11

Summoner - Chapter 11 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series

Notes:

ayo we hit 11k views?

and lots of kudos, comments, etc.

thanks, you guys really motivate me.

enjoy

next chap soon, prob tomorrow

It was nearly midnight by the time Sile sent her a text with the address of where Lung's club was, and it was in fact the thing that had woken her up after she licked Newter's blood off the sample glass, which she had done the moment she finished talking to Sile, her new minions, and her new partners.

She hadn't licked Newter's blood for a high, though that did help with her built-up stress and frustration, a lot, but so she could add him into 'Ultimate Hunter' and always know what direction he was in.

Why?

Because why not? Never know when she might need to track him down for some reason.

And if she carefully used telekinesis to make her dad cut himself while cooking dinner so she could sneakily lap up a drop of blood, nobody had to know.

Back to the main point, 'Oasis'. Lung's club and pseudo-headquarters.

What was it with clubs and villains? It was also an oddly tasteful club name for a man who was critically short of it, and in a surprisingly good area. She didn't even know this was gang territory.

The place itself was honestly great too, almost nostalgic. It had a faint Ionia vibe to it, which was a byproduct of the fact that Ionia was the Runeterra equivalent of Asia, so she quite liked the place. It had a nice, tasteful mix of new and old, of LED-lit paper lanterns somehow managing to mix with the laser shooters in the edge of the dancefloor.

The second floor was just pure degeneracy, unfortunately. Like Faultline's VIP room, if it was occupied by a bunch of animals who were in the regular business of human trafficking and prostitution.

She knew this was a gang's hangout, but when she peeked through the window, she was not expecting to see girls of questionable ages wearing little to literally nothing, their activities ranging from scandalous, stilted, reluctant 'dances' to bobbing their heads up and down some tatted motherfuckers' crotch.

Her tentacles itched for some guts to spill.

But she was not here to save them. She couldn't save everyone, not yet, not without showing too many of her cards. Saving those girls would never be as simple as just killing everyone in the club and dragging them off to the cops. The Empire apparently had the cops in their pockets, so she had no idea what would actually happen to the girls if she took them to the authorities, she had no place to put them, she had no way of dealing with the no doubt half a dozen addictions the girls had been forced into, she had no way of keeping them in line or providing for them without tying herself down massively, she had no way of helping them get a job and a functional life, she didn't know how many of them were here illegally and if she'd just condemn them to return to China, she just... 

Much as she wanted to just be reckless, she couldn't. She had the resources to take the girls away from this environment for a moment, but none to ensure they'd stay away, or even worse, end up in even nastier places. Like the Merchants. Or... hell, she didn't know for sure.

And saving them would reveal way too much, before she was sure she could take it. Even if things went perfectly, people would know there was a really strong cape in the bay, and be on the lookout for her.

Information was the single most important thing when it came to fighting a cape, and she'd rather keep everyone confused and wary, unsure of who and what Summoner was. She had to have serious aces up her sleeves for when it was time to take the real threats out, and showing herself now on something as measly as the ABB, when in the future, her trump cards could be the key to gutting some far more monumental threat? It just... wasn't worth it, even if it hurt to think about things like this.

Hopefully this way, when monsters like Nilbog and Jack Slash were under her claws, they wouldn't know anything about her, wouldn't know how to fight back and who.

And hopefully, that would be worth leaving these girls to their fate for a bit longer, in the long run. Hopefully, they might even forgive her.

But first, Lung and the ABB had to be under her thumb. The Empire could wait.

Because credit where credit's due, at least the nazis didn't kidnap girls and force them into prostitution and drug addictions. Or if they did, they sure as fuck kept quiet about it, because nobody mentioned that in her thread.

She materialised on the club's roof for a moment to check the message she'd left unread, just to have it out of the way, and then quickly pocketed it after speed-reading through it.

The Case 53 metal egg-man ended up going with Trainwreck as his cape name, apparently, which was kind of funny in a lighthearted sense, but also a bit too Merchant-y for her tastes. Still, his life.

She severely doubted he would refuse to go with Faultline after he met her. The woman could make a good pitch, and he needed some kind of group or stability. That and her perhaps too-honest text to him made the situation clear to him. She was not in a spot to employ him right now, and she had nothing for him to do.

She turned into smoke and flit into the vents.

Her first few attempts ended up with her running into more sights that made her blood boil and hiss in her veins like acid, but she eventually gave up and went to a main area to restart from.

Storage room, storage room, sex room, again, some kind of gangster lounge where half the guys were snorting crack and being obscenely loud with their cackling…

This place was a lot bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, damn.

Eventually, a door with a static guard sitting next to it in a chair and fiddling with his phone drew her attention, and she went under the door, into the room.

She found her there.

In a brick-and-floorboards room with a toilet in the corner, a flimsy, dirty mattress thrown into the opposite corner, and a metal handle drilled into the ceiling that had a chain attached with a clip on it, trailing down to the blonde form curled up on the bed, rattling softly with the slightest shift.

She was wearing a collar. Not a kinky one or anything, just a thick, bulky metal collar with lights gleaming through the seams and hinging locks, attached to the chain.

Well, fuck. Getting her out of here got a tad more complicated now. She almost went to push herself between the wall and the girl's eyes to get a good look at her face, before remembering that she was some kind of psychic or something similar, and deciding to err on the side of caution. She turned back into smoke, rushed out of the building and back to the empty one she'd designated as the escape point, just to make sure it was still empty and nobody had wandered in, and rushed back.

The girl was now on her back, so she crept around the edges of the room as she prepared.

The girl's open, unmoving position gave her time to examine her. Her right arm was in a cast, from the elbow down to her fingers, her left hand was also in a cast, the tips of her fingers being the only visible parts of it, and her breaths were artificially shallow, likely some kind of rib injury.

The most concerning part was the swathe of bandages and taped-on cotton that covered the left side of her neck, from collarbone to jaw.

Considering who they fought, she could guess that was a burn. She could probably treat that fairly easily, but she had ideas for why she shouldn't, or at least withhold it for later. She floated behind her along the edges of the room, before coming up as close as she dared, staring at the odd collar. She switched to the Rune of Inspiration. She quickly got a sense of the collar, one that she verbally translated in her head to something like ' This collar was built by an egotistical maniac-woman-child trying to prove her magic-not-magic-reality-twist was useful to her superior.'

'Cosmic Insight' did not exactly understand powers, she could guess from that odd insight. And of course the Thinker she was trying to rescue slash recruit was wearing a fucking Tinker bomb collar. Still, she had some solutions to deal with this. Needless to say, actually.

She carefully materialised in a crouch beside the bed, just barely out of sight of the girl. Then she went even lower, because the Legend she was about to change into was quite tall. After making sure that she wouldn't pop into her line of sight, and making sure that her transformation wouldn't make her accidentally punt a can into the wall or something, she picked Lillia, The Bashful Bloom, with only a small puff of displaced air.

She was… the definition of a cinnamon roll. Lillia was absolutely adorable and Taylor loved her with all her heart and it was honestly for the best that Lillia died without even realising it because if she'd suffered, that would have been incredibly depressing.

She had been an intensely shy fae fawn, skittishly wandering Ionia's forests, hiding just out of sight of mortals—whose mysterious natures had long captivated, but intimidated her. Lillia had hoped to discover why their dreams no longer reached the ancient Dreaming Tree, so, she one day picked up her magical branch in hand and left her magical forest in an effort to find people's unrealized dreams. It was as innocent as it was hard to explain without having experienced it for one's self. Thankfully, nobody would be asking anytime soon, so long as she did it right.

The most important part was that Lillia was the single Legend she had that had any kind of sleeping magic in their arsenal. Or atleast one that was somewhat stealthy.

So, she gingerly positioned the branch, careful to not smack it into the wall, and with a pulse of mana that moved through the branch to activate the dreaming flower with faint flickers of blue, she gently waved it as close as she dared, almost touching the floor, hoping the girl wouldn't tilt her head a couple degrees and see the blue light in her peripheral vision.

To her relief, she watched the girl's eyes immediately slide shut as the spell and the flower's dream's reached her, tension leaving her features in mere seconds, before her eyes slid shut.

Then she breathed out a sigh of relief because the girl hadn't noticed or even seen her, somehow.

She got up, and swapped to the Rune of Sorcery, before swapping to Ryze, The Rune Mage.

A special Legend, by all accounts. He was the one who had gathered the World Runes and worked with the old summoner to bind everything into a summon core. He was supposed to be the one who would carry the summon core, in fact, but had died via ' purple death ray from the stars while defending the binding site'.

Before the end of his world started however, he'd been widely considered one of the most adept sorcerers on Runeterra, an ancient, hard-bitten archmage with an impossibly heavy self-imposed burden to bear, which was to prevent the World Runes and any of their fragments from falling into the wrong hands. Armed with his immense arcane power and a boundless constitution, he had tirelessly hunted for the World Runes for centuries, gathering fragments of the raw magic that once shaped the world from nothingness.

And he really fit his legacy because his mana pool was… more of a fucking ocean. The man could probably level a city. Blaster 7, maybe 8? And very versatile- and he just gave her a fucking idea.

Magic tattoos. She could do that, actually. Fuck, she had to, didn't she? Her mana pool was a damn puddle, and it worked on roughly the same principles as Qi. In a world without mana, her growth would be stunted. She couldn't afford to be squeamish with damn tattoos of all things, even if they'd glow a lot.

She just had to get a way to enchant the ink and an actual machine.

She shook her head, feeling swamped, and focused on what she was currently about to do. The thing she picked him for was his interpositional space-swap. In less fancy terms, he had a mass teleportation spell. It had a ton of restrictions, like flat ground, no obstacles, and no destination point that had a higher density than water, just to name a few, but it was fast, it was long range, and despite costing a monstrous amount of mana, Ryze had more than enough in him to teleport at least once from one end of the Bay to the complete opposite end, and bring like fifty people with him.

She quickly formed the runes for a shield with her fingers, cast it on the girl, and once the space around the girl's skin shimmered faint blue, she brought out the 'Nullifying Orb', hoping that it worked on expressed powers, rather than just nullifying a power's user.

She carefully crouched down and lowered the orb into the collar's range, and barely contained the laugh of elation she felt when the lights coming out of the seams of the collar abruptly blinked off. The barrier shimmered out of existence too, despite being hers, but whatever, it was just a precaution.

She gently put the orb on the floor, and rose, dragging her book out in front of her, then she spread her arms, telekinesis keeping the book floating in place and flipping through pages memorised a dozen times over.

With a gesture not unlike she was trying to draw the runes out of the paper, which she was, four spinning, interlocking circles of nonsensical, indigo-glowing symbols formed around her, the girl just barely in range of the spell. Runes, just not the kind she was carrying. These were more like the language of The Runes, like the language of creation, in a sense.

It was complicated.

The runes melted, spread their indigo glow across the floor, until she was essentially standing on top of a blue, spinning wormhole, perfectly flat and difficult to look at, and space unlocked in her mind, a hundred different items and details unraveling in her mind. She mentally grabbed the girl's collar, and forced it out of the spell, allowing it to remain back here, along with its chain. She did the same to the mattress.

A sound not unlike a pretty giant made of glass slowly inhaling with a strange echo and ring to his rasping gasp rose in the room, and Taylor released the spell, allowing it to start the process. The sound rose, the light growing, until color in the room became meaningless, leaving nothing but neon-blue behind.

Then, because she had been getting things done with too much ease, it seemed, the world decided to spite her a little. The door clicked open, and she whipped around, mana rushing down her arm to pool at her left palm, which she thrust at the door. Her eyes met the wide eyes of a gangster, who, credit where credit was due, despite his naked terror at the bizarre sight he walked in on, immediately reached for his firearm, tilting his body to back away, letting go of the handle to push the door away, his mouth opening.

She didn't give him the chance to do anything else.

She swapped to the Rune of Domination, picking 'Dark Harvest' as the main effect, and sent a blast of penetrative telekinetic force at the man's head, not unlike shooting a boulder with the speed of a bullet, but ghostly, yet present. The sound was like the whoosh of rushing air, yet with an oddly metallic scrape to it.

Magic was strange.

She watched the basketball-sized rush of energy move to the man in the blink of an eye.

His head exploded like a watermelon from the lower jaw and up with a sickening squelch-crack, and she only minutely flinched as pieces of brain and viscera sprinkled themselves across her face, and primarily, her arm, grimly watching his corpse crumple backwards like a puppet with its strings cut until it hit the ground with a thud, his brain splattering across the wall opposite to the door in a million little pieces and blood droplets.

A wispy red fragment of a soul raced out of his chest, and into hers. Her first 'Dark Harvest' stack.

For three tense seconds, she listened to the usual clamour, straining her ears to be sure nobody heard or saw that, that nobody saw what she could do.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she grasped the pistol off the floor with her hand and mana, and yanked it to her feet, not willing to waste the tool by leaving it behind.

With a sound like the fabric of reality itself breathing a raspy sigh of relief, her world flashed blue, her body sinking into the floor in a millisecond, as something human and not, a blue-purple tinted mass of energy and mind and consciousness. The world came back dark and dreary and covered in dusty concrete, night light peeking through empty window holes in a building half-finished and abandoned. 

The teleport worked.

The distance had eaten about a third of Ryze's monstrous mana pool, but she was in an abandoned clothing factory near the docks now, far from ABB's center territory.

She turned her head, lowered her gaze to the peacefully sleeping girl laying on the floor, bereft of her bomb collar, and frowned.

She didn't actually need to kill that guy. She could have just thrown a small blast at his chest to wind him so he couldn't scream, and a second one to his hands so he couldn't grab his pistol, before dragging him through the door onto her teleport and then making him her minion.

It was not just a mild case of moral alarm that irked her, it was that it was also so wasteful. The guy was a scumbag gangster, so any guilt she felt was muted at best, but she'd just drawn way too much attention and wasted a potential resource.

She was annoyed at herself.

Even so, she'd completed her main objective, so she was left with the unpleasant part of a rescue.

Logistics.

She turned to herself, bent down to grab the pistol and the purple-blue orb that kept the girl's powers unusable, and quickly picked the rune of Inspiration with 'Unsealed Spellbook'. She cast 'Heal' on the blonde, a strange sound like someone inverted the sound of something bursting into flame filling the empty, open air floor. Green motes of light burst across the girl's injuries, beneath bandages and casts, leaving behind fresh flesh and skin.

She bent down, and slowly peeled back the tape that held the mass of cotton stuck to the girl's neck, before peeking under it.

She saw mostly healed skin, still a little warped and twisted and red, so she cast 'Heal' again.

It still didn't fully fix the injury, as it had already been festering or "healing" for a while, so there were some signs of discoloration and strange texturing, but it was the kind of scarring one had to be looking for to even notice it.

She could guess anything else that was broken was healed as well.

She swapped back to the Rune of Sorcery to pull out the nullifying orb.

Then she realized that the damn thing had a fifteen minute cooldown and swapping Runes dismissed it, so with a self-disappointed sigh, she turned back to Lillia, and got comfortable on the floor, waiting for it to come back.

Ten minutes later, and after a third 'Heal' cast, since its cooldown was only four minutes and there was no harm in making sure, she swapped to Evelynn and began to quickly peel the casts and bandages off.

It was only now that she really began paying attention to her rescue.

Her upper body was hidden by a hoodie that she accidentally realized had no shirt or bra underneath when she was trying to get rid of all the cotton that went down to the collarbone, and her lower body was hidden by some kind of… torn up catsuit of sorts, likely a part of her costume before the upper half got fucked up enough to need a jacket to cover her modesty.

She was more surprised the ABB fuckers gave her one rather than be complete degenerates.

She was also objectively very pretty, she noted as she cracked the cast around her hand open with her claws and inspected the fingers for any remaining breaks or pain, but she couldn't help but feel odd about the thought because…

Well, Taylor was fifteen.

But she felt like she was a mythically ancient entity more than an actual singular person, despite her best efforts to fix herself. It felt almost pedophilic to be thinking that a girl her own age was attractive, which she was, but still. She really had to work on that if she ever wanted some kind of meaningful relationship, or at least to have the ability to try for one.

Man, she really had a great way of ruining her own mood, didn't she?

And she wasn't done fixing herself it seemed. Meditation might help her do it, so she had that to add to the endless task list.

She briefly used 'Cosmic Insight' on the girl, and found that she was a rather… normal sort of girl, actually, if a little cattier and more needle-y than Taylor usually liked, mostly in how much she enjoyed being smarter than other people and poking at them. There was also some kind of… rawness around the topic of suicide.

Maybe she tried to kill herself once? That's… rough.

She picked Rune of Domination, nicked the girl, and gathered the drop of blood on one of her overlong claws to lap it up for 'Ultimate Hunter', just in case she had to track the girl down again.

Fifteen minutes after teleportation, she swapped back to Lillia, and undid her spell, before swapping to Evelynn again and briefly debating on whose part she might be playing this time, 'Nullifying Orb' in hand.

She could introduce herself as, well, herself, but…

But she was trying to stay hidden, at least until she was sure the girl would accept her offer. Hidden in a way that no matter what absurd series of coincidences might happen, nobody had anything to say, no matter what kind of powers were involved, Thinker or Master, nobody could have material to gleam information on her from.

But she also was not intending on being a business partner with this girl, neither was she thinking of Mastering her, no matter how strong her power turned out to be. She wanted her to be in her… court, of sorts. Her main team. A psychic, if she actually was one, which was rather doubtful, was perfect for her goals. Even if she was a mid-tier Thinker, she'd want her in her information team at least. 

Half a battle was won by knowing who you were fighting and what they could do. Information was the most valuable thing.

She had to present herself a little more personally without giving too much away.

So she went for the middleground.

She molded her form with Evelynn's, and then covered the naked skin with casual, tight jeans and a black hoodie, while she hid most of her face behind a respirator that looked more like a military grade gas mask. Then, she turned her hair a straight light brown.

The girl slowly stirred awake, and after a brief moment of consideration, Taylor bent down, her elbows on her knees and her calves pressed to her butt as she waited by her side. 

Half a minute later, green eyes fluttered open groggily, confused, with a small groan. They stared at the ceiling blankly, swept to her, lazily, and then once her brain registered that something was very wrong about this picture, she seemed to well and truly wake up, her eyes widening as she blinked up at her.

"Hello." She simply offered, her voice slightly deepened artificially, and the girl squinted at her.

Then her eyes widened even further, surprised fear flooding the air about her, before hurriedly rising to her elbows. The blonde glanced down at her hands in surprise when she felt no cast preventing her from moving, and her eyes strayed to the broken remnants of said casts all around them. She instantly turned to glance around, before gingerly raising a hand to her neck.

She paused, then jerked her head around and down, pulling her head back in disbelief to stare down her chest as if wondering where her collar had gone, then the feeling intensified as she accidentally brushed what should have been a badly healing burn but was now just smooth, if a bit wax-textured, skin.

Happy disbelief had a strangely tasty flavour profile. She almost licked at the air before remembering she didn't need to do that to taste emotions.

The girl's eyes finally went back to hers, clearing her throat.

"So… I guess I'm not being executed?" The blonde gingerly asked, uncertain, as if half-expecting the answer to be negative for some reason.

She snorted, thumbing at the orb's glass-like surface.

"No. I did not go through all that trouble to save you from Lung's psychotic ass just to kill you out here in the middle of the docks, don't worry."

Gratefulness, apprehension, some kind of suspicion-realization feeling, all mixing in the air.

The girl squinted at her more, pushing herself up a little so that her butt was on the floor and her torso wasn't, wiggling her fingers as if she was trying to get used to being able to move them again.

"Alec?" The blonde asked, asking it in a way that was more akin to asking if she was Alec, and Taylor did not have to fake the confused twist of her features.

"...Who?"

"Oh, it's… nevermind. So, you saved me from Lung. Somehow. I'd love to say thank you, but I have a feeling you did not do so out of the kindness of your heart." The blonde said leadingly, raising a brow. 

She was remarkably composed, Taylor noted. She was scared of course, and trying to cover up for it with false confidence, and there was the bitter-ish aftertaste of panic in the air around her, but were she not Evelynn right now, she'd never have guessed any of that. She covered it up exceptionally well.

"Actually, that's mostly why. First of all, hi, I'm Summoner. Heard through the grapevine that Lung was keeping some kind of psychic teenager in his metaphorical basement, and that didn't sit right with me. But, I am a parahuman, and I do plan to be making a team soon, so there was also that little motivation in there. You know, connections and all that. Figured that I could get you out of there, you could go regroup with your buddy that survived, and maybe in a month or two when you felt up for it, I could hire or recruit you both for my team, if you accepted. Though I expect you'd rather just go home right now rather than think about any of this more than you have to, so I'll drop you off myself, if you want, or at least escort you most of the way. It's kind of late right now and you don't strike me as a Brute."

The girl blinked at her, before her gaze wandered in obvious thought. After a few seconds, a low, bitter, defeated piel of chuckles came from her as she curled her legs in, feet on the floor, hugging her knees, before lowering her forehead to them.

"I'm so fucked." The blonde whispered, her voice a strange mixture of despair and incredulous laughter threatening to bubble to the surface. Taylor frowned.

"Why do you say that?" She calmly asked, genuinely curious.

The girl gulped audibly.

"My cape name is Tattletale. But if you want, just call me Lisa. I don't know where my teammate is, and I don't think he knows where I am either. He probably thinks I'm dead. I don't have a family or a home, and I'm not a psychic, I'm basically just a really good deductionist, like Sherlock Holmes on a lethal dose of Adderall. I can't read your mind, but my power is good enough to fool people into thinking I can do that. Nothing incredible, but it's good enough for someone like Lung to decide to keep me around as his private Thinker, and that's a sentiment I have no doubt the rest of the supervillains around Brockton Bay share. Before Lung, it was Coil. He's a Thinker cape. He found me days after I came here because I was stupid, but his power also had something to do with it. He put a gun to my head and told me I work for him now." Lisa finished, voice raw and bitter, and Taylor blinked at the sudden monologue.

That… was a lot.

Wait, did she just tell her her real name? It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't exactly true either?

Wasn't that some kind of taboo with capes?

Shit, Coil was a Thinker cape? No wonder he controlled territory while doing jack shit…

Lisa also wasn't a psychic, that part was true, but it did seem like she was lying about how good her power was, likely downplaying it, judging by two separate crime lords trying to keep her in their clutches by force…

Best to keep the orb out for the moment, establish some neutral ground before any sudden revelations came to Lisa and disturbed her.

A few seconds of silence stretched between them as she got to mentally parsing through the last parts, and the realization slowly dawned on her.

She sighed heavily in sympathy, more of a grimacing sigh.

"Damn… So, you have nobody to turn to, nowhere to go, no resources, and your power is good enough that most gangs in the city would rather chain you up and use you as an answering machine rather than a member… Not to come on too hard, but I do sound like your best option right now, whether you believe me in my half-benevolence or not. But, I feel like there's something you're not telling me, or else you wouldn't be saying you're fucked, and you certainly seem smart enough that I doubt you forgot about them. The Wards. Why not just go to them? You're young, and as far as I heard, you're just a thief. They'll take you in easily. What, did you murder a Ward or something in another state?" She asked, only half-serious, and Lisa let out another bitter half-laugh.

"Ah, if only. I can't go to the PRT. I don't know the extent, but Coil has men in there. Informants. Without factoring in his power… It's no use. I'll probably get kidnapped before I reach the building, or maybe they'll put me in temporary residence while they sort my papers out and he'll kidnap me then, frame it as me running away. Or I'll get in the Wards and get kidnapped the moment I leave the building for a patrol, have my death faked. Or maybe they'll transfer me to another branch at my request, only for my ride to mysteriously drive in the wrong direction until I'm just delivered straight to him again." Lisa mumbled in defeat all the possibilities in which going to the Wards would land her in someone else's clutches, before turning a little to side-eye her and shrug.

"So, yeah. You are my best option, because I have no other options. If you and your friends don't take me in and hide me somehow, I'm fucked. It's- shit, it's almost funny how fucked I am. I can't even get a ride and ditch for Boston!" Lisa exclaimed, her voice wavering as if she was about to laugh or cry or something in-between, leaning back to throw her arms wide as if to say "see yee and despair", a sense of despairing awe and stress-nerves flooding the open room.

Her gaze nailed to a window and the city outside it with a smile that was more of a pained grin, a sort of grim humour as an undertaste.

She frowned.

Coil had men in the PRT?

… Could she find them?

It took mere moments for her to chew through her worries, and discard… most of them. She wasn't dealing with a mastermind here. This was just a girl in way over her head that got a triple dose of the worst fucking luck imaginable. One that literally had no other options left. She didn't have to worry too much about information leaks and betrayals.

But that didn't mean she'd throw caution to the wayside, even if she almost felt a bit of kinship with her over that mile-long run of bad luck.

"Lisa." She said, and the blonde blinked and turned to her, as if she'd momentarily forgotten she was there. "First of all, I can't exactly accept you in my group without being honest with you, and vice versa. So, I'm going to give you a… rough guideline- Oh relax, I'm not about to threaten you." She scoffed and rolled her eyes, and Lisa blinked at her before giggling.

Fuck, it was a nice sound. Stupid teenage hormones.

"Shit, is this what it's like on the other side?" Lisa asked, and when she gave her a questioning look, Lisa waved it away, her emotions a little lighter from the welcome distraction she provided. "Force of habit, ignore me."

"Right. Moving on. My warning is simple. I have a lot of things to hide, or more specifically, everything, and I place a lot of importance on information. And to be blunt, If your power can do what I imagine it can do by extended interaction with me, you're going to end up knowing far too much about me for me to be comfortable with. What is important and unique to you, is that you won't have much choice in knowing those things, so I'm probably going to have to give you an NDA of sorts if you want to join, but the power version. At least until I can trust you with that kind of information. Sorry." She said with a faint shrug, actually feeling a bit sorry about the provision.

Lisa's brows furrowed impressively.

"What, like some kind of… vow of silence, but via power?"

She blinked, tilted her head. Nodded.

"Yeah, actually, exactly like that. You sign, and you physically won't be able to talk about anything to do with me, our operations, et cetera, if it isn't with me, or with my express permission. The contract will run out when I say it does. And the second bit, is that as I said, we're strong, but new. Still getting the hang of things, still securing funding. You've been in the game for longer, you'll have lots to teach us, so you're going to be a bit busy starting off with."

Lisa frowned a little, scrutinizing her.

"Whatever you're doing to block my power, could you ease up on it for a bit? I want to ask a question and know if you're lying to me." Lisa said, and honestly, it was a very reasonable request.

She also had to show some trust to gain some.

"Alright." Taylor nodded, and shuffled back a step, still crouched on the floor, then she took the ball, and extended it back and away from them, until Lisa left its range.

Lisa's mouth opened, then her eyes glazed, widening more and more, blinking rapidly and flitting about Taylor's body like she was about to have a seizure. Seconds passed like that, in awkward silence.

"Uh… Lisa?" She asked, genuinely worried she'd already puzzled out something horrible enough to turn on her, or refuse her, and damn the consequences.

Summoner drew the weird… Tinkertech ball thing away, and Lisa's power abruptly returned.

Sailor, experienced- paranoid, female, male, martial artist, tilt of shoulders suggests long history of archery, hates you, wonders how your flesh tastes, six foot three, foot placement wrong, left pauldron cracked by axe, eight foot nine, five foot eight, foot placement right, stump is misfitted, does not feel it, experienced combatant, experienced torturer, orphan, spy, killed many, killed thousands, killed millions, wonders if he can invert your ribs to make you grow organic wings of bone, wants to beat you to death, wants to help you, paranoid- can't find his sword, trust issues, megalomaniac non-realized energy manipulator, is fading and yearns death, you remind her of her sister, desert roamer, shotgun operating on unknown energies, thinks you're pathetic, thinks you're cute, chronic tobacco smoker, at peace and calm, war general, broken entity, unknown entity, dangerous presence, waiting for a threat to rise so he can protect-

"Uh… Lisa?"

She slammed the tap on her power shut, still gaping like a fish at Summoner, confused beyond belief.

She swallowed.

"Uh… my power is… glitching…?" She half-stated, half-asked, before glancing around and turning it back on.

Power is working normally.

Her ass it was, what the fuck was that?!

She still got her usual random, useless insights on the building, on the staircase in the corner of the floor.

Then she turned to Summoner, and grimaced as she was assaulted with an endless stream of complete fucking gibberish.

She slammed the door shut on her power again, nursing a minor headache already.

Lisa hissed, and rubbed at her forehead.

"Well, shit. I can't read you, at all. It's giving me just… complete random bullshit. Said you want to invert my ribs into wings, that you're a nine foot tall dude, that you're a woman, a man, an archer, that your stump is ill fitted, that your shotgun is Tinkertech or something, then began… rambling about how you want to eat me but also think im cute and you hate me but you want to help me and…. yeah. Your power, whatever it is, or maybe the tinkertech ball, they might be completely countering my power. So… good news for you, I guess." Lisa mumbled, sounding both tired and sulky as she rubbed her temples.

That…

Was a huge relief, holy shit.

Granted, maybe it wasn't, because that power was ridiculous in how right it was about so many things, like it was seeing things, but it wasn't seeing her, just seeing over a hundred completely different people and feeding fragmented junk info to the power user until they got a headache from trying to use their Thinker powers on her.

She almost burst out into a whooping cheer right then and there as she dismissed the 'Nullifying Orb'.

"Well, shit. You're in, I guess, no contract or anything. You were going to ask something though."

Lisa briefly scrunched up her brows in thought, before they went lax in defeated remembrance.

She sympathized. Not having any bargaining chips besides her own power, and bringing considerable 'burden' with the target on her back, Lisa was not in a great spot.

"Oh right. Well, I can't be sure you're not lying now, so that fucking sucks, but the question was simple, because its the only thing I really care about at the moment… Do you really think you can protect me?" Lisa asked, voice dubious and a little hopeless.

She nodded without the tiniest shred of hesitation.

"Everyone in the Bay is small fish. In fact, with you here, if you cooperate, I already think I have a plan to take down Coil and take over everything he's got in one single move, but that can wait. And short of the Triumvirate itself coming to gut you, I think we can defend you from pretty much anything. Which we will. Nobody fucking touches what is ours." She said with more heat than she intended, and then briefly paused at the raised brow Lisa gave her.

Lisa was a little weirded out by that statement.

"That… came out a little odd, but the principle stands. And you probably think I'm exaggerating or lying, but you'll see pretty soon that I'm not. If you want to leave, you'd also be free, but you'd have to sign that power-enforced NDA I mentioned, sorry."

Lisa huffed out a laugh.

"Big whoop, honestly. Whatever shall I do, not being able to spill your secrets to anyone if I leave?" Lisa drawled sarcastically, her mood rapidly lifting. "Yeah, okay, I'm in. How many capes do you have anyway? The… disappearing orb thing, whoever the hell healed me, what I'm assuming is a Tinker to disable the bomb collar and likely some Mover just to get me out of there without starting an all-out war…" Lisa vaguely gestured as if counting.

Taylor grinned under her facemask.

Normally, she'd be much more wary of sharing anything like she was about to, but being able to taste the waves of relief and gratitude and hope that Lisa was feeling, coupled with her overall situation, she honestly doubted a betrayal was anywhere in the horizon. 

"I'm a bit… overly cautious, I'd say, but if you're going to be part of my main team, and maybe even my second in command, depending, I suppose some trust is in order, so I'm going to give you the most damaging piece of information outright. You're the only other cape in our group. I did all that myself. Call me the world's best grab-bag cape, or Eidolon 2.0, if you wish." She said as she rose into a mock bow.

The sudden nothingness in the emotions Lisa was projecting made her quickly raise her head to see Lisa staring at her slowly, like she was piecing together a puzzle.

She straightened, before crouching back down to her height, just to not make this any more awkward.

Lisa frowned in mounting disbelief.