Chapter 21

A Wizard In Alexandria's Court

Chapter Twenty One

by Skysaber

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Story Day Thirteen, April 18th 2011, Monday - Morning

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There was one firm rule that, as far as Jared knew, every adventurer followed: If you don't trust someone, don't adventure with them.

Adventuring parties had to be able to rely on each other in frequent life-or-death situations. They supported each other not only through combat with all kinds of horrors, but faced down corrupt nobles, evil churches, and frequent betrayals by authority figures.

It was not a safe profession.

Jared felt certain that every adventurer had at least heard about, if not experienced personally (he himself, was in this latter category), the rogue thief that felt it far more profitable and amusing to steal from their own adventuring party, than the monsters.

Such thieves don't live long.

He'd personally killed the ones who'd preyed on him, and understood that was about average; most parties did.

Hey! You deliberately compromise my ability to defend myself when I am routinely going into life-threatening situations? That amounts to attempted murder, and you deserve to die.

That was a rough sort of justice, but accepted generally all the same, by virtually every adventurer he'd ever met; Paladins included - It was the paladin in their party who had walked up into face of the traitorous thief who'd been stealing from the party, and struck the first blow to execute him.

But the rest of that long-suffering party had then mobbed the traitor, and his accomplice.

Roughly the same thing had occurred, the once or twice he'd experienced it, there had been some full-of-himself fighter-type who felt he could threaten and bully the rest of the party into following his idiotic, self-aggrandizing edicts.

The answer was: 'Sorry, I kill dangerous things for a living - and by outright threatening my life you just added yourself to that list.'

So betrayal from within had a fairly standard response to it - the end to that relationship. Whether that meant you no longer trusted that person to be in your group and kicked them out, took their lives personally, or merely slipped off into the night and avoided them ever after, it worked out the same. The end of that association.

Taylor had threatened his life. The rest of that group had supported her.

If they had supported him, the answer would have been to kick Taylor out. The answer to their supporting her was obvious: they were no longer his adventuring companions. It was time for him to slip off and distance himself from his former party members.

He did not feel like killing them. For one, they weren't that much of a danger, and for another while they had delivered actual threats, there had been no real injury. So he was fine with slipping off and letting everyone pursue their own lives in their own ways.

But, as they were no longer his companions, they no longer deserved his support. So he felt he'd been rather generous in delivering their last and final power-up in the form of those books.

They'd get nothing more from him.

Of course, the flipside to that was the term 'solo-adventuring' was another term for 'suicide'. So he'd be wanting to find some new adventuring companions soon.

Looking out the window of the hotel they had stopped at, Jared held out his hand and a little robot dashed forward and jumped into it, transforming back into his phone. "Dial Brian." It rang. "Hello Brian? This is your old boss. Are you available for an assignment? No? Well, no harm in asking. I hope the new project goes well for you. Bye."

He lowered the phone. "Ok, option one down. Let's start exploring others. Dial Quinn Calle's office. Hello? Yes, I've been shocked by a recent PHO post claiming an abuse of the justice system, and wish to look into hiring a Parahuman Law specialist to look into taking on the case, which I believe to be of the singer Canary. Can I make an appointment? Thank you."

He allowed his phone to copy down the details of the appointment. Normally, he'd write it down himself, just to have a physical copy. But with all of the secret identities he was juggling, that was a bad idea right now.

He concluded that call, then made several others.

Finally, he set down the phone and released it to go back to imitating Thing. Turning to the bed, he grasped the woman's wrist, hauling her upright out of a deep sleep. "Come along, 'Tish. We've got an appointment at a parahuman asylum. No, they're not admitting us. We are going to see someone. Now get dressed. I'm having breakfast sent up. It'll be here in ten minutes."

Cherish, having been raised in an environment of complete hedonism and therefore not used to any sort of regular schedule, had been sleeping in to make up for having missed the night before. Nevertheless, she allowed herself to be awakened, and stumbled towards the bathroom.

She took over an hour and a half. Breakfast was cold by the time she emerged.

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Cherish was miserable.

What she had wanted was some private time to work on her newest toy, someplace nice and peaceful where she could be waited on hand and foot. However, what she'd gotten instead was a road trip - a *public* road trip, out in cape costume most of the time. There was no privacy in that, and worse! No safety!

She'd wanted to be back at that lovely estate of his, getting her feet rubbed with scented oils while musicians played violins and butlers and maids fluttered about waiting on her every whim.

Like home.

More importantly, she'd wanted plenty of armed guards who were immune to most Master tricks protecting her against her family.

Now, none of those defenses she'd so prized were hers. They'd left Brockton Bay and those lovely meat-robots behind, so they might as well not even exist. Worse, she had somehow managed to seriously alienate her toy from those capes of his small harem.

He was not supposed to think of those relationships as over!

Looking back on it now, it was obvious she'd made a mistake in her manipulations. Getting an average man to separate from an amorous girl was a tremendous battle, so she'd leaned hard on his feelings of hurt and rejection, thinking she'd have to in order to separate the man from his many would-be lovers. But somehow, she did not even know where, she had pushed too far and his feelings had fallen over a cliff she had not even imagined was there!

Before she'd known anything was wrong, events had spiraled massively out of control and instead of a polite distance, whose gap she could close at her whim, there was now a serious breach, almost a complete end to those relationships!

Cherish did not even know how she was going to fix that screw-up on her part.

She had not even caught it early enough to run damage control. No, instead she and her sleep-deprived brain had been busy congratulating herself in the chapel over that argument.

Then the next thing she knew, they were out of town!

Lots of people say things they don't mean. Most of them will make dramatic threats they hold no intention of ever carrying out - especially when angry. She'd caused that anger herself, relying on the fact that most people had a buffer, this broad swatch of territory between where they normally stood and any violent action - relationship breakups included. They would buckle down and endure over tremendous periods, tolerating some fairly horrid outrages before they would even consider violence - including walking away from a potential lover.

The mind of her newest toy had been so even-tempered and inoffensive she had simply assumed he was one of those who would say mean things while just rolling over to accept more abuse. But he wasn't.

She'd heard of people, spies and soldiers mostly, who had such well-developed kill reflexes they could go from relaxed to 'bodies falling' on almost no notice. But she'd never expected to meet one. Capes generally did not fight to kill. That was deliberate, so even combat between their minions was typically nonlethal, and that set the standard of behavior followed by most of the country.

But not him.

One little death-threat and suddenly he was plotting out how he would kill everyone!

To her shock, Cherish had discovered too late, once they were well out of town and gaining distance, the idea of going through hundreds of heavily armed soldiers to get at someone he did not like did not phase this boy in the least. He was as familiar and comfortable with death and killing as he was with breakfast - as if it was a routine he did every day! Yet it had not left him the sort of deranged soul one would have imagined, nor give him the sort of twisted outlook that liked hurting others. He was, in fact, surprisingly well-adjusted, one could almost call him mild-mannered - the exact reason his willingness to use violence had caught her so off-guard. It was like an action movie star from the 80s had stepped forth from the screen and stood before her - one ready to quip one-liners while filling entire morgues one-handed.

Cherish was beginning to realize that she had a tiger by the tail, and any misstep on her part was going to be deadly.

Probably for her.

She could not have been any unhappier, to have gone for what she'd deemed safety only to instead be playing rodeo with a tiger.

And now they were on a small, low-traffic, back-country road with trees everywhere, pulling up between some farmhouses or something to a roadside taco stand. Roadside tacos, when she would have preferred catered cuisine! What had she done to deserve this suffering?

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Pulling up to the taco stand, Jared could clearly see that it was an ambush.

The tree trunk across the road was, of course, a dead give-away. Another pretty solid indication was that the crew of the taco stand looked like a biker gang, one in love with bones and spikes at that, and rather than the one or two manning a normal stand, there were a crowd of perhaps thirty of them - most of them pretending to be customers, but doing a poor job of it. So Jared had immediately cast some detection spells, including checking his results via Know Greatest Enemy and Detect Evil, and had been analyzing the results. This had given him much reassurance.

He could easily take these guys.

So he could either order Lurch to turn the car around, then fight his way through whatever group they had almost certainly positioned behind him to prevent escapes, thereby adding hours to his trip. Or... sometimes the best way out was through. They could proceed forward.

Plus he could have some fun with it.

As they pulled to a stop before the tree-trunk roadblock, Jared, as Gomez, rolled down the window and affably addressed those oncoming biker toughs currently slapping clubs spiked with nails, or chains, or tire irons into their palms, "Yes, I'd like three dozen tacos. Do you have fresh tomatoes? And can I get crunchy shells on those? I much prefer them to the soft, flour ones. And how hot is your hot sauce? Can you fry an egg on it?"

Predictably, the toughs replied with some brain dead bluster. "We're gunna fry you if you don't get outta that car!"

"But of course!" Gomez flowed out of the back of the vehicle with sinuous grace. "I quite understand. It's a complicated order, and you'll want to make sure I have the money before preparing it. Would one thousand do? How about two? Can we add some chicken burritos to that order? Tish quite likes those."

Abruptly, one of the thugs swung a spiked club at his head while another made to grab him and hold him place, while 'Gomez' just swayed slightly so the one with the club hit the other. Then the cape smiled broadly.

"You tease me with tacos, then deny me? You are infernal! I approve!"

He drew a long sword, saluted with a kiss to the hilt, and took a fencing stance, grinning wildly. "This could be invigorating! En Garde!"

He could have fried this group from range with a fireball. But they had not been packed quite tightly enough for him to have gotten them all. Then those that survived would invariably have used their own ranged weapons back against him, and he'd sensed they had plenty of guns. While he would be fine in the ensuing bullet-storm, Tish would be vulnerable.

So that made this one of those rare cases when melee was actually the more sensible option, as even most thugs tended to hesitate firing into a group containing their friends.

Emma excepted, in his experience, of course. But then Taylor's primary bully had not been quite right in the head.

In response to his drawing steel, one of the thugs swung his chain and wrapped it around the blade, confining and controlling it.

Gomez immediately dropped the longsword without giving it a second thought. He hadn't meant to use it anyway. That blade had been strictly for show, a distraction.

Then his real strategy went into play.

There is, in the Oriental Adventures D20 supplement, a new skill called Iaijutsu Focus, meant to reflect that ability honed by samurai in old times of drawing a blade and striking in one smooth, lightning-quick motion. In order to make that skill an attractive option for players, the game company had assigned a rather generous damage bonus to its successful use, one that could grow as high as an extra nine six-sided dice, or 9d6 of damage - this, on top of whatever you'd normally have done with strength, or magic, or the actual weapon.

To put that into context, the D20 Modern game assigned only 10d6 of fire damage to being hit by an actual anti-tank rocket.

It was simple enough to optimize skill checks in D20 that one could expect maximum additional damage dice out of Iaijutsu Focus from every player that bothered to invest in it.

Which Jared had.

Gomez popped an ability, 'Strike With No Thought', that in cases where combat begins with him in melee range of his opponents, he gained a free surprise round despite those enemies already being fully aware of his presence - even *expecting* a fight.

Sudden, overwhelming violence can have that effect on people - even those who'd felt they were prepared to handle it.

Having dropped the longsword left Gomez' hands free to draw a bastard sword from its concealed, magical sheath. Having an enemy within reach at the time he did so allowed him to use that Iaijutsu Focus skill, offering him a huge damage bonus for drawing the blade and striking in one smooth, lightning-quick motion.

'Strike From The Void' allowed him to add his charisma bonus to each die of damage from Iaijutsu Focus. This was significant even if you only had a Charisma bonus of 1, as that alone would add 9 points, one for each of nine dice. Nine points might not sound like much, but it was more than enough on its own to kill a normal man - a perfectly average man would even drop twice, or a weakling three times. However, that was not the limits of 'Strike From The Void' s effectiveness. For someone learning Iaijutsu Focus who thought ahead and prepared a character with a Charisma bonus of 4, or 5? That could be devastating - an effect as powerful as being hit by two or three anti-tank rockets simultaneously.

An ordinary man struck by such an attack would be lucky to merely be reduced to chunky salsa.

Jared's Charisma bonus was insanely high, optimized via munchkining until it was much higher than a mere 4 or 5. He also had the feat Weapon Juggle, which among other things allowed him to return his weapons to their sheaths as a free action - allowing him to draw and get the Iaijutsu Focus benefits on every attack.

It would feel unfair, except it was all perfectly within the rules (as good munchkining had to be), and this wasn't a game. He was fighting for his life, not for the entertainment value of some spectators - he wasn't a gladiator risking his life for the amusement of some emperor, nor was he an actor performing at no risk to himself on a stage for the approval of his audience. So really, under those circumstances the only definition of unfair was when your enemy had an advantage you did not.

After all, what idiot would expect a special forces team, about to raid some terrorist hideout where they had been executing hostages, to suddenly ditch their armor, their radios, their rifles and special gear, stripping down to just clothes and pistols - because that's what the terrorists had, and to carry anything they didn't was unfair?

Or would Microsoft suddenly publish all of their source code, and throw open their patents and other restricted data for anyone to use, because reserving those advantages for themselves was unfair?

Should a pretty girl destroy her own looks just so she wouldn't hold an unfair advantage over the plain or ugly ones?

No.

The rule for Real Life was to grab any advantage you had. Heaven managed to be fair, but that was a miracle. For everyone else, fair had about as much relation to reality as a pig's head photoshopped onto the Queen of England.

People very often went to great effort setting up sports or other contests trying to be fair. Then, as if to laugh at the very concept of fairness, many of those same people often cheated at their own events, breaking the rules trying to gain unfair advantage.

Jared's sword lashed out, lightning fast, to strike one of his foes with a blow an Endbringer would feel.

Doctors and forensics experts could talk about hydrostatic shock and discuss sympathetic vibrations all they wanted. The effect was to separate all of the flesh from this man's bones and spray it out away from Gomez with the force of a fire hose, leaving the empty skeleton to sag for a moment around its cleanly severed ribs and spine before collapsing into a pile at its own feet.

He then followed this up with 'One Strike, Two Cuts' that gave him two blows with his bastard sword when normally circumstances would allow only one, and killed the idiot who was standing behind the first one in another spray of liquified tissue.

Then, having dropped an opponent (or two) gave Gomez extra attacks via the Cleave feat, and more thugs died. Then the Great Cleave feat kicked in, so there was no limit to the number of times he could strike so long as he'd dropped one opponent with his last one, yet still had another enemy in reach.

That was just his free surprise round.

Victor had been lucky not to have been on the receiving end of this, those two times the Empire cape had confronted Jared.

Emma and her hangers-on had been lucky not to have gotten treated to this when they'd surrounded his car at Winslow.

It was so very *EASY* to destroy bog-standard humans that an adventurer had to restrain himself, lest he become a monster. So he erred on the side of kindness and mercy when possible.

Kindness and mercy were not needed against his current group of foes, who, if he was not mistaken, were The Teeth, a gang who wore the teeth and bones of their human victims as trophies. No, these guys were going down, as they were worse than the Neo-Nazis.

Actually, as far as his research had been able to discover, in a reversal of typical expectations, all the Neo-Nazi's of Brockton Bay did were hold some dog-fights, do light organized crime types of things, and beat up people they didn't like. But they stopped well short of enslaving people and forcing them into prostitution like the ABB; enslaving them in a different way like the Merchants; killing, capturing and raping people, like the Fallen; or torturing and eating people, like The Teeth.

As far as major gangs on Earth-Bet went, that made the Empire surprisingly tame.

Even Coil happily practiced slavery, with a bit of torture and rape tossed on top of it for funsies.

One would naturally expect, in any assortment of villains, the ones wearing Nazi uniforms to be the worst. But no, what the source author seemed to have done during his attempt to write the grimmest, darkest, most evil and hopeless environment possible was to start off with Nazis, only for everything else he added to get worse from there.

Further, he'd just thrown out the word 'Nazi', then fumbled the implementation of it, expecting the label itself to be sufficient, despite him not bothering to tack on any of the atrocities and foulness that made the real Nazis such disgusting scumbags. It was just as if, having hung a target on their backs in the form of a bad name, he considered the job done and could not be bothered fleshing them out with actual reasons to hate them, too busy moving on to worse gangs - like the Slaughterhouse Nine.

For those with the ability to see beyond stereotypes, what was left was a gang of posers. Children dressed up as Darth Vader, looking like scary villains, but not actually that bad.

What the Empire was doing wasn't good. But compared to the rest out there they were practically choir boys. How ironic, then, that they had the poor understanding to pick a theme that made everyone hate and want to kill them; when despite Lung and his ABB being just as racist, even more violent, as well as guilty of entire catalogs of crimes worse than dog fighting rings, half the fans wanted to be Lung's friend.

Oh well. He'd never said they were smart, either.

Jared won initiative, and having run out of people within reach during his surprise round, he then charged the biggest clump of enemies he could see and used the feat Whirlwind Attack to strike out at everyone within reach all at once...

.. and deployed the length of chain danging from the pommel that made his weapon a Flying Bastard Sword, extending his reach by quite a bit and drawing new targets into his sights, going off like a blender among their midst.

For most people, even hardened combat veterans, the sheer carnage of this would have caused them to flee in terror, but for the Teeth it was like a drug, it got them excited.

More Teeth, standing by the sidelines, screamed and charged, their gang having put significant pressure into training all of their members in aggression, and violent tactics.

Thanks to being able to swing his sword around by its chain, Gomez was able to wipe out significant numbers of the first and second waves before they even got within reach of their own weapons. But then they began to rain blows down upon him - blows that he largely ignored, thanks to his armor.

Then the 'A natural 20 always hits' rule raised its ugly head and among the crowd, two got lucky. One struck out with his own chain, wrapping it around one of Gomez' ankles and yanking hard, pulling that foot out from under him so Gomez went sprawling. Then another brought down a sledgehammer onto his chest.

Smarting at those blows, and feeling the injury, Gomez rolled out from under that tangle before it became a pile-up, and had to dodge to the left as a man with an actual chainsaw tried to run it through his chest from behind.

Gomez turned and raised an eyebrow at the chainsaw-wielder. "Nice lunge, but your riposte? Tsk."

He popped another Whirlwind Attack, and that was it, the only thing left around him was collapsed skeletons and the blood dripping from his blade.

To amuse himself, as they'd been pulling up, Jared had replaced the wand in the chamber of this bastard sword with one he wouldn't ordinarily have been using - one for a simple cantrip that changed something's color, which he triggered at every blow (and been able to control the effect it caused, as thanks to it being effectively a part of his sword, he was currently counted as wielding that wand); and took great care in his footwork, placing himself in relation to his foes before striking them. So at the end, when he was done, Gomez paused and looked up at the full color self portrait he'd painted of himself in blood and viscera onto the nearby barn's wall - already signed, of course.

It was amazing what the aid of a few spells and a little subtle magical assistance could do.

Inwardly, Jared thought this was gross, but it was absolutely something Gomez would do, if able - and that thought alone was enough to convince him to ditch this disguise at the earliest opportunity, as he did not want to become anything like the head of the Addams clan - which he could. He was enough of an actor to know that the longer you act a certain way, the less it becomes an act.

Which answered the age old question: Was Snape an evil, child-abusing asshole because he was a bastard and liked to act that way, or was he a good guy forced by his role as a spy into pretending to be an evil, child-abusing asshole? Either way, it was the same answer: He was an evil, child-abusing asshole. The route he took to get there made almost no difference, only the destination.

'As you act, so you become.' It was a phrase older than modern civilization, and people kept repeating it for a reason. That reason was nobody who'd put any thought into it could deny the truth of its wisdom.

Of course, there were idiots out there who would deny the existence of dirt while they were lying face down in it. But they did not count. They were idiots who didn't know a thing about wisdom.

As Jared was determined not to follow that same road, he was ditching this horrible costume the first chance he got.

While he stood outwardly admiring his work, 'Gomez' got interrupted by his danger sense warning him to learn back just before a shot rang out and a bullet flew through the air where his face would have been.

Glancing over in the direction, he saw that the thug in charge of this disreputable group of scum had avoided the fight and gone to Jared's car, pulled out Morticia, and now had a gun to her head.

Gomez smiled on seeing this, calling out, "Dirty pool, old man. I *like* it!"

The sole survivor of this ambush run by The Teeth snarled obscenities for a long couple of minutes, while Gomez, after the first moments, grew bored and started cleaning his fingernails, then casually wiping down and cleaning his sword with an oiled cloth.

Upon hearing silence for over a minute, Gomez looked up from what he'd been doing with his polishing cloth, and asked, "Are you finished? You seemed to have a lot to say, although it was pretty repetitive. Eliminate all of the curse words and you could have said it all in a few seconds. To summarize: You want me to put this sword down on the ground, approach you, and not resist while you inject whatever is in that filthy syringe into my veins. Is that accurate?"

The thug in charge of this small pack of Teeth thugs fumed but nodded, not having the breath to respond. He'd been getting tired from having to hold up Morticia, who had gone completely limp in his grasp from the outset, and so the gang tough had had to do the work of physically holding her upright himself in order to have her body to hide behind, to shield him. Due to the bad health resulting from his poor lifestyle, this burden was already wearing the gang goon out, so his long tirade of filthy diatribe had worked against him, exhausting his muscles while he'd ranted.

It was honestly a little pathetic.

Gomez gave a little, contemplative nod, as if distracted. "You're lucky that Tish isn't feeling herself today, or she'd have already shown you why she and I both consider her my equal. However, in honor of the invigorating workout you've given me, I will spare you the full attentions you deserve, and give you a simple mercy killing."

Jared popped a True Strike and threw a dagger, nailing the gang tough where he was most exposed in his hiding behind Morticia - his face.

Looking down at the body, Gomez stated, "I've always been a firm believer in the direct approach."

Neither Jared nor Gomez would have said anything, upon discovering that his female companion had peed herself before fainting, when in that villain's grasp. Jared merely silently cast a cantrip cleaning that all up, before moving Morticia back into the vehicle.

Gomez then sprang spritely towards the fallen tree. "Come along, Lurch. We've got to move this blockage so we can complete our drive. We're almost late for our appointment!"

They were on the road again before Cherish/Morticia woke up to sit up in alarm and say, "You killed those men."

"And?" He was completely unruffled. "What's your point, Tish? I don't know where you are taking this."

"You killed all of them!"

He dismissed her accusation with a shrug, while trimming his fingernails with the dagger he'd pulled out of the face of the last Teeth member. "It was a fair fight. I don't see why you're so concerned. I even said 'en garde' and gave them the first blow."

"Killing is against the Unwritten Rules," she replied.

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You know, I have my own question to ask you, Tish. Why does it seem like those Unwritten Rules only seem to go one way? They were prepared to kill and eat us. I refuse to follow any set of rules that only benefits the worst sort of villains. If they did not want a fight to the death, they should not have started one. That's all."

Cherish/Morticia pondered that a moment, then changed the subject. "I thought you said melee wasn't your preferred choice?"

Jared harumphed, still focused on polishing his reclaimed dagger. "I said I avoid it. I never said I wasn't any good at it. Besides, it fits the costume terribly well. So I thought I'd have some fun. Fun is *always* an important choice! Also, my detection abilities said that none of them were serious threats. So it was a good opportunity to keep in practice, and of course have fun doing it."

He then glanced up to look at his traveling companion. "One thing you've got to understand, Tish, is that swords are a quaint anachronism in this world. There are only a vanishingly rare few who practice enough to even be considered barely proficient by the medieval standard - certainly almost none of their movie stars qualify. A true master swordsman? They'd barely even heard of such a thing. I doubt there are any living. The lack of skilled opponents alone would make that an all but impossible goal even for a dedicated student to achieve."

Looking back over what she could recall of that fight, Cherish/Morticia muttered, "Well, I think you've got master swordsman covered."

Jared scoffed, "Hah! In terms of the game my power is based on, being master of a sword is just three feats, while basic proficiency is only one. I have over thirty feats in that weapon, which is, incidentally, my preferred weapon of choice - and I hardly ever get to use it! No, this was a bit of light entertainment for me. Thank you very much for finding this delightful little vacation spot. I wonder if they do birthday parties?"

Cherish/Morticia shuddered and her eyes rolled back up into her head as she fainted again.

OoOoO

The PRT Central Threat Analysis Center was not a cheery place at the best of times. They had enough work to do it was always busy, yet none of it was 'happy' work.

They were the ones who got to decide who, among the PRT Directors all constantly demanding more resources, actually got some, and which locations got to starve.

Because for one office to get more, another office always had to get less.

In particular, they were the ones to determine if the local threat analysis team's evaluations had been accurate enough, once a dangerous cape began to roam beyond the zone covered by the PRT directorate they had first appeared in. Allocation of resources then took place according to those revised threat evaluations.

There had been enough PRT Directors inflating the numbers of their local villains over the years in order to squeeze more than their fair share of funds from Central, as to make this office necessary.

One of the more morbid members of that team, wearing wrinkled, days old clothes and unshaven, came into his latest meeting and plugged his own coffee maker in, next to the shared one, before taking his seat at the table, then demanded, "Okay, so how doomed are we?"

Since this was always that man's first question, he got roundly ignored.

The minor flunky in middle management whose meeting this was, seeing the meeting time just start, hit the button to play the recording they were all supposed to watch, before going back to smoking pot while surfing porn on his phone.

A couple last minute arrivals hurried in, taking care not to disturb the analyst already asleep, face-down and drooling on the table.

Theirs was a thankless job. The rate of burnout was horrendous.

"Teeth are back to making home movies of some of their ambushes again," the bored, and somewhat stoned, middle management flunky declared as the first film began to roll. "We've got the same fight from three angles: A nice video camera on the roof corner, another one in a farmhouse viewing through a window, and across the street a bigger more expensive one on a tripod."

"Quality entertainment," one of the analyst sarcastically declared. "Are you sure we can't repackage and sell these? Could triple our budget."

"Federal Departments do not sell slasher flics," the bored management drone replied, quoting policy before going back to his porn.

The film came to an end.

"Something wrong with the camera?" one of the analysts looked up from where he had been arranging his coffee-stained papers. The first looked over his shoulder from where he'd been fiddling with his coffee maker, while two others looked up from their pre-movie chat.

"Nope," the management drone replied, taking another pull of his pot. "That was the whole film. Thirty-two men died in eighteen seconds. Oh, sure there is another couple of minutes of hostage situation, but the real action is those eighteen seconds."

"Wow!" one of the analysts spoke up. "Thirty-two dead, how many wounded?"

"None," the management drone replied, taking another hit. "Or maybe one. One of them got hit several times, but did not act hurt. Now we'll watch it again on extreme slo-mo. It will take all of three minutes."

Having captured their interest, those present actually paid attention as it played this time.

By the end of it, even those bored office drones and their management flunky were all white with fear.

It was fifteen minutes of dead silence before any one of them spoke, and that was the most junior among them, straightening his glasses to declare, "This is clear proof that we need an immediate renewal of the nationwide campaign to strongly encourage the use of the Unwritten Rules."

One of those men at that table was already on his phone, selling that video to a news channel 'on the sly', for this weekend's beer money.

Another was contacting a shady art dealer, notifying him of that self-portrait painted by a cape out of the blood and liquified tissues of his enemies while he was still in combat with them.

That side of that barn would vanish within the next couple of hours, after having been sprayed with appropriate fixatives, and would wind up at auction the next day - from which the analyst got a kickback, so he was happy.

The first had picked up his coffee maker and left, already late for another meeting.

The last analyst in that room continued sleeping on the table, blissfully unaware of anything as his boss spread his toes to shoot up, the pot no longer seeming enough.

When that management flunky woke up hours later after having passed out, he blinked blearily at the open file before him, realized that he had forgotten everything about the cape in question, and typed in 'Tinker 2' before closing it out so he could leave work for the day.

Anything could be explained under a Tinker rating, right? No one would question it... whatever it was.

OoOoO

"Hello. I have an appointment. It's under Addams, G."

The receptionist at the Parahuman Aslyum looked up from the computer on his desk, where hung a game of solitaire. "Yes, you're the eleven o'clock. That's Cell Block F, on your left. Cell F 27. Wait a moment, we'll have an attendant to go with you."

Gomez politely waved it off. "No need. I can find it. By the way, glance out your window. Does that look like a tidal wave of spiders to you? Oh dear, I thought I'd given them the slip. Well, I'm off. Ta ta!"

The attendant looked out the window, went goggle-eyed, hit a red button to signal emergency, and fumbled in his desk for the keys to the weapons locker. He was hoping they still had a flamethrower in there, but even a shotgun would do.

Why would they have a flamethrower?

They were that kind of asylum. Sometimes really weird stuff went down, of which a tidal wave of spiders would merely rate a six.

Walking down the hallway, Gomez noticed that it was only 10:57. Seeing that it would not do to be early, he paused and knocked on the first door he encountered. "Pardon me, is anyone in residence?"

Hearing only growls, snarling and the scrabbling of claws on stone floor, he responded, "As I imagined. Well, as the Boy Scouts say: Do a good turn daily." He opened the armored shutter to view within, cast detection spells revealing that the Case 53 within was, at root, a human. Then did his good turn by casting Polymorph Other to turn the creature inside human, following that up with a Heart's Ease, then walked on with a song in his heart, his golden staff currently appearing as a mere cane which he jauntily waved as he strolled down the cell block.

He would hit a few more such cells before hurrying on to his appointment. He could hit the rest on the way out.

At Cell 27, he knocked politely and called out through the barricade. "Pardon me, I have an appointment to speak to a Miss Sveta, no last name given. Are you composed for our appointment?"

The heavy metal cell door shuddered and shook. Then came a woman's voice, "I suppose we can talk, but I'm not in control of my body. They locked me up here as a danger to everyone else... and I fear it might be trying to injure you. It sees the oddest things as threats."

"How rude of it," he asserted, then inquired, "Would you care for some assistance in asserting your rightful control over it? It is your body after all, not very sporting not to let you have a say in its operation."

That door shuddered and quaked again.

"Please," the woman's voice replied mildly.

"Splendid!" Gomez declared, tucking his cane up under one arm as he opened the heavily armored viewport and looked within. "Now, do be a dear and picture how you once looked, or how you would like to look if you were fully human... that's it. I've got it. Now, say 'Cheese'."

The woman actually said, "Cheese," before he could fire off the effect.

Polymorph Other had her returned to human in the next second, only for her power to actively override the Polymorph, restoring her to the form of a monster within moments.

"Thank you for trying," the woman within was obviously trying to be nice, despite holding back tears over the attempt failing.

"Oh, don't worry about that. I am sure we'll succeed. We just have to give it the full treatment," Gomez reassured her, at the same time creating another Lantern Archon, giving it the errand to go fetch him another pig. "Now dear, the next stage is a little disorienting. I hope you can bear with me. Are you willing to try?"

"Yes," Sveta called out.

"Good," Gomez returned. "Bear with it, now. It shouldn't be more than a handful of seconds, less than half a minute, at most." After reassuring her, he cast Ability Rip, transferring her power to the pig, which almost immediately began to mutate into a horrid collection of tentacles while Sveta's own body, which was itself still a mass of tentacles, began to flop down and die like a fish out of water without her power supporting it.

A mass of tentacles was not biologically stable by its nature.

Seeing that, he cast Polymorph Other, returning Sveta to human before he did anything else.

The tentacled pig, now under the influence of her power, attacked him.

It was still mutating, so not under full power. Nevertheless, it must have sensed enough of a threat from him to have made the attempt anyway.

An off-hand blow from Gomez' sword clipped it, as his precognition warred with its, and neither perfectly triumphed. Nevertheless it backed off, circling around for another try when he hit its shard with a Dimensional Anchor under Transdimensional Spell, destroying it, at which point the intelligence controlling the now-horribly mutated pig's body vanished, dropping it like a sack of rocks.

He dismissed the Ability Rip, returning Sveta's power - the most advanced danger sense in the Worm environment, to her in her newly restored human body.

While that power had the ability to transform its user into a tentacled mass of horror, and under control of the shard would almost always do so, since it granted some survival advantages, this time it did not begin to mutate her, as that aspect of her power, if still present, required a guiding force that no longer existed.

She was better off without it, anyway.

The pig attacked, this time of its own volition, and this time a swipe of Gomez' blade sent its flesh spraying away from him, like before.

"Well, my dear," he called into the cell. "Are you quite alright? Do you need anything?"

"Clothes, and out," Sveta declared firmly, tears of gratitude flowing freely, convinced she was dreaming, but determined to enjoy it to the most while she could.

"Of course!" Gomez declared. "Luckily, I have prepared for this eventuality, having brought along a spare one of Morticia's dresses."

He then cast Knock, opening the most ferocious set of heavy duty locks he'd seen, that had been keeping that door shut. Then, opening the heavy steel door, he passed in the article of clothing.

Moments later, Sveta stepped out of her cell, wearing that dress.

"Shall we?" Gomez offered the girl his arm.

When he came back to the car, escorting Sveta, Morticia exclaimed, "Oh, Gomez, you missed all of the excitement. There were all of these attendants fighting a huge mass of spiders. There were guns and explosions, flames, pesticides, stomping and baseball bats, webs and so much screaming."

"I'm glad you weren't bored, my dove," Gomez replied cheerily. Then, having helped Sveta in, he got back into the car himself and called out, "Lurch, drive on."

As the car pulled out, a stream of former Case 53s and victims of unfortunate Tinker experiments, now all cured, emerged from out of the asylum behind them, and began escaping in all directions as the Addams drove away.

Local PRT forces, desperate to make arrests, arrived at the site hours later, far too late to do any good.

They found the parahuman asylum all but empty. Only employees remained by that point.

OoOoO

Other Federal agencies were having a far more successful afternoon.

When the Feds began breaking up Lung's massive prostitution ring back in Brockton Bay, they'd wanted to make a clean PR victory out of it, and that meant not just getting the girls out of those warehouses (where they'd been handcuffed to cots in cubicles formed by partitions of hung sheets, and other unspeakable conditions), but doing their best to fix them up, too, so they could at least be returned to their families in something like good health.

The trouble with that was the local PRT had, following their director's orders, smashed the local healing cape Panacea when she was a glass statue and before she could be revived.

That was not a small deal, and a majority of government agencies had leaped upon that as the perfect excuse and were now arguing that fact alone proved the PRT was unfit to be granted so much leeway in their treatment of parahumans. So, opening a new front in their never-ending, inter-agency disputes over territory, they now demanded oversight be granted to some other government agency - a fact that had the PRT's Chief Director Costa-Brown burning political favors left and right trying to prevent it...

... only to find that her agency had made very few friends - but had PLENTY of enemies!

Lacking support from Contessa's Path to Victory, left her with no option but to try to handle the defense of her agency herself. However, she fumbled the ball quite dramatically when Chief Director Costa-Brown tried the usual bureaucratic tricks of obfuscation and lies; doing enormous damage to her cause before one of her underlings got to her to communicate in a panicked whisper that she was telling the unvarnished truth every time she'd meant to lie!

That was enough of an opening for the other Federal Agencies, sensing blood, to pounce on the PRT like a pack of starving wolves.

The PRT had most of the budget - and the others wanted it back!

Though the results were a foregone conclusion, waiting for that conflict to resolve would be pointless, as those inter-agency power struggles typically lasted for years. Some had gone on for longer than anyone involved had been alive. So the FBI, who was working with the local cops in breaking up those prostitution rings (this they could do as Lung's operations were heavily involved in human trafficking, which fell under the FBI's jurisdiction), called in a healer named Scapegoat as a substitute.

Now Scapegoat's power worked by transferring mental and physical afflictions between targets, using his own body as a bridge. While Scapegoat could accept to his own body the injuries of the person just healed, he explained right after being brought in that he was not willing to personally suffer the thousands of cases of mental trauma and uncountable venereal diseases they were asking. So one of the Federal agents on site authorized him to use the ABB gang members who had been guards and pimps over the prostitutes.

This proved to be ideal for this situation, allowing the Feds to restore the girls to normal condition, not the trauma-and-disease-laden wrecks they'd been, before returning them to their families. Plus it left the ABB thugs who were responsible for that trauma as the ones suffering for it, each with scores if not hundreds of cases of VD, and the mental trauma associated with hundreds of cases of being raped.

Each of the various law enforcement agencies involved felt a profound sense of justice being served as they signed off on that.

As Scapegoat was being paid before being sent home, each one of those agencies gave him a business card and invited him to work with them more often. That particular parahuman would take some of those offers and find himself profoundly busy in the near future, executing perfect justice on a broad swath of very nasty criminals.

Perfect justice in the sense that they received exactly the harm and trauma they had inflicted upon others.

Violent crime actually suffered a noticeable drop in the country after this new method of punishment became known. Even though there was no way for Scapegoat to reach even 1% of the cases, the mere fact that he could be, strongly disinclined most criminals from taking the risk - especially when the crime was severe.

OoOoO

Story Day Thirteen, April 18th 2011, Monday - Evening

OoOoO

Feeling hollow, the somewhat despondent group known as Skysaber's Sirens had been drifting around the Belmont Estate aimlessly.

All except for Rachel.

She, admittedly, did not feel any particular ability over the others in the mental department, in fact she knew that she was mentally inferior to most if not every other female of her pack, so had too often deferred to them when it came to decision making.

Normally, that behavior would be doing as a proper bitch should. Her status had been low in the group, so she'd deferred to their authority.

However, they had been screwing it up by the numbers.

Now, something that was vital to know about dog packs is there is always an Alpha. Even when there is only one dog left, and he doesn't want the job, he'll still step forward and fill it. The instinct is that strong.

There is also an alpha female, and an alpha male. Both roles have to be filled.

The alpha male of their group had been obvious since the start. He'd been doing a wonderful job.

However, Rachel was struggling, as she did not feel mentally qualified, but none of the other bitches of her pack were taking responsibility! Others had made noises about wanting to be in charge, but none of them were stepping forward and doing it!

They had, in fact, one and all abdicated the responsibility for the care and nurture of the group as a whole, and thus disqualified themselves.

That left this whole steaming pile of Smurf in Rachel's lap.

She did not want it.

But by her very nature, she had to take it up regardless.

Not knowing the first thing to do for how to fix the major problem they faced, of having driven off the male alpha, Rachel found herself seated before the television set, eating snacks and watching the news, hoping for some sort of inspiration.

They had a special on that evening.

Rachel's ears perked up, and she sat up, alerting in interest, as the newscasters told the story of some local woman, Annette Hebert, who claimed to have been returned from the dead by a cape dressed as Gomez Addams.

Rachel knew only one man that could raise the dead. He was also very fond of switching costumes.

The special report then continued with eighteen seconds of very gory footage (along with a warning beforehand for children to leave the room) of his fight against The Teeth, then recruiting at some parahuman asylum.

Rachel thought about it. She thought long and sore, before coming to a decision.

She whistled for her dogs.

It was time.

Time for her to take over control and start cleaning up this mess.

Not much later, Rachel came storming upstairs and burst into the room where Taylor had been lying face down on her bed, crying her eyes out. The dog cape then grabbed Taylor by the hair on the back of her head, not listening to any objections, and forced her to walk out with her, onto the lawn in front of the Belmont Estate, whereupon she shoved Taylor into a line with the rest where all of the Sirens now stood arrayed before her, each herded into their proper place by giant dogs.

Rachel then twirled her parasol as she assumed her rightful place before them, her manner as if one instructing the troops. "We took him for granted once, and look where that got us. We not only CAN be replaced, we have ALREADY BEEN replaced! Now, as far as I can see it, we've got one chance to win back his affections, and if we blow it, that's it. We'll be on the outside looking in. And I want to make this clear - if we flub our one chance at this we will NEVER be the important ones in that boy's life again! Do you understand?"

"Can't argue with you," Lisa contributed over folded arms, her foul temper evident as she blamed herself for not having seen the events with Jared coming. "In fact, I would even go so far as to say that should we stop being important to him, we'll stop being important, period. All of the big stuff that's happening around here? That's all him. Everything he does is making waves, getting big attention. He is having an effect. Can any of you name *anything* the rest of us have done on our own that has had an equal impact?"

The girls all squirmed. They had been thinking they'd been important, significant. But... yeah, they'd just been involved while those important things happened, hadn't they? The originator of those events had always been *him*.

Taylor in particular had been feeling miserable, blaming herself, ever since their boy had left them the day before. So she drew herself upright and declared, "I am willing to do whatever it takes!"

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Thanks to all of you who give me reviews. You truly cheer me up and help going on with this much easier.

Beta work by Dogbertcarroll