40

Chapter Text

She didn't like Los Angeles.

It was too loud, too bright, and too shitty for how beautiful it looked.

But most of all, it was too damn packed with people. It was hard as hell to find a place to park their cars in a normal city without someone unwanted snooping around them, but in a place like LA?

She had to bribe private junkyards just to park somewhere relatively safe.

She also didn't like doing a job for free, but like it or not, she owed Summoner.

The location was odd, but Gregor had done his research, contacting some of their old clientele that still hung around LA, and this was a neutral ground according to the grapevine.

So with yet another sigh, she carefully maneuvered the car to the side within the tight alley, turning to the right to point the nose at the gigantic garage door that broke up the line of trashcans on either side, the plates painted a dull, dark green.

She didn't have to wait long for a small, almost unnoticeable door to open to the side, a man in a hood and facemask calmly but briskly turning and walking to her, ducking down to window height.

"Hey. New faces around here." He stated more than asked, and looked beside her to Newter, who pulled his hood back a little to give the guy a lazy salute. Shrewd eyes examined them both. "Names?" He asked, digging around his pocket for a little flip book.

"Faultline and Newter." She provided, and the guy furrowed a brow in confusion as he began to write them down.

"Newter with a W. Not neuter. New-ter." She clarified, and the man made a small 'oh' sound as he crossed the name out and wrote it again.

"Right. Parking here is forbidden, so when you leave the facilities for more than two hours, you take your vehicle with you or we scrap it for parts. You're not getting anything back in that case. No fights, business talk only in the booths. No Thinker heroes allowed in the bar, period. Honorless shits, those." He grumbled, and jerked his head to the door. "Enjoy yourselves. Or don't."

She nodded, and he walked back to the little door tucked into the alley's side.

The garage door began to rattle open with surprising speed, and she drove the car into the underground garage, her brows rising at the sheer size as she drove between support beams and parked cars without a licence plate in sight.

It had enough height and width to fit trucks in here. A full floor of parking, clean, well-lit with warm light…

She might like this place more than expected.

She found an open spot, and parked, before following the spray-painted signs of a beer bottle with an arrow next to them to find the door to the actual bar.

The first door was cold, soulless sheet metal, but the second one down the hall was nicely varnished dark wood with a little window. She was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere as she opened the door.

It was that perfect mixture between noisy enough to feel alive but not loud enough to be annoying, classy music playing in the back. Velvet couches and epoxy-wood mixed tables, wooden floorboards, smooth white walls, while the bar front was long, well lit, and the wood was gleaming as if freshly lacquered.

Despite everyone in here clearly being villains, the most she and Newter got were a quick glance from the two dozen or so inhabitants of the large bar before everyone went back to chatting and drinking.

"Holy shit, I wanna live here." Newter whistled, and she resisted the urge to flick his forehead for being unprofessional.

"Calm down. We're not even sure they're here." She calmly noted, and he nodded, eyeing the wall of drinks behind the bartender.

Renata had given very specific instructions on where to go and how to notify the person who had the package that they were ready to get it, but she was still very dubious about the end result.

How would sending a bizarre, cryptic letter addressed to the local PRT office notify anyone of anything? It would get tossed in the trash after being tested front and back for contaminants. Unless the letter checkers were Summoner's insiders…? She was never one for convoluted plots.

She huffed, and walked past the tables to a large hallway tucked in the back, a wall of doors to her right with numbers and letters and little lights beside the door handles to show which ones were occupied.

She found the booth number, and finding the light green, rapped her knuckles on the door.

"Come in." A woman's voice came from inside, and so they did.

Two plush couches, a coffee table in between.

And to the left, their package and its delivery woman.

She wore completely casual clothes with curly hair in a ponytail, the only thing giving her away as a cape being the low-tech voice changer mask clamped onto her face and the hood. The gloves were a bit strange too for this weather.

"Stop." The woman briskly said, and they paused, the door half-shut, Newter's hand still on the knob. "You're not who I'm expecting."

She nodded.

"They sent us instead. Gave us a phrase to say. Said you'd understand."

The woman leaned her head forward with a questioning hum, motioning to Newter with their hand.

Newter closed the door, and she calmly moved forward to take a seat opposite the woman.

"In the fields of Elysium, a metal titan and a statue fight for three hearts on their first meeting." She quoted. "That's the phrase we were given to prove they sent us. The package?" She urged, and the woman just stared at her, inordinately still.

Then she nodded, lifting a giant briefcase and putting it on the table.

"This. Do not try to open it. She'll know." The woman warned, and Melanie nodded, mildly miffed about the constant warnings, as if she needed them. She was a professional damn it. She didn't snoop.

Even Renata had stressed enough about the importance of this package and contingencies to make her ears bleed. 

She couldn't tell if these people were all paranoid or just didn't have much faith in mercenaries.

"Anything else before we go?"

The woman shook her head.

Newter took the bag, just in case, and nodded.

Well, she just sat down for nothing…

She rose, and followed Newter outside, calmly walking back to their vehicle.

Just outside, Train's van was waiting with the rest of the team, just in case, but she doubted they'd need it.

Newter held it in his lap until they got to the van, where Trainwreck shoved the thing into a padded metal box, then they split up again to continue on their way.

The battery would be simpler to get, thankfully, if a lot more labour intensive.

Well, it would be easier this time around with Trainwreck present to haul the thing around. Last time had her enduring hours of Newter whining about his back.

Aisha wasn't really 'hard', as some of the shitty kids at Winslow might put it.

Yeah sure she could fight and scrap and she didn't mind breaking a bone here and there if she really hated a bitch, and her life was pretty shit so far, but she'd never seen anything…

Well, anything like that.

The first thing she saw on her way in was brains splattered all over a stair step, a dead gangster with a rifle in his lap leaning against them, followed by a tense minute of crouch-walking down a corridor absolutely destroyed by gunfire, hoping nobody randomly shot at her back by accident.

Then, women and girls in… varying states of nakedness, all with that look in their eyes and that sway in their movements that she'd learned from her mother meant high as fuck or in withdrawal. 

Walking into a brothel wasn't gonna be fun, she knew that, but she expected gross naked fuckers and cum stains, not this shit.

Another thing that movies got very, very wrong, was how difficult it was to fucking knock someone out.

The first guy took one shot with a baseball bat she found lying around and was out cold.

The other guy had a skull made of steel or some shit, because she just had to keep.

Fucking.

Swinging.

And then he had curled up, scrambled back over a couch, waved the gun around, and started shooting around the room at random, knowing that somebody was attacking him and probably thinking they were invisible or some shit.

It was only then that she broke his wrist and got the gun out of his hand, and he still kept shouting random crap and looking for another one.

The rest was… messy.

She didn't exactly know what else to do but keep beating him the fuck up with the bat, and by the time he stopped moving, the bat was covered in fucking blood, the girls in the back were still screaming and crying and sobbing and Summoner's guys were outside yelling orders like they were cops, flashlights and lasers poking through the dust and coke powder floating in the air from where a bullet exploded a sack of it.

In the chaos, panting and shaking she turned around and… and a girl was dead.

Just. There on the carpet. Gone. There was a girl trying to stem the bleeding from the hole in her chest with her hand, but her eyes were empty and glassy already, hidden beneath her matted bangs.  

She got a girl killed because she was fucking stupid.

She should have just grabbed the first guy's gun and shot their brains out. But she just… her mind just wasn't ready for that shit, she hadn't been ready to kill. She felt that instinctive, mild revulsion just from thinking about knocking someone out with a bat, killing someone was several orders of magnitude more violence than she had even considered or thought herself capable of.

But now, a girl was dead. Because she thought this shit was like a movie and she could just smack someone on the head with a bat and be done with it.

Things weren't that clean and simple in real life. Letting a fucker like that live just… wasn't worth the risk that he'd hurt people who actually mattered.

All of a sudden, she could really empathise with the kind of shitty situations cops would get put into sometimes, whether it was on the news or the internet. She could understand why they shot so fast now in those videos, when it just looked like needless murder to her before.

The alternative to not shooting just wasn't worth it.

She just wished that learning that lesson hadn't cost a girl her life.

For a long while she just sat on a crate opposite the corridor's entrance, in the same room, and watched Summoner's guys work through the brothel, gathering the girls and speaking to them in languages she couldn't even guess at, struggling not to cry or grab a piece of glass to score lines into her arms as a self-punishment for being so fucking retarded.  

She got an innocent girl killed.

Chick didn't look much older than Emily. Brown hair, Indonesian features. Brown eyes, slight tilt in her nose, probably broken before. She doubted she'd be able to forget her face, and wasn't sure she wanted to.

She watched a man in black briefly examine the guy she'd beaten, and mutter about how his skull was broken and he was going to die anyway, before pulling out a silenced pistol and executing him on the floor where he laid. 

Covering her face with her hands, she took increasingly uneven breaths as the guilt kept mounting.

She should have killed that guy herself. She felt relief for not having to do it, guilt about not doing it, and guilt about feeling relief for not having to do it.

Emotions were so fucking confusing.

By the time she decided that she had to get up and move on, just like every other time life grabbed her by the arms and snapped her bones for its own amusement, the trucks carrying the girls and Summoner's soldiers were rumbling down the far side of the street.

She watched them go, took a deep breath, sighed it out, and fixed the cheap dollar store mask she wore back onto her head.

She hadn't thought of him for a hot minute, but as she turned her power off and picked up her phone to report success to Insight, she couldn't help but wish Brian was still alive. He'd have some fumbling words of dollar store wisdom or some stupid pseudo-positive shit to say.

He'd probably try to awkwardly hug her, at least.

"Fucking asshole…" She whispered, her voice warbling with gross emotions she'd rather keep away. "Could have just gone to the Wards." She croaked out, fully aware of how hypocritical it was for her to say that now when working for a shadowy syndicate, then yanked her mask up to wipe at her eyes before yanking it down as she pressed the call button, sniffling.

She wondered if Spits would give her a hug.

Maybe she could bother Rune for one.

She let out a snort of bleak laughter at the mental image.

Eh, fuck it, she'd give it a try. Would be fun to watch the reaction, at least.

Thirty minutes and a car ride later, she was in the empty safehouse with only Rune for company, the former nazi pacing and glued to the TV that broadcasted endless emergency reports on the chaos in the Bay, and the little joke she'd made to herself kept nagging at her. She was curious, she was bored, and it might be funny.

That and she still felt like shit. Some part of her was genuinely happy that she helped rescue human trafficking victims, of course. That thought felt nice and fuzzy. She almost felt like a hero for a bit.

But the weight of failure and two lives was a lot heavier for the moment.

So, half-joking and half-serious, she got up, stretched, and held her arms open, a foot or two away from Rune's pacing area.

"Oi. Gimme a hug."

Rune paused, and turned to give her this scrunched up 'the fuck?' kinda look.

It was endlessly amusing.

"I think I killed a guy today." She blurted out, and immediately regretted how heavy her voice sounded. She grinned, and inwardly curled into an embarrassed ball of cringe because she was sure it looked fake as shit. "And a girl. Accidentally. Shit day." She explained, then tensed up because she could feel her fingers shaking and yeah just no.

And then she realized she looked really fucking tense which also looked stupid.

Man, it was just not her day today.

Rune, surprisingly, didn't say anything, just staring at her with increasing scrutiny like she was unsure if she was joking or not. 

"He uh. Gangster. Was holding some chicks hostage. I didn't really-" her breath hitched, and then resisted the urge to growl in frustration at herself, instead clearing her throat. "- didn't really knock him out right. Dude started flailing and shooting at random. Broke his s-skull, trying to knock him out. He killed a girl while shooting around for me."

Rune's hard stare slackened as the girl blinked at her, breathing out a soft 'oh' noise.

"I'll let you know what I know about today's shitstorm in return? You're lookin a mite worried there." She offered, half-jokingly, starting to feel a little awkward holding her arms out like this.

Rune turned and held her hands open by her side like she was herding a cat into a corner, then moved them around uncertainly as she hesitantly stepped forward.

"Uh, I… how do I…" Rune started, full of nervous reluctance, then moved her arms to gesture at her.

Being the queen expert on not giving a fuck about people's personal space, she assumed that meant Rune had actually agreed, surprisingly, so she moved up, and hugged Rune around the waist, laying her head on her shoulder.

This was… surprisingly nice, actually. 

"Uh… t-there, there?" Rune mumbled, awkwardly patting her on the back, and she snorted with laughter against her shoulder.

"Man, you suck at this."

Rune scoffed, very gingerly putting a hand on her back.

"I was in a nazi gang a week ago, fuck off. This is fucking weird." Rune hissed. "And I'm not used to hugging skinny midgets." She finished.

"Talking a whole lotta shit for someone in ass pinching distance." She hummed in teasing warning, and burst into hysterical cackles as Rune made a loud gagging sound, backing up then putting a hand on her face to push her away. 

"Well, glad you feel better." Rune growled, and turned to keep pacing.

Between hysterical giggles, she managed to wipe her eyes without taking off the domino mask.

"Don't you?"

Rune paused, and her expression shifted into surprise for a moment before she scoffed in dismissal and kept pacing.

Taylor formed inside Lisa's surveillance van, ignoring the short jerk its inhabitants gave before realising it was her, taking the opportunity to curl up in the corner against the insulation padding and clamp her ears and eyes shut.

Then she dropped Evelynn, and immediately felt the headache worsen with a wince.

But it was just that. A frustrating headache.

By comparison to the days following the Alexandria incident, she barely felt this.

A minute later, someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she opened her eyes up into Lisa's domino mask, wires and screens shifting in the background as the team managers kept coordinating people in the background.

A finger tugged the hand clamped over her right ear, and she reluctantly pulled it away.

"Hey. How'd it go? You good?" Lisa whispered, and she made an affirmative grunt.

"The ABB is ours. Entirely. I've got a bad headache, but it's manageable. How are our reinforcements to the Empire going?" She whispered back, and Lisa sat down next to her, using her hand to gather her hair and brush it back.

Her eyes fluttered shut.

She missed affection, reluctant as she was to admit it, and Lisa had basically been sleeping in her office for a couple hours a day so far.

This was… really nice. She'd missed it.

"Not great. This wasn't the usual kinda fight. The PRT isn't playing around anymore. The gangs kept escalating, and the new Director thinks it's only appropriate the PRT responds in kind. We lost two guys in the fight 'cause of it. Another one's injured. We got the Valkyrie twins back with the Empire though, the distraction helped. Challenger cut off one of their legs. And… well, to rip off the bandaid, there's a new Tinker around. He fucked with everyone's comms for a bit, ours included. Armsmaster and Dragon seem to have a huge interest in him, so we're going to be getting a visit from her soon."

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a bitter, disbelieving chuckle.

"Of course we will. Why wouldn't we…"

Dragon was coming to the Bay to look for a rogue Tinker. He either had some really good shit, or something about him concerned the PRT.

"I don't suppose we can find this Tinker first?" She asked, and Lisa sighed.

"He either makes programs or is some kind of technopath. We don't have anyone who can fuck around enough with computers to get a connection to the guy. Dragon can't do it."

So they had no chance, in comparison.

"He fucked everyone's comm lines for a solid ten minutes, and we're pretty sure he hacked into some of our body cams too. A coding based Tinker is extremely rare. So… we're probably not getting him unless he comes to us."

"Open up a line of communication to him if possible. Leave a high security camera in a room, pointing at a message on the wall, bait him into hacking it. Or leave messages over random security cameras all over the bay, something like that. He's gotta be looking at us from somewhere."

Lisa paused.

"Shit, good idea. I'll pass it by the techies. So… now what?"

She took another deep breath.

A good question. Now what.

"Now, we take stock of the girls we saved. A good chunk of them will be deported if we gave them to the FBI, so we're going to give those girls a choice. The problem is making sure that choice is ethical. So I need your opinion here."

Lisa wiggled closer, and put her head on her shoulder.

"Sure thing. What's the idea?"

"My idea was to give the girls the choice to work for us in whatever they feel comfortable doing. We're going to need more manpower in every aspect. We're going to need more janitors, we're going to need more movers, we're going to need employees in front businesses, et cetera. If not, we just give them to the FBI in Boston and New York, and they figure out what to do with the girls."

Lisa hummed.

"We could just give the girls fake papers and let them go out into the world without having them work for us. I uh… I saw the operation through cameras, you know? Their living situations were stomach-churning, but our guys don't exactly scream "rescue has come", even when we're pretending to be SWAT teams. I'm not sure they'll want to be involved with us or anything to do with their old life."

She made a short negative humm.

"Paper forgery is expensive. Especially with current standards. And if they get caught with fake papers it's even worse for them, they won't get deported, they'll get thrown in jail. Or deported then thrown in jail. We already spent enough resources in helping them, I'm not going to spend a couple million dollars to give them fake papers that might fuck them over."

Lisa shifted.

"Oh. Yeah, fair. Your suggestion is good, honestly. What else?"

She shifted.

For a minute or two, she simply thought, the truck calmly driving down the roads like nothing was amiss.

Then her head suddenly shot up, an idea that was so obvious in hindsight popping up.

"...Get me to Coil. He and I are going to visit his old pal Accord. And you're going to handle the ABB getting devoured by our faction while we do that. I've told Lung who to listen to."

Lisa sighed in complete exasperation. 

"You're putting way too much faith into my inexperienced ass…. And what do you mean devoured?"

She cracked her neck, another plan unfolding.

"I mean just that. Our men are from armies all over the world. Some of them were sargeants, some were drill instructors. Use them. I don't want gangsters, L-" she paused, and glanced at the console operators in the corner. "-Insight. I want soldiers. Go to ground, prepare. Our men can train them. If they won't bend, break them. I'd rather have a corpse than a man who won't listen. Teach them the new chain of command, then our ideology. 'Renata' first, you second, Coil third, Lung fourth. Ideology… you should explain that. Get Shadow Stalker to expand on it." She mumbled, then worked her jaw.

"Burn the drugs or ship them to Africa with Coil's gun trafficking network. Backstab the human trafficking network that sends Lung 'cattle', rat them out to the authorities. Do it in a way that makes it clear that 'Nexus' is giving this information out on behalf of 'Summoner'. We need to start making a name for ourselves. Tell the girls who saved them as well, obviously, word will get around with the amount of media companies we have ready to report on this. Then..." She paused, organizing her thoughts. "I'll be back from Boston in a day or so, then I'll take over the Empire in a day. They've got thirteen capes… Thirteen people in one day is a lot, but I've done ten in a day before and I could still stand. I'm also getting stronger, so it should be manageable now if I use some restraint."

Lisa nodded, pursing her lips.

"What are you going to talk with Accord about?"

"I'm going to test out if I can get a favour from him for grabbing Spree. Then… I think I'm going to have to violate my rules a bit, and Master some people of influence. Good or bad. I'm going to need them. Something's coming and we're gonna need to brace for it. Coil's got lists. Three birds." She finished, leaving the saying unfinished.

Lisa frowned.

"That's… smart. As usual. But why do you want Spree in the first place? He's a Teeth cell leader, you're gonna get the Travellers on Butcher's shitlist. And then us, if you send him anywhere in public."

She made a dismissive 'eh'.

She wasn't a cape. Butcher couldn't do anything to her.

"I just want him because there's a slight chance I could use him to exponentially increase my strength through my power's baseline abilities. A small part of it grows stronger when I kill something it considers alive. If it considers Spree's clones as alive when I kill them..." She trailed off, and Lisa blinked.

"Oh. Oh shit. Yeah, that'd be worth it…" Lisa trailed off, and a comfortable silence followed for a few moments before another sigh broke it. "I think you're putting way too much faith in me to work the ABB into shape."

She jabbed her side with her elbow, softly.

"You've been doing pretty good so far."

Lisa smiled, a small, pleased, uncertain thing, curling into her side.

"Thanks. Though most of it is Coil, I have to admit. Bastard knows how to micromanage people…"

"Shush. He's like three times your age, that's normal. You're still a pup."

Lisa snorted.

"A pup?"

"Yep. Little squirmy larvae." She said with utmost seriousness, and Lisa burst into snickers. "Just gotta wait to get your wings. Which I have some ideas about as well, if you're willing to push yourself."

"Hm?"

"When you explained to me why Tagg probably got here and Piggot got dropped, you talked a lot about the bank incident. You were kind of rambling."

"I don't ramble-"

"And then you mentioned that you used your power to dodge Genesis' tail. Remember that? You said you focused absolutely on the giant cobra tail thing lunging at your head and your power told you the tail's trajectory so you could adjust yourself out of harm's way."

Lisa's head rose from her shoulder.

"Oh. Wait…" Lisa mumbled, her expression scrunching up with confusion. "Wait, yeah. I didn't even… think about that, really. My power's never been that fast before. It's a slow bitch, usually."

She nodded absent-mindedly.

"And you also know that powers adapt to their user, sometimes. Or maybe the user just learns how to use their power in unexpected ways, or the power sort of unfolds over time. I think if we can get you in a bunch of brutal spars and you push the absolute hell out of your power, we might be able to turn you into a combat Thinker."

Lisa turned to her, wide eyed with excitement.

"Not that I want you anywhere on the frontline, of course, I'd rather chop my legs off, but the more dangerous you are, the safer you are. A strength and speed brute package with a broken Thinker power on top, and then you combine them. With a lot of effort and training…" She trailed off suggestively.

Lisa smiled, eyes practically shining.

"You are the greatest fucking thing to walk this earth." Lisa whispered, putting her hands in her hair and letting out a small laugh of incredulous joy. "If you can make me able to kick Lung's shit in, I will literally worship every fucking step you take. I'll try by myself to force my power in that direction, but when you have time, just come nudge me along and I'll- I'll fucking… I dunno. Just, holy shit. How did I not notice that when it happened?" Lisa griped, then sagged back. "We saved a bunch of people, did all this stuff, and now I'm hearing I could practically turn myself into an utter threat with some better training. Today's been fucking great, some… unlucky casualties aside."

She smiled softly, humming in agreement.

"And you say you don't ramble." She mused, and let her shoulders shake with silent laughter as Lisa turned to her and pretended to put her in a chokehold, grunting stuff about mean old sisters as she half-heartedly resisted her.

The added pain to her headache was worth that rare moment of levity.

"... Man, you really know how to raise my mood just to tackle it down to the floor again, don't you?" Lisa murmured, glancing around the warehouse, at the dozens and dozens of wide-eyed women and teen girls being checked over by their medics.

It was a sea of chairs, tiny beds, boxes, trays and IV stands.

And a lot of tense silence, because the building could only have so much insulation and drawing attention by having a seemingly abandoned warehouse full of talking and crying would probably get them all in trouble.

It led to some particularly tense corners where her men were torn between enforcing silence and not being too firm or aggressive with the girls, something that, obviously, for men who killed for a living, they seemed to be very awkward about.

"Why are we here though…?" Lisa asked, following behind her as they briefly examined each girl, Taylor disguised as Renata through Evelynn.

Being able to taste the absolute swirl of emotions drowning the air around her was unpleasant, but it actually fed her a little bit as a demon, and it helped give her a realistic outlook on what to expect.

"Perspective. Being in our ivory command towers too much will eventually turn us into things like Coil. That thing you said earlier bothered me. 'Unfortunate casualties'." She quoted, and saw Lisa cringe out of the corner of her eye.

"Okay, bad way to put it, but, they were just that."

She nodded. "Of course they were. I'm just trying to make sure that what the word 'casualty' really means sinks in. See the girls, see our men, realize what 'casualty' really means and let it sink it. I'm gonna need commanders the bigger we get, and some lessons have to be given early. So lesson one of many, I guess; when you're in command, you have to be present to get a real perspective, see what it's really like on the ground floor. To understand. Or else you start thinking in numbers and goals and before you know it, you're effective, undoubtedly… but so out of touch that you will eventually become heartless or even cruel, and make mistakes. Big ones. This problem lessens with scale, because you can reach a point where it simply isn't possible to be on the ground floor, but it's a good thing to keep trying."

Lisa was silent as they walked through.

The main reason she was saying this was that Taylor simply could not Master everyone under her into perfect obedience, regardless of their morals. It wasn't worth it, and it wasn't going to be, especially as things grew in scale. Just next week they'd be getting another squad of twenty more men to add to their little army.

And in the case of a battle against some alien god-like creature, it would be unfeasible to Master everyone. She needed influence and keys to power.

Lisa stopped dead in her tracks behind her, and she paused, turning to her, then following her laser-focused gaze full of numb revulsion.

There was a child in the corner, talking to a soldier in some Indonesian language with an IV in her tiny arm, curiously pawing at his rifle as he let her, covering the trigger with his hand.

"She'll be alright." She said with full conviction, putting a hand on Lisa's shoulder.

Lisa nodded, taking a shaky breath.

"Yeah. Just… How could anyone…"

Oh, Lisa wasn't worried about the girl, she was just experiencing disbelief over humanity's capacity for cruelty.

She almost felt nostalgia for when such sights could still surprise her, however many aeons ago it was.

"Some people are just monsters in disguise. Come on. We've got people to organise, and I have information about a certain organization to share with you."

Lisa slowly relented to her gentle tug, likely due to realizing they were going to talk about something as important as Cauldron, and they walked off to the upper office. 

Now, how to tell Lisa the world might end in less than a decade without freaking her out...

Fuck.

Notes:

i don't like this chapter TOO much and im not sure why, but i don't think i can rewrite it any more without slowing uploads too much and getting stuck, so im uploading it. Next chappie, progress.

also about the middle scene, no im not gonna do the 'ha ha nazi ends up dating black person' bit, its stupid and unrealistic. Plus, no ships will sail the seas in this fic as I said. Imp was just being an imp and rune was just trying to be a good person

tyvm for all the comments, i read every single one of them even if i cant find the time to respond to all of them, and i recognize many of you who are long-time readers, lovely seeing you guys still around :)

see ya next tiem