Chapter 24: 3-5 Charmed

Charmed 3.5

2000, July 7: Phoenix, AZ, USA

It had been two days since my kidnapping and I'd yet to hear from La Torcha at all. Lawless lived in the warehouse with me, constantly taunting me with that mocking smirk on his face whenever I considered vaporizing him with the Minion Dematerializer. I wondered at first why he wasn't freaking out over the tattooed weapon then came to the conclusion that his power wasn't like Tattletale's at all.

The scope was just too different. Tattletale would have flipped her shit and done her best to never stay in range of my right hand. Lawless' power did not fill in the blanks for him. He could hear my desires, but not what they meant. He knew I wanted to kill him, that was a given, but so long as I didn't think too deeply into specifics, he wouldn't know with what.

Either that, or he had to have heard "Minion Dematerializer" and assumed it was some weapon I'd yet to build. I was clearly unarmed after all.

I tried to keep tabs on everyone who came and went, but that was futile. Too many people entered and left the warehouse. And truth be told? I wasn't sure that all of them were gang members judging by how much raw merchandise got moved around. It wasn't as though every gang member had a Crips tattoo over their heart like Lawless. Camille didn't have one, neither did the mooks she'd been ordering around. This had to be a civilian front for them somewhere, not that that made anything easier. If anything, it just added one more complication to fighting my way out.

I considered trying to alert a civilian, but it'd mean putting someone needlessly at risk, and that was assuming I could pick someone that wasn't just a low-key gang member. Or someone that wouldn't panic and get us both killed. That seemed likely. My faith in humanity, especially Earth-Bet's flavor of humanity, wasn't all that high to start with.

Surprisingly, Lawless' order for me wasn't to make them Elixirs of Iron, or worse. I'd done nothing but meditate and make health potions. I suspected that would change when La Torcha found the time to see me.

As infuriating as Lawless could be, the worst was Camille. Tequila. She too was staying with me and represented the honeypot side of my recruitment. She was apparently called that because she was the perfect party girl, that enchanting face you glimpsed at a night out with friends, only to feel closer to her than anyone you came with.

I wanted to hate her. I knew intellectually that every time she looked at me with those hungry eyes, I should feel disgusted. I should feel bone-deep loathing. I knew that had she been anyone else, I would have loathed her with every fiber of my being. I knew that she was a terrible person. She even bragged about her "funniest kills" or "the most pathetic way some guy's tried to get in my pants."

But I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to hate her and I hated myself for it.

Worst of all? I could feel myself growing increasingly attached to her a little bit more each day. I didn't have much time.

X

2000, July 8: Phoenix, AZ, USA

I met La Torcha in person on the morning of the third day.

We had our meeting in the same office I'd woken up in. I sat on one side while La Torcha sat on the other. Lawless leaned casually against the wall while Tequila cuddled against her boss like a big cat.

I didn't appreciate the pang of jealousy that shot through me at the sight.

La Torcha, Veronica Camacho as I'd been introduced, was a tall, busty woman with calculating eyes that made me think she was measuring every last inch of me. I wouldn't be surprised if she knew down to the penny what my kidney was worth and where she could sell it for the best price.

The big boss of the Crips hadn't bothered with a costume nor a mask, full well knowing I could see through them. I took the fact that she was willing to meet me in civilian guise as a message of commitment. It said, "We won't let you go. We can't let you go now."

Heard. Loud and clear.

"I hope these two have been treating you well," La Torcha began. And, unexpectedly, they had. It wasn't just my bias towards Camille talking either. They got me decent food, didn't disturb my meditations, and generally tried to be accommodating without giving away just where I was. Some mook was on call twenty-four-seven to get me the nutrition shakes and glass cleaner I needed to tinker. Just one more part of their campaign to recruit me.

"They've treated me fine, La Torcha. Although, I'm surprised you've got me working on nothing but health potions," I said guardedly, fishing for information.

"You thought I'd have you making as many of those steelskin elixirs as possible?" She laughed. It was deep and throaty, the laugh of a woman who wore her heart on her sleeve. It didn't suit the calculating glint in her eyes.

She flipped her phone to a news article and tossed it to me. It was national news; someone had leaked my disappearance. "Ward Missing! PRT Inept?" screamed the title.

"I am no fool. Right now, no one knows where you are. All they know is that their liaison's body was found in a gas station dumpster and that someone took you in the chaos. The moment one of my boys use your steelskin formula, they come down on us like the hammer of God. You won't be making anything the PRT have used in the field. Even these health potions will only be handed out to my most trusted, and only to be consumed immediately."

I glared at her. That confirmed it. Agent Morrison was dead. "You killed an innocent man for what? A tinker you can't even use?"

"No, don't be silly, Andy. I didn't kill one innocent man. I've killed dozens. More importantly, you're not a waste. You'll be making much more than just potions. This… Petricite for one."

"Pretty sure he can make a lot more than that," Lawless chimed in. "I remember him wanting everything. Seriously, he makes that fuckwit Sawtooth look like a monkey playing with a couple sticks and rubber bands. Armor? Weapons? Magic drugs? Bottled powers? Kid's got it all."

"It's not that easy. In exchange for versatility, my power requires very specific materials," I explained. The more I cooperated now, the more slack I'd be given and the better my chances of escape. "For example, see that Petricite you were talking about? It can block powers, true, but it needs to be made of petrified wood. You know, fossils. It's a big part of why I haven't been transferred out of the city even though there aren't any major tinkers in Phoenix to mentor me. The more complex the tinkertech, the more specific my ingredient list gets."

"Ehh, it's not that big of a deal, boss. Fossilized wood is for sale in damn near every gift shop if you know where to look," Camille said. "I've seen them around."

"That's true, Cam, but we can't go buy them in bulk. Stuff like that is probably going to either be seized or is being watched very carefully," La Torcha pointed out. "One person buying enough for a paperweight? Great. Someone ordering enough to load up a pickup truck? No way."

"What then? We get him to make us a fancy gun?"

"Sure, I can make you a clockwork gun," I said easily. I thought about Caitlyn's cool sniper rifle. "But it'll be just that. A gun. It'll never jam and it'll have pretty great range, but it's a gun at the end of the day. Thing is, there are only so many ways you can make a gun deadly. Sure, exploding bullets sound cool, but they're not any more dangerous than a normal bullet to the head."

La Torcha shrugged Camille off her shoulder and leaned forward. "Okay then, smart guy. Let's hear it from you. What do you think you can build us to remain in our good graces? And remember, we'll stop being so polite if you can't give us something good. But if you do, well, like I said, I reward my boys well."

I mulled it over. It'd be a careful balancing act moving forward. I had to appease them while gathering information and resources to kill them all. Lawless' smirking mug wasn't exactly helping matters. "It depends on what your aim is. You want my help? Fine, you have it. But what exactly are you working towards? I want to know what you want the Crips to become."

"We're not too different, you and I. You want to kill Scion to prove you're the best. I want to kill Alexandria because she's a bitch," she began.

"That's… That's it? That's your big goal? You want something that can kill Alexandria?" I asked incredulously. It's not like I didn't understand. Rebecca Costa-Brown was a stone-cold bitch in canon. "Difficult" was putting it mildly. She was a bit of a bitch like Renekton was a bit bloodthirsty.

"Why are you so surprised? You had to have heard about what brought us here. That bitch killed my husband, you know."

"Mortician was your husband?"

"What? You didn't read that in the dossier, did you? God forbid the PRT humanize a villain. Believe it or not, Andy, we're people too. We don't all stroke white cats and feed our shark tanks twenty-four hours a day. We have lives outside of the vida loca."

"Well, sorry to break it to you, but I can't kill Alexandria for you. If I ever get to that point, it won't be in the next decade," I told her.

She leaned back and Camille immediately latched onto her side like a limpet again. I couldn't help but think she was as obsessed over La Torcha as her victims were of her.

"You think that's all I want? You're adorable, Andy. The world isn't black and white and people aren't so one-dimensional. Would I love to see that bitch suffer? Sure. But as they say, 'The best revenge is a life well lived.' No, Andy. I don't want you to kill Alexandria for me. I want you to help me rebuild the Crips, Torcha's Crips. After we take over Phoenix, we're going to go national. With the kind of gear you can make, I don't doubt that we'll be able to forge the connections needed to rival the Elite."

"You're awfully open about your ambitions. Isn't the gang leader supposed to be all cagey and stuff?"

"You'd think so, but no. Not with you. I told you, I want you as one of us. I'm telling you this so you know where I'm coming from. I don't want to hurt your mom. Honestly? I respect a lady with some hustle, you know? Can't be easy being a single mother and an immigrant. My mama was like that too. I don't want to hurt your friends in the Wards either. None of them did anything to me so I don't need to start anything with them. We don't need to be enemies, Andy."

I nodded slowly, deep in thought. The problem was, she was almost sounding reasonable, like she had more depth to her than some moustache-twirling villain. Then again, this was real life, not a comic strip. Her experiences would shaper her in more ways than leaving her with a craving for power and wealth. Oh, she wanted those things, no doubt, but she also wanted prestige, and if she was to be believed, to ruin the strongest brute.

It wouldn't work of course. I knew that. Contessa would never allow it and Lawless would be about as useful as a banana slug compared to the lady of snazzy hats.

But… I could use this. Her ambition wasn't mine; I had nothing personal against Alexandria and I wouldn't until I considered her unredeemable, but that didn't exactly mean I considered her some irreplaceable ally either.

"To start, you need to get control of this city, right?" I began slowly, trying to flush out my thoughts as I put them to words. "At some point, you're going to have to kill off SSM and Peckerwood. Or have you absorbed the Peckerwoods yet?"

"We haven't. We can get rid of them as we please, but Freeform is too useful as an independent agent right now."

A plan started to form. It was a nebulous thing, a vapor within a wisp within a cloud. I clamped down on it. I couldn't let Lawless see. No specifics, not 'til the iron was hot. "Dos Caras. What faces does he have right now? Do you know?"

"La Llorona and Halloween."

"Halloween… makes an orange mist that makes him invisible," I recalled from an old PRT dossier. "Anyone he touches skin-to-skin starts to cackle uncontrollably and becomes his puppet, but only for a few minutes. He led the Peckerwoods. I don't remember La Llorona."

"Good memory," Camille praised, sending butterflies fluttering around in my stomach. She waved her hand dismissively, "La Llorona isn't anyone worth mentioning. She cries a lot and makes other people cry."

I couldn't help but think that even her disinterest was captivating. I then immediately shook myself to the amusement of the other capes in the room.

"A bit more complicated than that, Camille," La Torcha said. "She cries and anyone who hears her gets depressed. Suicidally depressed."

"And what's your plan for that? Caras can also flay people alive on touch, right? That's how he gets new faces? So striker, shaker, master, stranger. There's a reason SSM's been in this fight despite being so outnumbered."

"Good, we'll make an executive out of you yet." Lawless said. "There are two ways to deal with Dos Caras. One, you can be immune to his master effects. Or two, you can shoot him from farther than two city blocks away. Either way, you need to be able to see him through Halloween's mist. I think he should make us something to see Caras, boss."

"Yes, that makes sense. Think you can manage that, Andy?"

I considered the request. It was unexpected. I would have assumed their first real order would be for a weapon. If not that, an armored car or something, not a utility item. I suspected that this was so they could ease me into crime, an insidiously pleasant road, much like Camille's power. Still, it was easy enough. There were plenty of magics that revealed an invisible foe.

The simplest would of course be a Control Ward, a totem version of my Oracle's Elixir. I just needed to build the body. The body would house a portion of my mana along with a unique rune sequence, allowing anyone to activate it. Once placed, it would generate a spherical field in which all invisibility would fail. More specifically, it would send out pulses of mana, visibly highlighting everything in an area in eerie red light.

"I can," I confirmed.

"Then that's what you'll start with," La Torcha said, ending this discussion.

I spent the rest of the morning making health potions. By lunch, some mook or other had dropped off a load of marble and steel along with a chisel, everything I'd said I'd need to start.

Making the actual body of the ward was more complicated than expected. In short, enchanting was hard. Predictably, it required the carving of runes. Runic knowledge wasn't itself hard to get; it was one of those things naturally provided by the World Rune, much like the memories of potions recipes. The problem was my inability to enter a true tinker fugue.

A newly triggered tinker could pick up a soldering iron and make anything his specialization allowed regardless of experience by entering his bullshit trance. Lacking a fugue meant I didn't get that ability. The World Rune gave me knowledge, but it wasn't puppeting my body so my hands were my own. That was fine for general crafts such as how to work a kiln or grind on a lathe, but for things that required exacting detail with a difficult to master tool like a chisel? It was hours before I had something I could be proud of.

And I was proud of it, no matter the client. The World Rune would not allow for anything short of my best on a project.

Each ward was charged with my mana and so could be activated by anyone. When placed, it would reveal all invisible targets within a fifty meter radius, much like my Oracle's Elixir. However, making it portable did result in a drop in quality, so each ward would function for only five minutes before fizzling out.

Thus began my life as a Crip.