When my life turned on its head for the first time, I was out buying and lifting groceries from the gas station around the corner from my dad's dingy apartment. As I turned from the counter, the clerk must've spotted something hanging out of my jacket pocket, because the alarm started blaring. I ran out of the store as soon as it happened, heading down the rows of houses to lose him around some corner. I tumbled over myself ducking behind a hedge that separated two houses, and found that the footsteps behind me were gone.

In the yard, blocked from the view of anyone else by trees and sheds, a tall blonde woman was shouting in my direction, but no sound was reaching me. When I moved, she continued looking in the same direction. When I looked behind me again, no one was there. Curiosity killed the cat, but I wasn't thinking in idioms in that moment. I approached the woman slowly. 'Am I going crazy? Is she going crazy? Is this some kind of weird exercise thing?' The thoughts came like an involuntary rush of vomit up the throat. I stepped again, passed some invisible threshold, and I was pushed towards her by the air itself.

The blonde woman looked at me, bewildered. She had stopped shouting, but for a moment before she took in my presence I could hear her voice. I turned to face the threshold, no, the portal I had pushed past on a nonfunctional side, and saw in place of the quiet patch of grass a sterile white-tiled hallway that interposed itself on the Hawaiian landscape. A black woman in a lab-coat looked down at me from the sterile hallway with the hardened and nigh imperceptible expression of someone who just got another job to do when they're already swamped. "If you would have just come with me Sundancer, this child wouldn't be dragged into this.", the woman in the hallway said with a steely professional tone and a tilt of something like a French accent.

I froze up, utterly dumbstruck. The blonde woman, Sundancer, stole a glance at me before returning to glaring at the other woman and shouting, "I'm not going back to Bet and you certainly aren't dragging another fucking Aleph kid there either!" 'Bet, the other Earth. Aleph, this Earth. Sundancer, a codename. These people are capes, and I've just stumbled into a superpowered argument.', my brain belatedly recognized. I tried to run again, to get back to normal life, the stakes so much higher than shoplifting, but the unknown lady had me by the wrist before I could get anywhere. "We have solutions to these sorts of problems, you understand. Cauldron will handle the girl.", she said.

Sundancer let out a suffering sigh, seeming to relive painful memories, and grabbed my other wrist. I was incredibly uncomfortable, but I didn't venture to argue with the capes. "You aren't experimenting on this girl!", she said with finality. The woman in the lab-coat continued, "Of course not, but her memory of this very moment is a problem that can't go unaddressed. We have tools for that that we use in our nemesis program, if you'll allow it."

I was only understanding every third word, but I didn't like what I was piecing together. With a tug of my arm away from the mysterious doctor, and an accompanying pull from Sundancer, I slipped out of the doctor's grip and was held protectively close to the blonde woman I'd just met less than a minute ago. I was much happier there than split between the two capes, but I didn't like my odds either way. The doctor reached to grab me again, but Sundancer formed a glistening ball of fire in her palm and she stopped. If there was any doubt about the superpowers, it was gone now. 

"I can't allow you to stay and for the girl to stay at the same time. You've revealed both your powers and the nature of my operation to her, my involvement is necessary.", the woman stated. Sundancer hesitated, and I stopped myself from staring at her and making the situation worse. With no small amount of trepidation, she said, "Then... I'll go along to this meeting, and hopefully someone there will have a better solution than giving her to you." And like that, I was pulled through the portal.

"We've been over this, the Birdcage will not be opened. It will do more harm than good, and it's not a decision to be made by any of us in the first place.", Chevalier, leader of the Protectorate, said. "Then we could really use more firepower, Sundancer.", Weaver said, somehow expressing resignation through her white and blue mask. She was on the Wards, but, weirdly, stood with the Undersiders here. "I'm only here because of the kid. Once we have some way to situate her, I'm going back to Aleph and my vacation.", Sundancer said, holding my hand tighter. "And how do you want to sort that out? Cauldron isn't going to let her walk around spilling their secrets on Earth Aleph, and no one wants her to be memory wiped like the Cauldron-made.", Weaver pressed. "I don't mind, we've all done worse than that.", Imp, an Undersider, chimed in.

My head was spinning trying to keep track of the sheer amount of things happening in the top secret cape gathering that I had somehow been caught up in. "There's a new Endbringer...", Chevalier was saying, but he was interrupted by another Undersider in a violet and black suit, Tattletale, saying, "Endbringers, there's two." The whole room reacted to that. Even I knew what an Endbringer was, the monsters that did more than natural disasters with every appearance and made life on Earth Bet so much more terrifying. These people were dealing with two new Endbringers at the same time. "We don't have time for the girl.", Chevalier finished, and I hated that I kind of agreed with him.

"There are two things that make this easier. First, she's a child so anything she says won't truly be believed, and secondly, Cauldron is becoming more and more of a known factor, anything she knows could already be leaked by dozens of other people with more standing. No memories need to be removed.", the robot-dragon man, Defiant, said. A deep, hollow voice joined in, the leader of the Undersiders, "Just drop her off in the same place she was on Earth Bet, the local authorities will realize she's got no records and put her in the foster system." "Harsh, boss.", Imp joked. Weaver looked troubled, as did some of the other heroes, but no one spoke up to disagree with that plan when there were bigger fish to fry.

"I think that will be acceptable.", Doctor Mother said, the name given by the other capes for the lab-coat wearing woman who had been vaguely threatening to me before. The room went quiet as another woman in formal wear, no doubt another cape, led me out of the gray meeting room and down another hallway of white tile to another portal. The same lawn I had been on some fifteen minutes ago was in front of me, but the weeds grew recklessly and the house across the street was clearly abandoned. The very air behind me pushed at my back, and I was stranded in another world.

I didn't even try to tell anybody about what I'd seen, I knew it would be too much trouble. I visited where the apartment my dad and I lived in should've been, and found a condo in its place. Any attempts to get some semblance that I wasn't in the situation I was in were in vain. I ended up squatting for several nights in the abandoned house I had exited the portal across from.

All the while, the memories I couldn't share with anyone replayed through my head, the strong-arming and positioning between powerful figures in the midst of a crisis. Certainly for some it was a necessary arrangement, but others seemed to only use the meeting as a stage for bargaining. All of that, while they stood by and let my entire life get dashed to the wind. I wanted them to answer for that. I could spare some of them, many of the heroes clearly wanted desperately to get into their fight with the Endbringers, where their time might be better spent, but most had just not wanted to face the elephant in the room.

I knew next to nothing about capes, or parahumans as I learned they're known when I went to research everyone I'd seen in the Cauldron meeting on a library computer. The Protectorate, the Undersiders, the Guild, the Dragonslayers, prisoners in the Birdcage, anyone and everyone I could recall except the members of Cauldron itself, who were shrouded in obscurity. The fact the word "cauldron" would get a post removed from the Parahumans Online forum was a well known quirk that veterans of the board studiously ignored for fear of getting their noses so deep in the world of capes that they wouldn't come back to the other side. The less seasoned users either spread what amounted to playground rumors about the phenomenon or attributed it to some unknown stranger class cape.

The nature of powers and how they were classified was something almost no one on Earth Aleph knew about, they were just nebulous superpowers that a only a rare few people had to everyone there. On Bet though, it was deathly important. Anyone could have powers and you had almost no way of knowing just from looking at them, so ranking, categorizing, and understanding powers was serious business. They even had a rhyme for it:

"Movers, shakers, brutes, and breakers,

masters, tinkers, blasters, thinkers,

strikers, changers, trumps, and strangers."

There was also a specific way you got powers, which was something mostly only true nerds knew. The first solid resource I found on the process came up after I gave up and went digging back through the information on people at the Cauldron meeting, a video of Weaver explaining what life is like for capes to a group of kids.

Weaver, previously Skitter, civilian name Taylor Hebert, had a very thorough perspective on what being a parahuman was all about. She was a villain in Brockton Bay with a laundry list of shocking accomplishments, until she killed one of the Triumvirate (who was still kind of alive? Parahumans are weird.) which somehow earned her a spot as a hero with the Chicago Wards. She wore a camera almost any time she was out in costume and released footage of her hero work fighting local villains and Endbringers alike, making her something of a celebrity even without everything else about her. Her, I could forgive.

In the video, Weaver explained the concept of a trigger event, a traumatic experience that causes powers to arise and has an effect on what those powers are. From there, she played a game with the kids where each would roll dice as they tried to live their lives taking advantage of their superpowers. The kids who chose to be villains made money but faced danger from both the heroes and their fellow villains. The heroes still put themselves at risk, but without the peaks and valleys of villain work. At the end, she had them roll the dice against an Endbringer, and several didn't make it past the twenty five percent mortality rate. It painted quite the picture. Earth Bet was not a very welcoming place.

I moved on to researching the parahumans nearby, in Hawai'i. Most of the state's capes were rogues that served tourists, making souvenirs, doing routines with their powers, or providing special services. There was a Protectorate and Ward team in Honolulu, and the matching rogue's gallery of villains and gangs on Oahu, all of which seemed to have a focus on staying quiet to keep the tourist population happy. Apart from one or two heroes, none of them had much notoriety outside of Hawai'i. Some islands had no parahumans at all, some had a small gaggle.

If I wanted to learn more about Cauldron and the others, I'd need the kind of information you could only get from inside the world of capes. Maybe it was reckless, maybe it was selfish, but I wanted something to be done about how I'd been treated, and no one was going to do it if I didn't.

I didn't intend to stay in that alternate version of my hometown, feeling haunted by memories, so I cranked up my thefts from lifting groceries to picking pockets. It had taken a while, but I scrounged up the funds to hire an out-of-state Rogue on vacation in Hawai'i. He did jobs in transportation, and his current gig put him ferrying weird shit between islands, and I certainly qualified. Sharpedo's bullet shark form wasn't the most comfortable ride, but it was nearly impossible to trace by the authorities and he didn't ask questions about why a ten year old wanted his services, which I appreciated.

Once I'd gotten from Kauai to Oahu, I approached the nearest known property of the Children of the Skull, the local supervillain group. They were primarily smugglers and thieves, even if their name implied a violent streak. Their leader was known to have some sort of stranger or master power, but the group's two known parahumans mostly just acted as muscle to back up their operation.

I was stopped at the corrugated steel garage door by a grunt of the group. "Kid, do you know where you are?", he asked flatly. "Children of the Skull territory right? I want to join.", I told him succinctly. He raised an eyebrow. "What fuckin' use do we have for some kid? You don't have powers do you?", he questioned me, clearly puzzled. "No, no powers. I need work and information, you guys can provide.", I answered. The grunt laughed. I glared needles at him, but he just kept laughing. Finally catching his breath, he decided, "Sure, ya know what? Fuck it. I'll tell the boss, we'll see how he feels about it." He turned to the door inside, but stopped himself. "What's your name?"

"Kau'i."

Not long after, I was brought inside to be tested. Initiation hazing was a must in a group like this; Going through my stuff, asking probing questions, and none of it went the way they wanted it to, because it only proved the story I was slowly revealing with each question. I was from Earth Aleph, and with every bit of groceries that would never make it through interdimensional customs coming out of my backpack it became more undeniable.

Id, the Children's boss, spoke over the assembled henchman, "This is proof of the girl's story, we can clearly trust her." His oily smooth voice was completely confident. If these things got out, it would only make his group look like they'd somehow smuggled products from another dimension, which was great for their reputation. The rest weren't so pragmatic. I was a hazard, a risk.

"What's the point of keepin' you around?", one girl asked sharply. She was wearing too much to be a regular member. 'She'd be the other villain then, Keratin.' It was an easy enough question to answer though. "Information on the Cauldron meeting I saw and a spare set of tiny, innocent looking hands.", I said smugly. That got the attention I needed. The doorguard I'd talked to first was staring at me like I was a winning lottery ticket he'd dug out of the trash. That had been a bit of a gamble, admittedly. I wasn't sure from my research just what other capes knew about Cauldron compared to the public, and if the info I had would be worthwhile. Apparently it was.

"Alright, first proper job Kau'i. We paid Cluster for some of his time, he thinks that if these people did buy powers from Cauldron like our sources tell us they did, the records will be here.", Rich pointed to a spot on the map of the country club we were about to heist. If the mercenary who could use the processing power of dozens of brains at once was saying it was there, it was almost certainly there.

With my story, the Children of the Skull had been able to wrangle more information about Cauldron from their sources than most people ever got. We now knew that Cauldron were a group that experimented on people from other Earths for the goal of giving people powers through a formula. Their research had created the Case-53's, monstrous parahumans who couldn't live normal lives. We had also learned that a possible sale was going down in our backyard, so we planned to crash it. The last piece of intel was the most damning; The Triumvirate were all Cauldron capes with suspiciously deep connections to the organization, which was the reason the Irregulars, a group of Case-53 heroes, had left the Protectorate and Wards. This shit went all the way to the top.

"So it's just a safe? Wouldn't Kathy be better for that?", I asked my fellow grunt, looking at the map with details of the plan already scrawled out. Kathy was Keratin's civilian name, and she could cut through most mundane materials with her power. Rich shook his head, "No, we need to keep our cover. If we cut open the safe instead of cracking it, everyone knows the Children did something to that safe. You can get caught in places you shouldn't be and they'll shrug it off as a kid being too curious. Crack the safe, record the information on when the meeting goes down, get back to Faba." Faba was Id's civvie name.

"Alright," I conceded, "do we at least have something to help me crack it?" He rolled his eyes and handed me a gadget. It had to be something they stole from the local Wards team, it was obviously their tinker's work. That was good on multiple levels, it made me look like I might be a Ward and gave the buyers reason to doubt that I was with the Children of the Skull, if I got caught of course.

Faba was really playing up the fun uncle cover story around the rich assholes we were conning, and I was tired of it. Luckily, being annoyed at adults talking too long was exactly the kind of believable excuse I needed to run off and get into that safe. "Can I go look around?", I asked, putting on an innocent face. Not my usual style of confidence scam, but that's just how it shook out. "Alright.", Faba drawled good-naturedly, hiding the devious smile he no doubt felt in his gut. I ran down a hallway that led away from my destination, taking the next opportunity to round a corner and take the stairs up to the second floor so I could go back in the right direction.

I waited for the security to go out of sight of the office door I was aiming for, acting for all the passing guests like I was playing hide and seek (Seriously, how immature do people think ten year olds are? I'm not stupid.), then picked the lock in a fraction of a second with the gadget. I closed the door silently behind me and was moving towards the safe on the other side of the room when an invisible, no, cloaked, arm wrapped around my neck.

Covert, the Ward's tinker/stranger. I screamed at the top of my lungs for a moment before his other hand covered my mouth. I was relying on the other grunts around the property passing along my distress signal. Id and Keratin should be on their way to deal with the threat, but for the moment, I was on my own. Covert brought me to the ground in a tactical roll, his large stature winning out against his short height to readily overpower me, and the lock picker he himself had made tumbled out of my hand and out of sight. With his full weight laid on my microscopic chest, I was unable to move and struggled to even breathe.

"Who do you work for?", Covert asked from on top of me, his tone belying genuine curiosity rather than the firmness of an interrogation. I was too confused by that to work through everything else stopping me from speaking and give him an answer. He slapped me on the cheek, huffed, and began gesturing wildly with his fingers, as if playing air piano. Four drones unfurled from his back, cloaked themselves to blend in with the surroundings, then moved to four corners of the room, upon which all outside sound became jumbled and quiet.

I wriggled under him, gurgling an uncanny sound as I tried to escape the fatty boy. His hand clasped my throat in response, a thumb tilting my chin up to face him. "Who. Do. You. Work. For.", he demanded, much louder than before. I sputtered a cough, spraying Covert with saliva, then answered, "Fuck you!" He paused, presumably to roll his eyes, but I couldn't see it behind his high-tech goggles.

After the pause, he made another few gestures and his bodysuit splayed to create a separate sheet of cloth. He grabbed a set of self-made, which in this case was disadvantageous for me, restraints from his utility belt, locked them around my ankles, knees, wrists, elbows, and mouth, then covered me in the unfolded sheet of cloth. I bucked against each interlocking piece, but found no success as he just uncaringly shoved me across the floor of the room and under the desk in the back of the office with the cloth still over me.

I managed to see where the lock picker had landed after I dropped it, underneath a chair where he, luckily, didn't notice it. Covert, for his part, stood up from where he had crammed me awkwardly in the tight foot-space of whatever asshole had ordered powers from fucking Cauldron, patted himself on the back for a job well done, then disappeared into the background of the room and let the sound fade back to normal.

The safe was right across from me, taunting me. I had come this close, and forgot to check for the fucking stranger cape I knew the Wards had! Now, to be fair to myself, I didn't know the Wards would be here, only expecting resistance from whatever rich asshole villains came out of the woodwork to defend their secrets, but that was no reason to forgo the always important stranger protocols for this kind of job. In the meantime, I blamed my muscle memory from all the times I'd stolen things without having to give powers a single thought back on Aleph.

After that, I waited. Waited for Id to cover the area in his power, leaving all the capes and civilians to scrabble at eachother without the ability to communicate, for Keratin to come in and slice apart my bindings with her sharpened fingers, but none of that happened. No sound of a fight, no ringing of carefully cut windows, not even footsteps on the carpet of the room. I was only half certain that Covert was still in the room with me, even if I hadn't heard the doors open or close. I was just alone, bound up, with my ears pressed between my shoulder and the hardwood of the desk, growing more and more sore.

I didn't recognize why, not for the life of me, but I started to cry. Before long, it was the only thing I could do, my face tightening to squeeze out every drop. After what felt like hours, but couldn't've been given the angle of the sunlight coming into the room going mostly unchanged, I was so cried out I began to convulse the same way a sick person tries to vomit on an empty stomach. My mind ran itself ragged trying to glean anything from the sounds jostling around the adjoining hallway. I went a little mad twirling my hand around in the cuffs, trying to claw the things off or reach for an edge of the cloth that was making me boil in my own hot breath. It was sensory deprivation, only crueler. Just enough stimulation to make what I was missing grate that much more. It also rendered me unable to sleep.

After what felt like days, but was actually hours by that same metric of sunlight, something finally did stir in the room. The door cracked, sounding thunderous to my starved sensorium, and footsteps traced a path into the back of the room. To where I was. I began moving as much as I could, trying to shout out again through Covert's sound dampening clamp. The steps stopped a measure away from the desk. A faint hope filled my mind that this would be my way out, that whoever it was would save me. The wood under the carpet creaked slightly as the other person in the room crouched down, then stood back up.

My brain, feverishly applying as much information as it could, put together that that spot must've been where I'd dropped the safe cracker. I then spun through the thousands of little ways that might change the situation I was facing, but that went mute as the footsteps began moving again. I squirmed with renewed vigor, but the chains were specially made to be quieter than a mouse. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, on carpet no less, but thanks to Covert I was even quieter than that. The feet rounded the corner. It was the sandals of Keratin's costume, bone white and dark green painted toenails.

The tears came back as I watched Keratin crouch down in front of the safe. 'I'm going to get out of here.', I thought, the worry being driven away. Then, Keratin looked around herself, checking for threats; the door, the windows, the rest of the room, and under the desk. She didn't see anyone, and turned to the safe to get what she needed. The cloth was cloaking me. It felt as if my heart cracked a rib as it fell. The tears redoubled, painful to even produce, turning from those of relief to despair in an instant. I watched my teammate go through the motions of bringing the device up to the safe's lock, clicking the button, putting on gloves, opening the safe up, and skimming through the contents until she found the documents I was supposed to scan. Then she reversed the steps, got up, and left me behind.

When Covert finally did return, I was in a much worse state. Peeling back the cloaking shroud, which was the right word as it had been partly glued onto me from the sweat, he visibly shuddered. "Jeez, kid. You look like you went through a trigger event in there. I'm gonna take you in for questioning now, alright? Right to remain silent, you know, all that.", he said as he grabbed the chains behind my back and pulled me up to bring along like luggage. For my part, I gave him the meanest death glare I could muster with puffy eyes, an aching face, and one ear slowly springing back into its normal position.

The oaf didn't even know how to give the Miranda rights, which was really inconvenient cause I was pretty certain there were more on Bet than on Aleph, to accommodate parahumans. He pushed me, twisting in defiance and spasming in pain, out of the country club and into the back of a PRT van. I was pressed down onto a bench with the chain between my hands and knees stuck under my butt, as if I hadn't been through enough of that sort of thing just that day.

The rest of the Honolulu Wards team was there too. Polish, the Ward's leader, was in full glittering white costume in the driver's seat. Of all the uses for his power to make non-capes subconsciously avoid where he was, he was using it to cut through traffic. It was either a very slow day or a very busy day, and either was bad news for me. The power itself was only compounding my want to get out of there. I continued giving my beleaguered stink eye to Covert, and he activated cloaking so I couldn't meet his eyes. Antibody was sat next to me on the same bench in her dark purple suit, while Ozoid was over with Covert, or at least where Covert had been.

I drummed my fingers on the metal bench. The other Wards carefully avoided my eyes. Boredom. I suspected Antibody might have a way to see through Covert's cloaking as a side benefit of her power, so I began pointing around the back of the van while reading her expression. Her muscles coiled a little, and my head snapped to where I was pointing. After a second, Antibody eased up a little, though she was more tense overall than before my head snap. He had moved.

I pointed around more, to no response. Covert uncloaked from right beside me, on the opposite side of the bench to Antibody. "Think she's a thinker?", he asked the group. "That would make sense. She's, what, eight? Doesn't make alot of sense otherwise.", Antibody said. "Eight!?", I wanted to cry, but I was still gagged. 'I'm just staying entertained, and suddenly I'm a thinker? I haven't done anything since this morning!', I thought, peeved. Before I could devise another game, we were at the PRT building and I was being carried by the cuffs by Polish like I was a briefcase.

Antibody raised her hands to start using her power, but Polish stopped her. She decided to cross her arms instead. She was around the same age as me, which was the only reason her ridiculous power wasn't being used on the frontlines of every Endbringer fight. It also made the slight of her guessing my age wrong sting just that bit worse. Antibody could change what qualifiers living things met for a specific power, which is to say she could do crazy shit like copy self targeting powers or reverse the Manton effect. What she had wanted to do, before Polish stopped her, was make all the PRT employees qualify as capes for Polish's power so the building was clear.

They at least did me the favor of not taking me through the entrance that led to their faux meeting room, which the public could see into during the guided tours. I was led straight to the elevator at the back of the fancy loading bay, brought up in the perfectly silent elevator cab, and walked to a cell on a higher floor of the building. I was passed to Ozoid, who entered the cell with me, turned into her slime form, and closed the door behind her. Only after that was done did she give a signal that caused the restraints to finally release me.

"I don't have powers.", I said out of the gate. Ozoid's gelatinous browridge furrowed. "You expect me to believe that?", she asked, her voice coming out with a drum-like resonance. I looked her dead where her eyes would be if she wasn't a single continuous substance and said, "It's the truth." She shrugged, showing my words didn't change things either way, and the motion continued to reverberate around her body. "Covert didn't give me my rights correctly.", I added. Her face jelly twisted around, and I took that as her looking away. We sat there for a while longer, in dreadful silence, until a beep sounded in the wall behind me. "Please continue jailing procedure, Ozoid.", a tired male voice followed the sound. I only caught the screen turning off when I went to look.

Ozoid sighed with her eery quality and recited, "This is an E-type containment cell. The cell is equipped to disable you in the event of an escape attempt, either through a measured electric shock or containment foam." Her mechanical tone clashed with her slime form's odd mode of vocalization, creating a disconcerting effect. "If you attempt to tamper with the door or use your powers in any way to escape, the shocker", she pointed up at the chrome sphere sticking out of the roof, "will fill the room with electricity and you will be rendered temporarily immobile. If further escalation occurs, foam will be used instead. Be assured, the PRT's containment procedures will not result in lethal force."

I was looking up at the shocker, as if to assess the threat, but Ozoid just continued on in her warbling monotone, "Your necessities are all here." Again she pointed, this time to the spartan bed with bars blocking its underside and the urinal cut into the wall and floor. "The toilet has three options, flush, sink, and shower. There is a screen the PRT may use to question you, it will flash yellow and a beep will sound before cameras are turned on and will flash red with two beeps before the door opens. There is a six second delay between these indicators and the accompanying action, please cover any exposed areas in that time."

I gave Ozoid a wide-eyed look of horror, but she just carried on. "Please wait while I call for a PRT officer to search you for foreign material.", she said in that voice that I was pretty certain would be in my nightmares. She became flesh again and touched a finger to an earpiece, saying only, "Ready.", before returning to her slime state. We waited another minute where I composed myself and got up off the floor, then the promised PRT officer stood beyond the opened door. Ozoid and the officer traded places, and the officer tossed a bag onto the bed. The door to the cell closed.

"Strip, then shower.", the officer ordered, the voice proving she was female. At least they had that much decency. I, on the other hand, didn't have that much decency. I didn't move, just clenching my fists. She didn't continue her brilliant niceties, advancing on me. I scrambled away from her, trying to avoid any more humiliation, but her stride was longer than mine and she clearly wasn't sore from being crammed under a desk for the better part of a day. She caught me by the collar of the frilly little dress Faba had made me wear to blend in at the country club and spoke into my ear, "If you do not cooperate, the countermeasures will be used and this will continue while you are disabled."

I continued to resist, kicking my legs backwards to hit her in the ankles and clawing at the arm she was holding me with, all the while screaming, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Let me go! I didn't do anything! FUCK YOU!" None of that seemed to affect the officer, who was not only trained to deal with people much more capable of convincing her to let them go, but also suited up with bulletproof, brute 1 rated protective gear. The pleas and attacks of a ten year-old were beneath her. She shoved me into the far corner of the room and the door opened and closed behind her.

I ran at the door, trying to get through in that split second, and crashed into the decorative wood paneling exterior layer. I received a mind-numbing shock for my troubles, collapsing on the floor and knocking my foot hard against the restraints that had been left on the ground. The door opened again as my muscles cramped inwards, the PRT uniform stepping back through the threshold and cutting the dress off of me, followed shortly by my undershorts and underwear. She put on gloves, rolled me to the toilet, and pushed my face into the perforated section of wall. I was sprayed with lukewarm water, right in my twitching eyes, and then manhandled around to wash off the rest of me.

She pressed further, combing out my hair with what amounted to the spikes of an iron maiden and checking everywhere for smuggled items. Finally, she dropped me unceremoniously to the wet ground, removed her gloves, and picked up Covert's cuffs on her way out. It was another minute at least before my muscles eased out of their shocked spasmodia. I took in a greedy breath, stinging all the way down into my lungs, and splayed out naked on the floor.

After taking the requisite time to recenter myself, I walked carefully to the bed and opened the drawstring bag the handsy officer had thrown. Inside was a paper thin towel, a finger glove toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a pillow and pillowcase of the same poor quality, and a set of prison clothes. When I unfolded them to take a look, I was pissed. It was a white shirt and black pants, each with the word "Villain" printed on it in the opposite color. I shouted at the ceiling, "I'M NOT A FUCKING VILLAIN!", but no one heard me. Covert had soundproofed these cells entirely.

I put on the clothes, if only for my sanity, and laid down to daydream of a world where I took the opportunity to punch Covert in the face, and the dick, when he had me in that headlock. My mind continued to wander, and despite my aching I decided to pace around the all too small room to get some of the physical feedback I was lacking under that fucking desk. I was on my thirty-first lap when the screen flashed yellow. I stopped and turned to the screen.

"Hello villain.", PRT Director Nanu said, wearing a helpful little nametag. It was the same tired voice from earlier. "I'm not a villain.", I stated acidly. "Who are you then?", he asked, not giving an inch. I stayed quiet. "Because I doubt you don't have powers. You are, if my eyes are to be believed, a very young girl who broke through a locked door in a fraction of a second on private property. Very private property.", Director Nanu continued. "I don't have powers.", I repeated. "Yes," Nanu sighed, "Ozoid did report that you said that. She also reported that you used cold reading on Antibody to locate an invisible actor."

"Anyone could do that.", I replied bitterly. "That is how plenty of thinker powers work, yes, extraordinary conclusions from mundane information.", he said, a note of amusement coming through his worn exterior. I moved to the mattress and laid down, silent. Nanu made a few more shots in the dark, but I just stayed there with my face in the pillow. After some time, the screen went dark and the indicator dimmed.

It was the desk all over again, only more maddening. Every day, or at least I hoped it was every day because it was one of the only things I had to keep track of time, the director appeared on screen to try to get any amount of information about me. My name, who I worked for, my powers. I was only getting more pissed every time the man insisted that I had powers, especially since I felt more and more like the treatment I was receiving should've qualified me for a trigger event. I had no such luck.

The other thing I used to keep time was my meals. I was certain by the third time I woke up from proper sleep that they were screwing with the times they sent the meals in to make me crack. I wasn't going to crack. I just stayed in the room, subsisting off of bread and cold soup. They didn't provide utensils, presumably so I couldn't spoon someone's eye out when they next came to give me food, not that I ever saw anyone who didn't wear a fully enclosed helmet. By the fifth "day", I had taken to eating the paper bowl along with the soup instead of furiously stuffing it through the bar under the bed and onto the vent. I still had enough shreds down there shifting around in the cold breeze to entertain me.

My muscles were dead tired before I slept each "night", whether from exercising just to keep warm and sane or from being shocked as I made my way for the door. The officers now knew to stand back from the door as it opened, so they could shock me instead of trapping themselves in foam with me when I pounced for the exit. The foam was way better than the shocks, but I wasn't the one in control of what I got, even after escalating as much as I was capable. I staved off the cold some days by just staying under the spray of the shower for as long as possible, but it had an automatic stopper built in, so that was never long.

I cried, I screamed, took all the anger I had out on the PRT uniforms delivering my food, but nothing was changing after a point. "Ready to tell us who you are?", Director Nanu asked, exhausted. Well he wasn't as exhausted or as stubborn as me. I screamed at the top of my lungs in response, then continued screaming. I had learned to scream while breathing inwards just to fuck with him. Amazing what you could do with unlimited free time. This went on for several minutes without a microsecond of interruption for a creak of voice or shudder of breath as I stood perfectly straight and still. Finally, his stupid face disappeared again.

The second time my life changed forever, I thought I was truly going crazy. A canister of shiny bubbling fluid had dropped from the vent in the ceiling. My doubts about my own sanity didn't stop me from descending on it in an instant. A bit of twine connected a paper card to the canister. The card read:

A shame you were caught. As thanks for the distraction, your reward has been delivered regardless: powers in a bottle. Regards, yours truly.

Id had done it. I twisted the top of the tube and chugged the metallic liquid like a starving animal.

Instantly, I fell to the floor. The pain radiated out from every point the potion touched, as if my body was melting away. My fists hammered the floor until my knuckles bled and I thrashed so violently from the pain that I thought for a moment I had broken my jaw. "HE FUCKING POISONED ME!", I tried to scream, but it only came out as a cacophonous sputter. My voice sounded more like Ozoid's slime form than my own.

I tried to hyperventilate, to stand up and bash down that stupid door, to just escape in any way possible. But I couldn't get back to Aleph, couldn't get those groceries to my dad, couldn't do anything but panic and flood my own brain with more endorphins.

Then, all at once, I wasn't in that damned cell. I was floating through the dark void of space, a mass of crystals shifting steadily in and out of this plane of reality beside me. I knew instinctually that the mass was alive. Then I, too, shifted. I was stirring along the surface of another of the masses. No, I was observing what one of the masses observed, spectating. It shifted, keeping a steady speed forwards as stars winked in and out of existence with each twirling of its body through that unseen fold. Invisibly, the masses communicated. Space warped and fundaments outside of my understanding connected the two.

Before I could try to reach out to the masses, to stay there where I wasn't being poisoned, I was back in my cell. The memories of the vision were already leaving me. I retched, my throat cleared of festering wounds, but the pain continued. My body would've continued to writhe, but my skin felt like it was turning inside out and the continuously changing surface contact only made the pain worse. My eyes burned around the edges as a second pair of transparent eyelids grew into place inside of my face. It was when I blinked with them for the first time that I realized what was happening. I was becoming a Case-53.

My skin continued to change, and my mind grew distant from the pain as I watched it turn smooth and red-pink, with small carpets of fleshy nodules growing out around my shoulders, chest, and the outsides of major joints. I rubbed my hands together, finding they had very little traction, and that rubbing them together hurt like hell. Then, the burning started. My new skin began oozing a mucous solution that clung tightly to my surface, and the solution began slowly dissolving my clothes, my hair, and softening the floor around my feet.

I had already slapped my now wet feet over to the toilet in a panic when I realized the mucus wasn't burning me. The pain was gone, even my eyes were safe thanks to my new set of eyelids. Just my hair, my stupid clothes, and part of the floor of my fucking jail cell were melting. That's a pretty good power, all things considered. I wasn't even bothered by the smell, even as my brain recognized it as the acrid odor of something dissolving in acid.

I washed my hands of the sticky acid and quickly moved the mattress so I could lay on the metal and hopefully stop dissolving things. Finally in a spot to slow down, I realized I still had the evidence of my powers in a bottle sitting on the floor and I grabbed the canister. I needed to get rid of the canister and note. The note and connected twine were easy, just holding them in my slimy hand disposed of the evidence, adding a brackish color to my coat that contrasted the fading colors of my goopified cloths. The canister would be a bigger problem.

I laid down on my back, acid slowly dripping off of the metal shelf. I needed to make the canister into something unrecognizable, to make it seem like whatever just happened to me related to the power they thought I was hiding instead of a Case-53 transformation, and also to get out of jail with my power if at all possible. My eyes caught on the glimmer of the glass refracting through my acid, and I kicked into gear.

(Simplified Schema) An acid cannon for short to medium range application:

* Create a cap of colonial bacteria that can flex like a diaphragm to increase pressure with a nozzle to spray the acid outwards. Allow for a steady intake of acid for nutrients.

* Form a hinge of conditionally flexible bacteria bonded with the crystal glass of the container on one end and to the cap on the other to allow for refilling of internal acid.

I reeled. My brain, no, my power, had just supplied me with the directions for making an acid cannon out of the canister. What was weirder was the use of bacteria for all the major components. 'Can I do that? Just make bacteria however I want them?' My gut, which now included all of my skin, told me yes. I ran my hand through my hair, finding it replaced by super dense mats of those same nodules that had grown on other parts of my body. 'I'm a tinker? That makes bacteria? This is ridiculous.', I thought. I was taking the weird powers alot less well than my transformation into an inside-out digestive tract.

I felt my bladder churn, and the continuity of it made me suddenly aware that my next meal was probably arriving soon. I definitely wanted that acid cannon, but my powered intuition was telling me I couldn't grow all of those varieties of bacteria from nothing in the time span I was thinking of. I needed to hide the canister for later, and the only place I could think of was under the bed. I kneeled down and looked at the bars separating the bed and floor, too close to fit the bottle through. I needed to bend or cut the bars. My eyes suddenly snapped to the thimble toothbrush I had let sit in the toilet for several days.

(Simplified Schema) A brush for cutting through iron alloys:

* Puncture a hole in the surface of the plastic under the brush fibers for ready access to acid for nutrients.

* Coat fibers in a high powered ferrosynthetic archaea.

That I could do. I prepared myself for the weird things I was about to do (which didn't take much preparing in my deranged mental state), grabbed the brush, rinsed it with my acid, then with water, turned it inside-out, and bit down with a canine tooth to puncture it as my power instructed. As I twisted the thimble around with my fingers to drill into it, I thought about the bacterial, or I supposed, the microbial aspect of my power. 'How do I make the archaea I need? Do I create it or modify it?', I wondered. Modify it, my power insisted without words. 'How do I modify it?', I continued. No feeling welled up, the question apparently being too stupid to warrant one.

With no answers forthcoming, I just tried really hard while thinking about what I wanted. 'A colony of highly active ferrosynthetic archaea on my left thumb and pointer finger.', I pictured to myself. Just like that, it was growing. I felt a touch dizzy as a spongy growth of maroon microbes began to expand out over the designated fingertips. My eyes widened in excitement, and I waited with bated breath for my power to tell me I had a sufficiently sized colony. When it didn't give me any insight even as bits of archaea began dripping to the slimy bed shelf, I decided it would have to do.

I scooped up the fallen ferrosynthetics with my free hand and began applying it all to the brush's fibers. It looked like evil cinnamon toothpaste. I cackled madly at the image of brushing my teeth with these, then realized that I could probably make an excellent toothpaste out of my microbes with enough work. I only cackled louder at that while I rubbed the rest of the archaea on my fingers on the bar I was going to get rid of first, the one against the wall and facing away from the door. With my brush complete, I put it on top of my pointer finger and began brushing all the way around the top of the rod. The entire process, from finding the problem to applying my power to it, felt eerily natural.

I scooped the canister and its discarded lid over to me with a foot, thanks to the increased flexibility from my constant motion around my cell, stuck it all back together, and tucked it between my other foot and the wall in the event that my meal came sooner than I hoped. I watched carefully as I brushed all the way through the top of the bar, but it didn't bend or break away yet. The brushing continued lower down, and my mind wandered back to the problems ahead of me, so many people I'd have to either fight or avoid.

(Simplified Schema) Bacteria operated arachnoid automaton:

* Wrap a minimum of four steel rods in pseudomuscular bacterial colonies.

* Join the legs to an acid cannon in a bilaterally symmetrical distribution with a disk of steel, pseudotendon colonies, and conditionally flexible bacteria each.

* Join the disk joints with pseudomuscular colonies in arches between those on the same side of the automaton and the acid cannon.

* Feed the nozzle into a system of acid distribution pathways.

* Coat the structure, apart from the hinge and lid of the acid cannon, in a mid-fast growing flexible bacterial colony.

I could picture the thing in my head, a four, six, eight, or ten limbed crudely spider-shaped automaton coated in pale gray bacteria hoisting itself precariously in the air with its ram rod legs as it pumps my acid through itself like one-time-use blood. I saw it clambering through the bars under my bed, stamping until it had bent the metal folds of the vent enough to drop in, then running out of acid and needing me to refill it. I was only stirred from the wondrous idea when my head smacked into the bed shelf. I had brushed my way through the steel bar again, shifting my weight forward without anything to prop me up.

Of course, that was when the screen flashed red, with two beeps to drive home how fucked I was. I threw the canister under the bed with a clatter and went straight to the toilet, pressing the button for rinse before thinking better of washing a iron eating archaea into the plumbing system. With a wince, I began brushing my teeth with the archaea. It was no longer funny, when I could taste the microbes like blood, snot, and the aftertaste of canned soda on my tongue.

The door opened, and the PRT officer immediately shouted with her finger to her ear, "Code ten!", before the door slammed back together without my food being passed to me. I could guess what the number was; the tenth power class, changer. I had been murmuring the rhyme since the fourth "day". The screen flashed yellow, and I doubted they would wait the six seconds for me, not that I could put clothes on anymore anyways. Director Nanu's bored face popped on screen and without skipping a beat he asked, "Are you sure you don't have powers?"

"I think Covert gave me a fucking trigger event.", I said, lying. That was a tactical decision, as I would put money on the PRT getting someone or something to check if I lied over the next few hours, but with me showing obvious signs of having a power, they'd have no reason to go back and check all the times I only said that I wasn't a villain and didn't have powers. I was playing their confirmation bias to keep Id's special delivery under wraps. No reason to bring Cauldron down on our heads in addition to the Honolulu Protectorate, especially when every day I flew under Cauldron's radar was a day I could find out more about them when I escaped. I also needed that canister.

"You sticking with that one?", Nanu asked. "It's the truth!", I shouted with fake conviction. Knowing these people, they'd take my obvious lies here as proof the rest of my talk was lies and I was just worse under pressure. "Are you going to explain your power, for our records?", he asked, looking for a shortcut in paperwork. Sure, it was also something they could pick apart with a lie detector, but he was mostly doing it for a chance to work less. I slow blinked once with each set of eyelids, then said with a tone as flat as a dead man's heart rate monitor, "No." He shrugged, expressing, 'It was worth a shot.'

"I'm going to have to ask you to turn back from your current form.", he said, his eyes staring at something off to the side of his desktop webcam. I had to be careful with how I answered this one to not give them any reasons to believe beating me unconscious would make me into a normal human again. Not that they needed to believe that to beat me unconscious. "I'll give you this one as a freebie. I don't know how. Not certain I even can.", I answered. All the truth. The director groaned, turned fully to listen to something behind his screen, then glared at his camera like I had insulted his cat. They were checking the truth of my statements live. 'Perfect.'

His next words came across more like he was confirming deeply troubling medical news than asking a question, "Any changes we need to make to accommodate you?" "My body needs more food.", I said. Unsaid was the, "for growing microbes I can use to break out of this place.", part. Still the truth. "And", I started, but caught myself. "And?", Nanu pressed. I sighed as if I was embarrassed, which I wasn't, and replied, "I was going to suggest you remove the wood paneling so I don't melt it away, but it doesn't all melt from my acid anyways, so it's probably better to just leave me be by you guys' standards." The lie detector gave another pass. He didn't know it was the pass that would let the canister go unnoticed while I turned it into a freaky flesh robot spider.

Director Nanu gave me an utterly deserved dubious glare, and I just smiled. "Do you have ulterior motives in all of this?", he asked. This was the one I had been waiting for, when I could shove aside the building schema for a bacteria coated automaton made on the frame of Covert's silent restraint device specially for strangling the director until he passed out. It was a sketchy design anyways, I already knew I would be able to do much better after I got out and trained with my power.

"Of course I have ulterior motives. I don't want to tell you anything about myself if I can help it, but I do want to be in your good book so I can hopefully get out of here sooner rather than later.", I answered seriously. I could see his expression change when he got the pass from the lie detector. Shocked. He shouldn't be. A voluntary release, through the system or not, would be much faster than my hair-brained scheme. Not that I was counting on Nanu being my out, but I wouldn't count my chickens, particularly if the very act of making those additional plans made the original work so much better. Being in a fucked up mental state did wonders for my ability to scheme.

The having superpowers thing was alot harder than it first looked. First, I was struggling to even carry myself in my changed body without fucking something up. When I finally did get that first meal after my transformation, I was stumped by the settling realization that I could no longer hold anything in my bare hands that would dissolve from my acid, including the paper bowls that held my double serving of soup. It took longer than I'd like to admit to come to the solution my power had been wanting to offer up, a coating of bacteria that held the acid back.

I hesitantly grew the relatively simple strain around my hands, shrouding them in a greenish black mat that felt like a t-shirt soaked with dry blood. There was the traction I needed, the barrier between my acid and whatever I was touching, but it didn't feel like a great long term solution. Gingerly, I lifted the paper bowl to my mouth and drank. The second bowl I poured over my head, for the microbes. I could probably swim in liquidy foods and drinks now. The bread was admittedly harder to share.

My next problem was in using my power for anything other than the most basic applications. I went through the arduous process of picturing, growing, and sculpting the microbes for the acid cannon, feeling lethargic and hungry afterwards. Then I was stuck with the nasty problem of having no way to collect my acid into the cannon, outside of dragging it across my skin or leaving my foot in it until it pooled high enough. My only thought was making a disease that would cause my body to produce acid faster, but my power seemed incapable of that.

With nothing for it, I wondered how my acid cannon actually worked. Like, I got the mechanics of the diaphragm structure, the way the hinge was only sometimes pliable, but nothing of how I was supposed to make it do the things my power told me it could do. I took my foot out of the canister and held the acid cannon up to my eye like I would find something that shouldn't be there.

Distantly, I felt like I was connected to something I hadn't been before. I yanked on the connection. The hinge of the acid cannon went limp and the cap tensed in a rush, causing a sick slapping sound as it bounced off and back into the casing. My eyes lit up. 'This is my power! Changing microbes into something I control and using them to power and control mechanisms!' It all finally clicked into place.

I realized after a moment that I received no feedback from the microbes, no feeling that they were dying or growing or anything else, only the specific control vectors of each colony. I could flex the diaphragm, lock the hinge, but that was it. I was no Weaver, but maybe I could be something else. Weaver couldn't brush through metal bars or make acid cannons, after all. Okay, maybe she could, but not in the same timeframe.

I slowly filled up the cannon with my foot, sealed it shut, and squeezed on my connection to it while aiming down at the ground. The acid shot out in a clean, powerful stream for only a moment, then petered out and dribbled from the nozzle. The floor bubbled and hissed where it had hit, leaving a clear crater. I stepped in the puddle to obscure the shape of the damage. The stream was too powerful, wasting too much acid on a small blast of force. It became obvious that, for anything more complex than a brush, I would need to revise my schema to get an effective result.

I spent the next few days methodically growing dead bubbles of bacteria to store acid for later, testing variations of microbes for an acid sprayer and revised automaton, and pacifying the officers and director into thinking I was still going mad locked up in my six foot cube. I was still earning myself the occasional shock, to keep up appearances, but I now actually had the danger level to warrant the foam if I went too far, which would stall my tinkering. Most of the inane bullshit I told Nanu was about my supposed changer power and how he was denying me medical treatment, though I used different words to flub the lie detector where I needed them flubbed. I still gave him a minutes-long scream every now and then though, to keep him on his toes.

The most important issue was multifaceted, controlling my microbes. If I focused, I would receive a list of each colony that had an available control vector, first the independent ones followed by the others, grouped with the device they were a part of, but no expansion of my senses. This meant I could tell what I had control over at a given time, but the lack of feedback meant I practically required some point of contact with a colony unless I wanted to try to shoot or act blind.

The other half was the finesse required for the controls. It was like learning to type from the beginning again, but with tendrils that just got transplanted onto my brain instead of my hands. I knew which keys were which, could tell them apart if I stepped back for a moment, but I would often fumble over the controls either from my unfamiliarity with my own body or with the keyboard. I'd have to make my own method for stability, since no one else had ever learned to type with tendrils before.

Both processes were slow, giving me time and incentive to make more tools for both my escape and practice. Easiest and most straightforward were the acid bubbles, which I was using to store up acid for the big day. When I felt confident or just bored I would let one finish growing off of my skin, like a microbial 3d printer, with some sort of control vector added to experiment with. I made a toggleable bouncy ball with it, and much more helpfully, an acid bomb.

I used the bouncy ball to keep myself constantly at least background focused, switching its bounciness off after it struck a surface and back on before it hit again. While that was going, I had a few mundane acid bubbles being activated in increasingly complex patterns. It was like playing Simon without even the robot to play along. What made it sadder was that I couldn't make a Simon automaton either; It'd be like trying to tickle myself, which I'd already tried before I got powers.

When I was confident I was ready on all fronts, I told Director Nanu in the middle of an otherwise typical conversation, during his check in that was now every other "day", "I think I might tell you about what's going on, about me, next time you call me. I really don't want to stay here. Changing, the process hurts. I'm not feeling good in here. If a plea deal or whatever gets me the credit I need, I'd be open to... discussing it." I'd practiced my nervous and reserved voices, and doubled up on practice for that call in particular. After the call, they would expect some kind of real progress from me, even if they doubted I'd give exactly what I'd promised. I would break out the "day" before.

I got to work immediately after my last meal that "day", since the number of devices I needed would spill out from my hiding spot under the bed. I made a bacteria bandolier for my acid bombs and acid bubbles pop off my skin right where I needed it, finally put together the version four arachnoid automaton, and left my room filled with a more aerosolizing variant of my bombs and a stretch of basic microbes across the gap of the door. I'd keep tabs on what I could control, and when that colony split in two I would detonate the bombs in the room.

Finally, after a full night of nonstop work, I killed off my acid glove bacteria with a virus and ate them, which was just the most efficient use of resources, to replace them with a glove of my revised ferrosynthetic archaea for a moment. Then I broke my way into the vent beneath my bed with the automaton leading ahead of me. The first step was to find where they were handling the runoffs of my acid, because if any amount of it was being kept around it was an excess of nutrients and weaponry I could use for my escape.

The drippage fell down a chute not far from where my cell was connected, and I had no way down without being stuck down there. I'd tried making gloves and socks that let me climb walls, or just a simple rope, but something was keeping me from making a functioning version of either, even though my power could generate the plans for them. One thing I did know about my confinement was that I'd been put above the ground floor of the building, so I decided to take the plunge. I wrapped the automaton in my arms and braced myself against each side of the chute, like I'd seen in a movie once, then let myself slide down.

I hit the bottom with a bang, unable to control my speed. I ignored it and pressed on, finding the acid trail led to a vent above the loading dock where I'd first arrived. A small bucket was set up below the vent, with pitting around it from times when the acid had been allowed to spill out onto the floor. Not a full vat of the stuff, but I'd take it. I had just begun eating away at the screws of the vent grate when my trigger colony split in half. I pulled on the gas production for the aerosol bombs, and the whole building began blaring with sirens.

A ruckus echoed through the building while the officers upstairs were caught in clouds of acid and then, I'd bet, in containment foam. I hurriedly switched to a full ferrosynthetic glove again and kicked at the grate until it buckled and finally popped. I killed the glove and didn't bother to replace it, then dropped my automaton into the bucket while I stayed hidden in the vent. I didn't expect the hiding spot to last long, but the whole point of the automaton was to give me something of a decoy while I waited for an opportunity to get away.

Right on time, a trio of PRT uniforms entered the loading dock, looking left and right for threats, but never up. They approached the bucket, since the automaton had splashed fresh acid around it, and I mentally reached out to drive the arachnoid away from me and to the squad's side. One startled, the other two PRT officers ran after it. I ducked it under a waiting van, then let it fall on its side and popped the cap on the acid sprayer's nozzle to let the liquid fly when they stooped down for it. My focus was disturbed when something bumped into my foot.

Covert's drone got fried by an acid bomb and I dropped on top of the dawdling PRT person's head, driving them to the ground and knocking the half-full bucket of acid onto their armor and into gaps to burn their skin. I got up from the flailing whelp and ran for the exit with the nearly empty automaton following after me. I heard it clatter to the floor even as I gave it the right inputs, and turned around to see more PRT people entering the room while my creation was sprawled out on the ground, out of juice.

I threw a bomb at the new arrivals, another at the two by the van for good measure, then ran over and pulled the mental trigger to release the acid sprayer from the rest of the arachnoid automaton. I started running away again, cracking acid bubbles on the rim of the canister like eggs and pouring the acid into my weapon with adrenaline fueled speed. I could've gone for the van, but I somehow doubted the PRT made their vehicles easy to hotwire. On top of that, the insights my power gave me into other tech didn't play nice with electronics, essentially treating them as mysterious black boxes that did whatever I knew they could do. And so I kept running towards the closed garage doors.

More people were coming. I threw my back against the door and began growing as much ferrosynthetic archaea as I could all along my back. I nearly blacked out right there from the lightheadedness I experienced creating that many microbes, but managed to keep myself conscious by focusing on the screams of the people I'd given acid burns and the screeching of the sirens. I fired on the closest attacker, making his visor useless with the pitting the acid caused and burning through to his mouth and chin. I set acid bombs on the floor around me without bursting them, then chucked acid bubbles at the incoming officers hoping they had enough force to break on contact.

I felt a lurch, knew my archaea had done their work, and burst the one remaining aerosol bomb on my bandolier to cover my escape. I wriggled myself through the hole in the metal, opening jagged wounds across my shoulders, arms, and legs, and immediately began running again. A second later, I blindly detonated the bombs I'd left on the floor of the loading dock to stop anyone inside from following me. I threw another acid bomb up in the air to catch any drones Covert might be using to track me, since they'd be cloaked, but I didn't seem to hit anything.

I thanked my luck that no civilians seemed to be hanging around to see me with nothing but bacteria covering my bits, then realized what that meant and bolted off in a different direction. Polish and his team were hanging around to bring me back in, and I needed to find civilians. I could guess that Antibody had excluded some PRT officers from the effect of Polish's power, but I would be working on the assumption that she'd done it for all of them just so I didn't make any obvious mistakes.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

While I ran parallel to the PRT building, I looked in every direction, including up, for where non-capes were gathered. When I spotted a rooftop party in the direction I was already going, I pumped a fist. Technically, no one had confirmed if Polish's power had a spherical or cylindrical shape, but I thought it was pretty unlikely that it wouldn't account for the sheer verticality of alot of parahuman fights, which is what it was ostensibly intended to handle. I shoved the out of place power analysis out of my mind and kept running.

Pounding down a still empty street, ducking into an alleyway, and making sure my bit-covering microbes were still layered on sufficiently thick took the breath out of me. As I was looking down at myself, I remembered the cuts from crawling through the door and set about growing a super-scab out of fungi on each of them. It was a new application of my powers, and that brought my combat high down to levels fit for reasoning out a problem. With my recouped reasoning, I immediately noticed that I'd left a sizzling half-melted trail of footsteps right from the PRT base to here. I grew socks that would catch acid before it left a clear impression of my tiny feet, then got back to running.

I burst through the alleyway into a crowd of people and my efforts to hide my path became laughably useless immediately. The tide parted for me as every spare eyeball tracked my scramble away from the heroes soon to be on top of me. Cameras were out and recording my every breathless stumble and start. I pushed into an apartment building just so the movements of the bystanders wouldn't give away my position from above. My panic brought me in a circle around the first floor before I stopped myself in front of a map on the wall. Then I followed the map and stuffed myself in a supply closet.

It was another hiding spot that wouldn't last, but they were supplies and I was a tinker; It had to count for something, right? As the first schema was summoned up in my mind, a macro version of my ferrosynthetic brush made from a broom which would let me almost walk through metal walls, the door was taken cleanly away from its frame. Red Shift, leader of the Honolulu Protectorate, was standing in front of me, looking profoundly disappointed. I raised my arms in surrender, which meant nothing when I was still covered in a good few acid bombs, but he hopefully had no way of knowing that. Seeing him, I thought I might have an actually effective plan. It would be ugly, but more importantly, it should work.

I killed the ferrosynthetics, socks, and stragglers in my head nodules. "What are you doing?", Red Shift ordered. "Making something to keep the acid in so you don't have to beat the snot out of me.", I answered, focusing. 'Fungi with the highest possible single instant elasticity while still retaining my acid, covering all of my body except the eyes.', I pictured. I wavered again at the expense of whatever my power was using to effect the rapid changing and growth of microbes, and Red Shift looked very on edge. I poked myself in the eyes to stay up. "What was that?", he asked. "Power limitation.", I replied vaguely as the fungi began connecting over my lips.

Once I was fully sponged, Red Shift grabbed me by my raised wrist and dragged me out of the apartment building. 'Bacteria that produce as much carbon dioxide in a single instant as possible, distributed in patches attached to the fungi.', I continued producing components as we walked, leaning into Red Shift's hold for stability. He gave me an investigative glare, but just kept moving. He began kicking up oddly with his feet, which brought us into the air through uses of his power. We experienced no acceleration, just deceleration as the air brushed up against us.

I grew my last piece before he got us too high up, since we were on a conveniently west-facing road and I wouldn't have to deal with intervening buildings. 'Fungi with the highest possible single instant elasticity, covering all my body except the eyes, and connected to the matching fungi around major joints, expending my acid supply for creation.', I imagined. The more complex instructions took longer to wrangle mentally, with more and more points of failure, but I was confident in this specific set. The draining feeling was better than it'd been with the outer layer thanks to the sacrifice of my acid itself for materials, but it was still significantly worse than the bacteria had been, and I found myself nearly limp in Red Shift's arms.

He rattled me when he noticed my suit expanding outwards. "Stop that!", he shouted, not looking very composed for a Protectorate team leader. I shook my head no, smiling with my eyes. He ushered us a few more feet upward with his power, and it looked about right for what I wanted to do. I closed my eyes all the way and detonated the acid bombs on the bandolier that now hung flaccidly off my shoulder. Red Shift flinched, nearly dropping me as the acid began chewing his suit and skin, and I looked him in the eyes. "THIS WHOLE SUIT'S A BOMB LIKE THOSE, BREAKS INTO PIECES FOR THROWING TOO!", I shouted through the musk of the fungi, mustering up all my bravado for the bluff. My eyes continued to smile with manic anticipation.

As I'd planned, Red Shift set me to a completely neutral velocity with his power, which is to say, due west at 1,038 miles per hour. My speed rapidly dropped as I spread my arms and legs wide to slow down to terminal velocity, as well as getting enough lift to give me more time to slow down. The whole process hurt. I mused on Red Shift's power as I flew. Red Shift's power was a striker/blaster. He could set the velocity of himself or anything he touched to match, well, himself or anything he touched. The catch was, he chose the reference frame, provided all of him or the target was part of the space where that idea of zero velocity held true for the majority of mass.

What he'd done to me was cancel out the spinning of the Earth by zooming his reference frame out far enough to make the spin irrelevant, sending me west. In theory, he should've been able to just stop the Earth revolving around the sun if he wanted, but his cozy position as leader of a Protectorate team rather than locked up in the Birdcage out of an excess of caution implied he had some kind of mass or size limit that stopped that from being achievable. It was a truly bonkers power that had done alot to earn him the position of team leader for the city's Protectorate. I was maybe a mile out from the coast, by very rough estimation, and very hot from air resistance to boot, when I finally began to drop significantly towards the water.

This was where my "bomb suit" came in. It was gonna still hurt like a bitch though. The suit was essentially just a bunch of airbags linked together. If I timed it wrong, I'd die, and even if I didn't, I was prone to drowning. I kept my clear eyelids sealed tight and my opaque ones split wide as I approached the bouncing waves of salt water. 'THREE, TWO, NOW!', my brain shouted. I slammed the keys for the gas producing bacteria clusters, which were, luckily, a design I'd mastered, and the suit exploded out, making contact with the water for me. My nose was bent into my face, all my loose body parts were (mostly) involuntarily pressed into a mannequin-esque straightened position, and all my internal organs were jostled and squeezed in ways that led to unique feelings and autonomic responses from each.

My entire body was bruised, facing the water or not, I was certain a multitude of bones were broken, fractured, sprained, or a combination thereof, some of that damage coming from the slap of the air rather than the water, and I was alive. Even better, my airbags kept me floating. I just laid there, relishing freedom. A short amount of time later, ten or so minutes by the sun, a boat approached me. Even just knowing roughly what time it was, midmorning, was hugely comforting after the extended stay in my jail outside of time. I used a virus with a control vector on its infection and cell bursting components to carefully chew through the fungus flotation device and get me in position for a good look at my visitors.

Not PRT. It was a civilian vessel, no allowances for cloaking or any other bullshit. The helm was well shielded though, with bulletproof glass I'd have loved to use for my own devices, literally. 'They have something to do with capes after all. A villain's ship?', I thought, before it clicked. It was the Children of the Skull. Definitely not PRT. I jumped up and down, finding Kathy jumping back in response and Faba giving a small wave. Finally, the waves allowed the spent airbags to not be pushed away as the ship approached and I hopped over.

"Jeez, Kau'i! What happened to you?!", Kathy asked as she helped me up from where I face-planted onto the deck, getting enough acid on her hands to burn the skin badly. "Powers.", I said dryly. Faba coughed into his hand and expounded, "She's become a 'monstrous cape', it is a side effect of Cauldron powers. More common when the recipient is stressed, and she was being jailed as a parahuman under false pretense." "How'd you know where to be?", I asked, interrupting before Faba could get into a spiel. "One of the other Children who drank a potion is a precog now. Knows when and where something happens, but doesn't control what she learns about yet. We're working on it, but we do get lucky from time to time with stuff like this.", Kathy said. She seemed to be coming into her own as the second in command.

"All great discussions, but we really should get going. Kau'i will learn about the changes in the Children of the Skull, we'll learn about Kau'i's power and transformation, and all of that information will be put together for our collective benefit, but in this moment we need to get away from the evidence.", Faba said, with an over-the-shoulder point at the airbags. We all nodded, and the engine purred into motion.

I put down the chiropteroid automaton I'd been working on and turned to face Gladion. "Are you just going to sit in my workshop all day? I have tinker shit to do, I don't need your powers stinking up the place.", I said bitterly. He shrugged and continued eyeballing me. I put the new toy down and rolled my reclining acid retainer chair over to the drawers of stolen tinkertech.

I pulled out the tracking device and once again tried to force my bio-organism loving tinker sense to put the electronic thing under my control. I'd made a biological battery as soon as my body was getting the nutrients to be able to put it together, nutrients I could've used on actually useful advancements of my craft, but had instead squandered on banging my head against this brick wall in my power. It would be great if I could use my power to put the server dependent gadgets on my own server, from there I could just power them with my own power instead through biological batteries and have a grand ol' time, but I wasn't so lucky.

No tracking device for the grumpy teenager, it seemed. I went back to the chiropteroid. "What's your deal?", I asked out of the corner of my mouth while I drank a caffeinated kombucha of my own design. The process of making it self-propagating and more like typical bacteria, and thus not reliant on my acid, was a valuable learning experience. The drink itself? Not so great. "I just want to learn how tinkers work, for when I have to face one.", Gladion said. When, not if. I sighed a gratuitous sigh and tried to refocus on my automaton and my plan.

My power wasn't quite Weaver's, wasn't quite Nidhog's, and wasn't quite Bonesaw's. I was somewhere between all of those capes and Blasto in different respects. Blasto had been a villain in Boston, a tinker that made hybrids of plants with other organisms which followed his vague direction. He was missing, presumed dead, after the Slaughterhouse Nine attacked the city. We were both biological tinkers with a unique interface to a certain group of lifeforms that gave us ways to control and design them. His power was the closest thing I could find to my own, and I'd studied his work with a bit of a fangirl-ish obsession. I'd also read up on what those other capes with similar powers had done with their abilities.

Weaver was all about control and had a sense for her swarm at all times that let her apply her control in creative ways I couldn't hope to replicate. Nidhog was, like me, able to turn existing biological matter into a new form he created, but his reach was much greater, allowing him to make robust lifeforms that could replicate long after he made them. Bonesaw was mainly a biological tinker, but her tinker sense actually applied to other technologies, unlike mine, which let her meld flesh and machine to great effect.

These examples let me focus on my limitations. I could make minions out of my automatons, but I couldn't control them with a flexibility that gave me many extra options in a fight beyond the core aspect of a master's minion, fighting in place of me. My microbes' defense systems were impossible to build, with too many forms of attack that would inevitably out compete them sitting out on every countertop on every Earth, which meant I couldn't recreate Nidhog's feats in a microbial form.

I also didn't have the versatility to make my microbes act independent of their colony. Doing tasks on a micro level was inaccessible, ironically, meaning I wouldn't be concocting diseases, nanobots, or anything of the sort. I didn't have a sense of other advanced technology, no circuitry, no coding, just kinetic and chemical forces. I was limited to my intersection of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and materials science, which meant I had to be very smart about any attempts to appropriate other tinkertech. All of these were things I had to be very aware of.

Blasto, conversely, reminded me of what I could do. I could make microbe colonies that fit almost any use case for a piece of biological tissue, on command! From ropes to muscles to baseball bats. I could produce tools no one else could purely by the application of my power. I had total control of any input I needed in my microbes, whether that was a self necrotizing switch or a production of gas so swift it caused an explosion. I had survived being blasted miles through the air and into the ocean at a thousand miles per hour with only a minute of prep time! I had escaped a jail cell made for terrifying parahumans that could break down buildings with their pinkies with nothing but a steady supply of food and an empty glass container!

"Are you going to do anything?", Gladion asked, throwing distracting social signals into my contemplative mental state. I snapped. "Get the fuck out of my workshop before I melt you down for nutrients. Repeatedly.", I said acidly. He left. 'Shame,' I thought, 'his self regeneration would make him a great source for so many pesky compounds!' These were the thoughts you had as a biological tinker. "Well, my homunculus, do you think you can handle flying into shit and exploding?", I asked my unfinished bat minion. I made a scratchy shrieking sound in response to myself.

It was becoming more and more obvious that my brain had not made it through everything that'd happened since my life on Aleph without a few scratches in the paint. Okay, it was more like a hole in the engine block, but it was a fun hole, with tinker nitro strapped to it! That's not how engines work, could've told you that with or without tinker insight, but that's sorta the point. I had taken a beating, emotionally speaking, and I couldn't expect my brain to recover cleanly in the company of uncaring jailers or supervillains. My power had, ignoring the literal freedom it earned me, exacerbated the problem, placing otherworldly knowledge and capabilities into my lap that I was all too willing to use for selfish means. My whole plan was a way to cope with it all, to recoup something, even if that something was revenge.

I finally returned to Bet long enough to get back into preparing for my plan. I unspooled the specialized flight pseudomuscle from the crook of my elbow and began carefully wrapping it between the chiropteroid's pseudobone fingers. My power guided me through each step, the final product in my head stripped down like with the onion skinning in an animation program to show where each little fiber should fall. It was calming in a world where so much just wasn't. Not every use of my power was calm and cool and nice, the on the fly uses throughout my escape certainly hadn't been, but putting things together at the end of the whole experimentation and design process was almost pure zen.

I ran out of material and rolled over to my tub. I'd hooked up a lovely plumbing system just for my acid so I could collect every little drop and use it to the last. After a while, without contact from my living cells, the acid would "die", but I could revive it by just reintroducing contact long enough. Any mass of "living" acid I was touching I could grow and change microbes in, but I could only keep so much acid alive at a time, so it wasn't an insane range upgrade or anything. The vat was just a comfortable convenience for when I had a workshop set up, which any respectable tinker should.

I filled the tub with acid and laid myself into it, not even bothering to remove my fancy acid resistant costume. It wasn't really a costume for me, I was just like this all the time, and I was over deluding myself that I could be cleanly by societal standards. I smelled like shit and vomit at all times no matter what I did, byproduct of having skin that is a digestive tract. Up to sixty percent of the "dry weight" (scientific term) of shit is bacteria, and the smell was distinctly reminiscent. The acid wasn't much better, even when it wasn't going through an active chemical reaction and making new fun smells that no one but me or a masochist could enjoy. I began growing more flight pseudomuscle.

My head leaned back as I focused on the specifics of the tissue I was changing and replicating, washing my crude imitation of hair in the sticky acid. On top of the villi that had wrapped my head during my transformation, I'd fashioned a bright red fungus with a carefully moderated mycelium structure to make something frizzy and stringy enough to fit the role of hair. Then I let it grow over some half formed acid bubbles I'd made, with perforations for acid to leak through, and I had myself some space buns. It was weird, I was getting used to it, but I liked it. The changes to my inside guts' microbes had been significantly easier though.

The tissue was finished, and I was lazy, so I called on the mass of fleshy rigging I'd built into my workshop. I mentally waltzed down the running list of colonies I was tied to and tracked the rig with my eyes as I pulled on the bacterial pulleys to move the rig around the roof space, setting it hanging over the unfinished automaton. I lowered the hoist with a twitch of my nerves, wrapped my creation up with the flexing straps, and brought it straight to my lap in the tub. The warehouse building lurched slightly, and I noted to reinforce the structure somehow so that wouldn't happen again.

I went back to the zen of wrapping the pseudomuscle around the structure, with the added benefit of lying in the tub of my acid. At first, the viscous liquid had been gross and uncomfortable, but it came out of my skin at all times, so it had grown on me. It was mine in a way I needed without a home to go back to. My power may have fucked me up, but it also gave me a foothold into Bet, the last of which had been crumbling out from under me the longer I stayed with the Children of the Skull without anything new to provide. I finally finished my first flying minion with that comforting thought.

I lifted my hand up, offering a stable platform while I stretched the thing's wings. I flapped experimentally, feeling with my hand the amount of thrust that generated. I already knew it would be enough, had already calculated out the drag coefficients and center of mass and everything, but feeling it in the real world still felt different. I raised my hands out of the tub, presenting the abomination up towards the sky like in one of the movies that outed me as someone with too much knowledge of Aleph's culture. That was when Katherine walked in.

"What are you doing?", Kathy trilled, having just walked into my workshop from the front door, out of costume. I jolted a little at the unexpected social contact. "Why didn't you take the normal entrance?", I questioned her, pointing over my shoulder at the trap door on the opposite side of the building. She shrugged. "Didn't feel like it!", she said lightheartedly, then asked, "Seriously though, what are you doing?" "Isn't it obvious?", I said with rhetorical smugness, "I'm learning to fly."

With my declaration, I flapped the wings again, mentally drumming my tendrils across several keys in quick succession to make the right inputs at the right times. I flapped again, and again, and again, before finally gaining lift and slapping the automaton face first into the tub of acid. It made a sickening gurgling sound and began slowly sinking to my calves as my mind retreated from the controls. Kathy giggled. "Learning", I reiterated. Kathy composed herself, taking a stance I associated with Keratin rather than Katherine, and said, "Well, you'll have to learn quick, cause we're going! Now!"

I leaped out of the tub and rushed to my weapons locker. "Why the fuck didn't you lead with that!?", I exclaimed, draping myself in fleshy gadgets. She stayed there with her hips akimbo, pulling hair ties off of her wrist to make the jungle green pigtails that were some of Keratin's most dangerous weapons, and looking at me like I was an idiot. I was definitely not an idiot. "Are you gonna help me? You could use some of this stuff just as well as I can!", I shouted. She rolled her eyes and said, "I can't. I crack one of your stomach eggs," "Acid bubbles.", I corrected, "right those, I crack one and I get permanent fucking burns, Kau. You are a stomach, I am not." She waggled the fingers that had needed a healer after she lifted me up for a few seconds when I broke out of jail to drive home her point.

"Just help put it on!", I screeched, sticking the self-gluing belt of aerosol bombs together at my waist. "And risk my hair? No.", she said, matching the acid I often spoke with. I stood outside the shower, running it until it was just acid without any residual water from my shower that morning before stepping in. "You're the worst!", I yelled over the splatter of the sticky fluid. "Thank you! I'm trying to be the baddest supervillain I can be, ya know? I appreciate the validation big time!", she matched, sounding totally genuine even as we both knew she was fucking with me. I focused on growing what I needed instead with the extra acid washing over me.

The socks, a design I'd improved countless times since I got free, made to catch all the liquid that dripped down my legs while still giving me traction. It cycled it all into the storage container on my back through tubes designed to look like garters. That bit of design language clashed with the plasticy trappings of my costume, but clashing was the point, and somewhat inevitable even if it wasn't. The gloves, different utilities residing on each fingertip that wouldn't affect my other microbes, with the thumb and ring fingers as neutral ground for anything else I need to grab on short notice. Then the thousand other little things, mini airbags here, extra traction there, spare colonies on my skin of this or that for quick repairs, and I was ready.

I grabbed a hose and ran over to fill my other two automatons with acid so I could get them to follow. First, the heavily revised version seven arachnoid, which now had its acid shooting capabilities vastly expanded, with two sets of two modes, stream or spray and acid or string. I'd learned from my bouncy ball how to have some control of my acids' physical properties, but the nozzle would still get jammed if I didn't clear it after a string shot. The arachnoid was also just harder, better, faster, and stronger thanks to not being limited to having a random canister as the base.

The other automaton was a result of my newer advances, mostly focused on what I was missing out on without an abundance of nutrients to put to task in jail. That had been the limiting factor, vitamins and minerals. In retrospect it was obvious. The version three urodeloid automaton was a salamander shaped thing that could crawl up on walls, was always a little bit coated in acid, like her mama, had my best simulacrum of the electric organs of an electric eel, and was able to use one of the regulators for that organ as a paralyzing poison if I really needed it. That started as an interesting discovery, and became an intended feature with a lot of care to make sure the tetrodotoxin-like poison wouldn't kill anyone. The bacteria I'd made to test the parts per million produced seemed to suggest the cloud of the stuff it made wouldn't be lethal, unless I wanted it to be.

All three automatons now stood at attention. "You look like two very different kinds of salads got mixed together before someone vomited two other salads up into the first two.", Keratin commented, now in full costume. Her crop top, jean jacket, and board shorts had disappeared somewhere in favor of a skintight red bodysuit, sharp white panels of armor, and a V-shaped mask of triangular teeth that jutted out from her chin and above her ears. She somehow got ready much faster than I did, and I was going as full tilt as I could without essentially throwing myself to the wolves through lack of preparation.

 "You also look beautifully villainous, oh villainess.", Trash Girl said wryly. I am Trash Girl. Other names had been suggested, Gutsy, Bacterium, The Smell, Shithead, but I went with what people were already calling me behind my back. It just felt empowering, and it was my superpowered identity's name, so empowering felt right.

We were out the door right away. I knew the rush, and didn't bother with the secretive exit. This was an important job, and we would go ahead with it whether the Protectorate caught on or not. "What'd Crux see?", I asked Keratin. I began trying to fly the chiropteroid above my hand, repeatedly catching it as it went off course each time. Keratin relayed the info, finally professional, "You, me, Polish, Ozoid, under the PRT office in about an hour. You cackling like a lunatic, me covered in some kind of liquid. We think Id and Covert might be there too, but he didn't see them. She also has one of those weird feelings, you know the ones, that Antibody and the Protectorate won't be there."

"No Antibody?! Oh this'll be a cake walk!", I cheered. "There's a reason for that you're not gonna like. Khonsu is attacking.", Keratin said, getting straight to the point. "Not here and not now, doesn't matter.", I decided. Keratin sighed, "I know you don't have the, um, lived experience, but Endbringers are not the kind of thing you brush off. Making plays during an attack goes against the game." The game, the unwritten rules of capedom, the aversion to guns and the secret identities and all the rest that permeated both sides. "In case you haven't noticed, this plan goes against the game anyways. You saying we should stop? Cause the vision's already been seen, set in stone.", I argued. "No, we're doing it.", she said, biting down on the hundred other things she wanted to say.

"Any way we can stay in contact with Crux while we're there? We're still thinking his visions have to do with him specifically, even when he's not present, so he should be in the loop." Something about the rush of confidence hearing what was in Stell's vision and the deeply in-character conversation with Keratin while bystanders ran at the sight of us and our guard of automatons made practicing flying so much easier. I already had a choppy rhythm going with the wings. "Nope, not unless she runs out there herself.", Keratin replied curtly, sharpened nails effortlessly gliding through the surface of a brick wall as we fast-walked to our destination.

I socked a bone white armor plate on her shoulder lightly, ensuring no inertia dragged globs of acid off my arm and onto her. "Look at us.", I commented, "Two little girls, and we're so scary that people don't even bother crossing the street to avoid us! They turn corners and find alleyways to hide in. And we're going straight to the Parahuman Response Team HQ to shove their faces in how much better we are at this shit." Keratin turned her head to me, her concerned eyes not matching the fear-instilling visage of her mask.

"You're scary when you get manic, you know that right?", she asked. I responded reflexively, "Manic? I don't get manic." She rolled her eyes and leaned her head to the side so her pigtails hung at odd angles, the expression matching the costume once again. Ever the performer, Keratin. "How do I get manic?", I asked sourly. She gave another condescending glare and answered, "Maybe manic's not the exact word. You have this rush of confidence to your head, like you deserve to rule the world cause you've got it all figured out, and you ram yourself into your problems until you beat them down, which you've gotten away with so far cause you have fucking superpowers, and you just leave everyone else to try and keep up. I've seen that kind of attitude in people before, doesn't end well."

I considered that before I answered, "Alright, hurts to hear that, but I see where you're coming from. You know the basic plan for this mission, how about you lead? Doubt it'll matter much once the snap decisions start coming out, but you have final say on what I do or don't go for. Cool?" "Hurts to hear that," she said, repeating my words, "but yeah, that's cool." We each nodded, which was as close as we could get to shaking hands when ready for war, what with my acid and her points and edges.

Keratin's hand pierced through another metal box of electrical components. I wasn't the best at picking them out, but the absence of my tinker insight is an insight of its own, so I managed. More of the PRT's security systems went dark, which was no problem for us with the bright bioluminescents I'd coated parts of both of our costumes in. I whipped a groaning PRT officer with the urodeloid's electric tail again. 'Shouldn't be able to groan.', I thought. "We need to get going," I told Keratin, "our appointment's coming up."

"Alright. Trash Girl, behind me.", she said, marching through the litter of incapacitated saps towards the stairwell access. Her eyes sharpened to match the devilish smile of her mask, and she brought her head down in a controlled sweep. Her pigtails cut straight through the door in parallel lines before she brought them back up, draping one across a shoulder and flicking the other with her hand, theatrically displaying that the hair was now dull again. Her fingers were then brought to bear, gouging the horizontal lines out of our entryway in dramatic arcs. She kicked the several inch thick loose rectangle of steel, knocking it to the floor on the other side with a clatter.

She climbed through the hole, then looked back at me through it. "Careful, Trash Girl," she said smugly, cutting a small groove as she laid a finger on the exposed edge of the steel, "it's sharp." I rolled my eyes. The automatons went through first, finding no issues with the sharp edges at all. Then I made my own show out of gripping the edges as I climbed through after her, leaving little maroon splotches where the ferrosynthetics on my pointer finger had taken to the door like a kid in a candy store. I had spent some time learning to deal with exposed metal. We went down.

With each inoperable containment foam sprayer we passed as we descended, my giddiness built. We were gonna get all the juicy details about the Wards and Protectorate that they'd tried to torture out about me. "What's your name?" "Where are you from?" "Who told you to do it?" "Why did you do it?" "Do you feel sorry?" "What kind of parents could raise someone like you?" Director Nanu hadn't pulled any punches when the cards were down, I wouldn't either. Keratin cut through the emergency door into the Ward's underground office with her hair, prioritizing speed over flourish this time.

My arachnoid did the honors of going ahead of us, with a spore smoke bomb being second through the hole. I heard Ozoid on the other side across the hallway yell, "CONTACT!", in her echoing slime voice. I had the arachnoid spray acid in the direction of her voice and got a sizzle of feedback. I pointed towards her and Keratin climbed through to get her. Ozoid's slime form was better at taking damage, in addition to all the usual benefits of being a semipermeable ooze, but me and Keratin were excellent at dishing out lots of damage when we wanted to. It was not her matchup.

Keratin ambushed Ozoid through the smoke, separating her jiggly arms in the snap of a finger, literally. Katherine had very few compunctions about bringing her flair for the dramatic into serious parahuman bullshit. A feign, chop, and an attack of opportunity took away her legs as well. The chiropteroid cleared the spores around me with its wing flaps as I began separating Ozoid's limbs from her jittering torso. Keratin and Ozoid shared the classic hero and villain banter, one part of the game she wouldn't drop for this job, but I tuned it out. Ozoid was holding together pretty well given her newfound lack of arms and legs. Her breaker form must've come with pain tolerance.

I ignored the both of them and went ahead, automatons leading as I prepared to fight Polish. Apart from the non-cape aversion field, he just had some unspecified combo of super strength and durability. The plan was to fight him off with my minions while I put a special little virus onto their systems to give me full access to the Honolulu PRT's personnel files. We couldn't touch the higher security stuff, even if there was an Endbringer fight going down we weren't going to risk Dragon getting involved. Sadly, it was the computer kind of virus.

As they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and this plan certainly didn't survive the running kick Polish sent into my urodeloid automaton. He wasn't a mover, but his super strength still gave him an edge in speed. Whether he modified mass or acceleration or circumvented that bit of physics entirely, he was able to put far more force into running. The salamander crashed against the roof and I felt many of the structures in it split into a less usable state. The electric organ's colonies were damaged enough to be useless against a brute like Polish.

I ducked out of the way of his headlong charge and began maneuvering my healthy automatons in-between us. He dug into the ground as he turned around to continue his assault, and was shot with my arachnoid's acid stream. He closed his eyes, but was otherwise unbothered, moving toward where he last saw me. I was already out of the way when I brushed the chiropteroid's wing tip against his arm to distract him. He ran again, right into the wall. I chucked an acid bubble at the back of his head and let it soak him instead of wasting my automatons' acid, then I ran as quietly as I could to the control center.

He wiped the acid from his eyes this time before pressing the attack, finding me halfway to the end of the hall. I tried to get the arachnoid to catch his leg, but he just leaped lithely over it and kept going. "KERATIN! A LITTLE HELP?", I shouted past him. "ON IT!", she reported cheerily. The coordination wasn't going to help though, since Polish had already caught up. I tried to swerve around him again, but he swerved with me and knocked me across the room.

The wind was knocked out of me, leaving me heaving for air on the ground. Polish approached at a more sedate pace, aiming to restrain me, and was cut across the back by Keratin. He turned to address the issue and was met with a lock of green hair across the face. My automatons joined the fight, creating a maelstrom of attacks around the hero while I backed away to get to our objective.

Polish delivered a solid kick to the arachnoid, leaving several of its legs busted. I scrabbled it around so I might still shoot him at some point, but it was effectively immobile. Keratin wasn't doing any real damage, each slash only leaving a shallow mark, and my acid wasn't any better. I pushed aside the problem and kept going.

I ran up the stairs of the Wards' control center, sliding into a fancy office chair in front of a computer terminal set into the desk. I belatedly grew a simple acid barrier on my butt and upper thighs to have a more comfortable stay in the chair, then pressed the power button for the computer. Then I held down the power button. Then I cracked my fist down on the power button. There was no power.

Keratin flew into and across the room, arresting her momentum with jabs into available surfaces as she passed them, finally stopping when she dug her fingers into the ceiling. She fell like she was dropping down from a set of monkey bars. Polish followed after her, covered in skin-deep lacerations and thrusting out with his fist like a rocket. Keratin deflected the blow with a stabbing kick into his forearm, leaving him open for a jab to his shoulder. Both attacks left an actual mark, conical shreds of flesh that reached down to the muscles.

"Keep doing that!", I encouraged, frantically growing as strong and steady a bio-battery as I could manage in the vat on my back. "I plan to!", she responded, doing everything she could to avoid Polish's powerful blows. "Also, uh, there's no power.", I added. She spent what little theatrics time she had to look at me like I was stupid, given the near blackout, then realized what I meant and tried for all she could to look at herself like she was stupid. That put her overtime, and she took a kick to the stomach that sent her up into the ceiling. "Figure something out!", she coughed, her feet wedged into the concrete of the roof. "I plan to!", I copied her.

I pulled the battery out, fumbled under the desk for the computer's power cable, threaded it out of the floor, and plugged it into the fleshy socket of the battery. From what my power knew, that should do the trick, but I knew not to get my hopes up in regards to my power and electronics. I held down the power button again while Keratin pushed an offensive to get her hand into Polish's gut. The light on one board in the case, I wasn't sure which board, flickered before fading out. "Looks bad!", I announced. Keratin flipped me off in the course of pushing Polish's arm down from an attempted headlock.

I moved to another computer, repeating the process. "Could you help!?", Keratin asked between ragged breaths. I sputtered, my arm still wedged in the floor to pull the cable out, "Not really, You know my limits!" "Shiiiit...", she said, dragging the word out. I popped my head up to spot what she was talking about. Ozoid was all back together, joining the fight. "Covert's here!", I announced. No one else was around to put her back together. Keratin boggled, "Covert's here?!" The lights flickered on. I cackled, "Covert's here!", and pulled the thumbdrive out to plug into one of the computers I hadn't gotten to yet, turning it on. 'Crux never said it would be dark!'

I tossed a special bomb out, a spore bomb I hoped would be able to disrupt Covert's cloaking tech, though I hadn't been able to actually test it. His cloaking tech was the one thing no one had recovered from the aftermath of a fight, for obvious reasons. Then I hucked a classic acid bomb at Ozoid, detonating it after it entered her body. 'Would the extra gases from the aerosol bombs rip apart her slime form?', I mused, then I tried it, since I had nothing else to do waiting for the computer virus to do its work. It left a huge hole in her. I began moving my two still mobile automatons towards me in anticipation of a fight. More of a fight.

The virus wrapped up, the progress bar at the center of the screen switching to a series of windows with the personnel files we were after. Director Nanu, normal human, long service record, active duty PRT ten years ago, a connected file for his niece Acerola, one of the rogues in entertainment. Polish, civilian name Ilima, stranger 5 and brute 3. Ozoid, civilian name Plumeria, breaker 6. Antibody, civilian name Mikala, trump 6.

The Protectorate team. Kahuna, aka Hala, Cave-In, aka Olivia, Brave Bird, aka Kahili, Isopod, aka Guzma, and Red Shift; Civilian name Molayne, striker/blaster 7, with a mover 2 subclassification, connected to his cousin's file. Molayne's cousin, Covert, civilian name Sophocles, tinker/stranger 5, the boy who had done this to me. There was one last file in the Wards directory, apart from staff. I wasn't aware they'd been recruiting, so I opened it too. Harm's Way, civilian name Gladion, shaker -5, changer 5. 'That fucker's a double agent!' I started laughing.

Keratin gasped out sharp breaths behind me. "It's not... that funny.", she said. She had been hit by Polish while I was reading. "This is though!", I giggled, pointing at the screen. Polish didn't bother to let us make small talk, leaping through the air from the ground level up to where I was in the rows of computers. "Hey Ilima!", I said before setting off an acid bomb on my bandolier. He was shocked on two fronts. "Plumeria, catch!", I shouted down to Ozoid, tossing another aerosol bomb into her chest. Keratin gave me a look. "By the by," I said, still laughing, "Harm's Way is a double agent. He has a shaker power that makes stuff around him try to kill him, gets people caught in the crossfire."

Covert chose that moment to try and drop down on my head, key word: try. I'd been waiting for him, suspecting he would've shown up by now and betting against my anticloaking bomb working. I caught him with a string bomb that used the same biopolymers as the arachnoid's string mode, though it was more like glue when used in a bomb since I had to add less polymer to get it to burst. I let it explode in a cupped hand to keep from too much getting on me. Covert spun in midair out of my way from the force of the blast.

"Hey Sophocles, how've you been buddy!?", I jeered. "Trash Girl.", the boy replied with a glue-coated scowl. Polish tried to punch at me, but I was out of the way. I got the chiropteroid to bite him with the neat little acid-soaked fangs I'd designed, but it just bounced off of him. Keratin cleared her throat, "Trash Girl, contact Crux, she's in danger being around Harm's Way." I laughed, enjoying myself, "Yes ma'am!"

I finally had the urodeloid back to me, so I shocked Covert for good measure, then began shoving bombs in Polish's face as I worked through getting a message to Crux from the Wards' computer. Parahumans Online would be best, lots of thinkers spent half their time on there and Stell was a cape nerd to boot. Much faster than email or fiddling to get SMS running. There was no way Covert hadn't run these computers through a half-dozen VPN's, so I really just had to worry about logging out and removing the history. I used the account I had used back at the library on Kauai, before I was even a henchman, just for security. I had an actual Villain tagged account now.

Keratin was dealing with Ozoid again as I typed out the messages.

Don't Say The C Word: Cx

Don't Say The C Word: It's TG

Don't Say The C Word: HW is a double agent

Don't Say The C Word: Unpredictable shaker power

Don't Say The C Word: You are in danger

No response, status still unread. Polish punched me in the arm and I spun as I crashed through the row of chairs. "Keratin! I've got something for this, but I need you here first!", I shouted, ignoring the radiating pain in my arm. 'I need another visit from that healer Id hired.'

Keratin got a good slash in on Ozoid before running over, jabbing Polish in the back, and asking, "What is it, Trash?" "Crack this over your head.", I instructed, handing her a large bubble of antitoxin goop. She ignored me for a moment, making sure the Wards weren't closing in, and I cracked one over my head first to demonstrate. "Close your mouth and eyes.", I said, standing up and holding an acid bomb up in my other hand. She finally complied.

"Don't do anything you'll regret!", Polish urged me. I laughed at that, the irony of those words coming from him was hilarious. He didn't give me the satisfaction of regretting what he did, I wouldn't give it to him. I had the urodeloid mist the place with its poison. Polish seized up, Covert was cloaked but would be affected just the same, and even Ozoid shuttered. I pushed past Polish's paralyzed body on the ground and typed again.

Don't Say The C Word: URGENT!

IC2Much: k

Keratin looked over my shoulder, the toxin digesting goop having been cleared from her eyes, leaving them twitching and bloodshot. "Clean out and let's go.", she ordered. "Agreed.", I said, ecstatic in spite of the broken arm. I grabbed the thumbdrive, the urodeloid, and cracked another antitoxin bubble over it before getting it up on my shoulders.

Ozoid blocked our way out, and I held Keratin back from engaging her. I grabbed another acid bomb, tossing it up and letting it fall back into my hand. "Why're you still with the Wards, Plumeria? You're old enough to be a Protectorate member by several years, same with Ilima.", I asked Ozoid. "You really wanna play mind games here?", she asked, voice warbling. "Not mind games, just curious.", I said.

Ozoid sighed and shrugged, answering, "If it keeps you here, whatever. For both of us, the Protectorate wants us on the team until they can fill our spots, and the Honolulu team's got plenty of heroes. For me, there's also probation, and Polish is working on getting Antibody ready to lead the team. WhAAAGGH!" I had brought the chiropteroid around to run into her back and exploded it inside her when she was distracted. It was a shame to lose it, but it was the best weapon for this. Ozoid was ripped to pieces that sprayed out around the room by the abundance of extra gas that I'd put in for the chiropteroid's suicide attack. It irked that I wasn't using any of the special bomb modes I'd built into it, but I'd live.

"You really just have no respect for the game.", Keratin said with a mad smile that reached her eyes. I replied conversationally, "The first rule of the game: Don't involve civilians if you can avoid it. Villains play that a bit more loose, but these heroes? They shit all over it. Eye for an eye, broken rule for a broken rule." I got Keratin to mount the arachnoid on top of my acid vat, and we strode out of the Parahuman Response Team's headquarters like champions.

I'd made myself a fungal sling for my arm and set my internal microbiota to ask my brain very kindly to please fucking heal faster. The gut-brain axis is a hell of a thing, but it's way easier to put a signal through there than trying to fuck with the brain directly. Even easier for me. I'd also made a few bandages and things for Keratin, who was way more banged up than me. Somehow, being battle-scarred made us more intimidating to the pedestrians we passed on the way to the main base for the Children of the Skull, where Crux had been. Whatever happened with Harm's Way, we'd need to speak with Id to get up to speed on their end of things.

I was just giving an overly girlish wave to someone staring in terror at me when a giant crash sounded behind me. I'd been hearing something like it for a while, but had shrugged it off as the pounding of blood in my ears. "What was that?", I asked Keratin. "Probably cape stuff.", she replied. "Our cape stuff or other people's cape stuff?", I pressed. Keratin's eyes grew wide as she answered, "Shit, probably ours." We started running towards the noise. "WHY OURS?", I shouted to her. Despite her injuries, I was still slower than her by a wide margin. "HEROES ARE DOWN, WHO ELSE IS IT GONNA BE!?", she said, her voice bouncing off the storefronts to reach me.

We reached an intersection and finally saw the calamity that was transpiring. Crux was running down the street, out of breath, stumbling every few seconds, and jumping or spinning occasionally. His moody grey and forest green costume was scuffed all over, the crisscrossing "timeline" designs drowned in stains. Her strange maneuvers weren't useless though, with each one she just barely dodged something that would have killed or permanently injured her. Parked cars randomly exploded, advertising signs and awnings fell from buildings, plumbing burst out of the road, power lines twisted every which way, and birds had heart attacks and seizures that dropped them out of the sky on collision courses.

Behind him was Harm's Way, being hit by all of the things Crux dodged and healing through it. Like a walking embodiment of Murphy's law, the world deigned to destroy him, and his power refused to let him be destroyed. This was the reason Harm's Way was in the PRT's files as a shaker -5, he was a genuine danger to anyone around him and they didn't want him working on their side.

Crux's stumbling was the result of her visions, which she seemed to be having constantly and for good reason, but Harm's Way was slowed about as much when he had to heal from the chaos of his shaker power. Without once looking our way, Crux turned to meet up with us. It was like her power was a pair of eyes in the back of her head, except it wasn't, because she was seeing the future. "IT KEEPS GETTING WORSE!", he screamed at us. "HIS POWER?", I yelled back, trying to stay out of Harm's Way's way. He responded, "THE FEELING! SOMETHING REALLY BAD IS COMING!" 'Oh, wonderful.', I thought, 'Just what I needed to drag down my great day.'

Harm's Way climbed out from under a car that had flipped through the air to land on top of him, a trail of his own gore being painted on the road by his freshly grown legs. Lucky for him that his regeneration made him an unrecognizable mess of scar tissue, since his costume was long gone. The scars would fade, my tinker sense told me, if he spent some time with his regeneration active without being crushed under a boulder or something. A red hot electrical line tore off his arm as he spotted us, and he didn't seem phased by the pain. My tinker sense told me his body was completely standard when healed, he just had that much experience shrugging off pain.

Crux, Keratin, and I were all together now, running away from Harm's Way. I panted out my plan, cursing my small jail cell for my poor cardio, "I think I've got something, but I need to see behind us! Keratin, hold me." I grew my most utilitarian acid barrier, using up the acid that covered me, and looked to Keratin for the go ahead. "Fine, you fuckin' freak.", she said affectionately. I hopped into her arms and looked over her shoulder at Harm's Way. "God, you smell like a rat corpse!", Keratin commented from next to my ear. "Not my priority right now!", I called over the clatter of city infrastructure ripping apart. Then, I threw the urodeloid out behind us with my good arm.

Harm's Way kept approaching, and he was now close enough that Crux was starting to fall behind again from her visions. I weaved the urodeloid through the chaos, occasionally getting a pointed finger from Crux to change directions before something affected by the shaker power destroyed it on the path to Harm's Way. Finally, I had it jump at him and put all I could into releasing the automaton's poison payload. Harm's Way fell over, paralyzed, and I kept pushing the poison to keep him down.

Crux ran back to us and nearly collapsed, this time from exhaustion. "We need to get out of here!", he insisted. "That feeling?", Keratin asked over the din of objects digging Harm's Way into a crater in the ground. Crux nodded. I climbed off of Keratin and offered my arm to Crux for her to be carried. 'Thank you, jail, for the impetus to get really good at lifting.' She got up, I settled her gingerly in my arms, we began running again, and I continued the conversation. "Explain?", I implored. "Harm's Way is doing something or causing something that makes this situation several orders of magnitude worse! I don't know what it is, no vision, but I can feel it getting closer. I think it's a blind spot, somethAAAAGGGH!"

Crux went into a panic on top of me, crushing my fragile arm. I could feel his heart rumbling in his chest and his feet and arms flailed against me. Then, even more than before, the world exploded with sound. Several massive mechs, Dragoncraft, circled in the sky above us, and the air crackled with the sound of cannons, ballistas, and tinker weapons firing nonstop. Lines of light connected all of the figures to a sphere of stone in the sky, passing through the towers of blackness that filled the air. Weaver spoke in our ears, her voice coalescing from the chitters of her swarm, "Khonsu is here, run in the direction you were running or fight." Keratin looked at me, terrified despite the grin of her mask. I knew what I was going to do. "You don't have to fight," I said, "but I'm going to."

I put Crux in her arms with a stab of pain and ran back towards the crater in the road. Keratin said something to Weaver's swarm, but I didn't hear it. I stopped pumping out the automaton's poison, in case anyone fighting Khonsu ended up in the crossfire, and took the version eight acid gun out of the arachnoid, letting the rest clatter to the ground as I ran. "Happy to have you on board. What's your name? I'll deliver you an arm band.", Weaver buzzed as I ran. "Trash Girl!", I shouted, nearly stumbling over a large crack in the road. "Bio-tinkers head to medical.", she directed, and an arrow of bugs formed in the air, pointing me right.

I ignored how she knew I was a biological tinker and followed her command. These people knew way more about fighting Endbringers than I did, I wasn't going to question it. Another arrow pointed me left once I stumbled through the doors of a building, then another pointing up on the door to a staircase. I followed the arrows in a daze, growing lightheaded as I used what time I had making bandages with my power out of most of the coat I'd used to be carried by Keratin. It felt like I had suddenly dropped into a different world from the one I had been living in before Khonsu showed up. It was a sickeningly familiar feeling.

I stumbled through the door marked by a circle of bugs and into the medical area. "Area" was about the most generous word you could use, it was a mess. Every sprawled, half-dying cape had a cherry red forcefield between them and the floor while the civilians bled into the carpet. Apart from the cries and curses of the patients, the room was deathly quiet. I expected there to be more people here if an Endbringer was attacking, but there were only maybe thirty patients. A cape in a yellow and pink body glove was lowered through a hole in the roof, her legs crushed by some debris or stray attack, and I rushed over to her.

The legs were beyond hope, so I set to making it a clean wound. I killed the gloves for a moment and began melting the tissue connecting her stumps to the mangle of gore that had been her legs. She screamed. 'There must be some nerves still in there somewhere.' Another of the capes working medical came up behind me, asking, "Are you sure that won't spread diseases?" I didn't look at the goat-headed man in white as I answered, "If I made communicable diseases I'd have a kill order on me, not that I can. Any microbes I made will get killed off in her body." He didn't respond to my left field answer, instead handing me the armband Weaver had promised to get me and getting back to it.

I didn't know the buttons for it, so I just put it on and pressed each one in succession until it asked for my name. "Trash Girl.", I told it, before getting back to work. I picked the bone shards from her stump, made a quick harness to keep her femurs from rotating out of place, and moved to the next patient. My hands, gloved again, wrapped the bandage around the man's lacerations as I stared out of the window.

We were on the top floor of some office building, only tinted windows and the frontline of our forces between us and Khonsu. I watched as one of his time fields passed over a building and a flying cape, causing the building to crumble and the flying cape to disappear. "Garrison deceased.", the armband announced. 'That would be why so few people need medical attention.', I thought, moving to another injured cape.

More bandaging, growing tourniquets and braces, and performing ad-hoc surgeries and amputations on body parts hurting their masters. "Your nose is bleeding.", one patient told me. "Ah, need some ascorbic acid. No biggie.", I said. "What's... ascorbic acid?", they croaked, throat hoarse. "Vitamin C, important in certain membranes. Turn your head.", I instructed, putting a neck brace on them and growing a little pill of bacteria to convert other nutrients into ascorbic acid. 'I could've just done that directly in my stomach.', I thought. I swallowed the pill and kept going. I spent half an hour just going through the motions, the throbbing pain of my broken arm mounting with each procedure.

"Khonsu is teleporting.", the armband droned, interrupting me moving to another injured civilian. Weaver made a ball of bugs near my head. "Are you coming with or staying?", she asked through her proxies. I sputtered out, "Shit! Uh... Take me with." A line of light suddenly appeared, connecting me to the stone sphere in the sky. Khonsu stretched out his pitch black arms, lined with leaf-like blades of armor that only furthered the twisted ghoulishness of his visage, and the stone pulled us all to follow Khonsu through the lines of light.

I started falling out of the air, suddenly forty something feet up without a building to support me. A forcefield caught me as the medical team and injured were lowered to the ground. The civilians had been left behind. "Sorry Trash Girl!", Laserdream, our attendant with the forcefield power, called down to me. The armband beeped right in my ears from my awkward position on the forcefield, "Current location, Simpson Desert National Park, South Australia." A new patient was lifted over to us, and I got right back to clamber through the sand towards them.

Harm's Way was laid out on the crystalline super-stretcher, barely conscious and covered in scars. "They really want you out of the way. Doing more harm than good?", I asked sarcastically, taking another wave of fatigue as I formed braces for all of his limbs. He was really bent out of shape, but he didn't let that stop him from chatting. "I could heal this all in a second, but they don't want me using my power at all.", he said pridefully. "Not powers?", I questioned him, "You've got two powers, the shaker thing and the self healing." "One power, they're linked. To use one I have to use the other too.", he said. "Thanks for the intel.", I commented, strapping a brace onto his arm without the proper procedure to make it not hurt like a bitch. He didn't flinch, instead groaning from what seemed to be agitation.

I began moving to another patient, but he stopped me with a hand on my ankle. "Tell them to let me go.", he told me. "What!? No!", I said, killing enough of my coat to burn him some with my acid. He didn't let go, but the acid was slippery enough to let me wrestle free of him. Just as I was looking around the medical area, now perched on a sand dune, finding no patient unattended by people more prepared than me for this, I was interrupted. "Message from Dragon.", my armband whined, "Move to search and rescue. The medical team is fully equipped." It took me a second to register the message, since I'd been tuning out the numerous alerts of the dead since Garrison died, to focus on my role. I grabbed my acid gun and ran towards the fight.

My head rumbled in time with the sounds of the battle, a furious roar that nearly caused me to collapse. Iron deficiency, my power quickly diagnosed, something I usually only struggled with making loads of ferrosynthetic archaea. I was running out of important nutrients from all of the shit I'd been doing. My armband pointed me to a hero who'd been buried under sand when we teleported, and I dug one-handed into the dune for several minutes to get to him. 'Need to build a burrowing automaton sometime.' I cracked an acid bubble into my mouth to build a salve in my torn up throat and provide my stomach extra materials for coaxing my body into peak condition through the gut-brain axis.

Finally, I pulled the hero out of the dune and began performing emergency surgery to get the sand out of his lungs. He was unconscious and his extremities were already going cold. My time was limited. My power gave me no easy answers for anesthesia, so I just had to hope he didn't wake up until it was done. I cut through his turquoise armor into his guts, rushed the clearing of one lung to give the man time, and moved frantically to the other lung when I felt his heartbeat quiver and stop. I tried to do chest compressions, but it just squeezed his intestines out of the incision I'd made. 'How ironic,' the grim thought passed my mind, 'I put his digestive tract on the outside, just like me.' "Porpoise deceased."

The armband kept beeping after that, and I blindly followed its directions to another downed combatant. This was just like the medical area, only worse. I was where the armband said the cape was, but I couldn't see them. My vision was blurred and messy. I reached up to see if there was something in my eye, and came back with a clear liquid on my bloody gloves. Tears. God, shock is a bitch. That's what I get for putting myself in "peak condition", a normal person's response to this shit. I finally could see how close I was to Khonsu, barely outside of his usual time field range. I lifted the tan suited Ward into my arms and moved back toward the medical area. The unbroken arm was so sore and scratched it hurt just as much as the other to lift with, so I just used both.

I dropped the kid onto a red forcefield and my armband barged in again, "Khonsu is teleporting." I'd lost track of time. I waved again at Laserdream for another forcefield, and she put one beneath my feet. Again, Khonsu's arms stretched out, and I could see the crowd of capes, Eidolon, Antibody, and the Honolulu Protectorate included, tense for whatever Khonsu might be planning in this new location. The ball above us rolled and we chased the Endbringer through space. "Current location, Pariser Platz, Berlin, Germany.", the armbands chorused in synthesized voices.

Several dozen capes fell out of the air where they had been on top of sand dunes, and Khonsu's spherical form loomed across the plaza. Time fields swept through the surrounding concords and buildings, catching the humans and parahumans who were caught inside. Cold rain poured from above, nearly sleet, mixing with the hot sand and leaving our forces covered in sharp, sticky mud. The Brandenburg Gate stood behind Khonsu, a tinker already mounting a turret to the statue of a chariot on top of it. Heroes scrambled to evacuate civilians, Weaver foremost among that group. Villains and heavy hitters stayed laser focused, often literally, on Khonsu. I just rushed to get to more of the injured.

Alarms began blaring, far too late for many. I ignored the armband's directions, running straight for where debris from the decaying buildings had hit the most civilians. I really wished my arachnoid had been healthy then, as I joined the brutes and breakers on the scene in digging people out of the rubble. I didn't bother sparing my broken arm the work, I'd practice the medical applications of my power fixing that arm once this was all over. As the stronger capes made progress getting people out, I switched gears to set up another medical area, somehow shittier than the first. Men, women, and children, only a few of them costumed, were laid out in rows on the cold ground, jagged cuts and smashed bodies exposed to the rain.

Before I could start sorting out triage beyond cases of immediate need, a white circle appeared below us, the portent of Khonsu's attack. One Dragoncraft swooped down, carrying a swath of capes and injured out of the field in a net of hard light before the field could activate, including me. Behind us, Khonsu's time field melted the injured that Dragon and a few Movers hadn't dragged away. Most died in the blink of my eye without the medical care they needed, but others blurred as they experienced weeks of dying of dehydration or infection surrounded by rotting corpses. When the time field released them, all that remained was bones and a layer of fine dust. That was what had happened to Garrison.

Dragon's machine dropped us harshly, just outside of Khonsu's range. The capes that had been working to lift people out of rubble began lifting people out of the pile of bodies Dragon had left them in. Far too many were unsalvageable, too close to bleeding out or suffocating for me to save. Too many more were hard to save, but not impossible. I didn't have the time or resources to save all of those, even if an Endbringer wasn't breathing down my neck, so I had to choose. Who lived? Who died? My brain was too overloaded, the tears now an unstoppable force and the fatigue held back with a bandaid. I just went by whoever was closest to me already.

"Tell Dragon to get better healers over here!", I shouted at one brute helping move the corpses as I performed a sloppy tracheotomy with a sharp piece of brick and a souvenir cup bendy straw. "Done.", Weaver buzzed through her swarm. I didn't let the suddenness of that stop me. I made a pseudobone cap for a woman with a hole in her skull, then stitched a little boy's stomach closed without the time to check for anything still in him, then staunched the bleeding of a man that was newly quadriplegic.

No time for the girl with the slashed open throat, the old lady with a piece of wood halfway into her face, or the person who'd been buried under so much building that the rubble was crushed into them like they were a layer of rock. "They can't spare any.", Weaver reported, the tone somehow somber through her bugs. "FUCKING MAKE THEM!", I screamed, the tears and shakes nearly causing me to drop my microbe scalpel into a man's open mouth. No one looked at me like I expected them to. It wasn't surprising, not in the middle of a catastrophe. "I will.", Weaver said after that chilling moment, completely serious.

I continued working, a dozen different people's blood on my hands, my own pain just background noise to the weight of tragedy these people were experiencing. I stalled, unable to grow more pseudobone to help an old man. I had to keep moving, would be too slow to help him, but I wouldn't let it happen again. "Get me one of the loose limbs!", I ordered. One breaker obliged, teleporting some woman's crushed leg to me through his body. I mentally flexed, opening the vat of acid on my back, and dropped the leg into it while I glued a child's ribs back together with my other hand. "What the fuck!?", the breaker shouted at me. "Need the nutrients for my microbes. Go ahead and break the truce buddy, we'll see how that goes.", I snarked as I went to yet another patient.

I grew most of the same suite of microbes I had inside of me in the vat, letting them digest the leg at rapid pace. 'Add cannibalism via vat to my record, that'll put some fear in my enemies.' I got to the end of the field of patients and turned back around to make another line through it before a healer finally arrived. Weaver dropped him in front of me, then gave a salute to me as she flew backwards somewhere else with her flight pack. "Get fucking working!", I ordered him, my hands already deep in another set of guts. My power made me weirdly calm about actually messing around inside someone, but everything else about people being crushed and cut by collapsed buildings was still just as mortifying.

He ran past me and began molding people's flesh shut. "You can do stuff that takes me too long.", I called over to him, "Weaver, arrows over the injured with large gashes and stumps?" Helpfully, arrows made of bugs marked most of the patients matching my description. "You get the one with arrows.", I told the healer. He stayed silent as he moved to the nearest arrow of bugs. I ran as well, across a group that didn't warrant immediate attention, stopping at a cape whose legs had starved and necrosed on his body. Some weird power interaction with Khonsu's time fields. I started amputating them, stemming the arteries as I went, and a person in costume I had passed over caught my eye.

"Crux, what's it look like?", I asked her. She clenched her teeth, eyes closed as she studiously ignored her shattered arm. "Harm's Way.", he said. "What?", I asked, my hand carving again into the screaming cape's mummified thighs. "Harm's Way runs in, down the plaza, towards Khonsu.", he clarified. I spoke into the air, "Weaver! Can you convey that? Harm's Way's power is dangerous to everyone around him, he can't be allowed to fight Khonsu!" "I did, but we can't identify Harm's Way among the injured.", she said.

"SHIT! Get more healers here, I have to go!", I shouted. Crux pointed shakily with his good hand, and I ran where he was pointing as soon as I was finished cutting the man in half. On my way to Harm's Way I passed Parian and Foil of the Undersiders, charging in to get a better angle on Khonsu from the back of a massive stuffed lion, Defiant, flying across the field to repair some tinkertech, and a group of native Berliner capes in form-fitting bodysuits, catching up to speed through a translator. This was a battlefield, but it was not cleanly delineated or organized. Every piece of sensibility in the presence of Khonsu had been etched with strokes of swords, claws, and teeth.

My body finally began to give out from under me in my mad dash, even with the restock of nutrients, and I refused to let it. I killed the coat that kept the acid in, used digestive microbes to reclaim the resources, and coated myself in layer upon layer of pseudomuscle and pseudobone. It was insulation between me and the world, squeezing and pressing against every bruise and break, but I wasn't exactly loving what the world had to offer at that moment. I fell over as I first tried to use my fleshy power armor in concert with my own muscles, and rather than try to learn on the battlefield, I just went limp inside of it. My power took focus over my real body, and "I" bounded down the plaza with new vigor.

My powerful strides brought me smoothly over the heads of patients in the original medical area, until I stopped above Harm's Way. His scarred face scowled furiously, browridge trying to knit together eyebrows that weren't there. "You're gonna do it, aren't you?", I asked him, disappointed. "Yes! Yes I'm going to do it!", he hissed, sounding like a smoker of seventy years. "You suck, you know that?", I said rhetorically, picking him up with comically large purplish arms. "What!?", he exclaimed dumbly. "Getting you away from the injured for your big moment.", I said, sarcasm dripping off of my tongue.

Then I stopped looking at Gladion, instead focused on a bundle of bugs curled up on a nearby cape. I dictated to the bugs, "Clear a path, straight from here to Khonsu. Make sure any tinkertech is being watched when Harm's Way starts using his power, those'll break first. If you have some idea to put Harm's Way down, do it, he's a liability." "Copy. Path clearing.", Weaver said professionally, then hummed, "I should have just taught you to use your armband, Trash Girl." I set Harm's Way down and kicked him. "Go get 'em tiger.", I said, already running away from him. He flipped me off as I ran. 'He is definitely going to die.'

Then, Harm's Way healed. In seconds, he was running on functional legs, the scar tissue receding. Then a tinker drone fell out of the sky and very nearly splattered Harm's Way into paste. He crawled out after a brief pause, running like it was nothing. Another disaster from his shaker power came. This time it was a metal beam that fell out of a hole in the building it was meant to support, rotated with great speed, and bounced oddly off the wet ground to spear Harm's Way through the chest. The fight raged on, but nearly all the thinkers and bystanders were only focused on Harm's Way. I couldn't do the real medical work when covered in my meat mech, so I joined the audience.

The ground caved in beneath him, and he just scrabbled up out of the pit on handholds so sharp that no one else would bother. The wind picked up an umbrella, hooking the handle into his eye socket, and he didn't even bother to pull it out. He made it all the way under Khonsu's floating body. The time fields swirled, and every time one caused a structure to collapse it sent shrapnel towards Khonsu and Harm's Way. Cuts were left in Khonsu, exposing more of the alternating silver and black layers, while Harm's Way healed it off faster than Khonsu could.

One time field came close to Khonsu to heal the damage, kill Harm's Way, or both, but Eidolon stepped in and knocked the field away. That was our one defense. He couldn't fully block out the fields, so instead he settled on deflecting them away. It had saved alot of people. Harm's Way ran as a white circle appeared under him, barely escaping the attack. Khonsu shifted the field forward, and his wounds sealed from the inside out as he passed through it. Harm's Way was behind Khonsu now, under the arches of the Brandenburg Gate. Brickwork fell from the ceiling, snapping his arms to bits for only a moment before he was back to normal, catching his breath.

Eidolon and Khonsu were fighting, floating around eachother as they traded blows, with Khonsu denying Eidolon entry into his time fields so he could bludgeon with them instead. Behind Khonsu, Harm's Way caught his breath between sudden acts of chaos. Two white circles formed under the adjacent arches of the gate, then moved through the walls of the gate to trap Harm's Way between the two fields. He was as good as dead. Eidolon continued fighting, fists shearing layers off of the onion that was Khonsu, while Harm's Way seemed to have a panic attack between the two time fields.

He turned to walk through the time field facing away from Khonsu, then tripped over a piece of fallen stone and fell backwards into the closer field. From there, it went faster. The Brandenburg Gate collapsed around Gladion, each piece of rubble crushing him to the ground before he got back up to do it again. Like a montage scene in a movie, he kept getting up just to be destroyed by another piece of the famous monument. His head was smashed, his feet fell through suddenly shattered shards of brick, and his legs were bent every single way that they couldn't.

Khonsu was doing it like this on purpose, using less time acceleration to show every part of the agony Gladion was going through as he slowly starved to death surrounded by a crowd of onlookers watching him get pummeled by his own power. It wasn't slapstick, it was grisly. When Khonsu's time field finally left Gladion's corpse alone, it wasn't bones or dust, it was the still warm rail-thin boy we'd just witnessed turn off his power so he could starve in some modicum of peace. He was just barely dead, an insult added to horrifying injury.

The Honolulu Protectorate charged from where they were resting, and I found myself charging with them. I hadn't even particularly liked Gladion, but Khonsu's attack struck a deep nerve, one that hated that injustice. I'd never do any damage to the hovering bastard myself, but I had to do something. While the Protectorate led a coordinated assault on Khonsu, I rushed to the rubble.

My meat mech tossed aside chunks of stone and steel while my eyes looked out for Khonsu's time fields. A woman coated head to toe in concrete dust had to be abandoned as a time field moved towards us. I carried a little boy, no older than seven, with a leg pulped to bits, outside of Khonsu's range before diving back in. A cape I recognized as Imp from the Cauldron meeting, was stuck under a slab of marble. I lifted the marble, became very confused why I was lifting a random stone when there were people in danger, and carried on. The stress was getting to me, the tears only subsiding because I'd run out.

I barely dodged a time field on my way to another pile of rubble. No one trapped inside. I moved on. The bugs began to stir, and it took a moment to understand why. Weaver was pointing me to where people were trapped. I followed the bugs, like Weaver was controlling me too. I held a woman's chest together as I ran to get her away, watching another two people die as I did. Several times, Khonsu tried to form a time field under me, and I pumped my legs so hard getting away I was certain I'd broken them too.

Suddenly, as I was digging a man out of a pile of glass shards, the time fields stopped chasing me. All of the pillars converged on the Honolulu Protectorate. "Message from Weaver. Lost connection to bugs on Khonsu and Honolulu team. Stranger or trump power? Stop it." I immediately knew what was happening. How could I not recognize my boss's power? "ID IS TRYING TO DIRECT KHONSU!", I shouted, and my voice came out scratchy and warbled, "HIS POWER MAKES THINGS AGGRESSIVE TO OTHERS HE EFFECTS AND UNABLE TO COMMUNICATE!" In the time it took me to say that, Khonsu had already trapped Antibody and Cave-In, Mikala and Olivia, in a time field.

I carried the man embedded all over with glass out of Khonsu's range, but there was no one to take him to one of the medical areas for me. The parahumans were going in every direction, most trying to find Id. Eidolon had flown in to keep the rest of the Honolulu Protectorate from getting swallowed up, and some confident close quarters fighters had gone to attack Khonsu from behind while he was distracted with Id's power. Id didn't allow it, shifting the area of effect to include the hopeful fighters. He wanted to keep Khonsu alive. "Any clues about his power? He's your boss.", Weaver asked me. "It might be based on line of sight, he never said one way or the other.", I choked out. "Tattletale says that's right. Thanks.", she replied before her bugs spread out again.

Dragon and Defiant's ships flew over the battlefield, trying to find Faba. Before they could find him, I saw another villain suddenly grab him out of the crowd, in civvie clothes but still connected to the stone sphere with a line of light, and blast his head open with a tinker weapon. His body slumped to the ground, and the fight continued. It was unceremonious. The Children of the Skull were, in all likelihood, gone, with that one act. Maybe Keratin would continue the work, but Crux and I had goals beyond just smuggling and stealing. Id was the one with the connections, the plans, the confidence. Maybe all of it was misplaced.

A part of me wanted to continue, to push myself past my limits again after however many times I'd already done so just that day. The rest of me, the broken bones, empty tear ducts, and worn throat, was done. I stumbled to the medical area, the one I'd established, and collapsed at the end of one row. I let microbes eat the power armor I'd cocooned myself in, and felt my broken body rest against the cold ground.

My inner eyelid was cloudy with cold rain as I stared up at the sky of a country I'd never been to before. Weird, to think about that. I'd been to Australia and Germany through sheer coincidence. Most people never traveled that far in their entire lives. Only a minute after I laid down, the armband announced another teleport. "Current location, Zebalattse, Gomel Region, Belarus." I drifted into unconsciousness on the soft, melting grass that now surrounded me.

The third time my life changed irreparably was when something slapped me across the face, waking me up after the fight with Khonsu. It was Weaver, no, she wasn't wearing her mask. Taylor Hebert was standing over me, and she'd used her bugs to slap me, avoiding getting my acid on herself. "We're done. Khonsu fled. Are you prepared to help more people?", she asked, and it was her real human voice. I hadn't heard her like that since the Cauldron meeting. I shook my head no. She didn't look disappointed or surprised. "Okay. Do you want to be sent back to Honolulu?", Taylor asked. "Not yet.", I said, and my voice was cracking and dry. I used up the acid that had pooled around me in my sleep to make a new coat, but stayed lying there.

"Why are you here? Why me?", I asked her, and it came out more accusatory than I'd planned. "Atonement, I guess. I thought I should do something after I watched you get kidnapped and abandoned on a different Earth.", she said. "I'd say that's stupid," I started, my body squeezing out each word, "but I've been there, earlier today. Thanks." She smiled at me, but her eyes were unfocused. Creepy, in that way only powers could make someone. "Could you, uh, carry me?", I asked her. She looked at me properly again and nodded.

"Bring me to Keratin.", I directed Taylor. She obliged. I spent the trip looking around us. We weren't in Belarus anymore. A city extended into the sky above us, cold and gloomy. Toronto, if I was going by the towering needle poking at the fog. Buildings had collapsed around us in the way indicative of a time field, but Khonsu was gone. I smiled, and it made my neck hurt.

Taylor entered an office building that had been commandeered for medical work, walked into a private office, and laid me in a chair next to Keratin. Her hair was a mess and she had a broken nose, but she was otherwise fine. Kathy tapped her temple, indicating where the camera was on Weaver's mask, and Taylor shook her head. She removed her mask and Taylor gave her a look. "I've seen the videos, if anyone's gonna reveal my identity it won't be you.", Kathy said pointedly. "I wouldn't be so sure.", Taylor said knowingly, and Kathy just laughed it off.

"I'm not going back to the Children.", I declared as firmly as I could manage. Kathy looked at me completely unamused and said, "Don't blame you." "It's just," I said, "I'm after Cauldron, and you don't have the connections Id did to do that." Kathy sighed. "I understand Trash Girl.", she said, "Anything else?" "I need the things from my workshop, but I don't know where I'll be moving it.", I answered. "You can keep the workshop until you move out, wasn't gonna use it for anything else until the smell came out anyways.", she allowed.

Then Kathy turned to Taylor, sensing I had nothing left to say. "Any advice for someone new to the warlord business?", she asked her. Taylor answered genuinely, just like in all the videos, "It depends on the person, but for you my advice would be to completely avoid getting into the warlord business." "Good advice!", Kathy said jokingly. The room went silent. "Well, if you're just gonna sit around in my cozy little room doing nothing, I'm gonna ask you to leave.", Kathy said, putting her mask back on. Taylor picked me up again and we left the room with tidy waves.

"You said you were working against Cauldron?", she whispered to me, like that would stop their Boogeyman from finding us. "Yeah, revenge.", I stated. I felt her bugs giving me a once over before she nodded. "I know where you might be wanted. The Irregulars are all Cauldron-made, and I know their leader. I put bugs down his throat.", she said, almost casually. Almost.

"Does he not dislike you?", I asked her. She replied, "No, Weld has respect for anyone who turns themselves around for the better. I also have some credit in that group for... well, you know." "Alexandria.", I murmured. She nodded. "So they have the same goals?", I asked. "For the most part, yeah.", she answered, "They're mercenaries, but they're on the hero side of things. That's a hard transition to make." With that last comment, she gave me a dreadful look. Pride, sadness, regret, and determination in equal measure. Experience. "That sounds good.", I said, "Let's go tell Crux, I want to know where he ends up."