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Life had been moving a little fast for me lately, so spending a day indulging an old friend in his latest get rich, or at least get some cash, scheme was a nice break.

Bruce, the original murder goose, had finally passed away at the ripe old age of twenty eight. Which is a pretty long life for a goose. But since I now know that as a Brute 1, old Bruce the goose was also a Regenerator .1 it wasn’t too much of a surprise the he lived so long.

The bird had long since outlived his non Super mate, and over the last few months had eaten less, and slept more. The day before he passed, he regained his strength long enough to nip me pretty good and then hiss at me.

We had never gotten along, but it was nice to have someone around to hate back when I was a teenager.

I think he felt the same. A stable relationship based on mutual dislike.

Now… Mike plucked another feather out with the pliers. “There’s got to be a market for these too.”

I looked over at the small pool of white feathers. “I usually trade them for handmade arrows. They make good fletching, and Sally made a cloak out of them for some cosplay since they stay pure white and hold together for years.”

My oldest friend glared at me. “You’ve been giving them away? Tell me you’re kidding.”

I shrugged. “The geese pull them out and they don’t rot. Not really. I had to do something with them and Rick from The Shaft offered me some arrows for feathers, it seemed like a good deal.”

Mike sighed and shook his head. "Bag them up from now on. I can find you a better deal.”

My friend was a year older than me, with the beginning of a middle aged pot belly. He had taken to shaving his head last year after I told him that the part in his hair was becoming a comb over.

He always had an angle when it came to finding bargains and making a few bucks, which before I started collecting a Superheroes paycheck had been a lifesaver at times.

Scorn had taken one look at him when she first met him, snorted, and said "You boys have fun." After that, she just wandered off whenever she felt him coming.

I didn’t ask what she didn’t like about him, since I could pretty much guess. But she never said a word against him, which I appreciated.

It was a pretty sure bet that Mike would figure out a way to make more money than I had out of the goose feathers, and I trusted him enough to be sure I would get half of it.

Eventually.

Today wasn’t about the feathers though. It was about Jerky. Goose Jerky, from a Brute 1 goose.

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As Mike put it. “Part of the appeal of Jerky is that it’s has a texture which requires chewing at it for a while, and getting the flavor the entire time. Brute’s like you don’t get the experience of that since you can just chew it up like candy. But Jerky from a Brute goose? There's got to be a market for it. With people who want the bragging rights even if they aren't Brutes.”

Boiling Bruce's remains hadn’t made him much easier to pluck, and we needed to get out the power tools out to dress him down to strips of meat.

It felt a little odd doing old Bruce like this, but this has always been a farm. And it wasn’t like I going to bury him. He was livestock, not a pet.

As we worked, I had to wonder if it was safe to eat him. After all he was made of something tougher than normal material. I mentioned that to Mike, who thought it over. "You've been eating the eggs forever, and so did your family, and me. Other than being a little chewy, neither I, your parents, your sister, or your grandparents even seemed to have a problem."

I nodded but still cleared some bits off the rotary saw to send off for testing. I used a small bottle and tied it to a Crow to carry in return for the promise of a beef hot dog when it returned. The organs and other offal I put in some old Tupperware out in the barn fridge for the Crows if it turned out to be safe for them.

The bones I set it inside a stock pot to boil, both for some soup stock and because the Mice had asked for the bones. They didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask.

Mike shook his head at that. "It's my people that are supposed to use every part of the animal, that's cultural appropriation, white man."

I rolled my eyes at him. My friend was an eighth native at best, and besides as far as I know that was only ever said about buffalo.

Mike took off after that, a bag of feathers in hand in order to get to work on time at the hospital.

I put the meat in the downstairs freezer to chill which would make it easier to slice, then let it sit before I doused and soaked everything in a honey and spice marinade, then finally put it in the oven on a low temperature to slow cook for three hours while I headed off for monitor duty.

Scorn had shown up after Mike left and I had talked her into watching it for me. Which turned out to be less of a problem than I would have thought. She just wanted to try a stripe of the jerky when it was done.

At the base that night, I had another project.

Manifest grinned at me, “Congratulations. It’s a girl.”

Samantha Gregor had been a Brute 3 Alter 1 who used the Super name Bayou due to her human crocodile like Alter form. She had made it a habit to go after serial rapists after they were released from jail, and afterwards strip their homes of anything worth selling.

Then she went after a guy who had triggered while in jail and had moved into a house owned by a Super powered gang who objected to Gregor kicking in their door and trying to gut their newest member.

The Circle had stolen her body from the morgue before anyone else could, and since Gregor had no longer had any surviving relatives. She had been sitting in deep storage ever since she died.

The Royals ended up being able to petition to get ahold of her remains due to her having signed the box to be an organ donor on her driver’s license.

Not that anyone outside of a mad scientist would put a Super’s organ in anyone else. But thanks anyways Samantha, it was generous of you to make the offer.

So bad news. Gregor had reverted to her mostly human form when she died, which made it look pretty bad for the gang when the cops showed up due to the gunshots and found a naked woman with multiple gunshots in their house.

And, I was completely unable to activate her power from inside her body. Which disappointed most of the team, but that had pretty much been as I expected.

When I drive a corpse, all I'm doing is using it as a puppet. Whatever biological mechanism activates someone's superpowers is inaccessible to me.

On the other hand, the good news.

Her body is still made of super stuff that makes her stronger and denser. Two hundred and twenty pounds of denser and tougher.

That didn’t change in death.

Also, I was wrong. My Force based Brute 3 in a dead body, with the biological based Brute 3 of Gregor did not add up to letting me be a Brute 6. Each rank of a superpower is about four times stronger than the rank below it.

So, with our power combined, we add up to about a Rank 4. Or about as strong as Shimmer without her using her force powers to supplement her biological Brute rank.

Not that I'm complaining, but at Brute 4 I can actually throw down directly with the real bad guys instead of being doomed to picking off their minions, being a distraction, or a meat shield.

Again. Thank you Samantha. I’ll set the Mice on tracking down some wanted men with rape charges as a way to pay you back. But only to arrest them.

With prejudice.