5

Chapter 5

Alea Iacta Est

Part Five: Roll for Initiative

Dinah

I looked up at her, trying to appear calmer than I was. Being yanked into a service corridor and shoved up against the wall was kind of a new experience, but I tried to roll with it. "Because I wanted to talk to you, Lisa," I replied. "Away from your friends, if possible."

She eyed me sharply, but showed less in the way of surprise than I might have expected from having me know her name. Well, duh. She's got Thinker powers, giving her high-end intuitive capabilities.

"You got my name from your friend on the phone," she stated flatly. "You weren't looking for me; you were looking for someone with powers. I fit the criteria." Her eyes narrowed. "You can tell that I've got powers, just from looking at me?"

From outside, I heard a voice, possibly from the older boy, "Okay, where did Lisa get to now?"

"Search me," the younger boy replied. "Off on one of her tangents, I guess."

Okay, so that's how I was going to learn it. "Yes, I can," I told her quietly. "I want to recruit you. My team needs someone like you, which is how -"

"- you know what powers I have," she finished for me. "It's an analytical Thinker power. Picking out powers is a secondary function. It seeks out people to fulfil a need, a goal. So if you're seeking parahumans, you find parahumans."

You're right, of course," I confirmed. "Now, I know you're not totally free to join. You and those guys are with a pre-existing team, but you're not on it by choice. However, you're still unsure whether to take me up on it, or to walk away. Because …" I paused. "I don't know the because."

"Huh," she mused. "It's not often that I get analysed. The because is simple. I don't want to end up with a bullet in the head and I don't know if your team can protect me. Scratch that; I appreciate the soft sell, but I'm pretty sure your team – how many members so far? Three?" Her eyes searched mine. "Huh. Two. You and one other. Pretty sure your team can't protect me."

"You might be surprised," I retorted. I was getting a feel for her technique; she liked to push and prod and find weak spots, then exploit them for all she was worth. "I'm really good at organising people according to their strengths. I'm basically the Alexandria of team coaches."

"According to the task at hand, right," she finished for me. "So what's your friend do? Thinker as well?" I didn't react, or at least I didn't think I had, but she nodded anyway. "Right. Some sort of information gathering. You spot prospects and your friend gives you what information she …? … Right, she can about them."

"Exactly," I retorted, nettled. "And if you can give me any information about whoever's likely to shoot you in the head, I can work out a plan to get around that problem for you."

She stared at me. "Holy shit, you really think you can. No way, kiddo. It's not going to happen. This isn't just some ganger. We're talking about major Shaker or Thinker powers that you're going up against. Reality manipulation, at the very least. So walk away while you still can."

I shook my head. "I'm not just some kid. And this isn't some wannabe team. For instance, check this out." Pulling out my phone, I dialled Taylor's number.

"Hello?"

I cleared my throat. "It's me. Lisa isn't convinced. Tell me the random number she's about to guess."

Listening carefully to the phone, I could hear dice clattering, but Taylor didn't speak. I watched Lisa expectantly, then put the phone on speaker and mute. "Well?" I asked.

She crossed her arms and looked back at me. "Not gonna give you one," she stated.

"But you have to," I protested.

"Nope." She folded her arms. "I don't have to do anything. Let's see what your friend says about that."

"Wonderful." Sighing, I took the phone off of mute. "What've you got?"

"No number given. She's being a bitch." A grin spreading across my face, I watched as her expression changed. She pointed at the mute button, so I hit it again.

"Okay, so you've got a precognitive," she admitted. "Useful. How accurate is she?"

"Accurate enough to let me know that you were going to be a bitch," I pointed out.

"There is that." She rubbed her chin. "Okay, what makes you think you can go up against a guy who has dozens of well-trained minions with automatic weapons? Pretty certain that he's not gonna let someone just poach his best Thinker, not without some serious argument."

I frowned. "Who is this guy, anyway? It's not Lung, because you're not Asian. Could be Kaiser, but you haven't mentioned the obvious heavy-hitters and I don't know of anyone in that gang with probability manipulation. It's not Uber or L33t, unless they've had a total competency upgrade."

Lisa snorted. "No, it's not those two losers. Look, if I tell you who it is, will you walk away then? You seem like a nice kid and you've got some serious cojones, trying to poach me for your team, but I don't want to see you hurt."

"Maybe," I allowed. My phone chimed; I didn't look at it. "Depends who it is."

"That's fair." She nodded. "It's Coil. Satisfied?"

"Coil?" I frowned, then took the phone off of mute. "What do you have on -"

"Coil? He's supposed to be a mid-level crime boss. PHO rates him as not very high on the scale."

"Damn, that's got to be super useful." Lisa sounded mildly envious.

"Yeah." I raised my voice slightly. "Anything there about probability manipulation?"

"Nope. Says he's not a cape at all."

Lisa rolled her eyes. "Well, duh. If you could alter the chance of something happening or not happening, would you broadcast the fact, or just let your enemies – of which he has more than a few, let me tell you – think that they're all suffering from shitty luck? All the time?"

I had to admit it, she had a really good point. "Okay, so Coil's got you in a really bad situation. And he's got guys with guns, not to mention those two guys I saw you with, working for him. What are they, your minders?"

"Huh? Oh, no. No. Those are my teammates. I'm in the Undersiders."

"Which is owned by Coil."

"None of which is on the page for his gang."

"Which is, as you say, owned by Coil." She pointed at my phone. "It won't say anything about it on PHO. He comes across as an unpowered gang leader, but he pays us to do stuff for him, stuff that he doesn't want connected to his operation."

"Ahh." Comprehension dawned. "So if he wanted to pull something against one of the other gangs, he'd use the Undersiders, leaving him in the clear."

"More or less, yeah." She eyed me. "So, you figured out yet that it's a good idea to walk away right now?"

I looked right back at her. "What if we could do it? Would you join? We could be helping people and there wouldn't be a gun to your head."

"You don't get it." She shook her head. "He'll always have a gun to my head."

"I mean, if Coil wasn't a factor. Would you join us then?"

She raised an eyebrow; there was a bemused look on her face. "Kid, I gotta hand it to you. You've got big brass ones. If and only if Coil's out of the picture, I'll join you. But it's a really, really bad idea to try to bring him down. Like I said, he's got probability manipulation or something really similar to it. I've never seen him caught short. It's like he can change events to suit his needs."

I nodded. "Got it. We're not going to do anything silly. But if I came to you with a plan of action, would you at least consider it?"

Lisa leaned up against the door leading out of the service corridor, peeking out. "Christ, you're persistent. Yeah, sure, I'd look at it. But I wouldn't commit to it unless I really thought it had a good chance of succeeding." She looked back around at me. "Because make no mistake, Coil doesn't play patty-cake. You cross him and lose, you either get a really sharp warning as to why you shouldn't – and I can't even pick out your chances of surviving that – or you end up with the same deal as me; work for him or eat a bullet."

"I understand, I really do." Holding up my phone, I continued, "So can I get your number so I can get back in contact with you?"

A smile quirked her mouth. "Okay, sure, kiddo." She recited her number and I entered it into my phone. "So, you got a name, or do I just call you 'kiddo'?"

I finished saving the number and looked back up at her. "Why don't I get back to you on that one." I need to check with Taylor on the wisdom of letting her know that. "For now, call me 'Management'."

Her smile widened; it was almost as if she'd read my mind. "Yeah, you got a point. I guess I'll see you around." Opening the door, she slipped out, closing it behind her. I leaned against it, realising for the first time that my heart was racing. Wow, that was just intense.

Lisa

Brian looked around as I came up behind him. "Hey, where'd you get to? You just vanished."

I gave him my patented mischievous grin. "Sorry about that. I saw some stuff that I just had to check out. I knew you boys would be able to handle yourselves without me for just a few minutes."

"So what'd you steal?" That was Alec.

"Steal? I don't do that any more." I put on a carefully calculated look of wounded innocence. I wasn't very good at it, but that was all right; it wasn't supposed to convince them. "I can afford shit now."

"Yeah, but it's more fun to steal." I had to admit, Alec had a point.

"Which we don't want to be caught doing and maybe draw attention to ourselves." So did Brian. The party pooper. "Like you said, we can afford whatever we want. So no shoplifting."

"Even if it's for a really good cause?" I was just arguing for fun now.

"What cause would that be?" He wasn't.

"The cause of me proving I'm smarter than store security, duh."

"I think we've already proven that one." He'd figured out that I was teasing him; a reluctant smile was crossing his face now. "You don't need to rub it in."

"Fine. Be a spoilsport." Having successfully diverted attention from my disappearing act, I put the ball back in his court. "So what are we gonna do now? See a movie?"

The discussion moved on, but my thoughts were busy.

That 'Management' kid really thought she could cut me loose from Coil. If she can pull that off, I want to be in on that, but I'm not so sure that she can.

She seemed pretty sure of herself. And having a precog to back up your guesses has got to be useful. Actually, I wonder if Coil doesn't already have a precog he can call upon. It would make a lot of sense.

I'm just hoping that Management's plan is actually worth carrying out. Somehow, I think it might be. She doesn't strike me as someone who does things half-assed.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Taylor

"So, you all right?"

As I asked the question, I rolled the dice. Chances that Dinah has problems in the next half hour?

"Been better, been worse." Her voice came over the phone as the dice rolled to a stop. Seven point three four percent.

"That doesn't sound like a yes to me. Are you sure she's worth it?" I still remembered the massive cramp that had seized my hand and wrist when I went to roll the random number. So I had rolled the alphabet dice instead, with my other hand, ending up with the "she is being a bitch" message.

"Not a yes, not a no. You heard what she was saying about Coil, yeah? I'm gonna need you to run some numbers for me."

"Ready to roll."

"Okay then. What are the chances of retaliation from Coil if we just walk away right now?"

I rolled and checked the numbers. "Zero point four three one percent."

"Okay, she's not gonna tell him. Good. I didn't think so, but you never know." She took a breath. "Chances that we'll be successful in our chosen goals if Lisa joins us."

The dice rolled off of my hand. "Eighty-six point three percent."

"Right. Chances that we'll be successful if she doesn't join us?"

I regathered the dice and rolled them. "Sixty-one point nine percent."

"Shit. A twenty-five percent drop." She paused, I assumed, to think. "What are our chances of peacefully extracting Lisa from Coil's organisation?"

The dice clattered on the table. "Uh, four point one three percent."

"I was afraid of that. Chances of getting away with an extraction if we don't totally neutralise Coil in the process?"

I fixed the question in my mind as I rolled the dice. "Twenty-two point one percent."

"Dammit. Right. Chances of neutralising Coil and extracting Lisa with the resources we have at the moment?"

Now we were going down the rabbit hole. "Seventeen point five percent."

"Chances of being able to successfully neutralise Coil and recruit Lisa if we expand our operations?"

My hand cramped. "Uh, the dice won't roll on that one. Probably too many indeterminates."

"Okay, sorry. How about this one, then. Is Coil really a cape?"

For that one, I picked up three of the alphabet dice with my other hand. The clatter they made on the table was more definitive than the d10s. "Signs point to yes."

"Well, that's a start. Is Lisa correct in assuming that he's a probability manipulator?"

Clatter, clatter went the dice. I stared at the result. "Well, damn. I got a big fat NO here."

"Really?" I could hear the interest quicken in her voice. "Can you get a reading on what his powers really are?"

This one was gonna be a doozy. I picked up four alphabet dice, fully expecting to feel the paralysing pain of a cramp at any second. But the dice rolled off my hand smoothly and bounced on the table. I stared at the result, scribbled the letters down, then rolled again. Then I picked up the phone.

"Well, that's interesting. And by interesting, I mean terrifying."

"What? Why?"

"Direct quote from the dice. PRECOG."

"What, like you?"

"One second." I rolled the dice. "Uh, nope. Not like me."

"So he's got precognitive abilities that let him pretend to be a reality manipulator. That's really interesting. How would you pull something like that off?"

I thought about it. "Well, he's not omniscient. Otherwise he would already have warned us off. So maybe he's really good at asking 'what if' questions and seeing how scenarios play out. Then he does what he needs to do to make one particular scenario happen." Absently, I picked up the d10s again. Chances that I'm accurate with this guess? The dice clattered once more on the table. " … and that's eighty-one point six percent accurate."

"So mostly right, but with some factors that we don't know about yet."

"Yeah, basically."

"I have a question for you."

"What's that?"

"What are the chances of us taking down Coil and recruiting Lisa, now that we know more about his powers?"

"Ooh, interesting question." I recaptured the dice and rolled them. "Shit, they've gone up to thirty-one point three percent."

"Wow, they nearly doubled. Because now we know more about what his powers are."

"That's a huge jump. But still pretty low."

"Because we don't know anything else about him. How many men he's got, where his base is, anything like that. Plus, we don't have any heavy hitters. If we make just one mistake, we're dead."

"Okay, I've got a question."

"Shoot."

"Are we sticking with the original goal of 'recruit more members for the team' or focus on 'bringing down Coil so we can recruit Lisa'? Because it seems like we're aiming more for the latter, now."

She paused. " … that's a really good question. I'm gonna need to think about that. It's almost certain that we'll need to recruit more members before we're in the position of being able to take down Coil."

"Right. So it's a nested quest."

"Okay, you're going to have to explain that one."

"You get them in fantasy stories. Ann – a friend at school told me about them. Say you need a magical pendant to defeat the evil wizard. In order to get the blacksmith to create the magical pendant, you need to get the jewel that will go into the pendant from the giant that lives in the hills. In order to get the jewel from the giant, you need to deliver a flock of sheep for his afternoon meal. In order to get the sheep, you need to give the shepherd something. And so on."

"Oh, I get it. In order to get our eighty percent success rate, we need Lisa. In order to get Lisa, we need to take Coil out of the picture. In order to take Coil out of the picture, we need more recruits. Yeah?"

"Yeah, basically."

"Right. Okay, well, I'll keep looking."

"Keep me posted."

"Will do."

The Next Day

"Okay, I never would have picked you as a rogue type," Annette observed. "Paladin, yeah. Fighter, maybe. Cleric, possibly. But rogue? That's kinda out of left field, isn't it?"

"Hey, she made a totally rockin' rogue," interjected Kay. I didn't comment; it felt weird talking about my character as a 'rogue' when I wanted to be a hero. But Kay was still talking. "I notice you went with point buy for your stats instead of rolling. How come? Most starting players prefer to roll."

I shrugged. "Oh, uh, it's something Annette told me about making a balanced character. This way I know I can place my numbers where I want them."

I was, of course, lying; as Dad had put it, the temptation of rolling whatever numbers I wanted for my character's attributes may have been too much. Until I knew I could keep it in check, I had decided to go with a less random system.

"Though I'm curious as to why you went with a half-elf instead of a halfling," Cameron noted as Kay slid my sheet back over the table to me. "Ever since Lord of the Rings came out, nearly everyone goes with halflings for rogues. It's kind of a trope."

"Oh, that's easy," I told him, trapping the sheet with my hand as an errant breeze threatened to blow it away. The tables outside were great for eating lunch, less so for leaving character sheets unattended. "If I'm going to be sneaking around in the dark and looking for stuff, I want that low-light vision thing as well as the perception bonus. Halflings don't get low-light vision. I checked."

"Really?" Kay frowned. "I was sure they did." She pointed at Cameron. "Your last halfling character did, I remember."

"No, no," Annette reminded her. "That was his dwarfling character in the Mountain Realms campaign. Remember?"

I frowned. "Dwarfling? I don't remember that race. Is that in a different book?"

"Hah, no." Annette grinned at me. "It was gonna be an all-dwarf game, but Cam wanted to play something different, so we let him make up a dwarf-halfling crossbreed."

"Yeah," Cameron supplied. "We've got the hybrid rules, so we worked out the stats. It was a kickass character."

I tried to envisage such a pairing. "It would be short, for sure," I ventured.

"Short and tough," agreed Annette. "But it got the job done." She nodded at my character sheet. "Well, we've got Krystara statted out and equipped. You understand what all the numbers mean?"

"Kind of, but not totally," I admitted.

"Ah, you'll be fine." Her grin was infectious. "Once we start play, you'll -"

At that moment, the bell went for the end of lunch break. A flash of motion overhead caught my eye, I looked upward. "What's that?"

Annette shaded her eyes against the sun. "Oh, that's Vicky and Amy. They probably went down to the Boardwalk for lunch or something." She made a rude noise, but sounded amused as she continued. "Showoffs."

"Wow," I commented as I carefully packed the character sheet away. I knew that she meant Victoria and Amy Dallon, otherwise known as Glory Girl and Panacea. Sisters, they were perhaps Arcadia's most famous attendees. "The Boardwalk isn't that close."

"Glory Girl can get up to seventy or eighty miles an hour, you know," Cameron informed me seriously. I detected the tone of a hardcore cape geek; it wasn't hard, because I was pretty much a cape geek myself.

"And just think, she doesn't have to worry about slowing down for corners or stopping at traffic lights," Annette added, just a little facetiously. "So yeah, she can cover distance pretty quickly if she has to."

"Huh." A thought struck me and I picked up my three d10s; we hadn't been rolling them seriously, but somehow they had found their way on to the table. Without saying a word, I rolled them.

"Hey, you want to get all that packed away," Kay advised me. "The teachers don't mind if we game down here, but if we linger after the bell, we're in trouble."

"Coming, coming," I told her, scooping up my dice and dropping them into the bag, then tightening the drawstring and stowing it in my backpack.

Chatting among themselves, the others headed back inside. I went with them, but didn't contribute much to the conversation; my thoughts were occupied with the roll I had just made. The question I had asked myself on the spur of the moment was, chances that Glory Girl or Panacea would be interested in joining our superhero team?

And the answer had been fifty-one point three percent.

That can't mean both of them, I decided. So one of them has to be interested in leaving New Wave. I wonder who.

"Hey, wait up a second."

Annette looked around. "Taylor, hey." Her welcoming smile gave me the impression that I was the one person she'd been wanting to see. "You lost? Need a hand finding your way around?"

I gestured with the school map I was carrying in my hand. "No, I'm good. For the moment."

"So what's up?" She checked her watch. "You don't want to be late for class."

"No, I'll make this quick." I paused, trying to figure out how to say it. "You know how you were named after your mom's best friend?"

Annette nodded. "Yeah?"

I took a deep breath. "My mom's name was Annette. Annette Rose Hebert. Anne-Rose. I think she might've been your mom's friend."

Her eyes went wide. "Holy shit, that's awesome! Our moms were besties!"

"I'm not a hundred percent sure," I told her, "but … "

"No." She stared at me. "Is your dad's name Danny?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah." I nodded. "That's him."

"Oh. Oh, wow!" She grabbed me; I felt myself being squeezed tightly. "This is so awesome! I can't wait to tell Mom!"

"Uh, it might get a bit awkward," I cautioned her. "Just so you know."

"Awkward?" She let me go so she could see my face. "Why awkward?"

I shrugged, feeling more than a little awkward myself. "Uh … Dad says that when he met them, my mom and yours were … uh, kind of seeing each other."

"Hah, that's not awkward." She rolled her eyes. "Relationships are normal and natural. That's what Mom always says." She grinned. "You wait; she'll ask us if we're interested in each other."

I stared. "You're shitting me."

"I shit you not." Another flashing grin. "It's okay; I'll tell her we're not serious." Before I could even think of how to respond to that, she checked her watch again. "Whoops, gotta go. See you later." Off she dashed, leaving me with one thought uppermost in my mind.

What the fuck just happened?

Dinah

"You have to be kidding." I held the phone tightly to my ear. "Panacea?"

"You heard me. I flipped a coin." Taylor's voice was definite; I could hear it through the phone line. "Glory Girl was heads, Panacea was tails, and I got tails."

"Wow, holy shit, Panacea is unhappy with where she was, enough to want to maybe leave her team?"

"That's what the dice said. Of course, they didn't tell me exactly why. Or at least, not yet. I mean, I only just got home, so I decided to call you."

"Well, fifty-one percent is pretty marginal." I gnawed on a fingernail. "It's nowhere near enough to make a good pitch and hope that she takes me up on it."

"I was thinking." Taylor's voice was contemplative. "Maybe the fifty-one percent is because New Wave is an established team and we don't have costumes, a name, anything. It's one thing to be recruited into a new team. It's another to step into a group that hasn't even thought of a name yet."

"That's – you're right. It's exactly right." In my mind, I changed the goal for the job at hand, from 'recruit new members' to 'recruiting Panacea'; one of the steps in the plan was now to get the team established, give us costumes, a team name, an air of legitimacy. "Doing that would make it a lot more likely that she'd come across."

"So how do we do that?"

"One thing at a time, Taylor. One thing at a time." I curbed my own excitement. "If we're going to recruit Panacea, we need Lisa on the team." That was the other thing my power had told me. "Her insights would be really useful to us, there. Give us an idea of how to approach her."

"Okay, so to get Panacea, we need Lisa. To get Lisa, we need … who?"

"Still working on that one." I paused. "Actually, what if you made a list of the parahumans in the Bay, and rolled off against each one, to see who'd be interested in joining?"

"Leaving out the ones we don't want in the team, I hope?" Her voice was slightly sarcastic.

"Yeah, leaving them out." I grimaced. Some people we just did not want in the team.

"I can do it. It'll take me a while."

"Don't push yourself too hard. It's only our second day."

A snort. "Yeah, yeah. I'll let you know what I come up with."

"Thanks. I appreciate it."

After I ended the call, I got up and wandered into the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. Taylor was not the only one working hard; I had a job to do myself.

After all, our budding superhero team wasn't just going to name itself.

End of Part Five