26

Chapter Text

The entourage she came up on was not exactly what she had been expecting the Travellers to be, but then again she was expecting some team of professionals.

Not a wheelchair bound girl that was exuding enough guilt to make her choke and sputter on its tangy aftertaste, nor another girl that seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, shivering and jerking in the corner.

The guys were more composed, but of the two, only the injured one seemed to not be interested in participating in whatever lingering tension and drama seemed to thicken the air between them all, and that was because he was pretty much unconscious.

Speaking of Ballistic, he was… alive. He had been given the majority of the floorspace in the moving truck they used to move around, and their attempt at cauterization had worked, but seemed to be making most of them at least a little sick. The girl with the elaborate red sun costume seemed to have the worst of it.

Ballistic's burnt leg smelled nice, actually. Made her hungry.

Ew.

'Cosmic Insight' fed her with enough information to make a rough judgement on their characters, though most of them were in the middle of some monumental shift, it seemed.

And they were all from another planet, one familiar to this one. Earth Aleph, maybe? Probably, but how the hell? There was a portal to Earth Aleph somewhere on Earth Bet, but physical matter was difficult to transport as far as the public knew. That was why it was easy to send literature and programming drives through but not people or something like food shipments.

Regardless, she took a moment to think of what she would do with these people once they led her to Coil and she took over.

Ballistic was a guy who seemed torn between wanting to help people, do some kind of… competitive group activity which she could guess meant sports, and his extreme introversion. He would be happy in complete isolation and a bag of money to spend, but other interests forced him to interact with people, and he was unwilling to compromise. As a result, he was just constantly drained and tired mentally, but was friendly and a generally nice person who did not want the powers he'd gained, only able to destroy.

The guy wearing a tophat was being annoying even while wrangling a shitty tourniquet on Ballistic's leg, who was thankfully zonked out on morphine.

'Cosmic Insight' said he was an annoying asshole intentionally, to unite his team in their dislike of him.

Which was pretty damn stupid in her opinion.

Beyond that, he was a bit of a narcissist with an inflated sense of self. He struggled to show empathy to people who did not share his point of view on a matter. A prank to him would just be a prank, regardless of how frustrated or hurt the victim was, because in his view, it was just a prank, and the victim was unreasonable. But if that was the worst her power would say about him, then big whoop.

She doubted she'd like the guy, but he wasn't a horrible person from what she could see. Had his issues like everyone else.

The girl with the red sun costume was a friendly person that did not want to be here or be doing any of this. She did not want to hurt anyone, and she was only here because she had no other place to go. She had at one point been under the thumb of some controlling shadow, likely an authority figure, and her jaunt across worlds and into this mess seemed to have begun from that. She did not want to be a cape, and wished to return home.

Well, too bad.

The collective fight-or-slowly-go-insane mentality of parahumans was well-documented to anyone who bothered to dig, like Lisa.

But there were ways to circumvent that. Ways to give this girl a normal-ish, quiet life. Ways to manage that supposed itch with controlled fights every once in a while.

Hm. Thoughts for later.

The next girl was an unmasked, average looking girl with a mop of auburn hair and atrophied legs, sleepy and silently crying in the corner. The one who was making her choke on guilt. She likely thought she led to Ballistic losing his leg, which was a pretty rough spot to be in, mentally.

She was a bad actor and she felt lonely despite being around people, which had much to do with how her disability was an inconvenience for all of them. Had been disabled for a long time, missed her family, and was good at compartmentalising her life to deal with the difficulties of her disability. She was gradually losing grasp on reality due to her mental walls of stability that she used for said compartmentalization quickly crumbling due to circumstance. Fantasy and real life violence were starting to mould together in her head despite her desire to not hurt people.

On one hand, it was nice to know her future employees were not irredeemable monsters. On the other hand, she couldn't really Master them because…

Because of a rule she already broke with Maria…? That- wait, no.

Now that she had some time to think about it, she had haphazardly set a rule that she wouldn't master innocents, then immediately broke it for Maria because she needed an insider, without much thought.

So that presented a bit of a moral question she had to sort out before she could make judgements on how to deal with these guys.

She could either renounce her rule and work on nothing but a loose moral framework, or double down on it and try to somehow make every innocent cape she might come across at least passingly want to work for her rather than an enemy.

It was not an easy question to think about.

On one hand, she didn't really feel guilt, not really. She was embarrassed about how quickly she broke her rule to Master an innocent person, more than anything.

And she was prepared to do anything and everything to reverse Earth Bet's slow slide into the abyss. Maybe Lisa or even her own self did not quite understand what everything meant, however, the weight that word carried.

It meant that she was willing to become a monster to fix the world, if that was what it took. If she had to kill children, she would do it. If she had to commit genocide, she would do it. If she had to become a monster like those she hunted, one that had to be put down when all the rest of her kind were destroyed, she would do it, if only because at the end, she would have saved an ungrateful world that would live on in blissful ignorance of her actions in the far future. 

That concept of the far future was a lantern in the dark for her. A shining aspiration of what could be, if she could just will and push it into existence.

It was difficult for humans to think of what would happen in a decade, a century, harder even more to care about it. Human lifespans and minds did not think and operate on such detached, distant concepts. She was in a unique position to have lived through history, and to be able to comprehend and care. So she did.

Regardless of that conviction however, she would also do her damn best to try and make it so that there would never be a need to stoop that low. She didn't want to become a monster, she just would if she had to.

So, she was not guilty about what she did to Maria. She had expected that she would need to break her rule in the future, depending on how necessary it was and how dire the situation was, but…

Hm.

This was a tad frustrating. Balancing what must be done and what is unnecessary, judging, weighing the scale.

It wasn't that she opposed Mastering innocents as a principle, not at all. It all lay in the individual circumstances. Maria was a hasty choice, but the woman did not have anyone around her who would be hurt by her shifting allegiance, and even said shifting allegiance was nothing but a fairly mild case of unthinking, unfaltering loyalty. Unpowered cult leaders had done things a million times worse to their followers, mentally.

Her main concern was to not slide into Heartbreaker territory unless completely necessary, but there was no scenario she could ever possibly come up with that would make it necessary to be like him.

And by god was that relieving. Not becoming like him was what her "rule" had been about, a clumsy sort of mental stopgap to give her pause.

It didn't work, obviously, so she took a moment to rationalise as she idly listened in on the bickering moroseness of the truck's occupants.

What was Heartbreaker like? What made him truly reprehensible and more than a little disgusting, even to her?

In short, the fact he controlled people for his monkey-brained hedonism, the fact he controlled them without regard for collateral damage or what would happen to them if he were to die, even claiming to have deadman switches all over the country, and the fact he left nothing but broken hopes and shattered families everywhere he went.

On all three of those fronts, she was nothing like him, and that was what mattered to her, not the act of Mastering someone itself.

Mastering people had so many incredible applications if done right. Why struggle for a lifetime with trauma when someone with a Master power could sit you down in a chair, fuck with your head a little, and all of a sudden, you'd be a functional, happy person in the course of a few minutes? Why remember traumatic events that crippled you if someone could just pluck that memory out of your head and leave you a well-adjusted person who did not carry a mountain on their crumbling back? Why make the tax payer and the lawful good people pay to keep monstrous scumbags alive in a prison that would only make them worse people instead of sitting them down with a Master and telling them to become functional members of society?

Most people did not think like that, because few trusted anyone enough these days, and the PRT had made things like this frustratingly illegal, but the general principle stuck out to her. Pragmatism.

Her distaste of Heartbreaker had everything to do with how and why he Mastered people.

The rule she put in place was not... bad, but unrealistic and hasty. A loose moral framework was required for her goals.

As far as she was concerned, while by no means was she a saint or even a passingly good person, she wasn't a monster like those she wished to hunt yet. Hopefully she could keep it that way.

Maybe she should employ Lisa or someone else with a bit of moral backbone, like Maria, someone that wasn't as flexible as her so they could tell her what might be a slippery step before she tumbled down the slope, but for now, she was doing fine. The rule was not bad, but was not needed.

The truck bed had gone quiet eventually, the auburn haired girl in the wheelchair holding onto the sun-dressed girl's hand.

She had caught some names, passingly, as she pondered on base ethics.

Sun girl was named Marissa, wheelchair girl was named Jess, and tophat asshole was named Kraus, or some variation of that. He definitely did not look German to her, but whatever. Ballistic was Luke.

Not useful info, but it helped humanise them a bit.

Eventually, their driver took them to the heart of Coil's territory, and that was where she found the man's hideout. A minute of zipping around at max speed then flitting back to the truck let her know the rough context of where they were and how this whole place came to be.

Coil's base was set up underneath a demolished old mall, judging by the melting, aged signs dotting the construction site, a mall that seemed to be in the middle of being rebuilt into an apartment building with an open yard before that construction was given up on, bricks and half-formed foundations sitting in the open wide space left behind.

Something that hadn't apparently been demolished was the underground parking lot beneath the mall, around the back of the construction site. The entrance was cleverly hidden by a shell of an abandoned squat little building that seemed to have been built around the entrance, and one of its walls was nothing but crumbling bricks and artistically dirtied detritus glued to a metal plate that extended outwards and tilted its bottom up until the truck could move into the underground tunnel, like a detachable wall.

It was so over the top that she immediately loved it. It felt like something only she would be paranoid enough to bother doing.

And to make it even better, the entire process had been hidden by the rusted, busted open cargo crates on either side of the little building, basically surrounding it in a way that was just perfect to not seem like they were actually surrounding it, like a puzzle whose purpose was to block all sightlines and the pieces were perfectly placed in all directions.

That, and the single heavily armed guard patrolling around, should be enough for nobody to ever wonder or bother to find out what this place really was.

One guard, just enough to indicate that there was some company or another interested in this place, discouraging those not brave enough to fuck with a guy doing lazy circles with a pistol on his hip, and just little enough to make people that were brave or strong enough realize that there was likely not something worth a damn in the construction site to bother with.

The carefully dusted security cameras littering the place also looked too aged and dusty to be actually working, but she just knew they were, all of them.

She had no doubt the man had even more surveillance and security measures she hadn't yet noticed or seen.

This place was almost cartoonishly like an evil villainous lair, and with her half-serious mannerisms of calling her employees and capes minions, this felt like a great place for her to set up some less sensitive operations within.

The industrial garage door with an entire wall glued onto its surface descended, and she quickly flit into the closing gap, and rocketed down the short winding drive to the parking area.

She almost got deja vu from the PRT building, though the armour on display here was much lesser.

There were plenty of jeeps and armoured cars, but for the most part it was just military transport trucks painted black, and nothing nearly as heavy duty as what the PRT had.

She tore her eyes away to follow the Travellers as their driver brought the truck to a stop. The team was met by an armed group that quickly took up a gurney and dragged Ballistic off for medical care, Jess now wearing a domino mask as they unloaded her with a ramp that extended off the underside of the truck.

Oddly nice of Coil to give them a truck with disability access, even if only accidental due to it being a moving company's truck.

After a few minutes of the Travellers unwinding and finding their footing again, shaking off the adrenaline, they moved to a giant section at the end of the parking area that was covered by two rectangular-looking vault doors. Coil's men were in the middle of half-jogging down the red-lit hall beyond, the doors slowly shutting behind them, so the Travellers slipped through the gap and attached themselves to the group as they moved down and down, through checkpoint after checkpoint and blast door after blast door, all covered by cameras and at least one guard each.

She stuck by them, but what she saw made her amazed enough to stop and gawk sometimes, before quickly relocating them and following them again until it repeated.

The base was…

Basically her dream lair.

Oh sure she could have her bunker and stuff for things that were truly secretive beyond measure, or too important to ever even think of having accessible, but this? This was a perfect secondary base of operations.

Hallways with blast doors upon blast doors, large stretches of space dedicated to mountains of ammunition and supplies, what must have easily been over a hundred mercenaries either training or fucking about, all armed with things so slick and clean it made her salivate.

Which was a strange reaction, much like when she saw the vehicles, but whatever was driving it was there to stay so she accepted it.

Some stretches were just metal walkways over large stretches of space, some others were just dozens upon dozens of rooms, and there was an area to the right side of the base that looked suspiciously like an Endbringer shelter, complete with vault doors and faded luminescent strips around it.

It certainly explained how the hell he got this all made. Likely some backroom deal with the companies that made these shelters.

Eventually, the group traversed the semi-labyrinthian halls, and after a minute of awkwardly waiting in a wide hallway guarded by two stoic men absolutely dripping with firepower, the guard on the left told Kraus to hand over the flashdrive and that they were dismissed for the moment as Coil was busy. After the Travellers had been dismissed, with some snarling from Kraus, which was fair enough, in her opinion, the door at the end of the hall opened with a hydraulic hiss.

She floated in with much more haste than the guard, and paused.

Whatever she had been expecting to see, it was not a ridiculously oversized room housing a child on a medical bed getting an IV put into her arm by some unassuming middle aged man next to Coil's sufficiently villainous-looking desk. The gangly villain himself had one arm around his stomach and the other caressing his chin as he hovered over both of them, damn near fretting.

"Sir, the Travellers acquired the package." The guard said, peeking into the room just enough to show the flash drive with his free hand as she idly floated above him, her gaze moving back and forth from the girl to the villain.

Coil didn't turn to address them, gesturing vaguely to the desk.

"Leave it there."

The guard nodded, and quickly did as instructed, leaving the room and shutting the door behind him.

The girl on the bed groaned and shifted, brows furrowed as she let out a tiny whine that tugged just a little at Taylor's heartstrings.

"Be careful with the dosage, Mr. Pitter." Coil carefully intoned, his words as much commentary as they were warning.

For a moment, she faltered, hesitated.

Was this his daughter? Was he a villain because she had some incurable disease or something? He certainly seemed invested in her safety. And Amy Dallon did not heal villains, so that was another possible point as to why he hadn't gone to her.

Then she switched runes to bring up 'Cosmic Insight' and was just confused, because the effect did not even passingly mention the girl in any way. If anything he sounded like exactly what Lisa said. Ambitious, calculating, and paranoid, with a dash of uncaring cruelty.

"Yes sir. I know, sir. The men used a little too much chloroform, but this should fix that. There won't be an issue with brain damage, or anything. She's a strong girl." Mr. Pitter said in a croony, almost mesmerised cadence that made her immediately realise that something was deeply wrong with the man, and that was before he gave the girl the creepiest pat on the head she'd ever seen, including the one she gave Bakuda.

She checked him with 'Cosmic Insight' as well. Mr. Pitter had a disturbed everything, from childhood to adulthood, a seemingly unhealthy fascination and fondness for children that thank fuck did not extend to pedophilia, and a dark sociopathic streak that made him… indirectly kill his wife?

Then her brain caught up with what he said, and she paused.

Chloroform.

And a girl in a secret underground base with not one, but two creepy old men.

"I shall trust that you're correct. The special blends are ready. Remind me how long I have to wait until I'm able to dose her and get some answers." Coil asked, making his question sound both like a command and like he already knew the answer and was just testing the man.

"Ah, the opioids and painkillers don't interact well with this… solution. I believe we should let her be for twenty four hours. Shall I take her to her room?"

She heard enough. The palpable, growing sense of satisfaction and triumph in the air as Coil watched over his 'catch' made her all the more certain he probably had his timelines turned off right now. No better place to merge.

She checked around for any automatic defences or hidden switches in Coil's disgustingly tight costume, then waited until both men were turned away.

There was a brief debate of pretending to be the guard, as if she'd never left, or the tophat asshole who apparently could teleport, according to the discussion in the truck, but she decided to go for old reliable.

Brute force.

She materialised as Evelynn's base form, invisible, and shapeshifted a third arm on her back. Two ribbon-like tentacles wrapped themselves around both Coil and Mr. Pitter's necks, each jerking in surprise and choking as she lifted them each a foot up in the air.

At the same time, she swapped to the Rune of Sorcery, materialising the 'Nullifying Orb' behind her back.

She dashed forward, one hand grasping Coil's chin, and the other clawing into the material around his head. If her claws flayed his cheekbone a little and slapped his fumbling hands away, too bad.

The rubber-like fabric tore with ease, and she was rewarded with a wide eyed stare, muted bafflement and surprise in the air as his eyes jerked around the room to try and find her, legs and arms vaguely flailing as his eyes lingered on the purple-blue orb just hovering in the air a foot or two away from him. His hands twitched as he tried to speak.

Calmer than she'd expected.

Then, for seemingly no reason at all, the room filled with terror, his eyes widening comically. He likely just tried to use his power again, and failed.

Lisa you're the goddamn best.

He tried to reach for the orb, giving up on trying to peel away whatever was holding him up by the neck, and flinched when his hands met the solid flesh between him and it.

Namely, Evelynn's tits.

He recoiled quickly enough, but… ehguhg. Fuck, now she felt like showering. Or scraping her skin off a couple times.

She turned the invisibility off, and her eyes flashed gold as she dragged Mr. Pitter's choking form next to his employer's, pushing mindless, dreamy fuzz into their heads before gently lowering them to the floor, where they remained, silent and suddenly calm as a cucumber, if a bit breathless and raspy from the rough treatment.

She crouched into a squat, turned to Coil's placid, dazed eyes, tilted his head up to see them better, and dove into his mind with another brief flare of golden light.

Notes:

not sure why but i dont rly like this chapter and writing it was a slog

meh

see ya soonish