10

Summoner - Chapter 10 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series

Chapter 10

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Their names were George, Chut, Mano and Ethan.

George was just a skinny white guy, who had a black fuzz on his head in place of actual hair, Chut was vaguely indian-looking and had a dirty, small brown ponytail, Mano looked almost stereotypically mediterranean with brown curly hair, and Ethan was a black guy with shortcropped fuzzy hair who had a crack addiction so serious she wouldn't put it past him to die from her command to stop being a druggie. 

One she gave to all of them, but Ethan could barely stop tweaking even when she had bent iron bars around his legs to stop him from running while she went to grab the rest.

She didn't feel the slightest guilt about how thoroughly she Mastered them.

George had a mental tie to 'rape' with 'excitement-lust', Chut would literally sell his mother to the S9 if it gave him a big enough paycheck, Mano was just a violent bastard that liked beating anyone and anything that couldn't fight back, including hookers by his own admission when she asked, and Ethan was a pedophile. With at least two experiences in his deranged fetish.

Yes, during her short interviews with them she had to refrain with all her willpower not to just make spikes erupt out of the ground and turn them into mangled swiss cheese and leave them for the seagulls and crows to finish.

But she needed minions, and with a very strict set of commands and very thorough emotional manipulation, she had mostly 'fixed' them. Ethan especially. 

She had given so many fucking orders. She had tweaked so much stuff to make these bastards her complete and utter slaves, because by fuck, did they deserve it. She gave them a damn laundry list of hygiene, lifestyle, what skills she wanted them to develop, what she wanted them to turn into… In a couple months, they would be fucking gentlemen. Or at least respectable enough slaves to where she didn't want to splatter them on the pavement every time she saw them.

She would have done the same to Sile if it weren't for their differences.

For one, Sile was fucking useless, and in the ABB. He was more of a snitch, and taking him out would draw an eye or two. Also, his current task was already taking him hours to achieve, and she was not impressed.

These guys? Nobody would care if they left. Nobody would even notice.

Additionally, these guys were useful. Chut and George had a lot of experience with being drug dealers, Manos had been in enough fights that half his teeth were missing and he still wanted more, as well as having copious experience with steroids before his new drug hobby drained the money that went into that, and Ethan was such subhuman fucking scum that she could order him to do the most deranged, horrific shit and he wouldn't even blink.

Really, he was a complete sociopath. His emotions were muted to shit about everything except his own self-preservation and a mild haze of depression, which she guessed was exactly why he started taking drugs.

That was the definition of a sociopath, right? She wasn't sure but it fit.

Did she technically fix him by making him inwardly worship her, or did she just fuck him up further?

Regardless, she had accidentally stumbled upon a pretty decent team, once her orders began shaping them into somewhat more respectable people.

George and Chut could be her dealers, Manos would be security and muscle once she started paying him enough to get him back on his steroids and gym, and Ethan could be her assassin of sorts, once her commands forced him to be back to a semi-functional human being again.

Really, he was very calm and collected when he wasn't twitching and tweaking the fuck out because of all the drugs in him. He was also as tall as her and just as thin. With some time, he could be good.

However, there was a slight problem now.

They couldn't go back to the Merchants, because they couldn't clean up their act like she told them without drawing attention. It was far more convenient that they simply vanish after the fight and say they got spooked out of that life or some crap if someone ran into them later, or some such unlucky coincidence.

And four grown adults that had little to no money on them needed a way to support themselves, to make the changes she told them to do. And they certainly did not care about saving, they barely had enough to last them a week each from what she understood.

So, she found some nice, quiet corner, went invisible, and cast Teleport.

Once she popped back into her bunker, she turned into Zyra, and after a brief couple minutes of inputting the scents of all the Legends she was likely to use into the Thorn-Spitters, turned into Taliyah.

Then she made another room, about two hundred feet to the left of her bunker and fifty feet above, also completely isolated and only accessible by Teleport, made of tightly compacted dirt with pillar supports and a cage-like framework of rock around it to give her roots support.

Then she turned into Zyra and began adding structure and further support to the whole thing via roots.

Lots, and lots, and lots of roots, most of which came up to the surface shrubbery above, but also made the dirt very stable and unlikely to fall on her drug operation.

These same roots would make said drug operation self-sufficient.

She attached those roots to hallucinogenic plants which she grew all along the forty-foot box of dirt and stone, added another Breather-Plant, as she named the grotesque thing in her bunker, allowing her plants to grow and shed on their own with ample oxygen and food from the outside world.

Then she realized she was stupid, and made a lightbulb plant. It was just a giant, membranous flower with a sack full of liquids that had some bizarre chemical reactions with each other in the middle, leading to a bright light when they mixed together. She stuck one to the ceiling to also give her plants a mimicry of sunlight and make them even more self-sufficient, went back to her bunker to get rid of the stupid moss in favor of having a couple of these hanging off the ceiling instead, and went back to her drug den.

She began configuring the plants for a while, as they were not exactly safe, and after twenty minutes or so of very freaky and odd mental gymnastics, she had made distinctly non-lethal moondust-lilies, as Runeterrans called them. They were also only mildly addictive, because she wanted return customers for her future drug operations but she also didn't want to make people gibbering addicts that ruined their lives for another hit like with meth and crack.

She didn't care to be a saint, but she didn't want to be evil either.

Then she began an automatic collection system, of sorts.

The flowers would grow, and their petals and leaves would quickly fall off, only to be gathered by reactive, slithering vines that were set all along the floor. Then these vines would twine around each leaf, and drag them into closed collection pods, flat plant sacks that… that were more work to make than the actual drug plants, honestly.

She knew how drugs were made, she had chemists in her arsenal that could make things that hit like a mule. What she was trying to emulate here however, was something like very strong weed, or the Runeterra equivalent. And the process of making weed was not exactly difficult, but it had its complexities.

Long story short, the plant sacks that lined the edges of the room were completely dry inside, had microscopic feelers to know when they were full enough to stop collecting, and would heat up and press the leaves down to make them ready for processing.

The plants would then measure humidity on their insides and prod the leaves to judge if they reached a set of conditions. If they did, they would shuffle them down to their excretor, and through contractions, would slowly force them along the walls like someone huffing and puffing air down a pipe to make the leaves move, until they reached her shredder plant.

Imagine a vertical, tooth-lined blender plant that would shred the leaves down, sprinkle them with some of the collected hallucinogenic excretions from the leaves, and dump them into a giant sack of palm-leaf like material , before sealing it airtight shut and detaching it, leaving a bag of green-pink weed with a rather bizarre but pleasant smell, ready to be rolled into a blunt.

Or just, sold. In general.

She didn't know prices yet but each bag was about large enough to fit a watermelon, barely, and would probably fill up about once a week.

Then the blender-plant would grow a new sack, the sack-plants would gather more leaves, and eventually make another bag, repeating until drought, which she doubted she had to worry overmuch for.

Brockton Bay was generally very humid, and it rained with reasonable frequency.

She tried to give them all a growth and work speed that would match to avoid overproduction or hiccups and inefficiency in the whole system, and eventually managed that too.

Of course, these were Zyra's plants.

In other words, complete and utter bullshit.

By the time she was done tweaking everything, she could already see a few leaves tumble to the ground from above, and, nursing another fucking headache that mixed wonderfully with her exhaustion, she Teleported back to her attic back home in a swirl of purple energy and ribbon-like lines. It was the most secure place she could think of as her dad never went up there, and the sole window the attic had was tiny and out of the way, hiding both the light and her.

It was also a window she could crack open and fly out of as Evelynn, so she quickly did that, and went to formally meet her first capes.

Hopefully.

The Palanquin was a great club. One of the most secure ones, and it was sort of well-known that Faultline and her crew hung about, or maybe even owned the place.

Of course, it was still a club of sorts, so in the middle of the day, it was completely fucking empty.

That did not stop Faultline from placing a few guards with well-concealed firearms around the place.

Which meant she wasn't stupid.

She flew up along the third floor windows, the single floor not available even to VIP's, and began peeking around, through one after another, and saw the people she had hoped for. The snail cape was reading, the orange guy was on a plastic-covered bed listening to music in his room, and their leader was in her office.

They definitely lived here between jobs. Likely owned the place.

She materialized in an alley nearby, and for the first time, took Evelynn and carefully shifted her form to match another Legend's.

Right now, she only wanted the Legend's appearance, voice, and gravitas.

She turned into Renata Glasc.

After a moment of trying to master the absolute ' boss ass bitch' aura the woman exuded with her walk and glare, which wasn't very difficult actually, her hips and chest almost slotting into place as she remembered the first few times Renata had to practise her almost signature walk, she walked out of the alley, left arm in pocket, right arm slowly, casually, swinging a little, uncaring to the world if they saw her.

The moment the guards saw her, they stiffened, their steps and necks stuttering.

A moment later, she saw at least five hands in her peripheral vision dart upwards, all trying to speak into their earpieces at the same time.

She fought to keep the snicker in as she leisurely waltzed right up to the front door and regarded the guard who bravely, if stiffly, walked to the side to block the entrance, his boots thudding along the flat concrete that led up to the gleaming double doors, his hands in his pockets, likely so they would be closer to his firearm.

Just in case, she swapped to the Resolve Rune, and picked 'Guardian'.

She idly wondered if she was a little paranoid before immediately dismissing the notion.

She stopped, and briefly regarded the man with the best ' what is this trash' look she could muster, which seemed to make the man whither a little.

"I'd like to have a talk with Faultline." She drawled, her deep, feminine voice like butter to her own ears, especially through the slight mechanical tinnyness that her face mask usually gave Renata's speech.

Goddamnit, did she even have a type anymore or did she like everything?

She inwardly hissed a dozen hexes and curses to that old summoner bastard that dragged her into his world for messing with her head so much, while outwardly showing no reaction.

After lifting his hand to his ear once again, the guard nodded, and rather than stepping aside, opened the door for her, then immediately darted forward to guide her upstairs when she walked through.

At least they had manners.

She already liked the woman.

Part of her was irked at the suddenness of the woman's arrival, but there wasn't really anything holding them up, so she quickly assembled her team, and took them down to the vacant VIP lounge as she told the daytime bartender to bring some snacks and drinks upstairs as soon as possible.

It wasn't like they had any customers in the middle of the day to occupy him, this was a nightclub.

The guard opened the door, revealing a striking figure of glowing purple eyes and a dress type that screamed authority and eccentric wealth.

The Tinkertech prosthetic certainly added to the image.

To call the woman a striking figure would be an understatement. She walked into the VIP room like everything around her was the background to her, and like she also owned that background, and everyone in it, and everyone looking at her or the background.

White silk dress pants with silver buttons and tasteful swirls in the silk, a figure to kill for despite the woman seeming somewhere in her forties, a little dark skinned, a severe but beautiful face adorned by a streak of silver hair framing a metal mask covering most of her lower face and nose. A strange, custom pistol hung from its chest holster on her right side, over a buttoned vest shirt and next to a right arm of white-patterned metal and dark purple tinkertech muscles, she could guess, ones that glowed as purple as her eyes, and to top it all off, an open white jacket adorned with gothic patterns of bronze and silver on the right arm.

The way her left arm stayed casually in her left pocket also gave her an air of absolute confidence, like she knew she could walk in here and out of here regardless of what they thought.

Melanie was grudgingly impressed. Not many could project that aura, and fewer still could possibly fake it.

"Greetings, Faultline and crew." The woman rumbled through her mask as she sauntered forward, ignoring her team to stare right at her for a moment, the mirror-perfect shine on the black walls and the dimmed windows showing the dancefloor beneath barely drawing a side glance from her.

Gregor and Newter nodded to her as they lounged on the couches, projecting the air she expected of them, which was casual interest and calm subordination. Elle just sat there, for the moment.

"Greetings. Have a seat with me. Let's speak on equal ground." She gestured to the armchairs opposite each other, separated by a casual coffee table that was flanked on its long sides by the aforementioned couches Newter and Gregor were lounging on.

This was a test, of course. If the guest did not move and lower themselves first, it implied they thought themselves above her in her own base of operations, and she knew that clients like that were difficult, to say the least. 

Thankfully, the woman did not hesitate to move forward and lounge back into the leather armchair like a queen would her throne, crossing her legs and removing her hand from her pocket to reveal it was covered by a fingerless leather glove with outwardly dented copper ovals over her knuckles.

Melanie did the same, getting comfortable despite her rather hot getup.

"I don't believe I caught your name." She said.

"My name does not matter overmuch, as I am here as a negotiator for my boss, Summoner. However, for ease of communication, you may call me Renata." The woman calmly replied, and Melanie's eyes narrowed.

She'd never heard of a 'Summoner' crime boss before, and she could assume the woman did not mean the object teleporter that died a couple years ago.

"I see. What kind of job is your boss interested in hiring us for?"

Renata shifted like a lioness sunning on a rock, relaxed and unafraid.

"It's not a job, exactly, as much as it is a... package deal, I suppose. The offer is in need of context first. For starters, would I be incorrect in saying that your team lacks a heavy hitter?" Renata asked rhetorically.

She nodded, genuinely curious as she ran through possibilities in her mind. 

"You would be correct, of course. We do not have a heavy hitter, though I cannot say we have much need of one. Our team is more than capable enough."

"Your team is more than capable enough for the jobs you accept. If you had a heavy hitter, you could accept a lot more jobs without worrying about risk, capture, or failure. No offence, of course. Incidentally, you seem to have some special kind of interest in Case 53 capes, yes?" The woman asked rhetorically again, glancing at Newter and Gregor, who both tensed, likely taking that the wrong way.

Melanie frowned.

"I do not mind taking Case 53's under my wing, if that is what you are asking, nor do I have any prejudice against them. What does that have to do with your 'package deal'?" She asked, fearing the worst. It wasn't exactly a secret they were trying to find Cauldron, but she was leery of mysterious people who brought the fact up, even in a roundabout way. Or was she about to threaten them...?

"A trade. A rather complicated one. I recently developed a new drug, and have established a small manufacturing operation here, as both a test of how it will perform in the open market and to gauge the interest for it before we invest more in it. If you need details, the closest I can compare it to is a very diluted form of Newter's fluids in smokeable form, though a tad more addictive, for obvious reasons. However, to put it bluntly, we cannot exactly distribute it without angering the gangs around here and getting our dealers killed or captured, which would disrupt operations and reveal our existence. So, we had to look at more neutral territory, and coupled with the small scale of the operation, we were hoping to establish a partnership around this area and the club, as it is the most 'neutral' territory we can think of that is under technical cape protection."

Melanie's frown turned into a grimace of distaste. She was not in this for the gang-side of things. She was already leaning towards refusing. It just sounded risky and like it would be nothing but trouble.

"We get permission to station a couple dealers around the club- the more respectable and presentable sort of course, we have no interest in besmirching your business-, your guards protect them and give them a place to swap out their clothes so they can sneak back home, and you take a small cut of the profit. Were this to go well, you'd also get increased traffic to the club, needless to say, as people will know they can get a similar hit even when Newter is off on a job. In return, for starters, and to give you an idea of our offer, we would be willing to put you in contact with a recently surfaced Case 53 Tinker who would fit into your team excellently."

They all stilled, her included.

That was…

Not a small offer, not a small offer at all. People don't just give away Tinkers, even if they were Case 53's, especially not for something this small. There was something else the woman was trying to butter them up for.

"He's a heavy hitter and combat Tinker. Our operations do not tend to go loud, and he would require substantial training time to be the kind who would suit our operations on any level, so we are not very motivated to recruit him at the moment, but we have established amicable contact should we wish to in the future and he is under our protection at the moment. This is simply an offer for you to make your pitch now without our or anyone's interference. And finally, we'll give you a bit of admittedly vague information on the nature of where the organisation behind the 53's takes their victims from, deduced by one of our Thinkers during discussion with the Tinker, as well as a small insight into your two men here. All of that as well as Canary and whoever else is in there with her in her Birdcage transport, and a drop of Newter's blood. I'd like to try and make something a bit closer to the original, you understand." She said while glancing to Newter briefly with a sudden nod of respect, despite the way her eyes raked up and down his form like a student surgeon likely looked at a dead frog, and Newter gave a strained smile and a nod that was just a little perturbed by the intense attention.

Melanie ignored the interaction for the most part, her brows fractionally rising to her hairline the longer the woman spoke.

This…

This organisation or whatever this was, they were smart, cautious, and powerful. As well as obviously competent enough to build what sounded like a small empire without anyone ever even hearing about them.

Summoner had to be some kind of high-tier Thinker.

Maybe it was a coincidence that their drug emulated Newter's effects, but judging by the woman's words, it was not, and not only that, they hatched a great plan for excusing its existence through them. People might start looking around and asking questions about a nonsensical drug in the streets, might start connecting it to some kind of chemical Tinker like Renata, but if people thought that Newter just… bathed in leaves or something and put them in a blunt, they could keep their operations underground and secret, they could protect their dealers by using the pseudo-neutral territory and reputation of being Faultline's employees, and the same dealers could also get lost in the crowd and go home amongst the drunkards late at night, making it nigh impossible to track them.

"You're asking a bit much, It feels like, I must admit. We could dig up the information of where her transport is going through so your organisation can make the retrieval itself." She hummed pensively.

The woman slowly arched an incredulous, almost offended brow, tilting her head a little.

"Are we really asking 'a bit much'? Passive protection that will cost you nothing and make you profit, a pitch to a Case 53 power armor combat Tinker that would be the perfect muscle for your team, only has a week's worth of memories and is in a desperate situation, meaning the chance he will refuse is next to none, and clues about this mysterious organisation's obtainment method and the origins of your men, all in exchange for your permission, Canary and whoever else happens to be in there with her, a drop of blood, and obvious secrecy."

Well…

Fuck… when she put it like that, they were getting a hell of a deal here.

"You said a small cut of your dealer's profits. How small are we talking about?" She asked, and she could see an almost visible cloud of satisfaction fill the woman's cold eyes.

The woman finally left, after two exhausting hours of discussion pertaining to the specifics, drop locations, burner phones, and finally, the thing Newter and Gregor were the most interested in.

Newter looked oddly shaken, and she could guess why.

Gregor just looked mildly more troubled than usual.

"From other worlds, huh…?" He mumbled, and she could taste the underlying bitterness in those words.

The people they were trying to get answers from could just reach across fucking worlds and grab people at random like it was nothing. She could admit to some bitterness herself. It felt increasingly impossible to find the bastards, or rather, to do anything to them even if they somehow figured out who and where they were.

They had chosen to let there be no secrets, and the woman had shrugged and simply told them whatever insight their Thinker had gotten from staring at videos of them.

Gregor apparently used to love the sea back when he had memories. He was also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and he adored the scent of an old book. The last bit seemed like current insight, while the first bits were old.

It was almost ironic how Cauldron turned him into some kind of snail then, wasn't it? Salt killed snails. Assholes.

Newter had taken his news harder.

Apparently, he used to be an archer. He used to enjoy war, enjoy the way an arrow would thread through an open helmet hole and get a clean kill, and something about his enjoyment of it suggested a medieval period of sorts to their Thinker. He also liked lifting people's moods. Again, from old to newer insights, she could guess.

Still, he hadn't much enjoyed hearing his past self was a killer who enjoyed and took pride in his work of war, combined with the whole cross-worlds abduction thing.

Melanie sighed, and stared at the two sets of numbers on the paper in her hands, before digging her own phone out to input it in her contacts.

Much as she wanted to comfort them, somehow, they were all adults here. They needed a bit of quiet time to process it and move on.

The paper itched on her hand. The woman had said that if they were finding themselves failing their retrieval mission, to call the top number, and they'd send someone over as reinforcements as soon as possible.

And the bottom number was to set up a meeting with this Cape.

She honestly believed the woman, considering that the moment they shook hands, she took her phone out and sent him a text notifying him.

A very long text, which only made it more believable. 

Then, she called up every contact she could think of that could deduce when Canary would be heading to the Birdcage and on what route. 

Notes:

Taylor's such a fucking schemer in this fic im so glad im writing this

and for anyone wondering, Taylor did intend to grab Trainwreck for her future team, but she saw an opportunity to hit like four birds with one stone, and considering how she had no real timeline for when exactly she'd finally be able to put Trainwreck to use, as well as how urgent Canary was, and how much money she DIDN'T have, this was the best outcome of all to go for.