Intermission 7.7

Eugene Lewis

2002, November 16: Winnipeg, Canada

I stepped out of the Doorway onto the rooftop of a high-rise apartment. The PRT's expansion into Canada was a methodical one. Even with support from the Canadian government, there was a limited amount of funding so Rebecca strategically placed offices in major cities, starting of course with Ottawa. It meant that though Winnipeg was the provincial capital of Manitoba, its PRT presence was somewhat lacking compared to state capitals in the United States.

'Maybe that's why he's active here,' I mused as I flared up my cloaking device. I seldom disclosed just what my tinker specialization was and when I did, I simply said "wavelengths" and left it at that. Most people assumed that to mean light, which for them meant laser beams with a few neat auxiliary knick knacks like my flight pack.

They didn't typically think "invisibility cloak." Even when they considered it a possibility, "Hero" was such a visible public figure that they assumed it wasn't something I'd built.

My "cloak" wasn't a physical garment. It was a fist-sized module attached to the back of my chestplate just above the flight pack that expelled what I called a photon haze. The haze of refracted light was manipulated to create an invisibility effect. It took several tries and a consultation with Zero Day but I eventually managed to develop a software that processed information in real time, altering my visible light and infrared signature to perfectly mimic whatever was directly behind me, even while moving.

I mostly used it to take peaceful flights for some me-time across the skyline but it did come in handy when I wanted to investigate something quietly as well.

I hovered down into the city proper, twisting a tiny, whale-shaped device attached to my belt to negate the sound of my flight pack. The whale was a gift from Bluesong, one I'd kept for years now.

I flew just above the heads of pedestrians as I looked for the seedier parts of town. Winnipeg was not a large city, only having a population slightly north of 700,000, but that was enough to have its share of societal outcasts.

I was here following Istanbul and Algiers because I'd heard through the grapevine that the Protectorate branch here had an unusually high concentration of Case-53s. It had been an amusing little statistical factoid until the information sank in and rang alarm bells in my mind.

That was of course impossible; the rate at which Cauldron was releasing Case-53s into Earth-Bet had trickled since the onboarding of Peter Pan. The Forest of Babylon was now populated by both regular humans and Case-53s who'd largely regained their human forms. Not only were most of them perfectly happy to live peaceful lives in what amounted to an enchanted forest, their presence in Andy's little corner of our world ensured that Scion would avoid turning his gaze towards Cauldron HQ. We wanted them there.

Which begged the question: Where were these new capes coming from? If they weren't true Case-53s, who was making them?

Though the local Protectorate managed to recruit a few new members, most were too unstable. They exhibited erratic behavior and were far more aggressive than normal, sometimes lashing out with intent to kill over perceived slights despite both understanding English and having full control over their inhuman appendages.

There were so many "Case-53s" transported to parahuman asylums that some had to be trafficked out of the province to larger cities like Ottawa and Toronto.

The more I heard about Winnipeg, the firmer my suspicion became. And so, I'd left Narwhal and Masamune in charge of the Guild for a week or two so I could follow up on a hunch.

Chris Kaminski was given the moniker "Lab Rat" by Andy in a brief covering noteworthy villains. More specifically, he dedicated a lot of time to describe those who would become future cell block leaders of the Birdcage. Unfortunately, he knew a decent amount about the Lab Rat's powers but little about his appearance and life.

As far as he knew, Lab Rat had two siblings, an older sister and a younger brother. His sister was a serial killer who killed her youngest brother, which likely caused Lab Rat's trigger. Beyond the bare bones, I was told that Lab Rat was a drugs or mutagenic tinker who specialized in field tests on living things, preferably humans.

Those test subjects would be subjected to rapid, temporary mutation during which time their fight or flight instincts would be driven to extremes. Recovery from his experimental formulas was not guaranteed and some were left with physical or mental mutations that persisted. Andy said his modus operandi before finally being taken down would be to experiment on the transient population.

With that kind of description, I could only assume Lab Rat was active here in Winnipeg. His formulas worked through injection or consumption so I made sure to put on a fully covering version of my costume.

I wandered around the slums of Winnipeg, looking for the man in question. There was the odd homeless man but the city was largely free of violent crime, certainly none involving parahumans that I felt the need to intervene in. My presence here was something of a secret for now; I didn't want Lab Rat to go to ground.

I looked at the man's photograph. He wasn't officially wanted, there was real concern of a biotinker outbreak, so the photo in my files was of his high school graduation. I would have respected the unwritten rules but he didn't bother with a mask as far as I knew.

Andy hadn't known Lab Rat's last name but the information he had allowed me to build up enough breadcrumbs to find his civilian identity with some minor bit of background research. A serial killer sibling? Who also happened to be a woman? Who had two brothers and was suspected of murdering one of them?

Considering men were ten times as likely to be serial killers, the first question alone greatly limited my list of suspects.

Lab Rat was a man who looked nothing like a stereotypical tinker. Most people thought of men in lab coats or power armor, perhaps with glasses and pocket calculators in their civilian guise. Tinkers were the tech-geeks of the parahuman world and most conformed to the stereotype in one form or another.

Not so for Lab Rat. Chris Kaminski was a tall, broad-shouldered man with misshapen teeth and unkept, black hair. He had thick brows that gave his eyes a shaded appearance and a bit of a belly that wasn't excessive but was still noticeable. He looked more like a stereotypical brute than a tinker.

Because the city's surveillance system was lacking, I had little choice but to patrol the areas it could not reach. Traffic cams could only do so much after all. A handful of local PRT officers and policemen were told to keep me abreast of any "monster" sightings but I had little hope for those because Lab Rat's potions were fire-and-forget sorts of products. There was no telling how long he would remain on-site to observe his work, or if he'd remain at all.

X

2002, November 20: Winnipeg, Canada

Lab Rat turned out to be a hard man to track. I didn't think he knew of my presence in the city but increased rumors of monster sightings had put cops on high alert, which in turn made him cautious.

I supposed I could have asked Fortuna, but she had asked that she not be disturbed as she expected an endbringer to attack soon and the one on rotation was the bird bitch herself. She was off nudging world events with the Path set towards "minimizing loss of life while optimizing the growth of powerful capes," whatever that might mean.

Ultimately, it was more luck than skill that led me to him. Four days after my arrival, I stumbled on two men conducting what looked like a drug deal. I would have passed them by had I not felt something odd about the dealer.

I wasn't sure what that initial sense of wrongness was, only that I'd been taught to follow my gut in the field. I backtracked for a moment and sure enough, I had a match to the picture. He had a five o'clock shadow and his hair was scruffier than when he'd been spotted last but the facial recognition software built into my visor was not fooled.

Perhaps that was my problem; I'd begun scanning for homeless people but not drug addicts who he could fool easily into taking his products.

I alighted atop a street lamp to listen.

"-the right drug?" the buyer, some kid who couldn't be older than seventeen, asked.

Lab Rat held out a matchbox-sized container. "Yeah, man, this the new upper going around."

"What's in it?"

"It's a new version of molly I got my hands on. Ecstasy, you know? Heard it's the best high you can get without meth."

"Shit, and you're just giving it out?"

Lab Rat rubbed the back of his head in mock sheepishness. It looked at odds on the tall man but was enough to fool the druggie. "I got some but I gotta know if it's the real deal, you know? And a good dealer doesn't take his own products. Take some and let me know how the high is, yeah?"

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Shit, alright. A free high's a free high."

I took that as my cue and shot the matchbox out of the druggie's hand with a pinpoint laser as I decloaked. I twirled my pistol around my finger by the trigger guard; a hero needed some style after all. "Far be it for me to rain on your parade, but that's not molly, bud."

"Hero? What the fuck are you doing here?" the druggie exclaimed. He started to back away. Whatever he did around here, facing a cape was likely out of his paygrade. He turned and ran as soon as he realized this wasn't a normal drug bust.

"Hero," Lab Rat grimaced at the same time. "I don't suppose you're here to talk shop?"

"No, no I am not. You are Chris Kaminski, aren't you?" I asked rhetorically. I almost defaulted to "Lab Rat" but remembered that the name was one provided by Andy. Seeing how Chris lacked a mask, courtesy demanded I give him the chance to name himself. "I'd prefer it if you came quietly."

"What am I wanted for? I'm not a gangster."

"The innocent act? You can't really pull it off, Chris. How about that you're the chief suspect in several missing persons cases for starters?"

"No, I suppose I can't, not if the great Hero himself came to pay me a visit."

"Just surrender, Chris. You can test your products in a safe space, without hurting people. You don't need to be like this."

His response to that was to reach into his pocket and pull out a different matchbox. This one was not made of metal but rigid, easily cracked plastic. He hurled it onto the ground, only for it to shatter and release a small swarm of beetles into a puddle of blue fluid. They must have lapped up the fluid because they grew at an alarming rate.

When his dossier reached our desk, Rebecca and I had an academic discussion on whether he should be considered a true biotinker or not. According to Andy, his potions did not actually morph the biology of the drinker, at least not initially. Instead, they stored the body of the drinker while drawing in mass from their surroundings to create whatever abomination Lab Rat envisioned. Which meant mutations actually happened as the drinker's body was returned from whatever subspace it was in and meshed unfavorably with the creature that occupied its space.

Again, purely academic. For all intents and purposes, he was a biotinker. Though if I had any doubt as to Andy's theory about him storing the bodies, it was gone now. No amount of nutrient slop, even tinkertech slop, could stimulate such a rapid growth in the original insects if the original body was being used. Even tinkertech at least paid lip service to basic biology.

The beetles were replaced by monstrosities the size of motorcycles. They each possessed sixteen pairs of scything legs and flat, segmented bodies reminiscent of centipedes. Each segment of their body was also occupied by a set of long, narrow wings like a dragonfly's. Their mouths were made of grasping finger-like limbs that led into a maw full of squat, grinding teeth. A whip-like tail sprouted from the final segments.

I considered shooting them down before they could reach their full size but decided against it. It was perhaps arrogant of me but I didn't think someone who made biological constructs could do much against a forcefield made using hardlight wavelengths folded across half a dozen dimensions. Just in case, I examined them using an x-ray scanner to see if there were any outstanding internal anomalies, and so I could target the core of their nervous systems.

If I had to be honest with myself, I wanted to see what they could do. How did he plan to control these bugs? Was it pheromone-based? Or did Lab Rat's Shard know to keep its host safe? Would the bugs listen to Lab Rat or would they rampage? Did damage transfer to the beetles' original bodies? He'd clearly had these prepped in case he got cornered so surely he had a plan, right?

Tinkertech was so fascinating!

There was some screaming in the background now; my arrival and the insects' transformations had drawn the attention of a handful of bystanders. I marked them on my HUD so I could ensure their safety.

Chris let out a sharp whistle. I raised an eyebrow as the eleven centipede-like constructs rose into the air on their many wings in clear defiance of basic physics. It seemed his Shard was done paying lip service.

They made for me with the sound of dozens of wings. The bugs were big enough that the noise was more akin to the scything of helicopter blades than the buzzing of flies.

I hovered out into the middle of the empty street to get a bit more room and observed their assault. They accelerated deceptively quickly, going from stationary to forty-eight miles per hour in the span of three seconds.

"Mid-level mover. Three? Low four?" I mumbled under my breath. My words were being recorded for my personal records. A rudimentary AI would sift through both visual and audio recordings for relevant data before completing the AAR, easily the most convenient thing I'd made lately. I dodged out of the way as the first reached my position, only to have to move again when its centipede-like torso twisted on a dime to correct its trajectory. "Decent speed, but it's the flight and multiple pairs of wings that give it a better rating. Its agility is likely to give a full PRT team trouble."

Then the rest caught up and I was forced to rise further. I deployed a hardlight shield in my left arm and allowed one to collide into it. Immediately, its finger-like maw began to tear and scrape at it futilely. I glanced at the readings coming in. "Bite force of approximately 3,600 psi, roughly comparable to a saltwater crocodile. The finger-like appendages around its maw have enough force to tear flesh and kevlar with ease. Close combat is ill-advised."

The hardlight shield over my arm reshaped itself at my command, extending out in a razor-sharp point that impaled the creature through the mouth. Another four tried to dogpile me in the air but my flightpack had no trouble getting me out of the way even with one of them attached to my arm. I continued to make observations. "Lacks armor on the inside of their mouths. A strike to the brain will kill."

I immediately felt a little embarrassed stating the obvious but one could never be too careful when it came to biotinkered constructs. For all I knew, Lab Rat's other constructs possessed decentralized brain structures similar to octopi.

The corpse of the flying centipede slid from my arm with a gross squelching noise and I watched it drop. Off forty feet away, Lab Rat had begun to run.

Why had he stayed at all? I had his face, heart rate, and unique heat signature now, wavelength scanners were bonkers like that, but he didn't know that. Had he been expecting to disable me? Or maybe he wanted to see how his work compared to mine firsthand?

"Lab Rat is fleeing," I muttered into my mic. "Finishing up tests."

The remaining centipedes rushed towards me but I activated something I'd been saving specifically for scenarios like this. A golden light bloomed from my breastplate, enveloping a thirty feet radius around me in a shimmering bubble.

The entire swarm froze, captured in perfect stasis. The idea came from Andy's own Anivia's Grace. I'd never seen it in action, Rebecca said it was far too indiscriminately deadly to use in the field, but she described it as a field which sapped all sources of heart to fuel an impressive barrier around him.

Why couldn't I do something similar? All movement, all energy, was expressed in the form of wavelengths after all. My Shard was called the Stilling, right?

My field wasn't quite the same of course. A lot of his creations seemed to be flavored with ice, though whether that was intentional or not was beyond me. Instead of bitter winds that turned everything around me to coarse powder, my version of the field was true stasis, preservation of the present to the point that even atomic entropy took a pause. If I released the field, everything would proceed on its original trajectory.

Except of course, me. It'd be rather silly if I couldn't move in my own stasis.

I detached the module from my chest and left it hanging there to maintain the field before giving chase. I caught up in short order.

"So, Chris, care to surrender?" I tried the diplomatic route again. "You've got a lot of potential. I can't imagine living like this is better than having a proper lab."

"Shut up, what do you know? You think I haven't tried indexing every chemical in my formulas?" he spat. "Guess what, genius? I can't. No one can. There isn't a centrifuge in the world that works with my formulas. I do my best work in the field and you're not taking this from me." So saying, he reached into his pocket for a syringe that he raised to his throat.

I rolled my eyes and shot it out of his hand. I sank to ground level and started to cuff the struggling man.

"Pity. Well, you know the drill. You have the right to remain silent when questioned. You have the right to be told the reason for your arrest. You have the right to hire and instruct a lawyer. If you cannot afford a lawyer, you have the right to be informed of options concerning legal aid and duty counsels. You have the right to speak to a lawyer as soon as possible," I spoke dutifully. They were a little different front the Miranda rights in America but the Canadian variant was close enough to hit the same general notes. I still had the words flashing across my visor, just in case. It'd be pretty embarrassing if Hero couldn't remember basic procedure.

I dragged him to the stasis field and searched him for any more tinkertech, he had a handful of those matchbox-like containers, before handing him off to the cops five minutes later.

I undid the stasis field to finish testing the durability of their armor so I could assign a proper brute rating but was disappointed when they shrank back into regular, dead beetles in seconds. In the end, I concluded that it was because the insects could only absorb so much of his formula and it was too much for their insect brains to handle. That particular test would have to go unfinished.

The whole event was somewhat underwhelming. I'd decided to come here because Andy said Lab Rat would become one of the ten most wanted men in North America by 2003 but perhaps I was expecting too much from him. Chris Kaminski had not been given time to come into his own, nor did I allow him to use his formulas on larger subjects. I'd read that some of his creations could grow to the size of a two-story house.

'Then again, I'm an awful matchup for him,' I mused. 'I can imagine teams having a hard time with a swarm like that.'

"Hero, can we get a word?" some lady in a pencil skirt and green blouse called, waving a mic in my general direction. I suppressed a sigh; the news had arrived.

I plastered on a winning smile. "Of course, the perpetrator was responsible for the monster sightings that had been reported around Winnipeg for the past week. I heard about it and became concerned about a biotinker outbreak so decided to pay a visit."

"What do you think will be the eff-"

She opened her mouth to say something else but was cut off by a long, piercing sound from my phone.

I visibly winced as I read the alert that flashed on my HUD. That was a very specific ringtone, set to override everything else just in case it ever came up while I was in the middle of a tinker fugue. I turned and rose into the air. "I'm sorry, this can't wait."

"Wait, Hero! What's going-"

"The Simurgh has descended on Shanghai."

Author's Note

If anyone remembers, Hero first used the sound dampener when he and Andy were having lunch at Quigley's in DC.

No one's sure where Lab Rat is from. Taylor said his accent couldn't be placed so I literally looked for a random city in North America and settled on Winnipeg.

Have a random mythology fact: The Korean origin myth states that we are descended from bears. Story has it that a tiger and a bear wanted to be human so prayed to Hwanung, the Prince of Heaven. He gave them a bunch of garlic and mugwort and told them to meditate/pray in a cave for 100 days to… I don't know, prove their dedication or something…

The tiger gave up part way through but the bear persevered and was transformed into a beautiful woman, who Hwanung then proceeded to bang. They had a son named Dangun, who would go on to found Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom.

So yea, if you're Korean, your spirit animal is by default the bear. Odd, because our national animal is the Siberian tiger and not the Asian black bear. Even stranger since there are zero wild tigers in Korea nowadays.

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.