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Chapter Text

For her appearance to Accord, she picked something simple but endlessly elegant to mould her appearance after.

A sports car.

Odd as it sounded, it seemed like a good idea for a man like Accord.

So, she picked Evelynn, and began to meticulously mould her appearance.

Pale pink skin faded for a pitch black, utterly smooth expanse, glossy as if freshly waxed ceramic, reflecting every tiny mote of light that hit her. Feminine curves smoothed into complex eddying curves and waves and lines, every figure shape curving in artful ways to give off the impression of smoothness and motion, logic be damned.

The end result was a faceless black thing that vaguely looked like a pitch black glossy slate of moving, polished glass, naked save a single tie coloured in a flat, slightly lighter black.

"Thoughts?" She asked, flexing and adjusting her fingers, toying with the lines and trying to find a mix of beauty, grace, and danger.

Coil fixed his suit tie a milimeter to the side, and side-eyed her, trying his best to not turn his neck and wrinkle the collar of his suit even the tiniest bit.

"He appreciates whites, natural colors, and gold far more than black, but the figure and cleanliness alone should win him over. Your indecency won't be registered because you're too inhuman looking to be considered in any such standards. The way you move will make him very interested in you. You do not even breathe, which is perfection he can't even ask of himself. So, if we were here to talk, he would no doubt practically beg you to join his Ambassadors. And would draft whatever plan you asked for simply because he appreciated your nature and would like to build rapport. We could make him an ally very quickly and easily. He's a fairly simple man when one gets to know him." Coil quickly explained, then turned his eyes up to the small mirror in the car, obsessively looking over his mask and the folds of the fabric.

The annoyances of having no shapeshifting.

It was mildly interesting that Coil was trying to nudge her into the previous plan of not Mastering Accord, whether he was aware of it or not, but she couldn't care much about the question of whether or not the man did actually have a heart. Too late for that.

"Unfortunately, I don't have time for allies. I need subordinates that can pose as such." She mused, and settled on a nail shape, something elegant but just sharp enough to give the suggestion of danger, perfectly seamless, as glossy and reflective as the rest of her.

"Anything else before we go?" She asked, and Coil took a deep breath.

"No."

She nodded, and got out of the car.

Coil did the same, much, much slower, then spent a couple seconds correcting a tiny irregularity in his socks, one being higher on his ankle than the other, then carefully smoothed out the wrinkles that made on his inordinately tight suit.

If the material was not designed to smoothen wrinkles on its own, meeting the man would have been infuriatingly slow.

As they were, they simply walked through the immaculate underground parking lot, wound around to an equally unnaturally clean alley, and entered the skyscraper through the back door.

A couple minutes of confirming dates and times of arrival with his secretary, a quick rundown on Accord's expectations of them, and they were walking out of an immaculate elevator lined with gleaming bronze.

She took point, hands relaxed but still against her sides as she measured each step to the mechanical beat of a metronome, then stood before the silver-embroidered door that led inside to Accord's office, silent and still.

A few seconds later, a tiny beep came from Coil's watch, and she opened the door to get her entrance right on the millisecond the minute ticked over.

She liked Accord's style.

Two of his Ambassadors stood to either side of his desk, a man in a suit, utterly immaculate in a way that almost distracted her, and an equally appealing woman in a gold dress so tight it might as well be vacuum-sealed onto her body, golden ropes and ribbons twining around her upper body in graceful lines to make it seem less like golden body paint, most likely.

White and cream-coloured marble wavered around the floor and walls, immaculate leather on the furniture. Not much, if any scent, besides a small hint of lavender from the woman and something vaguely sea-like from the man.

She walked in, flickering once to get them used to the pattern, and was pleased to note only one of the three to be suspicious of the flicker and by extension, her.

A gigantic mahogany desk stood before Accord, who took a gloved hand and spread it to the two armchairs before his desk, his eyes nailed to her with a disturbingly powerful dose of interest in the air.

At least she knew she had his approval, for what little time she needed that.

Her new approach was perhaps overaggressive, but Accord was not as clean as he liked to appear. It did not grate on her conscience.

Confirming no eyes were on her back, she slowly moved her hands behind her as if to cross them and flickered again, precisely three seconds after her first flicker, establishing a pattern and easing the current parties as she walked forward.

Three peeled seeds the size of small lemons withered in the open air within her hands, dissipating a myriad toxins into the air, scentless and colourless, silent. 

In the three seconds it took her to reach the chair across the enormous office, little was left of Zyra's seeds but the faintly blue-glowing core.

A flicker, and they were gone, back to her original body.

"On time as well. I must admit I did not…" Accord trailed off, and from the side, a distortion in the air snapped to life for a moment before flickering out as all four people in the room besides her slumped over, unconscious.

She flickered the antidote into her hand, a tiny little plant sack full of liquid with a hollow spike on the side, and jammed said thorn into Coil's neck like a syringe, squeezing it dry before flickering it back into her base form's hands.

Zyra's Legend was such a cheat. She had such variety in her plants. It was harder to remember what she couldn't make, than what she could make.

She didn't waste time waiting for Coil to wake up, instead walking around the desk, carefully removing Accord's mask, pricking his cheek on one of his fancy metal quills, licking the drop, then peeling his eyelids up.

Anticlimactic, really, but she much preferred that, and with Accord apparently sharing in Coil's paranoid patterns, there were no cameras in the room.

Her eyes flashed gold.

Mastering Accord was a simple matter of locking some of his useful emotions down, like his appreciation of order, symmetry and aesthetic, while taking the idea of herself, that sleek-black thing in his mind, and inflating it far and above them.

It was more draining than she'd like, but she was getting better at Mastering people. No superfluous overuse of power, like with Bakuda and Lung. She used a little extra just to make sure, but she didn't hammer herself out for it.

She would have to be a surgeon rather than a butcher, regardless of her bullish definition of 'diplomacy'. 

Mastering Accord's two Ambassadors while Coil staggered upright and reoriented himself took considerably less time, as neither of them felt particularly strongly about anything beyond themselves, which… oddly fitting.

Merely seventeen and a half minutes since entering, she pulled back from the unnamed male Ambassador, and switched Runes just to be cautious before flickering to her base form to rifle through her pockets and get her phone.

Another flicker, and she was back to Evelynn, quickly updating herself on current goings-on, some important minute-to-minute things and some others which she'd mostly ignored until she had to pay attention to.

The girls they'd rescued had been pushed very hard to give an answer to their proposition, because they were on a tight time constraint to get things moving without bogging themselves down, and with most of them being shipped out to Boston, a few streets down from where she was, and New York, right now, they had a couple confirmed acquisitions that had stayed behind with them.

As Coil lifted his mask and rubbed at his face, blinking rapidly to wake himself up, she dove deeper into the report for a moment.

Of two hundred and seventeen women, and a few men, surprisingly, a whopping twenty two decided to stay with them.

She'd expected maybe ten. Max.

Four wanted to be soldiers, which… hm, wasn't a bad idea, honestly, if they could follow orders without being driven by drugs. She'd need organic military growth too, even if that wording made her wince.

Seventeen of them just wanted stable, safe work for an actual wage and relative freedom, and three of them wanted to keep working like they had before. Which she was sure her men would be pleased about, speaking from experience in Runeterra, but she'd have to ask Lisa to make sure those women actually wanted to keep doing that kind of work instead of being groomed into thinking it was their place or some vile shit like that.

She trusted Lisa, but she'd rather have that off her conscious.

She wrote a quick text as Coil gathered his bearings enough to dig into the back of his tight suit for another three little balls of antidote, carefully locked inside tight little plastic containers that he slowly and carefully lined up on Accord's desk, taking his time.

"If you have your hand-eye coordination, I'd rather you sped this up a little. We have a lot of shitty people to hit today." She murmured, moving through another report, skimming the important bits.

A 'lot of shitty people' was kind of underselling it. There were so many horrible, influential bastards in Boston alone it was kind of depressing to read. Coil had given her a stack of people she could take, instead of a small group. Lobbying groups hurting people for profit, fraudulent investment firms, all sorts of politicians and financial criminals who were at the relative top of the foodchain… it was sad to think that Runeterra, a magical-medieval society for the most part, had less corruption in day to day life life than Earth Bet.

Coil jabbed the unconscious woman, his free hand palming at her throat in a way that reminded her quite easily that he was a megalomaniac freak. It wasn't sexual as much as it was him relishing that he could do it to someone he'd never be able to touch normally.

The urge to jab him with a dose of agony surfaced, but he took his hand away relatively quickly, pulling the syringe out and moving onto the second one that he had for Accord.

Her eyes went back to the reports.

It was frustratingly laggy, but with some hacker apparently lurking around the Bay, her tech team had made some bizarre solution that seemed to make the app's network even more impenetrable and isolated than ever before at the cost of a huge delay. 

Another couple seconds of further reports loading, and she read up one directly from Lisa.

Imp had bounced back well from her little trip, but she was a bit more closed off than usual and Lisa was half-complaining about how she was having to play base therapist because of her power.

Which was still incredibly useful because she now knew that Imp regretted not killing the guy who caused that accident.

It was a bit… no, it was honestly fucking tragic that Imp was even in this life to begin with, being only fourteen, but at least she probably wouldn't have that many qualms with assassinating a few horrible people here and there if and when Taylor asked her to, and was already sorting out what she wanted to do with her money. 

Honestly, she wanted to pair the girl up with Lisa on a semi-permanent basis. They seemed to resonate oddly well with each other.

Rune was still undecided, Spitfire was recovering from a bullet that grazed her thigh while helping extract one of her teams during the police fight…

Everything seemed good.

The woman in gold stirred first, and Taylor flickered her phone back to her real self as she dropped the transformation, cocking a hip and putting her hand on it from sheer habit as she turned to look out of the window.

Coil carefully took out a burner phone, as secure as it could be made with mortal hands, complete with servers running entirely off one of their underground fronts and interacting with as little of the open internet as it could manage to send encrypted, trap-spring data packs, whatever that meant, and laid it in front of Accord's limp form on the desk.

It had their requests, now turned to orders, in it, as well as two contact lines.

She let Evelynn drop for a moment, revealing her current costume, which was just an adjusted kit from one of her soldiers made to fit her.

She checked her wrist watch, fingers itching to have a gun in their grasp just to be safe.

11:16 AM.

"Let's go. Schedule's got wiggle room, but I want to be done with this quickly." She said, and flashed back to Evelynn, already shifted into the form she used to walk into the building.

As the sound of shuffling cloth came from behind them, they walked out without another glance.

Seven minutes passed as they walked back out, through doors and checks and various expressions of meaningless wealth.

Almost ten minutes later, as she closed the door on their car and Coil began to drive, she flickered her phone into her hand, refreshed the app, and clicked on the first message.

Accord worked fast.

He would be a great 'ally', considering the tone of the message. She hadn't even messed with him that much, yet he spoke to her like an exemplary employee would to their boss. Just the right amount of deference while knowing their work, and enough supplication while also exuding confidence.

She'd have to move him in the future, but for now, he could sit here. That type of transition was more than she could handle in one day, or even a few days.

The tone and speed also meant her Mastering work was getting less choppy, which was good. He wasn't as unhinged as Bakuda.

A moment of navigating the menus as she flipped through Runes according to sightlines, possible, albeit paranoid, dangers, and her need to focus, and she called Trickster.

It hadn't even finished the first ring before he answered.

"We're getting close but we're drawing a lot of-" He began, immediately.

"I've got him." She interrupted, and he went silent. "Three nine six, one fortieth avenue. Along the coast, near the old container yards. That's the HQ of Spree's particular cell. Exact personal address, if he even has one, we don't know, but if he's not fighting he's usually hovering around there. Plan is the same. Find, teleport, neutralize, run. You'll be implementing some improvements we will draft you soon. Accord's work. Follow to the letter. Any questions? Complaints?" She asked, mostly rhetorically, and shifted her appearance to a middle aged woman as Coil took a slow drive through a tunnel, practically peeling off his mask in the process with hurried fingers and hitting the button to flip the licence plates to another set.

"Following Accord's maddening instructions… just like the good old days." He mumbled, then a shuffling noise as he likely shook his head. "None. All clear."

"Alright. Good luck. And try not to make Sundancer use her power unless you have to." She said, and cut the call.

Her last request was both practical and somewhat emotional, because Marissa's power was very distinct and incredibly attention drawing which she did not want, but she also wanted to keep in mind the Travellers' temperaments and personalities. They might be Mastered, but for once, it was not because they were too evil to bother redeeming, and Marissa did not want to use her power to hurt people for the most part.

She already felt bad enough, keeping them Mastered and sending them on errands, but there wasn't exactly an alternative until she somehow managed to kill the Simurgh.

The request might just be a small balm on her mind to remind her she had taken her standards of evil from 'serial murderers, human traffickers, and genocidal white nationalists' to people who committed financial crimes, corruption, and a whole host of other immoral practises, but it helped.

Besides, if terrible rich people were going to commit a dozen types of financial crime and cover up a million felonies, she'd rather they were doing it to benefit her instead of themselves, and she'd be able to cut down on their most erroneous behaviours to keep them and the innocents below them relatively safe.

How the hell these people hadn't been found out and taken entire sections of Boston companies down with them, she could only guess was due to even further corruption, or negligence.

Really, with how easy it was for Coil to find so many criminals in the upper echelons of one city, one would think the government would have done the job of sweeping through the bastards ages ago.

As she mentally refreshed what she knew of their first target, Coil drove with relative grace, even as he hastily and angrily stuffed his mask into one of his suit pockets.

She took the time to watch her surroundings, both to see what the good parts of Boston were like, and just in case.

Boston was…

Almost literally just Brockton Bay if it had money and less desperation baked into every tile and brick. It was like the before and after of a deep-cleaning video she'd find on websites when she was fourteen and trying to find a distraction.

She wondered how long it might take to make all of Brockton like this.

If she could manage it before the world ended, of course.

The car drive to their targets was not exactly a long one.

The convenience of already being in the richest, most peaceful part of the city, she supposed. All the rich and influential lived within the same couple blocks of each other.

"You're sure these men deserve it?" She asked, for the last time, because she didn't have the time to read up on their targets' absurdly extensive list of supposed immoralities. 

"Yes. Michael Atlen, for example, our next target, used police and hospital connections to arrest a young journalist investigating him on trumped up charges. The officers beat her an inch away from a coma for "resisting arrest", while the footage of the arrest mysteriously vanished from the records through an 'error'. Then a hospital employee, unknown, 'misplaced' the journalist's medication and 'accidentally' put her into a vegetative state for the rest of her life by giving her the exact worst medication possible for her condition. She was twenty eight. I believe I know your standards for 'evil'. You will find no misunderstood men in this list." Coil replied as he changed gears, eyes cold with that unfeeling determination she has grown used to.

She chose to trust him, if only because he was Mastered.

Even if she knew that in the future, they… might have to do some similar things, depending on how things went. Depending on what was at stake.

She hoped she wasn't going down the wrong road, doing this. Despite her lived experience, she could only hope that she could limit the morally bankrupt actions of herself and her organization to a minimum, but with the world literally hanging over her head, she wasn't sure how much of those shiny morals she could keep, battered and bruised as they were.

It was one thing to make a militant organization with an ideology, not unlike a popular militia, and it was another thing to try to take over the American Government by yanking at its rotting, bloated strings, one piece at a time.

She flopped into the seat with a sigh, rubbing at her forehead, blinking tiredly at the mid-day sun.

They mostly knew where everyone was and would be, but two of the ten targets were nowhere to be found, so they were going to end up with a little less control over Boston than she'd like.

One was the CEO of an electricity providing company, which would make it easy for them to hide their electricity usage, and the other was the owner of a chain of restaurants that would be very useful for a lot of drug trafficking and money laundering.

It was a shame they couldn't find them, but they'd show up in time. And now that she had teleport points here, it would be much easier to return.

Regardless, she could not complain by any measure, even if she'd just spent hours bouncing from one penthouse, office building or suite to another, then to the car and back.

Coil wordlessly ducked out of the wealthy district, going as fast as the law would allow them to get out of Boston.

She spent her time thinking.

That was when an idea rose, and she jerked her head up.

"Stop. I need a brain scan."

Coil turned to blink at her in complete bewilderment, before hurriedly glancing ahead and slowing the car.

"Of- who?" He asked, haltingly.

"Me."

His brows furrowed further.

"Private?"

"Yes. Just… have an idea, need to know something first. Know anyone or do we ask Accord?"

She had to know if she had a corona pollentia before she could continue on that… highly risky train of thought.

Coil nodded.

"Shouldn't be more than an hour. I know a place. Do you want me to go now?"

"Yeah, drive."

He nodded, and took a left turn down an alley.

She cracked her neck as she hurriedly ducked out of the machine, and quickly walked off to the sectioned area to put all her gear and weapons back on. 

She could see Coil talking with the back-alley doctor in the glass partitionment to the side, who looked very confused.

She quickly put everything on, as much as putting on sixty pounds of gear could be quick, and walked over, yanking the door open before ducking in, trying to ignore the scent of cigarette smoke and dust as she flickered into Evelynn.

"Ah, hello! So, these are-" The man began, and she ignored him, staring at the pictures on the lightboard.

"Do I have a gemma pollentia or not?"

The man snapped his mouth shut, and made a dubious sound, getting up with a groan to point to one of the pictures, at a small section of almost purple-blue at the back of her head, contrasted by the blue hues of the rest of the internals.

"Short answer is yes! Long answer is also yes, but it seems to be dead and inactive, somehow. It's not receding, or being absorbed, or necrotic, so don't worry, there's just zero activity. The Corona Pollentia is the part of the brain that controls a power and gives one access to them, however, when it's activated during a trigger event, it swells and connects to the brain in a more complete manner. We can tell whether one is activated or not through the veins. Such rapid expansion leaves a lot of trails, even months later. So, you did go through a trigger, which means that you are a parahuman, and this little piece of biology was activated at some point, but now it's just completely dormant. Which is… actually quite bizarre. But your power… the veins are connected but the lack of activity makes me think its somehow not connected, but that would mean you wouldn't have a power at all… hm..." He mumbled, scratching the side of his chin.

"This is… pretty fascinating. I'm just a man with a removed medical licence, but I know my way around a parahuman. Only a Case 53 had something even close to being as odd as this. Maybe your power just doesn't need the gemma pollentia to activate your power? But that goes against…" He trailed off, mumbling again, his grey, greasy hair swinging as he jerked his head from one picture to the other.

Well, there went her short-thought plan.

Killing Butcher before driving back wasn't going to be that easy, it would seem, because she… was a parahuman? Her power just… didn't exist? Or… wasn't connected?

Yeah, that made her previous plan a recipe for disaster. She was already not exactly the most stable human she could think of, if she got Butcher in her…

When could she have triggered though?

She briefly thought back to the locker, how there was a small flash of something incomprehensible and vast, a glittering cosmos of mirrors, before it was almost yanked away.

At first she didn't think much of that sense of her sense of self and perception being suddenly yanked in another inarticulate, non-euclidean direction, but now…

Did she actually trigger in the locker? Did the old summoner who blindly picked her as his successor somehow… what, intercept the connection?

She knew it was likely his attempt to break through the fabric of reality itself to reach her that killed him and wiped most of his memories from himself before she inherited them, but still, it was a bit of a revelation to her that even if that old bastard hadn't stumbled onto her, she would have still walked out of that locker with powers.

She took a deep breath, and turned away, waving Coil over.

She wasn't worried about the doctor. He'd be long since dead if he had a loose mouth, with the kind of people he worked with, and he didn't have much other than an MRI scan or whatever that piece of equipment was called and did.

The drive back home was pensive, on her end.

She would have loved to just nuke Butcher out of the face of the earth, and get rid of the bastard, but it would have to be done some other way.

Her mind stuck to him, or her, whichever it was, for the entire ride back.

She had ideas. A lot of them.

She doubted any of them were good, but she just might have to work on some of them regardless.

"Find some alley I can duck into and teleport without anyone seeing." She said, and thumbed at her phone.

The fading purple sways of Teleport hadn't even finished fading into the air before her phone started to buzz, and she furrowed an annoyed brow, walking up the stairs and swinging the door open to the ground floor of their current, temporary HQ.

Immediately, she paused, tensing at the inordinate amount of tension and alertness she saw in her men spread throughout the warehouse.

Most of them didn't even turn to her, precisely because she was decked out in the same gear they were, but the few she'd Mastered quickly noticed her and gestured to their headphones, either tapping or pointing at them.

Resisting the urge to groan, she took her phone out, and accepted the call.

"What's the problem now?" She asked.

"Our mystery hacker is way, way, way fucking better than we thought. Yes, I know you're listening, take that as a compliment. Anyways, long story short, he's blackmailing us. Which is just so heroic of them." Lisa snarked.

She paused, taking a deep breath.

She was doing a lot of that these days…

Reigning in her frustration was tough, and it was equally tough to guess how much this person knew.

They kept the most important things out of the app and away from cameras, like Noelle and civilian ID's, but that was still a lot of fucking information this person had, whether they were a tinker or a technopath.

Should she have been more paranoid and just nuked her entire communication system?

"What does he want? Money, fame, a job, a favour?" She listed, trying to think of ways she could get rid of this hacker.

If she had a name and a face, she could literally just go and execute them right now, theoretically. Getting that would be unlikely however.

"Apparently, they want to talk to you specifically. Name-dropped you. As in, your old civilian name. T-H. They said they used to know you." Lisa asked, voice dead flat serious.

She froze, eyes widening.

That- no.

No fucking way.

Why? How the fuck. What the- just- what?

" Emma? " She hissed in angry disbelief, turning her back to the rest of the room, and Lisa gasped in realization.

"Wait, that-"

The line cut in static, and a second later, the static cleared, to silence.

"Is that you?" She asked, voice utterly blank, struggling not to crush her phone in her hand.

A swallow.

"Uhm, no?" A male voice came through, and her head jerked back in surprise fast enough to give her a mild case of whiplash. "Uh, just so you know, this is a private line now, so we can talk freely. So… yeaaaah? Hi, uhm. It's- been a while?"

She still couldn't quite get her brain to compute the words and place the voice, but after a very long moment of awkward silence, she suddenly remembered.

"Greg?" She asked, in complete disbelief.

He cleared his throat, something in the background click-clacking incessantly.

"Y-Yeah. Hi! You've uhm, changed a lot! I mean, I, uh- s-sorry, this is just. It's hard to think about you talking like an RTS C&C commander, when just a while ago you were with us in the… kinda losers club. And your powers seem sick! I keep losing signal and you keep teleporting, and there's a bunch of other grab-bag stuff I can't quite place and- oh, right, uh, sorry for spying on you, took me a while to place that it was actually you- "

Holy shit he hadn't changed one fucking bit.

"Greg, stop rambling." She snapped, and he stopped, surprisingly.

She let out a sigh.

Good news was that this wasn't really something that serious. She expected something a lot worse than Greg.

Bad news was that the hacker was Greg. He wasn't exactly the type she wanted to work with.

"Alright, let's cut to the chase for a moment. I don't know why you told me any of this. Like, who you are, for example. You realize you just lost all of your negotiating power by telling me that, right? I'm a teleporter. I know who and where you are and I can teleport right to you and kill you in seconds if I have to." She said, voice cold and dead serious.

Greg gasped, as if he just fucking realized, and she wanted to shut the phone and slam her head into a wall.

God, he was so fucking dumb! How the hell did he get a power?

Wait, how the hell did he trigger? When?

Irrelevant.

"Uh, okay, uhm, please don't do that?" He squeaked out in a wheeze, likely realising what kind of situation he was in and Taylor wanted to slap him for being so goddamn stupid. "Look- I just wanted to act tough for a second, I- I don't know how to negotiate! I traded pokemon cards, not- military information or whatever the hell you guys are doing, okay? I was like 'oh okay I'll act all broody and mysterious and tell them I know everything and act tough and maybe I can get them to take me seriously and wire me to this Sam chick who I'm almost completely positive is Taylor' but then this Insight girl thought I'm blackmailing you! I know- I know you've changed a lot, so I'm a lot more nervous, s-sorry. Just- I wasn't trying to blackmail you! Honest!"

She rubbed at her face.

"Look, Greg, what did you even want? We wanted to have you onboard anyway because a technopath is useful."

Greg cleared his throat again, followed by an equally nervous mumble.

"Okay, so- I'm not a technopath, I just have a tinkering power around making programs. I might have- done a lot of stupid stuff. I- I had just gotten my power, I had a gaming computer with a lot of fricking power, then I got excited, and then I started digging a little too deep and I might have ended up hacking like three national agencies and the NSA and the PRT and and long story short I'm ninety percent sure Armsmaster and Dragon want to grab me and arrest me for breaching into national agencies and then use my crimes to make me their Tinker slave until im old and gray because holy jesus fuck the sentences for cyberhacking are so much worse than I thought." He rushed out with a wheeze, followed by a nervous laugh like he was trying to lighten the situation up for himself. "So, uh, I was thinking of trading? Thought you were my best option if I was right, because, well, we used to be friends, t-though I do get that that's- probably not the case anymore, with... whatever happened." He weakly finished, sounding quite regretful of... something.

They never were friends, but she didn't care to point that out to him.

She sighed as she turned and began to walk up to Lisa's office, tilting her head up and seeing her… 'little sister' leaning off the railing and staring down right at her with a quirked brow.

"Now that, I can work with. What's your proposal?" She asked.

"Oh! Yeah, okay, so! I was thinking, I can, give you like this super, super secure, much better version of the app you're using, something not even Dragon can get into, working off its own subnetwork of parallel servers like its own separate internet, pretty much, and In exchange, you give me like, a way out? Or, pay me? I mean- I- I'm kind of freaking out, you know?" He said, voice wavering with a hysteric giggle. "I just- I just got all these ideas and I got curious and then next thing I know Dragon's trying to track me down- and holy fuck my mom is going to skin me if I go to juvie for a decade. Or federal prison. Some guy got thirty years in two thousand and four for doing the same I did! Look, I just- I just want to be- safe. I want to be safe and I want to be paid for whatever I give you, that's it. Mostly safety! I can make a lot of money easily anyway, but being safe from a manual sweep from Dragon and Armsmaster… seems like the kind of thing I can't exactly program my way around. So, that. And- I don't want to be too… close, I guess, to you guys. You seem like you're doing some really serious spec ops Call of Honor kinda crap and I don't wanna get the death penalty for directly working for you so just, uh, pay me and I deliver stuff, like, what's it called- commission! Commissions? Yeah. Keep me safe and pay me when I give you stuff and uh. Don't tell me anything. I don't wanna know. Yeah, that- seems good. That's alright?"

She frowned, slowing her walk.

Reeling herself back a little, she had to stop and think about the fact that Greg was literally just a kid. He sounded like one too. A nervous teenager who lived in videogames and media more than real life, until very recently. And one that was absolutely terrible at negotiating. He practically had no chips on his side but her morals.

It seemed like it was quite the common theme in the bay. Kids getting powers and diving in far deeper waters than they ever expected.

"Alright. We can arrange that. What kind of safety do you mean, however? Giving you and your mother safety without her knowing about any of this is going to be nigh impossible. Stationing a couple coats around your house isn't going to cut it if the two most famous Tinkers this side of the world are out for your head." She plainly stated.

Greg's breaths turned audible, and she moved her ear away from the phone with a slight grimace of disgust.

"L-Look, I- I can't just tell her! Why wouldn't it… okay no, it wouldn't work. Fuck. " He whined, and she heard his chair roll backwards, the keyboard sounds stopping to be replaced by audible stomps as he began pacing. "Can't we… I- I don't know, like, give her a fake job offer in like a, security company, and then tell her she has to change all her legal documents to accept it? And then we just give her and me a new ID and you guys can make me a blackroom to work from, move us across the Bay or something?"

She hummed dubiously as she began to climb the steps.

"Surprisingly intelligent suggestion, and it might work, but I think we can both agree that's rather far-fetched to do without her getting suspicious or realising something is off. If you're that much of a pussy and can't tell your mom about what you did, and refuse to try, we can probably try that, but I don't think it will work. I suggest just coming out with it now. It will be much, much, much harder to do later, and it'll hurt a lot more."

Lisa just stared at her from the railing as she ascended.

"I… okay. Yeah, I- I know that…" Greg mumbled, sighing into the mic again, and she grimaced a little.

That was so annoying.

"I… okay. I'll- I'll tell her. Just, get us a safe place, fast, please? I know you guys have bugs in the PRT and we don't know when Dragon's gonna come here, but it might be tomorrow! So, just, get us a nice place to live and hide. Uhm, blackbox basement for me to work in. Your techie guys should know what that is. How fast do you want to do the trade? I'll tell her- today?"

Well, that was surprising.

Maybe he did grow up a little.

"Do that. Call us back, normally, and we'll have you two settled in… two days. Don't back out of an agreement you made, Greg. And do not get bright ideas about putting in any backdoors in the app you'll make. We'll know, and while you may be able to hide from Dragon and Armsmaster, you can't hide from me. Alright?" She asked, making her voice unnecessarily soothing and tired at the end to give off the impression this wasn't so much an implicit threat as much as it was something she had to say.

Assuming Greg was even smart enough to read between the lines.

"Uh, y-yeah. I uhm, I know you've… killed people. Don't worry about me trying to uh, what's the word… 'play you'?Aa-anyway. I'll- go now. I'll tell her today, and I'll call back-"

"Yes, Greg, we just said that. Calm down instead, you're rambling again. Call us back later." She said, and he mumbled something affirmative before the call ended with a tiny beep.

She took her phone off her ear, exhaled through her nostrils, and walked up to Lisa, bending at the waist and staring down at her men as they continued running around and stripping every bit of tech they had on themselves in neat lines.

"Eclipse protocol?" She asked, and Lisa chuckled.

"Only you would fucking remember how that shit is called. Yeah. One of the sargeants knew what to do the moment I told him, word spread quickly. Communications are practically all dead until this 'Greg' kid is done fucking with our stuff. He your friend?"

"Not really. Just someone I kind of knew from high school. Was... about as much of a loser as I was. Videogame nerd, not really attractive, pretty meek... Doesn't really matter."

So much had happened in a day, and it wasn't even afternoon yet.

"I don't know why, but I have a really bad feeling." Lisa mumbled. "This is too… convenient. I can't help but think Cauldron might be behind this, but…"

She sighed.

"Simurgh paradox." They both said, their words overlapping with the same exhausted tone.

"Yeah. Don't know if I'm being paranoid or not. What I do know is that I'm almost positive Cauldron is trying to fuck us over somehow even if they're not slinging Alexandria over here to kill us. I'm confident they're feeding the PRT information. They have way too much information on you. Just an hour ago, they wrestled the girls' case away from the FBI, because despite you having made no appearances yet, they somehow have you confirmed as a Master cape, which gave them jurisdiction to check the girls for Master influence."

She scowled, feeling her teeth grit.

"How much do they know?"

Lisa shrugged.

"Most of it is on documents, so we don't know. From spoken words we overhard; they know you exist, they know you're dangerous, they know they can't find you, and they know you have a 'weak' Master power. That's basically a step away from "kill on sight", as far as the PRT goes. They're terrified of Masters, and this Director is a forceful, hateful motherfucker. The entire PRT is going through Master Stranger procedures every other day, starting this morning."

She shifted, thoughts racing, a mild headache caressing her frontal lobe with blunted razors.

The PRT knowing she was a master was a tremendous fucking setback. She had done all this stealth and shadow games precisely to make it seem like she did something more than just force everyone to work for her. To show off the image that if she had so many people behind her, she must have something else about her. Something more.

Which she did, but she didn't have the damn time to be making friends and allies with the scum of parahuman society.

"Did the story get out?"

Lisa nodded.

"Yeah. Or it should, by tomorrow. This literally happened while you were finishing up in Boston. The journalists got all the information 'leaked' to them, and many of them were in our pockets, so their articles are a bit more positive than the big ones. I'm sure it'll hit national news for a day or so. People for some reason or another like to root for an anti-hero, and a criminal mastermind doing the government's work and giving the result to them on a silver platter, dismantling a large branch of a human trafficking ring out of the goodness of his heart? They'll eat it up for a little while until the news cycle moves on. People's inherent disdain of the government will make this even more popular. Won't last, but you got your debut, I suppose. Summoner will be semi-famous by tomorrow. "

She nodded.

It was rather anticlimactic, but no new cape could usually get the exposure of being on national news, even if only for a day or two, for their debut.

She was still miffed about being out in the open, but it couldn't be helped with how things had progressed. She had to abandon her love of the dark and step into the light, to some extent.

The agents she'd sent out all over the US should be ready for her next publicity stunt, so to speak.

Tomorrow, the empire, then, fixing something nobody in the world had been able to, so far.

She hated having to word good deeds like that, but it was what it was. The PRT did the exact same thing.

Cynical opportunism was the standard.

"Did the girls at least make it out alright?"

Lisa hummed an affirmative.

"As far as we can tell, yeah. No strange 'losses'. Too big of a situation for that. And none of our guys got arrested either. They should be driving the trucks back as we speak, though a few of them are struggling to evade authorities."

She let herself smile, just a tiny bit.

She'd need the armour suit she made with Zyra's plants sooner than expected. 

"Oni Lee?"

"He's rooming with Printer and the little army we have around her at the moment. Extra security. They like him."

Printer?

Oh, Noelle.

A bit dehumanizing, but she assumed it was more of a security nickname than a cape name.

"Interesting name. Anyways... how many men did you send over to whip the ABB thugs into shape?" 

Lisa waved her hand dismissively.

"Just ten, so far. Figure we need to start small, and we can't afford to use too many of our valuable soldiers on training new ones when we're still like this. On the bright side, we have a lot more places to hide our stuff and people, even if people are starting to ask questions."

Hm, that was going about as expected.

"Alright. If we have nothing else to do but wait for tomorrow, I'm going to set up some things for Greg, then spend the rest of the day exercising and ripping life out of our guys on the training mat. Need to keep a lot of juice in the tank." She said, just to break the quiet, and Lisa hummed.

"Ripping life...? Oh, yeah, the, green stuff… energy? Good idea."

Grasp of the Undying, but she hadn't told her that.

"Lifegrasp, as I like to call it, without being overdramatic about it. It's slowly making me tougher, but I need something larger to beat on. When we've got some peace, and he can stop pretending to be nursing his wounds from the 'betrayal' in private, I'll start fistfighting Lung. He should improve my progress by… a lot. " She emphasized, and deciding to relax on the paranoia a little, switched Runes and took off the helmet, holding it by her fingers as she watched things down below, unwinding for a short moment. 

It was getting really sweaty in the helmet.

"Well, we can talk later instead of sitting here, thinking about what to do. We're sleeping together tonight. Missed it." She said simply.

Lisa smiled, hip-checking her butt.

"How romantic. And no I'm not flirting." 

A moment of silence.

"We still haven't gotten that apartment, you know?" Lisa noted.

"I don't think we ever will, to be honest. How does an evil underground throne room sound instead? With spiked torchholders."

"Dork."

"Ass."

"Yes, it's quite nice." Lisa hummed, laughter in her voice, turning to slap her own ass with an audible, crisp sound. 

"So uncouth." She said, wrinkling her nose, ignoring the horny teenage urge to turn and stare at said ass.

Then her brain blanked because she had no idea what Legend that even came from. Who the hell said uncouth? Jarvan? Leb- Yeah it was Leblanc. Tricky bitch.

"Holy shit you're such a grandma." Lisa quietly exclaimed, shoulders shaking with laughter as she bent forward, practically laying on the railing.

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." She hummed, lips twitching upwards.

"Are we sure you're pretending? Want me to walk you down the basement to the training mats? Did you take your medicine?" Lisa cooed as if talking to a senile pile of dust, barely containing her snickers.

"... I kinda walked into that." She grumbled, smiling.

"Yep."

Her phone rang, and she raised a hand in a stop gesture as Dillan, her usual beating partner, gasped for breath across the mat.

She'd gotten a few uses of Grasp out of him before he started acting woozy. He was pretty lively for a man who was almost forty.

She walked over to the corner, where a pile of their equipment was, and dug her phone out, not expecting anything too groundbreaking with the state of their comms.

A single message by Lisa.

Rune's in.

She smiled, and put the phone back.

Dillan groaned.

"Oh come on, can I rest?" He asked, wiping his sweat with his shirt, revealing his abs for a moment.

Her eyes jerked down and stayed there for a moment until the shirt dropped.

Her self-directed annoyance flared up again.

Holy shit she had to get laid, this was getting so fucking annoying.

She'd gone through dozens of puberties but she still had kind of forgotten how animalistic her brain was when high on hormones.

With a physical shake of her head to push the thought aside for later, she wandered back to the mat.

"Come on. I'll give you pardon from base chores if you can last five more hits." She stated, getting into a loose, half-crouched stance with her arms limp almost to the floor, a stance that probably made no sense to the man across her like the other half-dozen she'd cycled through so far.

He huffed, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

"I'd say you're being overconfident before, but now... I don't know who taught you to fight, but I'd kill to get them to teach me. Do you know how humiliating it is to get fucked up this hard by a girl half my age? My ego's dying over here." He said, voice half-joking, and she mentally raised a brow at how personable he was getting, chatting like this.

She'd have to discipline him down the line if this kept up. More chores? An actual beating? Hm...

"Also, five hits with the green fire-like thing, or normal hits?" He asked, getting into a stance.

She tilted her head, considering it.

She was greedy.

"Green hits. Then I'll hit you with little fireballs again."

She had to, to raise her personal mana. Manaflow Band only activated and increased her mana pool if she hit someone with a spell, no matter how strong or weak.

He sighed, and took the first step, signalling the start of their fight.

She was kind of cheating because no matter how hard she fought, she didn't have a heart. The summon core would just keep her blood flowing in a bizarre mimicry of the organ, but there was no sensation of a heartbeat itself. It kept her going a lot longer for some reason.

With the thought of endurance, she remembered what she had to do tomorrow, and frowned.

She hoped she had enough juice in the tank for the Empire tomorrow, because fighting with a headache was making it quite a bit worse. That, and she had a really bad feeling about trying to do a full sweep of the Empire in a day. 

She trusted her gut enough to assume the worst, within plausibility.

Notes:

This is a really hard story to write, and I'm just doing my best. Criticism is welcome, but if it's something so wide-reaching its unfixable, I'll probably ignore it and just keep going forwards.

The original plan for this chapter was to push harder, but I recognized that a small lull was a bit better for the moment. Still, a lot of things happened, a lot of hints dropped, and some minor mysteries were solved, not that Greg is really a mystery.

Let me know what you think about me including greg, btw. I was going to make an OC, but halfway through it i realized I was just writing Greg but skinny version, so i just took Greg instead. Worked better a bit too because he's a character people are at least peripherally aware of.

tyvm for ocmments, they're my secondary motivation to keep writing. I'll prob focus on Mom Militia for a bit because its less stressful to write, but i'll prob see u pretty soon.