was saying.

“Come!” Darlene shouted.

In the tunnel, there was a splash, as Cretan brought his fist down on the ceiling of the tunnel.

Another pulse.  Another ripple.

This time, there were walls and bends that obscured Darlene’s view of her team.  She could feel them, though.  They felt a normal distance away, even if her last glimpse of them seemed to put them in weird places.

Leaving her alone.  Separating her from them.  From Sidepiece, thankfully.  From the birds.  She could only hear the shouts and the chaos.

She turned around.

A man in red, with a white handprint on his mask.  He held a knife.

She wished she wasn’t wearing her own mask.  Maybe if she wasn’t, she could say or do something, pretend to be innocent.

The man threw a pair of handcuffs her way.  They slid on the floor, traveling in a straight line until they hit a weird bend, then slid left a short distance.

She bent down to pick them up.

“Cuff yourself to that bench.  If you use a power, I cut you where it hurts,” the man in red said.

She opened the cuff, looking at the serrated metal edge that allowed for the handcuff’s adjustments.

“I can’t stand being tied up,” she said.  “It makes me want to barf.”

“It has to be better than being hurt or dead.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t make me be an asshole,” he said.

“I just want to go back to my friends,” she told him, her voice small.  She could feel Capricorn being kicked hard.  Felt Aiden’s back slide against a surface as he tried to make himself small.  “They need me.”

“That’s exactly why I can’t let you do it,” the man said.

“Life has really, really sucked for a long time,” she told him.  “I finally have good things.  I have a boy I like.”

“Cuff yourself, then.”

She shook her head.  She had to swallow gorge to keep from coughing or vomiting into her mouth.  Just the idea of it brought her to that point, made her breathing uneasy.  “I’d lose my mind.”

Aiden noticed, turned her way, touching the wall.

Not that it helped.

She broke the connection.  The absence was palpable.

The man approached, knife held out, until it touched her throat.  She breathed hard, her eyes wide.

Was there even help coming?  Someone coming through the wall?  Aiden’s Aunt Rachel?

No.  Not this soon.  Even if she came in fifteen minutes like she’d said.

She created a connection to Operator.  Connecting her body to his.

The knife moved, touching where her jaw met her neck, and pressing in enough to split the skin.  It stung, and she saw him jump at the feeling.

She pushed the knife hand away, cut the power and punched for the balls- and he blocked her hand.  He wrenched her arm to one side, so she bent over-

And she reactivated the connection.  Let him feel that pain of arm being twisted backward.

Her foot had always had a quirk, where if she curled it in a crescent shape as hard as she could, it cramped hard.  She did that.

There was an element to things where it was sympathetic, and while it was sympathetic, he felt compelled to adjust his balance, move his own foot, to do something about the cramp.

She shifted her weight, shoving into him with all her weight.  He stumbled, still holding her arm above her, shoulder socket twisted nearly as far as it would go.  She forced the twist, reasserted the connection so he could feel it just as much as she did.

He released her, catching her by the neck instead.  He had the knife-

And she had her hands free.  She grabbed her finger with the hand that still had the cuffs, and she bent it backward until something gave.

The knife didn’t reach her throat.  It clattered to the floor and she was able to push and pull free of the hand that had her neck, the injured finger flaring with a pain that lanced to her funny bone and up to her shoulder, close to her throat, where the pain magnified the barfy feeling that had accumualted there.

She threw herself at the knife, curling around it.

He kicked her, more to get her off the knife than to hurt.

“I was going to go easy on you because you’re a little kid, but-”

She bit her tongue, hard.

It shut him up, startled him.  An opportunity for her to take the knife she’d grabbed and swing it madly in his direction.

Except he knew what he was doing.  On her second swing, he slapped at her wrist, and her hand went numb.  The knife clattered from it.

A blow to the temple, and her vision went fuzzy in one eye, the other seeing double, like all the vision in one eye had been shoved into the other.

“I can do things other than hurt you,” he said, growling.

She brought the handcuffs down with her other hand, relying on her sense of him.  She was too slow to disable her power, so she felt the initial connection, where the blunt point and serrated edge caught him in the wrist, gouging.  She fell as much as she pulled down, and the thing was hauled in deeper.  A fishhook set.

With a hand with one broken or badly hurt finger, she hung onto the cuffs, the rest of her reaching own, groping for the blade.

He kicked her, along the lower half of her body, and the pain was immense, jolting through her.  He’d hit her in the back, near the spine.  She knew he felt it, just as much as she felt the injury at the wrist for as long as her power was active.

Her fingers found the knife, touched it, made it spin instead of grabbing it.

She kicked up, toward the balls.  He blocked it again, but took the momentum out of the kick more than he stopped it entirely.  It made him bend over slightly, and that gave her the chance to pick up the knife.

Still hanging down, pulling on the cuffs where they were embedded in flesh, because relaxing it would mean he could pull the cuffs out, she swung wildly with the knife, aiming at the only flesh in reach- the back of the arm she was pulling down on.  Four wild strokes, and she’d turned flesh there into thick ribbons, blood pouring down to the ground.

“You-”

She bit her tongue again, hard.  Every part of her was tense, rigid, trembling, straining, and her face mid-bite was no different.

He hurled his mass and her mass around in a quarter-circle, screaming as he did it, because he was pulling on the cuffs and making the damage worse, but in the doing, he created an opening where he could grab her hand and peel it away from the chain of the cuffs.

She reasserted the connection as she picked herself up.

She knew exactly what he was doing as he did it.  Her movements weren’t as eerily efficient as his, but they were informed.  On the occasions where it did look like he’d catch her, she used her power, so he felt it too.

She took an opportunity to cut him, and that was the point he stepped back, panting, bleeding, and drew two more knives.

She still couldn’t see in the one eye, one ear was ringing, the other eye was seeing double, and her back hurt, where he’d somehow hit her and made the organs hurt.  Not just one, but multiple ones, the pain radiating through.

He lunged, and she dodged.  He swung downward, and she reached up, both of her hands gripping the handle of her one knife, to provide the strength that, combined with the rush of danger, almost let her match the strength of a grown man using one arm.  Her knees bent as she tried to keep the knife from coming down, she felt him get ready to stab with the other knife, and let her hand slip.

The hand came away from the handle and found wrist.  She dug fingers into the wound, making him drop the knife, then brought her blade away from where it had been holding him at guard, matching his swing with hers.  The knife ran along knuckles.

She’d aimed for fingers, hoped to chop them off, but the knife wasn’t an extension of her or her power.  Had she used her fingernails, she knew she could have gotten them exactly where she wanted them, respective to her opponent.

This wasn’t the only time her mood had turned this black.

“Nobody’s taking them from me.  I have a family, a job, and things I want to do.”

“I’m-”

She bit her tongue.  She tasted blood.

“-mrg,” he said.  “Stop that.”

She lunged for him, scrambled to get away from one swung, lunged point-first for another.  On attack, her power was off.  On defense, it was on, ensuring that she knew his every move, she could deflect, absorb, reduce the impact, and when she felt anything, he did too.

She didn’t stop.  Her assault was on his legs and his footing.  Cutting his thighs.  Swiping for his groin.

A glancing blow, a knife sinking into her upper arm.  The sympathetic feeling of the pain weakened his grip on the weapon.  She twisted back, pulling it out of his reach.  When he reached again, she kept twisting.  Always keeping that horrible pain away from the fingertips she could feel just as much as she could feel her own.

He took a step back, and she felt the thigh muscle flare with pain and fail to provide the strength in the same moment he did.  She closed the distance, driving the knife into his belly.

Her face against his collarbone, she withdrew the knife and stabbed again and again, then dropped to her knees, just to get the knife handle to a place where he couldn’t grip it and pull it from her arm.  His fingertips touched the handle, but didn’t come close to gripping it.

He struck her across the face, instead.  This time, she was rendered entirely blind, her head full of noise and pain.

The Operator slumped to the ground, and she felt everything, felt the blood welling out, sticky between fabric and skin.  She knew he felt the pain and noise in the head that she experienced, and she felt it was fair.  Fair that he had to experience the kind of thing he’d done to others.

She wished she had a good quip.  The others were better at it.

“I’m Heartbreaker’s kid,” she said.  “I’m not as powerful, but I’m better, because he was horrible.  You shouldn’t have fought me.  That was stupid.”

He wore a mask, and she could feel him gasping and gawping, a fish on dry land, his hands at the portion of his stomach where he had multiple stab wounds.

She reached for his mask, to pull it off.  He shook his head, refusing.

She stabbed him a few more times, trying to hurry him along his way.  It didn’t really work.

She turned away, instead.

The others- she pushed out with her power, trying to get it through the wall.

Sidepiece.  Sitting with her back to a wall.  She banished the power as soon as she realized who it was.  Another direction.

Aiden.

She felt Aiden’s alarm and agitation as he realized she was hurt.  He touched his arm.

She cut off the connection and looked down at the knife at the spot he’d indicated.

Darlene had spent enough time around Roman to know the particulars about stabbing people.  Pulling things from stab wounds made it worse, not better.  Though she wasn’t sure it really was better, here.  There wasn’t much there at her upper arm, with it being as skinny as it was, and the knife kind of bobbed and dangled where she moved wrong.

“Darlene’s hurt!” Aiden called out.

She pushed out.  She found Capricorn, crawling across the floor.

Everyone was separated from everyone else.

“I’m sending birds!  I’m going to try to reach you!” Aiden called out.

She looked, groping for openings.  The floor had turned up at a right angle and nearly met the ceiling now.  She set to climbing up, as best as she could with two feet and one arm.  A bench had turned up at a right angle too.  Her starting point.

She reached over the top, where there was a foot of gap, and a bird touched her fingers.

“Take me to him,” she said, before she started squeezing herself through.  The English phrase ‘stick out like a sore thumb’ kind of applied, since she had a knife sticking out of her, and a narrow space to fit through.  She did her best, her arm draped across her front, right hand by her left hip, wriggling through, groping for handholds on the far side.

A labyrinth.  She felt out with her power.  Found the Cretan.  The Minotaur that was making this maze.  He moved so quickly through it that it seemed impossible, though it was possible he was undoing the effect as necessary.  His head turned her way.

The power that let her find people also let them find her.  She had to be careful.

Forward, forward-

Into the L-shaped space that Capricorn was in.  She dropped down, and her legs were so shaky she landed on her rear end.

“Creating handholds,” Capricorn said.

She nodded, tense.

“You’re hurt.”

“So are you,” she said.

He was in two pieces.  The legs were twitching.  The upper body, lying on its back, was creating orange lights.

He didn’t respond, didn’t elaborate.  Didn’t say he was okay or not okay.

She felt out with her power, establishing a connection.  She felt his body, in two pieces.  The other side of him was intact, waiting.

“That’ll have to be good enough.  I’m not-” he groaned, a strangled sound.

He blurred, trying to change back.  It was a torturous thing, the blur reaching out, groping, trying to connect, to meet the two halves.

She reached for him, grabbing the lower half, and dragged it closer by inches.

Unnecessary.  It just took time.

Capricorn with the blue armor, now.  Intact.  With her power, she felt the two separated parts, floating superimposed around him.

“Climb.  I’ll follow.  I may have to lose my armor so this doesn’t break under my weight.”

She climbed.  She could follow orders when important.

“You kids are scary,” he said.

“Yes,” she murmured.  “We have to be.”

She climbed, one hand and two feet, the other hand more a guide to remind herself where she was.

On higher ground, she had a vantage point of more of the battlefield, below raised walls, around bends.  The tunnels that seemed to magnify and shrink.

The Cretan crashed down near Sveta.  She struck at him with a gauntlet.

And Tattletale-

She saw Tattletale backing up until she was out of sight and hurried forward.  Aiden was rarely far from Tattletale.

“I’m not a part of this.  I’m keeping half of an eye on the kids,” Tattletale was saying.  “You don’t want to go this far.”

Though unable to see Tattletale, Darlene could see Cradle, holding a glowing red whip.

“I have to,” was the response.

She heard the impact, a sound like the whole universe was gasping for breath.

Again, she heard the sound.  This time, it struck a wall, carved it away like it was butter.

The wall fell away, and Cradle advanced, head low, passing between the four segments of Tattletale,

“Cradle- the most intact part of Tattletale said.  “You have a mole.  Someone who tipped you off.”

“Learn your own lessons.  Mercenaries follow the highest bidder,” Cradle said.

Darlene pushed out, connecting herself to Tattletale- to someone who had been carved into quarters and felt it.  Then to Cradle.  To stop him, to stall.

But that was all she could do.  She watched as he found his bearings, straightened, and ended further discussion with a stomp of his boot vicious enough to mute out Darlene’s connection to Tattletale.

The whip flared as he cracked it, turning toward her.

Previous Chapter                                                                                        Next Chapter

138 thoughts on “Interlude – 11.c”

  1. That went better than expected. Darlene is absolutely the MVP taking on a combat Thinker with a knife, but I also really liked Capricorn’s moments and Tattletale continues to be a glorious asshole.

  2. So the fuck you into pieces dude turned out to be Cradle, because he needed to be more evil somehow. Sure, whatever.

    Though, I guess he had to get that trick from someone else, what with how WB’s been rather insistent on tinkers needing to scan powers to make new things from.

    Oh wait a minute. Maybe Cradle didn’t need to study anyone, because dismemberment is just the opposite of prosthetics or something.

    But why does the multitrigger tinker get a flipping mini-mech? In what universe is that fair?

    1. It was confirmed a couple of chapters ago that Cradle based this thing on Disjoint. One of Love Lost’s B-tier villains.

    2. He was studying Disjoint. A guy who’s power is seperating, but the pieces stay alive. And I think he mixed it with his version of Rain’s severing power.

      And if Kenzie is the tinker who never has time or resources to replace her busted stuff properly, Cradle is the Tinker who always seems to get the time and resources. I guess there’s benefits to being offscreen.

      1. Right, that makes sense. I’d forgotten about Disjoint being on tap.

        I think hero tinkers might have it a little rougher though, since they’re obligated to interfere when something bad happens and it’s generally considered unethical to experiment on people and toss meatshields at problems when they try to pull you away from your work.

        The whole villains act, heroes react algorithm is decidedly not balanced in their favor, since it means villains only make their move when the new doombot is done, and heroes need to stop whatever they were doing and bring the half-finished prototype to battle because that jerk’s doombot was specifically designed to beat everything else they had.

        1. Cradle also has the advantage of being Love Lost’s silent partner. She can go and gather the funds and resources so he can afford to sit around building things. Most tinkers don’t have that, or if they do, it’s because a villain has caught them and chained them to a work bench and forced them to build. Pre-Gold Morning, most Tinkers probably do their first job with inferior or half-made gear because they need to buy more metal plating, or steal half a ton of obsolete microwaves, or something to finish their good stuff.

          Also, Kenzie’s a child. She’s still got school to take up time, and guardians who can prevent her from pulling an all-nighter as she builds camera after camera after big black box.

          1. Trainwreck did that. Actually I suspect all tinkers can use whatever’s available, because the shards couldn’t really assume the presence of a particular technology level. For instance, Bakuda built a powerful bomb out of Canary’s restraints, using only her teeth. Lookout thanked CL for bringing her a couple of toy cameras. Squealer seemed to have had something of an “A-Team” vibe. Of course, given the choice, most tinkers also use modern technology…

          2. > Lookout thanked CL for bringing her a couple of toy cameras.

            She probably did more than that. I suspect that some of CL’s pigeons carry those same cameras now. Feels like a nice way to repay him for his visit in the hospital and the feathered necklace.

          3. The bomb Backs made out of the restraints wasn’t very powerful. It only dosed everyone in a small radius with a low dose of tranquilizer.

            So still several steps up from what you or I could build out of scraps with our teeth.

      2. If Kenzie could find a way to have her enemies onscreen with her cameras, while being offscreen herself, she’d be the most powerful parahuman in the universe

        1. More than that – she already figured out how to make a past camera, once she gets it to look into possible futures as well, she can go full on Simurgh on her foes (and friends)!

  3. There was something very satisfying about Darlene taking down Operator Red. Very satisfying indeed.

    And boy did Lisa mess this one up. And hey just like I figured was eventually going to happen. Her own mercs got bought out from under her.

    1. Actually my first guesses about the mole’s identity would be someone from Faultline’s crew (possibly even Faultline herself – she apparently doesn’t like Tattletale much) or Snuff.

      1. It could totally be Snuff. Especially after we were fed a line of crap like this: “Snuff wanted her for the status. She had a place in the city and in the cape dynamic, and he was cementing a role as her enforcer and bodyguard.” He has followed TT around like a puppy the entire time. Why even introduce a mook like that, if not to motivate some drama like this?

        Although, now that I think of it, I’m suspecting Kirby née “Creep”, Coil’s sex-pervert-former-chauffeur. Coil knew how to keep the man loyal. I’m sure TT knows, but I’m not so sure she would be as willing to pay him in that coin… Many of her enemies wouldn’t have such compunctions.

        1. The mole could also explain how Love Lost knew about the Breakthrough-Undersiders meeting in time to deploy Disjoint and Sidepiece as spies. If this is what happened, then perhaps the mole is someone who didn’t take part in that meeting, but was informed that it is going to happen?

          Perhaps it wasn’t even someone on the Undersiders, but on Breakthrough side of things? Though Cradle’s gloating about Tattletale using mercenaries probably doesn’t fit this theory.

          1. Another possible clue about the mole’s identity is that the Villains apparently predicted that Tattletale will attack Cradle’s place, but apparently were not sufficiently prepared (and were not certain about) the attacks on Love Lost’s and March’s bases.

          2. They did have a trap set for Imp’s team, though there wasn’t anyone present as an Imp countermeasure, so they didn’t have information about team composition.

            Love Lost’s place was booby-trapped but not initially guarded, so they maybe weren’t forewarned of that attack at all.

            I think the traitor has to be one of the periphial non-parahuman soldiers Tattletale has; it’d both explain their rather limited information and why Tattletale didn’t discover them. Anyone she regularly interacts with is likely to get randomly picked up when she’s using her power while they’re around.

          3. I think it could be someone who stood guard during the Breakthrough-Undersiders meeting next to the mall (or wasn’t invited there at all, but was informed that it is happening), so the mole knew when that meeting would happen, but couldn’t listen in.

            Later the mole was outside Breakthrough’s HQ – either guarding the entrance or the cars. This way the mole knew that both teams left to attack, but didn’t exactly know where or even that it was an attack in three places at once.

            Assuming there is only one mole, who could fit in both situations?

          4. Another clue about mole’s identity could be that apparently Tattletale’s power didn’t warn her about them in time. Either they took a very stupid risk (early Taylor level of stupid!), or they knew (or had support of someone who knew) exactly how to fool her power.

          5. Sounds like there was some powerful Thinker, or maybe Stranger or Trump involved in this mole situation, and unless I misinterpret something that Thinker is not March – doesn’t sound like her specialty.

          6. Maybe Dinah finally figured out that Tattletale did not play fair with her in the epilogue of Worm. We learned that Dinah really doesn’t like when people do it – she even threatened to stop working for the PRT, because she thought they did something with her prophecies she didn’t like. (I don’t exactly remember at the moment what it was – was it mistreatment of Taylor after she surrendered to them?)

            Maybe she’s our mysterious Thinker?

    2. It is astounding, how little Cradle rubbed her nose in it. She had spent nearly the entirety of “Pitch” explaining to BT how helping Cradle was really her only option, because Snag was grumpy, LL was angry, and Ro’FF was Fallen. If Cradle doesn’t twist the knife a bit here, Antares is going to have to, whenever she finally shows up. “Cradle is pragmatic. He got it.” Hilarious, TT. What he got was you in several pieces.

  4. Wow! This chapter was great.

    Darlene is really cool, her power is neat and creepy in just the right way. And that fight was awesome.

  5. >“Tch,” Juliette made a small sound, because Aiden had mentioned Roman.

    Roman (formerly Romeo) and Juliette must have a hate-fest going on given their themeatic naming and incesteous insinuations thrown their way constantly by assholes.

    1. Would fifth trigger mate going in the pit at triggering explain their absence? Since the rest don’t remember the moment of triggering, they would not have met them. Except maybe before.

      Whose seats were next to the empty spot?

      1. I’m thinking more and more about their cluster being a much bigger part than the general cluster shenanigans, as far as the bigger picture goes.

        The only cluster that shares “dreams”, dreams which have a real world effect on them, an empty seat at the table, and triggering post gm. Broken cluster seems so possible.

        Plus, none of them have a power that even hints at making such a dreamworld. I’m really leaning to there having been a fifth(five fingers for a cluster who all make hands, lol) who would have such a power, but went into the pit.

        Further, Rain’s emotional response, post fire, progresses rather neatly from all the characterization we have of him without character sleepover from the cluster, but everyone who was actually in the fire is so perpetually keyed into the same negative emotions that Rain isn’t, I can’t help but think the fifth member is at play, which doesn’t need to be directly a shard and still would be mired in shard craziness if it was a bad trigger.

    2. Sounds like he has also been getting messages from Snag. I wonder if Rain also heard those, and has been just keeping his mouth shut for all those chapters?

      On the other hand maybe Love Lost and Cradle have finally managed to break into the dream-room (or have someone else do it for them), like that mysterious guest Cradle was supposed to “organize”, and who apparently ended up being cut to pieces. If this is the case, Snag could directly or indirectly (depending on exact method they used) communicate with them without Rain knowing.

    1. I had that thought as well. For the first half of the chapter I was like “aaaawww, such a cute kid!” And then she went and broke her own finger without even hesitating. And THEN she proceeded to stab a guy in the gut. Multiple times.
      Aiden, never EVER make her sad. Or angry. You wouldn’t like her if she’s angry.

  6. Holy Hell. Cradle needs to go down hard. Also red operator getting taken down by a preteen is hysterical.

      1. The parts that were separated werre being kept alive, yeah. She wasn’t killed by the separation, but the head-stomping cut off Darlene’s connection…

        1. I don’t think that killed her. One of the navigators got clawed at the neck with something that clearly wasn’t Cradle’s whip. He still survived, although that should have killed him. Even IF Tattle survived, she’ll need Panacea to fix this. (And I sure hope she’s not dead… :'[ )

          1. On the bright side if Cradle fails to capture Tattletale, it will be a perfect opportunity for her to bond much more with Antares, Tress, other New Wave members, Capricorn and maybe even the Navigators and Weld.

            She may also get a therapy session with Yamada, and that could be very interesting – in part because of what she thinks about how therapists can’t help her, because she analyses them faster, then they can analyze her, in part because she has been in such a bad place mentally (at least since her interlude, but I suspect it has been going on for years) that she really could use some professional help.

          2. Panacea’s a non-option.
            Physical contact with her is an Unacceptable risk, especially considering she’s One of Lab Rat’s test subjects now…

  7. Darlene’s power is scary and great. ‘Not as powerful’… No, probably not. Heartbreaker would have just hit Operator Red with a wave of self-loathing and despair and watched as he opened his own neck. And it’s really interesting that she connected to both Capricorns. That must have been a surprise for whoever was inside (and I’ve lost track of who it was; I think Byron?), being able to feel their own body moving along with the one outside.

    Juliette’s power’s good too, but she’d have not been able to beat Operator Red. She’d have held him still until somebody else arrived, but the chances of that being an ally is slim.

    1. Sounds like Byron was mostly outside, and Tristan has been inside, except for when he got sliced in half.

      Which… Ow. I imagine at that point, Tristan won’t mind taking a very long break inside his brother.

    2. It is possible for Julliette to use her power for solo offense, but it’s not convenient. The easiest way would be freeze them while they’re off balance (e.g. running) so they fall, then drop the power and attack them while they try getting up. A tricker method is to freeze them when they’re near a hazard so they can’t escape (grenade, encroaching fire, underwater, etc.). If they’re using a continuous fire weapon, she could wait until they’re firing but not quite at her, then freeze them to force them to deplete their ammo or overheat the weapon. And she is not somebody you ever want to try throwing a lit stick of dynamite at.

  8. Typo thread:

    We do need to have a conversation sometime about how you want rides places,
    -can’t tell if ‘rides places’ requires a ‘to’

    Let’s just get through tonight.” Tattletale said. Weary, she said, “We’ll talk to Imp about it, another time.”
    -paragraph reconstruction?

    If none of the young Heartbroken were with Aiden, then the older heartbroken would be,
    -it kills me that ‘heartbroken’ is capped and decapped in the same sentence

    Aiden broke away, leaving her with only the warmth on the one side, leeching away in the cold.
    -I think this should be ‘leeched away’

    each with the camera collars. With his other hand, he had his phone out, and he thumbed his way through until his phone was displaying the view through the camera.
    -singular camera?

    Jean Paul,
    -Jean-Paul

    four-times-normal -width
    -four-times-normal-width

    She had her nice coat, her velvet dress with the extra layers underneath, padding out the skirt portion, and black tights
    -underneath padding

    Darlene could feel the eyeballs slide against eyelid, turning Tattletale’s direction.
    -turning in

    Tattletale hung back. She looked at Capricorn and tress.
    -Tress

    And she reactivated the connection. Let him feel that pain of arm being twisted backward.
    -an arm?

    accumualted
    -accumulated

    the rest of her reaching own, groping for the blade.
    -down

    She knew he felt it, just as much as she felt the injury at the wrist for as long as her power was active.
    -his wrist or ‘their’ wrist if you want to be creepy

    She kicked up, toward the balls.
    -hmm

    Aiden noticed, turned her way, touching the wall.
    Not that it helped.
    She broke the connection. The absence was palpable.
    -It seemed like she only cut the connection to Aiden.

    She took an opportunity to cut him, and that was the point he stepped back, panting, bleeding, and drew two more knives.
    -the point when, the point at which

    Always keeping that horrible pain away from the fingertips she could feel just as much as she could feel her own.
    -what horrible pain? It’s as if she’s talking about the knife. Is she talking about the knife?

    He took a step back, and she felt the thigh muscle flare with pain
    -Okay, it’s on purpose. Got it.

    The wall fell away, and Cradle advanced, head low, passing between the four segments of Tattletale,
    -missing text

    1. ‘Underneath, padding’ works. There’s extra layers, which are padding out the skirt, making it bulky.

      1. She felt his expression like she felt his own (should this be “felt her own”?)
        ampitheaters > amphitheaters
        things’. > things.’
        were a worse > were worse
        view through the camera. (maybe “one of the cameras.”?)
        normal -width > normal-width (extra space)
        he had slipped his mask on > and he had slipped his mask on
        “They know where we are, don’t worry about that. Pulling the alarm lets them know we know.” (it’s obviously TT, but should this have a dialogue tag?)
        Capricorn and tress > Capricorn and Tress
        onto bench > onto a bench
        one swung > one swing

    2. > The only thing keeping Amias perched where he was was Amias, because Juliette wasn’t putting in much effort.

      Technically not an error, but wouldn’t something like “The only thing keeping Amias perched where he was was himself[…]” sound better?

      > […]and Papa and ‘the women’ were a worse adult examples.

      I’m probably the worst person here to make judgments about use of articles, but is this “a” correct in this sentence?

      > The spikes were on hinges, and didn’t actually reach directly back because the shape of her head didn’t let them them, but it formed a distinct look.

      Repeated “them”.

      > Darlene reached out, connected to Juliette, and felt the sensations bubble into existence- it wasn’t quite immediate,[…]

      > Juliette knew the routine, and she moved and flexed everything in order, clenching hands, then feet, then forearms, calves, thighs, stretching- Darlene locked in the sensations.

      > They passed the initial row of lockers, moving to the center of the crossroads- routes lined with lockers, benches, and places to study extended in all four directions.

      Needs spaces before dashes.

      “Vulturehawk and Thud,” Tress said. “Weld’s sources say they’re not from our Earth. There’s a language barrier.”

      “They’re here, in the building?”

      “Yeah,” Tattletale said. She pointed right. “Cradle, Operator Red, two of March’s underlings. We don’t know what those underlings do, either.”

      “What if we go the way we came?”

      “The rest of March’s group,” Tattletale said.

      “You picked a shitty way to go,” Tress told her.

      “I picked a good way. We pick and choose which group we want to bust through as we make a run for it. How strong are Thud and Vulturehawk?”

      “Strong,” Sveta said.

      “And Contender’s in that group. If he catches us, then there’s nothing we can do, unless we’re willing to abandon one of our own.”

      It is unclear who said “They’re here, in the building?” and “What if we go the way we came?”
      I guess that “I picked a good way. We pick and choose which group we want to bust through as we make a run for it. How strong are Thud and Vulturehawk?” and “And Contender’s in that group. If he catches us, then there’s nothing we can do, unless we’re willing to abandon one of our own.”, were told by Tattletale, but I’m also not completely certain. Could be Capricorn.

      “Cretan and Lionwing struck a deal,” Tattletale said.

      “Can you say anything that isn’t about how this is getting worse?”

      “We can go that way or that way,” Tattletale pointed. “Any way that isn’t to Cradle or March. The lines will be thinner.”

      Again not completely clear if it is Capricorn who said the middle line.

    3. > Capricorn blurred. His entire body and the blue armor he wore became just a little bit bigger, and where his eyes were, she could see a glow.

      Shouldn’t Capricorn’s armor change color whenever brothers switch? This time it feels like it slayed blue. Later in the chapter it felt like it changed to blue, so I doubt Tristan started wearing blue for some reason.

    4. ““You get used to it,” Chicken Little said.”
      Sudden switch to cape name (from Darlene’s pov), when “Aiden” is used before and after.

      “He hurled his mass and her mass around”
      Repetition.

      “segments of Tattletale,”
      Punctuation.

    5. > “Cradle- the most intact part of Tattletale said. “You have a mole. Someone who tipped you off.”

      Change “Cradle- to either “Cradle” or “Cradle-“.

  9. So, the traitor one-fourth of Tattletale mentioned was probably the same guy who slit the throat of the Navigator to end his suffering. Obviously, enough is enough and he is trying to sabotage everything from the inside.

    Meanwhile, Darlene and Adrian totally nailed that handshake. That’s what Adrian meant by “everyone working together.” He wants to create the sickest handshake of all time.

    1. Yeah, we’ve only seen the barest glimpse into the exciting, unexplored realm of powered handshakes. Imagine the possibilities if they got Rain or Chris on board, or if Victoria got the Wretch sorted out. There is a whole ‘nother universe out there! A whole ‘nother frontier of hand shaking combinations!

      1. Eventually a handshake so epic will be created that it will do at least two things.
        1- Cause any entities that witness it with all their senses to die from the awesomness.
        2-Cause a Big Bang for an alternate universe.

  10. The Heartbroken are surprisingly dangerous and effective in CQC for a band of Masters. Chicken Little, though, really needs to get in more practice at gathering flocks. He was decidedly under-birded for this fight.

    1. Considering that Regent, whose power could be used to hack people’s nervous systems to make them trip, drop something or vomit, was a Heartbroken, it’s not too surprising.

      However, this arc is showing how dangerous Masters can be, even if they don’t have full control of a minion.

    2. CL will be underpowered until TT pays Faultline to access that hellscape Earth where the full range of Coelurosaurians (“that clade containing all theropods more closely related to birds than to carnosaurs”) still reign supreme. TT may be biding her time, waiting for some sign that CL might someday become more mature. The only thing worse than a childish King Tyrannosaur might be a childish King Tyrannosaur controlled by the Heartbroken… It might help that his number two lady seems pretty well-adjusted, given how amazingly capable she is. (Seriously, if she hadn’t gotten so much screentime being so very charming and sensible, she would be the scariest child in the story right now after dismantling OR, the scary cleaver dude who already dismantled Precipice and would have done the rest of BT if Cradle hadn’t called him off.)

      On that day when CL’s potential is fulfilled, however? Woe betide anyone who has ever fucked with Undersider or Heartbroken. You like whipping people into pieces? A flock of T-rex is also pretty good at piecing folks out. Y’all best have a corner world into which you can flee and destroy the portal…

      1. I’d think CL’s affinity to birds would get him control over delicious Dromaeosauridae first and foremost instead of Tyrannosauridae.
        He’s already surrounded with clever girls, so he’s already got the right mindset for it.

        1. I expect he’ll recruit a variety of species. The raptors are fine for indoor work. Sometimes one needs a bit more power, for instance when facing fifteen or twenty Brutes. In that case, accept no substitute for the T-rex. Or maybe fifteen T-rexes? The only drawback is feeding them… CL might not want to stray too far from the portal to Dinosaur Earth.

      2. Ain’t had a chance to feed Rex yet
        His talons flex; your pants get wet
        Seems every goose chase leads to my claws, mmmmmm
        I’ve Heartbroken and monster pets
        Fighting me was no safe bet
        Your minions scream from between my jaws, mmmmmm

        Here they come for Chicken Little, oh yeah
        But he’s not so little, yeah!
        You know the sky is gonna fall
        Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know the sky is gonna fall

        Here they come for Chicken Little, oh yeah!
        But he’s not so little, yeah!
        You know the sky is gonna fall
        Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know the sky is gonna fall

        Ridin’ tall, Jurassic Man
        Birds shit on you in my home land
        Lookout sends me pictures of my prey, mmmmmm
        I was forged in the Skitter’s nest
        Now windows fog with dino breath
        You guys, please, can’t we all just work together?

        Here they come for Chicken Little, oh yeah!
        But he’s not so little, yeah!
        You know the sky is gonna fall
        Yeah, yeah, you know the sky is gonna fall

  11. Tattletale noooo…I hope Bonesaw or someone can put her back together 🙁
    Darlene is a badass. I had never considered the combat applications of her power before…

    1. Things I never thought I’d hear – “I hope Bonesaw can put Tattletale back together!” Yet so true lmao.

      1. Victoria Dallon upon seeing Tattletale atm. “As if it wasn’t bad enoughwhat you caused originally, now you’re doing fucking impressions of me!”

    2. Everybody always jumps to Bonesaw and Panacea. Boringly obvious. I’m rooting for Withdrawal gluing everybody back together with one of his goop mixtures.

        1. Dragon? Yes, this sounds like a plan. Paris will soon know the city-shaking might that is Mechacapricorn!

      1. The problem is not mere biological separation, I think. It is more of a spatial warp thing than anything else.

        I suspect that it won’t be someone like Bonesaw or Panacea who could fix the victims of Cradle’s whip but rather someone like Vista. Someone capable of bending space and attaching two otherwise discrete locations.

        Do we know anyone like that?

        1. I realize that simply sticking their parts together won’t be enough. That’s why I recommended a chemical tinker — since they were torn apart by a superpower, they’ll need to be repaired with super-glue.

        2. If it is a question of making the body parts start interacting with each other again, then Citrine should be able to do it. She can undo Gray Boy’s power, and the effect here looks very much like each body part being trapped in its own “bubble.” But of course this is all up to WB’s mercy…

        1. The Major Malfunctions in general are a pretty interesting bunch. I think they’ll be floating around the sides for a while, considering how they’ve been showing up for Breakthrough’s networking get togethers.

          1. Speaking of characters we haven’t seen in a while, I wonder how Doctor Wayne Darnall is doing these days? Has he been safe and healthy with the cape war going on? Was Victoria too busy to meet him lately? I may be wrong, but I think last time we saw him in chapter 9.1, and no more meetings with him have been mentioned since then.

            Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily want a chapter with yet another therapy session, not unless there is a good reason for it. I just want to know what has been going on with the Doc lately.

  12. 1. After seeing what Aiden and Darlene can do with a simple handshake or a hug, I would very much like to see them dance one day…

    2. One more thing about that “simple fist bump” Darlene gave Aiden:

    Ninety-five percent of it without looking at each other.
    […]
    “How many tries did that take to pull off?”

    “That was the first try,” Aiden said.[…]

    “It’s cool, don’t get me wrong-”

    “Very,” Tress said.

    Is this longing for a normal body with normal coordination and a sense of touch we can hear in Sveta’s voice?

    3. Wouldn’t Darlene be able to let any other C53s experience a sensation of having having a human body? Would she like to experiment with more C70s or breakers and the like? Could it be used to keep Weld a little more honest, at least during his more innocent “experiments” with Sveta? I guess she wouldn’t mind such feedback from him. And a probably most crazy idea – could Darlene’s power work on Dragon, and what consequences would be?

    4. It looks like we got an external conformation that both of the twin brothers’ bodies always exist, and one is just “stored” somewhere. Something apparently even the brothers didn’t know about, at least not the way they know now.

    5. It is quite telling that Tattletale is the only person who decided not to enter the network. You’ve got to stop hiding from people behind all of those walls Lisa!

    Or maybe it is just that Tattletale doesn’t like when other people distract her when she is trying to listen to her power? Sounds almost like her power does everything it can to keep her from forming closer connections with other people:

    Tattletale held up a hand for silence, which seemed insane, because the fire alarm was loud. Hearing anything that wasn’t from someone a few feet away was impossible.

    Tattletale turned at a right angle, a course that would have carried them even further from the entrance and the stairs that had led them down.

    She didn’t actually walk forward.

    “Cretan and Lionwing,” she said, pointing left. She pointed forward.[…]

    6. How much Darlene’s homeschooling network, and her insecurities about what people in that network thought about her shaped the power she ended up with? It could also have something to do with this:

    Capricorn blurred. His entire body and the blue armor he wore became just a little bit bigger[…]

    I think Darlene may be the first character to notice a change in sizes of brother’s bodies after seeing them change for what I assume is the first time. She also seems to be constantly aware of people’s facial expressions and body language including distance between people she can see (as in – when and how they enter each other’s personal spaces) – even those she is not connected to. Is it a side effect of her power (or possibly just experience gained through her power), or it is the other way around – she got this particular power because she was always so focused on those things? I love how these kinds of questions seem impossible to answer in this story.

    On the other hand the abuse (apparently involving being tied up) she and her family had suffered at hands of her father probably has something to do with combat application of her power, we saw at the end of the chapter. I guess she always was quite emphatic, and it also factored into her power resulting in weaponization of sympathetic pain. Pity her power apparently also suggests and reinforces masochistic tendencies. It is also interesting to see that someone apparently so emphatic can bring herself to using lethal force in self-defense.

    This chapter shows so much about what the Heartboken have been thorough…

    7. The more I see Aiden and hear him speak, and I’ve been keeping an eye on him at least since he triggered in Worm, the more he sounds like he wants to become not only the next leader of the Undersiders (a position Tattletale has possibly again indicated she doesn’t want, depending on how much we read into her comment about leaving command to Capricorn), but also the protagonist of one of the next books in the series.

    Has he lost his mind? Don’t get me wrong, there is a good chance that in next few years he will be the best candidate to take over the show from Tattletale, but doesn’t he realize how much it sucks to be such central figure in a Wildbow’s story? Also wouldn’t Wildbow veto having another master as a main character?

    8. This is an interestingly put together bit of text:

    Lionwing and Cretan were there. White and black armor, hers modeled with a griffon aesthetic, his modified with a bull, but no clear or obvious horns.

    Always amazing to see when Tattletale is accurate, Darlene thought.

    Cradle was there too, wearing a tinker’s outfit with a jacket.[…]

    As soon as Darlene thought Tattletale was accurate we see, that she was not. Cradle was supposed to be in a different area.

    9. Looks like Antares’ tactic with Love Lost’s computer payed off:

    Cradle audibly snarled on seeing them. “There they are. The job.”

    “Not without being paid,” Lionwing said, not budging.

    “You’re aware Tattletale is a mastermind? Why would we pull your pay in the middle of the job? Do the task and you will get paid.”

    It also shows that the order are there apparently just for the money (or at least mostly for the money).

    10. Was Capricorn considering doing something vengeful, and unheroic?

    Capricorn touched the lockers. Then he looked at Paris, and he hesitated.

    Why?

    “Tress!” Darlene tried. “Juliette can’t run until he’s dealt with! If she starts moving now then he’ll be right back after us!”

    “No,” Capricorn said.

    If he was going to say anything else, he was interrupted before he could.

    11. Cretan’s power is living up to his name. I wonder what Labyrinth will have to say about it. Vista will probably also want to have words with him.

      1. They apparently had an architect called Daedalus build an overcomplicated container for a certain guy with bull’s head. Nothing to do with me, but I imagine certain capes will notice someone apparently warping space to build similar containers.

    1. Chicken Little is one of the very few characters in this universe who I would feel pretty comfortable saying will not be a protagonist of a story in it. At least not one of the usual web serial length. I just dont see why WB would want to write a character that is virtually Taylor 2.0 in terms of his power. WB is a creative dude, I think he would want to branch out with the types of abilities his protagonists have.

      1. I also think Aiden’s power makes it less likely for him to be the next protagonist, but from what we saw from his interlude already, Wildbow can sure make his power function and feel very different from just “Taylor 2.0”.

        1. There is more to explore. I just don’t see why WB would want to write 1mil+ words on a character with fundamentally the exact same powers as his very first character he wrote to that length. If I’m him, I’d wanna change it up each time.

          1. Hitler, Hannibal, Han Solo, and Hannah Montana all have the exact same powers, and yet their stories are all very different.

            Anyway, he could always shake things up by going with a pair of POV characters instead of just one. “He’s the bird-controlling capespawn of a supervillain warlord. She’s the autistic half-human daughter of an Endbringer. Together, they fight crime! Join us in 2023 for the third exciting installment of Parahumans: Wuv.”

  13. Crazy theory time.

    In Sidepiece’s interlude Cradle says that if he or Love Lost will kill any member of their cluster, it is going to be Rain. In Love Lost’s mail to Lord of Loss we read that she has two enemies who need to die. There is no ‘if’ here. What if none of those two enemies who must die is Rain? What if Snag’s warning is about something so big that Rain is no longer the main focus of their actions? Maybe this is a part of the reason why Love Lost let Breakthrough go in the Lyme center? Maybe it is also somehow connected to the fact that apparently Cradle had to cut Tattletale to pieces? Maybe Love Lost and Cradle are even doing Cauldron-like job right now – doing some terrible things to save what or who they can from some great threat? They apparently have common acquaintances with Teacher, so maybe they are a part of yet another splinter group of Cauldron?

    1. One point against my theory is that I don’t doubt that Love Lost still wants some sort of vengeance against Rain (not necessarily death – the cluster members always felt like they were on the fence about it), and won’t be satisfied until it happens, but maybe she predicts that soon something bad will happen to him. Something so bad that whatever she could do it couldn’t bring him more suffering, death would be a mercy at that point.

      1. Or maybe Love Lost has accepted the fact that if Rain is killed, he will share Snag’s fate, and she considers it neither dead enough nor suffering enough for Rain.

        1. Maybe she is looking into other options to make Rain eternally suffer? Like Gray Boy’s time loop? It could explain why she suddenly seems interested in people who want to go after these sorts of effects. It could also explain why Cradle wants Tattletale – he wants her to show him a safe way to do something like this to Rain.

  14. Does anyone else find this constellation kind of weird? Apparently, March’s group shifted to Cradle’s place, and Love Lost went to March’s place, leaving her own place under the watch of only three capes.

    Granted, the Lord of Loss/Nursery combo was insanely scary, and LoL has a reputation that would make them comfortable to leave the base under his watch, but I still find it weird that none of the three leaders (Cradle, March, Love Lost) were present there. So I’m kind of left to wonder how capable March’s timing ability is, and if she could have expected the good guys to win that fight.

    The enormous concentration of power on Cradle’s place is logical, if he knew Tattletale would be there he’d want to be prepared. It seems like overkill, but they needed so many capes to box Tattletale in.

    That leaves us with Love Lost’s group, who apparently just lucked out? There is no way they could have predicted a trigger event to happen during that fight, right? right? At least they did have enough unpowered henchpeople to take immediate advantage of the situation, and these henchpeople didn’t really participate in the fight before the trigger happened. So we have three options there:
    a) The leadership simply miscalculated the chances of that fight
    b) They were meant to loose
    c) They predicted the trigger (let’s hope it’s not that)

    Makes you wonder what their big scheme plan is if it wasn’t just “capture all those guys and we win”

    1. A lot could be explained if we knew the mole’s identity. It could tell us how much Cradle and co. knew about the upcoming attack. Also remember that Cradle apparently was interested in paying triple price for Tattletale’s services during the villains meeting.

      Since that deal apparently did not go through, Tattletale apparently had a personal reason not to work with him, and because later Lisa told Aiden that the Undersiders may need to fight Breakthrough at some point, I doubt the reason was that she was determined to keep Rain safe from the rest of his cluster – she probably still doesn’t feel any particular loyalty towards him. This means that Tattletale probably refused to work with Cradle, because he needs her to work with March on something. Time loops, and such I wrote about in the theory just above seem to fit.

      1. When it comes to the fight at Love Lost’s place it probably didn’t matter if LoL’s people would win or not. Their powers (especially LoL’s and Nursery’s) seem particularly well suited to prolong a fight, to pin even superior force long enough that they can’t disengage to help elsewhere in time, and this is probably what was more important than winning that particular fight.

        One thing that probably surprised the villains was that Victoria had the idea to use Love Lost’s computer to help other teams without having to leave Love Lost’s place first.

        1. Also even if Love Lost could figure out that her computer could theoretically be used to do something like this, she probably didn’t predict that Rain could break her passwords so quickly.

          1. This distribution of forces may also mean that Love Lost is seen as a less important partner in whatever Cradle and March are planning to do with Tattletale. She was used to provide the mercs, and to guard the bases Tattletale wasn’t supposed to attack – basically providing basic security to less important bases, but wasn’t with March and Cradle in Cradle’s place, where they were waiting for Tattletale.

            Sounds a lot like that theory I had back when Breakthrough and Undersiders met shortly after March’s attack on the truck stop – March is working closely with Cradle, but her alliance with Love Lost is purely tactical, and may end with Cradle leeching Love Lost’s power, when she is no longer useful in other ways.

          2. In fact maybe Love Lost’s connection to March and Cradle is like Legend’s membership in Cauldron was at the beginning of Worm – he thought he belonged to the inner circle, but the other members kept a lot of secrets from him, because they knew he wouldn’t approve their methods. It is possible that Love Lost is in the same situation – Cradle deceived her into thinking that she is his equal partner in their dealings with March, while in fact LL is just March’s and Cradle’s pawn.

            If this is the case Tattletale might have been right to tell Victoria to go to Love Lost first.

          3. Or perhaps I’m reading the whole situation wrong, and Cradle did not want to cut Tattletale to pieces, and did so because of a new deal he just struck with Cretan and Lionwing after it turned out that Love Lost won’t pay them.

            Only what would Cretan and Lionwing want with Tattletale, and why would they ask for money first? Did they need the money to buy Tattletale’s services later, or were they sent by a precog (like Dinah for example) who predicted that Tattletale will end up working for them one way or another?

    2. Well… do we actually know what was in that drug Colt took? What if it was somebody’s variation on a Cauldron vial? I seem to recall somebody made off with a bunch of them at one point.

      Absolute speculation, but it could be that Nailbiter gave Colt that pill knowing it’d give her the potential to trigger, if not necessarily the guarantee. Nailbiter went through special effort to recruit her, then did the whole “are you with us or against us” thing, and then gives a special drug to help Colt make the decision to stay?

      Seems suspect.

      1. The Dealer’s had his stock stolen by Teacher. And they were, in turn, stolen direct from Cauldron.

        And it doesn’t seem suspect to me. Nailbiter’s put a lot of effort into recruiting Colt and keeping her there, so encouraging Colt to stay ensures that effort remains worthwhile. If Colt leaves, that effort is no longer worthwhile, and Nailbiter has to go recruit a new Colt.

  15. Also, we got confirmation that the chop-up effect only applies to one of the Capricorn twins, but it does take a bit longer for the fragmented one to switch out.
    Now I wonder, what will happen to them now in the face of apparent loss? The smart thing would be for Byron to switch back to already-injured Tristan, so that he is ready in case of an inevitable escape attempt. The question is, how would that work for Tristan? If I remember correctly, they both feel the physical sensations of the currently active body, so Tristan is probably quite happy about being in the back seat right now.

    1. Since Darlene could feel all parts af Tattletale and Tristan, and her power tells her where other people are in relation to her, I wonder if it can be used to locate the body parts Navigators are missing. Does she have enough range to do it if at least one of the body parts are close to her? It could also help if Cradle gets away with only the part of Lisa containing her head.

  16. Hmm… just so I understand correctly:
    Tattletale, the famous and powerful Thinker did not realize her own hired mercs did sell her out?
    So all three of their missions turned out to be ambushes? With no clue for her to latch on to?

    1. I wrote about it above in the thread started by negadarkwing. I think some other power has been interfering with Tattletale’s. I suspect an involvement of a powerful Thinker (probably not March though- not her specialty), or maybe Stranger or Trump. This theoretical parahuman could either be the mole or a person supporting the mole.

  17. Dude. Cradle is cold.
    Lovelost may be crazy, but she’s competent, and sounds like Vicky could actually reason with her.
    Irrational, but smart as hell. Put a knife to her throat and she’ll Back Down.

    … these are important things, in superhero land.

  18. First I thought that Darlene’s power is great for supporting and coordination but useless if she gets separated from the rest of her group, and then she kills a combat thinker all by herself. Holy fork.
    Also, Cradle REALLY needs to die.

    1. Rule #1 of the parahumans universe: if a power sounds harmless, it’s probably lethal in some horrifying fashion

      1. Even Skidmark’s Shaker 2 power of designating slippery areas that slipped in one-way only, which could be layered and, according to Wildbow, had the potential to knock over Behemoth or Leviathan.

        Don’t believe me? Watch as he layers it next to a car then slowly pushes the car onto the slippery area and hits you with it… Except that required more time and planning than Skidmark was probably capable of.

        1. Most Brutes can brush off car-missiles for breakfast, and speedsters will just slip around/through it to stab you in the face with the keys.
          Most Movers would also negate Skidmark’s ability to disorient them by denying stable footholds.

          I’m not saying he can’t do anything dangerous with his power (especially with a few friends to synergise with), but there are a lot of counters to his shtick. Only a few capes are really dangerous on their own, mostly those one-cape-army Trumps with crazy tricks in their hats.

          1. Oh, I’d have loved for Skidmark to live long enough to actually get into a cape fight with Skitter and the Undersiders. His power was really lame, but also really interesting. Using his power to move around the battlefield while disorienting and confusing his foes. Particularly since the Merchants are the only major group of Brockton Bay the Undersiders didn’t fight; it’d be interesting to have seen all of them, Squealer and the guy who made armour out of nearby trash.

    2. I’m not entirely sure Operator Red is dead. He got stabbed multiple times in his belly. It is not that rare to survive such wounds if you end up on an operating table quickly enough (say within half an hour to an hour). Of course a lot depends on which organs were damaged exactly. For example if she managed to reach his kidneys or a major artery, he is probably already dead from blood loss, but otherwise he may still have a chance.

      1. I hope he’ll stay dead. That will be the only good news after two lost fight and so many of our sympathetic heroes/villains being taken hostages or exposed to fates worse than death. A monster like Operator Red should just stay dead so we can feel a little better after such clusterfuck.

        1. Do you really want Darlene to have someone like him on her conscience? I don’t. After everything she’s been through her life, I think she deserves better.

          1. Why not? She said she is a better person than her father, and personally I believe her, and would very much like her to stay this way. Some Heartboken may be as bad as Heartbreaker, but honestly I haven’t seen any of them, except maybe Cherish, do anything to prove this is the case yet. They do have potential to become monsters, but first and foremost they are victims, and I want to believe that not all victims of monsters have to become a new monster themselves.

          2. And heck, even the worst monster can sometimes grow their conscience back. Just look what happened to capes like Bonesaw, Glaistig Uaine or Goblin King.

          3. > Do you really want Darlene to have someone like him on her conscience? I don’t.

            Why not? I don’t think that killing someone who was obviously ready, willing and going to kill you should be a burden on your conscience. And I agree with you that Operator Red might yet survive but I, too, hope he doesn’t. When one party is willing to kill and the opposing party is not, and thus is forced to defend themselves again and again while not fighting at the top of their ability, it can only go so long (and the suspension of disbelief can only do so much if the fighting just goes on and on like that).

          4. It is always bad when a kid becomes a killer. Also remember that Operator Red didn’t exactly begin by trying to kill her. He just told her to cuff herself, and really started fighting only when she used her power against him. That hardly sounds like a killing intent, so killing him in return (and especially continuing to stab him after he was out of the fight) would exceed the normal limits of self-defense.

            What Darlene did is understandable in the heat of battle, but it would suck for her to realize later that she basically ended up killing an already defenseless person who never intended to kill her in the first place.

          5. As much as I like her (especially after this fight) I still have to admit that Darlene is a psycho and she doesn’t seem to have a conscience yet (maybe she’ll grow one with age) but right now she’s more like: yes, I killed an enemy. I’m a strong heartbroken, Aiden will be proud of me. I feel so good about myself. She’s certainly not crying and feeling very sorry for what she did. She did GOOD, I agree with what she did, anyone helping Cradle/Love Lost is a monster just like them and deserve to either die or suffer fate worse than death, but she’s not exactly a sweet child like Kenzie. She’s a HEARTBROKEN.

          6. > It is always bad when a kid becomes a killer.

            It’s always bad when anyone becomes a killer, or even has to fight. Kids especially, but a kid with powers is pretty much forced to stop being a kid.

            > Also remember that Operator Red didn’t exactly begin by trying to kill her. He just told her to cuff herself, and really started fighting only when she used her power against him.

            Well, she used her power on him when he threatened her with a knife to her throat. It’s pretty clearly signalling “do what I say, or I might kill you”. That’s one step better than just going straight for a kill, but interpreting it as an absence of a killing intent is a stretch. It does not help that cuffing oneself in Cradle’s headquarters would be worse than suicidal, even if one would be in principle willing to surrender.
            And regarding the limits of self-defence – Darlene could afford to hold back more if powers weren’t in play. As it is, an “already defenseless” person was capable to land a strike which rendered her blind with pain.

          7. @david

            I don’t think that Darlene is a psychopath. She did attack Operator Red more out of fear than anything else. That is hardly a psychopathic behavior.

            @T.T.O.

            > It’s always bad when anyone becomes a killer, or even has to fight. Kids especially, but a kid with powers is pretty much forced to stop being a kid.

            Agreed, though my point was that normal kids not only have an extra layer of innocence to lose compared to adults (which I believe Darlene still has at least to some extent), but also that the simplest way to produce an emotionless, professional killer is often to make a child or a teenager kill someone in cold blood, as their emotional barriers against killing defenseless people ar easier to remove through this sort of trauma. At least this is the conclusion I reached after reading a few books which went into a topic of executors who during world war two carried out death sentences passed by underground courts in occupied Poland. From what I read very few of those executors were very successful if they carried out their first execution before they turned twenty years old.

            As for Operator Red and his willingness to kill I’m not entirely sure he was willing to do so, at least before Darlene started using her power. A knife to the throat can be a bluff. I’m also not entirely sure that Cradle wanted to kill anyone (at least in that group) at that point. He seemed to be more focused on taking Tattletale alive and in pieces.

            As for Darlene’s self-defense I hardly see how Operator Red could still fight after Darlene stabbed him enough times that he first fell to his knees, and then:

            The Operator slumped to the ground, and she felt everything, felt the blood welling out, sticky between fabric and skin.

            after which point:

            She stabbed him a few more times, trying to hurry him along his way.

            This hardly felt as self-defense anymore. More like a deliberate attempt to kill a complete defenseless person as quickly as possible. At that point it could be maybe explained by a combination of reminders of panic after a near death situation and willingness to shorten the suffering of a foe who Darlene was probably was convinced was beyond saving. However after the fight with Cradle’s and March’s groups she may face the reality that maybe all of those blows he received when he was still fighting wouldn’t be fatal, and it were the blows he received after he was no longer able to fight that decided his fate.

          8. > From what I read very few of those executors were very successful if they carried out their first execution before they turned twenty years old.

            As much as I would like thw world to be as I wrote it, I messed it up. I meant to say “From what I read very few of those executors were very successful if they carried out their first execution AFTER they turned twenty years old.”

            Unfortunately teenagers apparently make better murderers than adults do.

          9. And the worst thing about breaking that psychological barrier against killing in cold blood? If the two examples of former Home Army executors are anything to go by, once you break this barrier it stays broken for the rest of your live. Neither of those two managed to live a normal life after the war. One of them even couldn’t stop killing. It didn’t even matter who anymore. He considered joining a armed anti-communist resistance, and ended up becoming a member of the communist Security Service tasked with fighting those same armed anti-communists he wanted to join.

  19. I feel really dumb that I only just NOW got that Lord of Loss is abbreviated LoL, and he uses that and the laughing emoji in ever sentence…

    1. Well, with his power and personally you wouldn’t expect him to laugh quietly, would you? He’s pretty much always loud, so what other abbreviation for laughter would he ever need?

  20. I kind of want Tattletale and Capricorn/Tristan to die. Death will be much better for them than to “live” for the rest of their lives in pieces while in UNIMAGINABLE PAIN (I don’t think that Riley or Amy will be able to heal them, because this is not their specialty, this is more like Cradle’s unique specialty and he’ll rather enjoy knowing that they’ll suffer forever than to ever want to put them back). This is a worse fate than death. Worse fate than even the fates of Jack Slash and Cherish.

    1. There’s accepted fanon that Riley’s speciality is prosthetics. This I wholeheartedly disagree with. If she was prosthetics, then Rain would not say, of Ashley’s hands, that they are outside Bonesaw’s speciality. Likewise, she’s done lots of things with prosthetics, but she’s done other things too. Such as Cherish’s fate, which needed Mannequin’s tech to pull off.

      I believe Riley’s speciality is in surgery, with prosthetic technology being an adjacent tree she can access as a result (prosthetic limbs are attached with surgery). She’s sewn two capes together in such a way Panacea- who can read something’s biology from the DNA up- couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. She built robots that can hijack somebody’s nervous system. She made Jack Slash immune to having his throat cut by… I don’t know, but she did something there, and I doubt it was a prosthetic.

      If anyone can fix Tristan or Tattletale, or the Navigators, it’s going to be her. They’ve been ripped apart and kept alive with tinker tech, all Riley has to do is stitch them back together again. For a tinker specialising in surgery, that’s less challenging than creating Murder Rat. Or sewing somebody to a wall, lengthening their nerves and keeping them alive in constant pain and unable to be rescued because to reach their body you have to walk over their nerves and make things worse- which she’s also done. To Grue. Riley can totally do this.

      And also remember this is not Cradle’s speciality. His speciality is giant hand-arm conglomerate mech-suits, and this was produced using information he’d gained by studying Disjoint, and possibly also studying Love Lost and Snag’s own variants of hand/arm technology to produce the whip delivery system.

    2. This is totally within Amy’s specialty, as her specialty is “altering living things” on basically any level she wants. She can case-53 anyone she felt like, and even alter how the connection to shards work, allowing bypasses to certain limits.
      As far as Riley… actually, this works too. Not only has she had experience with other tinker’s tech and utilizing it in her own specialty, her specialty is basically designed for the type of thing required to fix them.

      But honestly? The absolute best bet is probably within Dragon. It’s still up for debate if Dragon triggered as a para-something, but something we all agree on is her ability to understand and make use of any tinker-tech as if their specialty were hers. As long as there’s no rule still in her system somewhere preventing altering of human material, with her knowledge of riley’s, Mannequin’s, Cradle’s, Defiant’s, Blasto’s, and the Clone Tinker’s tech, there’s no reason she CAN’T fix them.

      1. Yes, actually. There’s a big reason why Dragon can’t fix them. She can understand, duplicate and reverse-engineer any Tinker’s tech she wants, and combine them to work even better. What she cannot do is innovate. She cannot build something that she hasn’t seen. Her Dragon-Craft are based on vehicles designed by vehicle-tinkers, with improvements in the jet system from Stinger the missile-tinker, cameras by Kenzie with lenses from someone else.

        This would require innovation, as it’s never been done before, so nobody knows how to fix it. Particularly since Cradle’s tech has never been captured for her to examine, so she doesn’t know what it looks like or how it works.

  21. Considering Vista’s contamination of the crisis scene, doesn’t Cretan’s power sound like a natural counter to Lookout’s time camera?

      1. Also a nerd joke, that seems a bit on topic:

        “-clidean space,” Tattletale was saying.

        Yes, yes Lisa the physics figured out a long time ago that the space is non-Euclidean. The very fact that you can have weight is a proof of that.

  22. Maybe I should’ve asked this several chapters ago, but hey, I’m confused again! So I’m gonna ask now.

    Cradle is the person who tears people into still-living pieces? According to the comments this was revealed earlier, when? I seem to have missed that 🙁

    Why are the mercenaries doing their jobs when they know that they won’t be getting paid? This really, really annoyed me. In that kind of situation, that isn’t something that can be just shrugged off like it was. That’s a really big deal to people who are risking their lives and would otherwise be unrelated bystanders. So, what are their other motivations, I guess?

    Lookout and Chicken Little talked and tried to be friends. Then, the confusing bit happened. For some reason that was bad, and TT + Imp attacked Breakthroughs data collection. What? I’m defo missing something here. I know I am. I’m not sure how I manage to read this without picking this stuff up xD

    Why has Tattletale become…uh…so much more of an asshole than she was? I mean…simply the way she responded to the news of the fact that Victoria f***ed with the money without telling her made her respond in a way that I would call almost venomous. Which actually seems out of character, to me, considering Worm. But then…maybe headaches and the end of your world do that to you? I guess? Help me out here. Am I wrong about her being meaner now? Is it justified (if she is)?

    Does anyone else feel like we’re overdue a happy chapter? Where nothing happens and the plot doesn’t move along? Maybe with a bit of character development or exposition? I don’t know.

    If you read this: Thanks!
    If you respond: Thanks a lot more!
    If you respond in a helpful way: Thank you so incredibly much! Have a cookie! On the house! Courtesy of this website!

    1. It was revealed that Cradle was the one responsible for the tearing-apart-attack during Sidepiece’s interlude.

      The mercs are doing their jobs because they have been convinced that they will get paid after all. There will just be a delay until the account is unfrozen or until money can be shifted from elsewhere.

      Chicken Little is not in trouble for talking to Lookout. He’s in trouble for sending Lookout photos of Tattletale’s notes without permission over unsecured networks. Imp attacked Breakthrough’s data to try to stop the leak before the data spread further.

      Tattletale and Victoria have never gotten along. Now Tattletale’s empire is falling apart, the teammates she’s going way out of her way to help and losing her empire over don’t even like her, her protege is going behind her back to leak dangerous, sensitive information to the opposition, and she’s having to work with Victoria. Not surprising that she gets cranky when unknown actions by Victoria throw off her power and put her at risk of being dismembered. I would be cranky too.

      And I think this was the happy chapter…

      1. Thank you, that was clear, concise and I now understand what’s going on. I think. You never truly know with Wildbow.

        Also…to the last thing…seriously? F***.

        (Posting this from iPad, not phone, am same person)

Comments are closed.