4 & 5

Chapter 4: ...and the morning and the evening were the first day.

Chapter Text

You need to figure out if this is, well, 'canon' Bet or like 'naked cape', or 'even shittier than canon' Bet or whatever. You also want to get some magical study done while your attention isn't going to be taken up with school or caping or what-have-you. Finally, there's the fact that you have no food in this joint. There is a fridge which is empty, and a stove that you check to make sure works. No microwave, but that's fine. A trip out to find the library, some shopping, and back into your mage-hole to firm up some research for the day.

And toilet paper. You vaguely remember some kind of JKR tweet about vanishing their shit, but you're not pointing a wand at your ass to clean it off. The last thing you need is to blow off a buttock.

As a precaution you re-shrink the trunk to take with you and look over what little remains in the apartment before your eyes fall on to your coursebooks. The metaphorical lightbulb goes off in your head and you scurry downstairs to the street. You don't have to wait long until a bus pulls up and you spend the ride to the university alternately practicing the detection of minds around you and memorizing the path for later.

The library is centrally located on campus and a flash of your student ID and a polite question or two gets you time in a computer cubicle. Logging in is easy enough and you take a moment to check your student email account. Apparently 'you' have submitted homework and the like and a check of your grades shows them hovering in the C/B range—you were set up to be so generic on paper it's painful.

Ignoring that you open a couple of tabs and switch between the Bet Google News equivalent and Wikipedia to research anything that catches your eye. The first major thing you notice is that the Endbringers don't seem to be on their rough quarterly schedule. It looks like it had started out every three-ish months, but shifted over the course of a couple of years into a once every nine-to-twelve month pattern. The attacks seem to have been somewhat less dangerous as well, at least the non-Ziz attacks. Those seemed to have mindfucked people as per canon and involve quarantines, but the other twos' attacks were horrible but not slaughters. You don't exactly have perfect recollection of something you read prior to getting dumped in here, but while they were still called Endbringers they seemed to be less 'oh-god-we're-all-gonna-die' and more like semi-regular hurricanes. The Slaughterhouse 9 were considered more of a threat, and their make up didn't seem to have changed much from canon. Of all things it felt like someone had dialed back the grimdark level from a firm 10 to a 7 or so.

Another part of that grimdark assessment was just plain weird—Scion takes naps. Apparently the Warrior-avatar will, every now and again, just flop down in some remote area and go dormant. The first few times it happened involved states of emergency and shrines being set up and all kinds of craziness, but now it had become accepted that the first parahuman had some screws loose with their power that caused it. The golden dipstick had even been seen bellyflopping into the ocean multiple times, so at least a bit of the shine had worn off 'The First Parahuman'. These sleep-mode episodes were incredibly random in both frequency and length. You can only hope that means something was wrong with the Warrior-entity. Maybe it'll even manage to die on its own without a big shit-flinging tantrum at some point.

One could hope, at least.

During your research binge two attractive girls walked in and took over a computer not too far from you. That wouldn't normally be much of note—there were multiple people around, easily over half female—but the part that stuck out in your mind was that the slightly-shorter one was hovering a few inches above the floor in order to bring her height up to what had to be her cousin.

…and then there was her aura.

You could state with confidence that Glory Girl didn't suppress her aura all the way. Fortunately even a total neophyte Occlumentist like yourself could detect she was using it. Unfortunately, it felt like a six-year-old child poking you in the ribs and whispering 'worship me!'. Not enough to be dangerous, but seriously fucking annoying. You have no idea how well your rudimentary shields would hold up to an actual blast of it either, since there's no way for you to know if she's holding her power at 1, 10, or 50%. It's enough that other eyes are drawn to her on a regular basis, but doesn't seem to be disrupting everyone's ability to work completely.

At one point after a harder mental poke than usual you look up and frown and manage to match gazes with Crystal Pelham. Your unusual eyes seem to startle her for a second before you flick your head over and raise your eyebrows, adding in a 'what the hell?' hand gesture. She looks over at her cousin hovering over the cubicle walls around them and looking down at people and corrals her back down, refusing to meet your eye again. The mental pokes go away for a minute or two before starting back up, but stay so minor that your mental barriers reminding you of the influence is more irritating than the influence itself.

Shrugging, you do a little more research. PHO is every bit the horrible cesspit you'd expect it to be with people vomiting streams of crap about capes all over the place, but something about Eidolon catches your attention. He still heads the Houston Protectorate branch but it's his administrative decisions and not his cape ones that seem odd. Someone has posted a timeline of 'admin liaisons' from the PRT who seem to shadow him everywhere when he's not actively fighting. There's always one, always a woman, generally fairly young, and they get replaced every year or two—not in a murdery kind of way, they always seem to go on to other PRT positions elsewhere. The poster makes the argument that they're the reason Eidolon stays where he does, otherwise he'd go and form his own non-governmental hero team. There's a bunch of misogynistic stuff sprinkled in about them being 'whores' and such, but a skim through the pictures and timelines they've posted proves the physical part of their case—the liaisons exist, the PRT websites show they were indeed employed, etc.

At that point you've been sitting for a couple of hours, so you finish up by looking up gang areas for Brockton and the location of a couple of stores nearby and on a whim type in 'Cook street' in a mapping website. Turns out it there are both 'Cook' and 'Cooks' streets—well, one's a road and one's a avenue. You assume the guy meant the one that runs roughly parallel to the Trainyard, a hell of a hike from where you are on the south side of Downtown.

With that done, you leave the library and hike your way to a grocery store and pick up some food, containers, and other miscellanea. You find a quiet back alley to expand your trunk and dump all your bags in before hopping a bus back to your apartment.

Once back in Wizard Central you stick the chicken in one of the containers to brine while you get some combined study and practice going. Opening the second container of the trunk you practice summoning books to you, first trying by listing titles you can see, then by concentrating on a specific book and just using 'accio'. It's not extremely difficult, and you know the spell from the books and movies, but seeing it and using it are different. Magic almost seems to be like a partially-tamed animal. It generally does what you say, but if you give it less than your full attention at the moment it gets balky and doesn't act right.

Making some stacks of summoned books, you start levitating larger stacks out onto the floor to make some room in the chest itself. It doesn't seem to help much—while you carve out a small gap it really does seem like there are entire libraries packed to the gills in there. Through some creative guessing you manage to summon a book on 'library charms' that you flip through greedily. It appears there are indeed ways to index books and even search them but it involves casting a couple of spells on each book and then they'll need to stay within 'half a dozen furlongs' of each other. You don't remember how much that is exactly but you do know it's related (and smaller than) an acre, so that means it won't be too portable. Nevertheless you switch chest sections and summon out a couple of bookshelves then take the time to cast and stack what you have so far. You can quickly see this becoming tedious as hell but best done as you go rather than wasting entire days doing it.

You take a break to find a couple of household spellbooks and flip though them so you can make dinner. You managed to find a single plate, bowl, mug, and set of cutlery in a drawer, but you have neither cutting board nor knives. With the help of a familiar-looking book called 'The Joy of Magical Cooking' you manage to clean, slice and lay out potatoes in the bottom of the broiler pan. Of all the weird spells to find while looking through the book though, you find a spell to spatchcock 'corpses'. No size restriction. That's…. creepy.

Anyhow, bird in the oven on top of the potatoes and you go back to arranging your library. It's pretty charms-heavy at the moment, but they seem the most generally useful spells for you right now.

You spend the rest of the evening eating your chicken and potatoes and practicing a couple of new charms. The Freezing charm immediately freezes water solid, even your entire bathtub full, and seems to coat anything that isn't perfectly dry in a super-slippery layer of frost. Duro, the Hardening Charm, turns things into heavy stone and seems to be able to target parts of an item. You had set up a coat rack with a robe and hat for lack of any easily found sparring dummies and after some false starts managed to pick and choose what turned to stone when you hit the target. Having your pants turn into stone will probably keep people from being able to run, and being stone-shirted would keep them from moving their arms. You assume your attempts at the silencing charm work okay, as the things you silence don't make noise, but your charms knowledge tells you that casting it on a living being is more difficult.

Finishing the day with cleaning and warming charms on your mattress-on-the-floor bed you do a bit of mental housecleaning and sorting. One of the exercises has you run through memories again and you manage to recall little things that had escaped you the first time—muttered comments on the bus about recent ABB attacks in the Downtown Coast area, a guy flirting hard and getting shot down in the library, Crystal and Vicky talking about the work they had been assigned in intro Parahuman Studies, gang tags you saw on your walk, nuances of how well the spells you practiced worked when you did them—a useful review that you really should make time for as much as possible. That done, doors and windows magically locked, you finally drift off.

Chapter 5: Saturday, Jan 15thChapter Text

The best part of waking up is the tea that's in your cup.

Because it was made with fucking magic.

A heatproof container with water and tea leaves, a simple charm and poof, no wait on boiling water. And yes, even though you're not British, you have loads of British Wizardry in your head, so tea it is.

While you wait for your tea to steep you work on your Occlumency a bit more. Mental protection could work in a number of ways, but the main divisions went something like shields, false seemings, and non-existence. Shields keep probing thoughts or effects out but could be broken, false seemings mainly work against Legilimency or similar mind reading effects and allow you to project fake thoughts and feelings, and non-existence was like the old D&D mind blank spell—can't be affected if it looks like you're not there, can't be changed if you let everything flow through and past you without being touched. The first and last options were valid against pretty much everything mind control related, and the second would be the basis of fooling Armsdude's lie detector or Tattletale's pericog. Or at least scrambling them, you'd need to be Grindelwald-level to pull it off flawlessly.

At the moment you can't seamlessly switch between modes but you do work on strengthening your shields and false seeming as 'just a normal dude' as they are the easiest to do at the moment. You continue off and on through having breakfast and getting ready for the day and taper off as you look through the various syllabi you have for classes to see what's going to be due.

You're an undeclared major at BBU, so most of your classes are prerequisite-filing. Math, History, Parahuman Sociology, Computer Programming, and Macroeconomics for this semester. There's papers due in both Sociology and Macro, and math work to turn in via a lab, so you'll be heading back in to campus for part of the day. Come to think of it, the cape studies paper might've been what Laserdream and GG were doing yesterday.

You continue to passively use your thought detection abilities on the trip to the library and while you can't detect anything other than the existence of thoughts, you are able to pin down numbers and direction fairly well. Distance—well, you're okay at 'near' and 'far', so long as 'far' isn't more than about fifty feet away. You haven't quite worked up to Gamer-level minimaps yet, but it's something.

Setting up in study cubby you do your best to plow through everything due for the next week. In between you continue from where you left of researching things yesterday by narrowing your look at the world down to Brockton Bay.

Some things remain the same—the major gangs are the E88, the ABB, and the Merchants. Oddly, Faultline's Crew has actually claimed space around the Palanquin if PHO is to be believed. They don't really have a huge presence, but some of them have been out protecting their turf, primarily against the Merchants' dealers. It seems that Faultline isn't as hands off in the city as in canon, though the sparse postings you can find about it make it sound almost like a police action rather than claiming territory.

The other major difference is the lack of a couple of capes. With Endbringer attacks fewer in number and less damaging, the PRT and Protectorate have pushed a bit harder than the 'cops and robbers' play acting that Tattletale is always quoted as saying. Both Crusader and Alabaster have been arrested and jailed in the past year. Both were transferred out of Brockton for trials and actually sent to a supermax-like jail. You're not sure how they were kept there for so long but the PRT seems to have successfully kept quiet about it, other than some rumors of tinker involvement. Unfortunately it appears that a month ago there was a general jailbreak and they were among those that broke or were broken out. They weren't the only capes that are now missing, and few if any seem to have shown back up so maybe it's all a Cauldron plot or something.

Honestly though, judging by the heat villain capes gets when they're noticed in public in BB they may actually be back and be laying low or they might've been sent elsewhere—Hooky gets an all-hands-on-deck throw down as soon as he's seen as a known jailbreaker, and the Empire probably doesn't want that kind of heat. Supposedly there are new Nazi capes to fill out the ranks, but you can't find enough information to know if that's Night and Fog, a 'rebranded' Crusader and Alabaster (however they would accomplish that), someone completely new, or lies.

But seriously, the biggest news is that Skidmark was captured yesterday morning. In the early hours of Friday a big cape battle between the Protectorate and the Merchants ended up with Skidmark caught, Squealer shooting off in some kind of invisible vehicle, and Mush barely escaping. You're sure that Squealer is going to do something crazy to get her 'Skids' back, the question is how long it'll take and how quickly the PRT can get Skidmark out of the city. She's no Bakuda, but if she's not caught fast enough there's likely to be a tinker-tank rampaging around turbofucking the landscape.

You're far enough away from the general Merchant-claimed areas that you hadn't noticed yet but apparently the expected pushes from the ABB and E88 have occurred but haven't been too bad. You wonder if that's because neither of the other gangs really wants Merchant territory, most of the gang's 'turf' was otherwise abandoned land. They could also be focusing on finding Squealer to snatch-and-grab and less on land acquisition.

There's nothing you can find that mentions Coil, at least not under that name, and very little you could pin on the Undersiders. Hitting the casino isn't for another month or two and while there are one-off comments about 'huge dogs' and 'clouds of darkness' there aren't any names to go with it.

The ABB has Lung and Oni Lee as expected, but current rumors mention something about a 'rain goddess' that no one has seen, but may explain the unseasonable fog that's hung over parts of the ABB's territory recently. There are also some comments about explosions and fireworks that may be Bakuda or yet another cape.

Uber and Leet were… themselves, having pulled some game-themed bullshit recently that wasn't their notorious GTA stunt. There are a few postings of other capes like Circus doing things recently, but nothing major in the past week.

With a fair chunk of the day over you pack up and wander the campus a bit so you can familiarize yourself with the locations of your classes. You notice during your walk that there are levels to the mental chatter you hear. People who seem to be engaged in something mentally challenging, like study or arguments feel 'brighter' or 'more active' than people who aren't. Sleeping people are almost invisible unless they're in REM sleep in which case they're super obvious beacons. There are also people whose base level seems to be higher than normal—one may have been Sabah/Parian, but that's a complete guess considering she was at the very edge of your range and you barely saw her going in to a dorm. You'll need to be around a known parahuman to compare, so Crystal or Victoria might be your best bet.

Back at the apartment you dig around for some Defense-related books and try your hand at a few. Some spells will need practice on actual targets or at least outside, because you're unwilling to even try a fire-whip in the space you have available, and your attempts at expansion charms are giving you an additional five feet at best. There's a reason that even Hermione thought them tricky.

You do manage a decent incarcerous, getting force and distance like a bolas, as well as the Impediment Jinx, Revulsion Jinx, and a smattering irritating and annoying hexes like the stinging hex. You also practice two curses, the Conjunctivitis Curse and Flagrante, both of which you got pretty good at aiming. The Orbus jinx and Jelly-Fingers jinx will have to wait until you're outside or targeting something with fingers, because you're sure as hell not practicing on yourself, counter-jinx or no.

You're at something of an impasse here—you need a location where it's safe to practice more damaging spells and you need target dummies (or just targets) to practice on. Actual experience in a fight might be useful too, but given the hive of shit Brockton is, you'll get that one way or another.

Finishing off the day with a bit more Occlumency, you use part of the time to sort your thoughts. You'll have Sunday and Monday free but classes will start again on Tuesday, so at least some of your time will be taken up daily, not to mention travel times and such. Perhaps you should look in to studying apparition or portkeys or something.