Chapter 4

A Wizard In Alexandria's Court

Chapter Four

by Skysaber

OoOoO

Story Day Three, April 8th 2011, Friday - Early Morning

OoOoO

Taylor woke, and it was not until she had reached the kitchen and saw her father's expression that she realized that everything was different.

She had a smile on her face.

She'd not even realized until she'd seen her father's reaction, then wondered what he could be so surprised about, that she indulged in the moment of self-examination, and it came to her: This was not an ordinary day.

Unlike practically every day for the past year and a half, she did not wake up unwillingly, drag herself hopelessly out of bed, to face an impossible situation. Today, she was not afraid to face her life. Frankly, she'd woken joyfully, sprang out of bed with all of the possibilities ahead delighting her, went through her morning routine with enthusiasm for all of the wonderful things that promised to follow, then floated on clouds of hope down into the kitchen, smiling all of the while.

How could her father not react to that?

The duo reacted with embarrassment over their conflicting emotions, her delightful expression and hope in her eyes clashing with the defeated misery in his, until they settled down to a matching compromise, her feeling sympathy for him, while her father tried hard to feel good for his daughter's sake.

They were just settling down to toast when they heard it.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Taylor instantly looked to scan the kitchen windows, only there was no cape standing out there, waiting with breakfast in one hand, looking in and smiling at her, as she halfway hoped.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"That's not the door," her father lowered his cup of coffee to say.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"It's coming from the front of the house." Taylor stood up to say, her father following as they both went to investigate the mysterious and unfamiliar sounds. The thumps repeated a few more times before, following them, they got to the front door and opened it.

"Rick!" Taylor exclaimed, delight filling her and making her jump a little for joy, as she and her father both saw the boy halfway down their front steps, looking up from where he had just replaced the rotten board, the old one laid aside as a shiny new one had already taken its place. A bucket of paint and a brush stood nearby, ready for use. The blue-eyed boy wiped blond hair from his eyes with the back of the gloved hand holding a hammer, as he met Taylor's eyes and smiled.

"Taylor, good morning! I was just fixing this step here..."

That was all he got to say before the young girl had swarmed out and gotten him in a hug, before joyfully dragging him inside, excitedly talking a mile a minute.

Danny stood in the open door a while longer, conflicted feelings at war within his mind. On the one hand, he still wanted to strangle the upstart and string him up by his rotten little neck for even thinking of defiling his little girl. On the other, he did not dare to while the boy brought that kind of joy to his formerly-morose daughter.

Then the man reached into his pocket and felt a set of keys - not his own.

He brought them out. Then, just as he had last night after the last of his friends had gone, Danny looked down at the set of keys in his hand, then up at the two classic vehicles parked right outside of his house; one, the Camaro, declared as a gift to Taylor; the second, a V8 van for Danny to arrange through his contacts to sell.

His thoughts were tumultuous as he went back inside to breakfast.

Turned out the kid was a fantastic cook as well. The Heberts had not eaten so well since Annette died.

Danny felt very conflicted as he went in to work that day.

OoOoO

The front steps had been repaired, freshly sanded, and glistened under a fresh coat of paint (all done the normal way, in case any neighbors had been watching) when Taylor and Rick drove off in his new car - a Pontiac Trans Am, like from the movie Smokey and the Bandit.

Unlike the movie car, the windows were tinted, but it was a feature that Taylor quite liked. Of course, windows tinted to the degree that celebrities and politicians liked, to where you could not see through from the outside at all, were illegal for normal people to possess, so these were just a little smoky.

But still, she liked the feeling of privacy, and it was pretty good at foiling cameras.

Since Jared could pick from among the many derelicts and abandoned cars in the city, he'd generally just taken the most valuable one he could see when he'd discovered he needed one. That this also helped their resale value once restored he did not mind a bit, especially when (after Danny's noncommital grunt) Kurt had promised they knew some people in the used car business who'd be happy to get everything squared away with the licenses and registrations and so on.

Apparently, there was a fair bit of paperwork involved, which was why it paid to know a few experts who knew how to properly massage the system.

Because if the system got unhappy with you it would turn around and bite you.

Something Jared knew well.

Taylor was as delighted as a puppy once they pulled away from her home. "So, where are we going?"

"Hunting down your missing decoy," Jared told her.

When she looked at him in confused surprise, he added, "I dropped it off to attend school for you yesterday. But something must have happened to it, because if it had followed the program outlined, it would have just gone home after school. Danny would then have given it that uncomfortable talk he was waiting to give to you, and you would have been spared two miserable experiences."

He turned left on the next intersection, on the route she realized headed to her school, all while still talking. "What I expected to find when we got to your place last night was your decoy in your room, and Danny in his. Then it would have been easy enough to switch you for her without anyone noticing. Instead, what we found was your duplicate never got home, and Danny had gotten agitated enough waiting for it that he got all of his friends there, cleaning guns."

Taylor blinked, assimilating that. "At least Lacey gave me that uncomfortable talk, instead of him. I can't imagine how bad it would have been if my dad had been forced to tell me those things."

"He'd probably have been at least three-quarters drunk doing so," Jared surmised. "There is a reason some men call booze 'liquid courage', after all. He'd have needed some help to face that."

"Some men?" Taylor blinked at him, then realized. "You don't drink. You said it was against your religion."

"And it is," he agreed. "Funny thing, is when you have to face your demons without it, you learn that you don't truly need it, and that you never did in the first place."

He drove on for another moment, before looking at her and adding, "Besides, as an adventurer, I've had to get used to facing literal monsters that were fully intending to kill me. Angry fathers kind of pale in comparison to that."

"No doubt," Taylor agreed, wondering just what kind of villains he'd had to face. Maybe he'd had a brief encounter with the Slaughterhouse Nine? Or had he been one of the few to escape Ellisburg? Or maybe he'd survived an Endbringer attack?

Whatever it was, it sounded like it had been nasty.

She resolved to comfort him, when he felt like sharing more details about the experience.

They pulled up to her school, with students streaming in from all over, many of which paused to stare at the cool car - and countless students were surprised to spot her in the passenger seat, dressed in colorful, fashionable clothes.

Jared had brought a set by for her that morning, saying that Lisa insisted. So she'd changed, and was now wondering at the expressions of all of the students staring, wondering at her.

She wasn't really so different, was she?

They pulled up to a parking space nowhere near the entrance (those ones were all long since taken), and Jared whispered aside to Taylor, "Alright, do your thing."

On seeing her look of blank incomprehension, he refined his instruction, "Use your bugs to find something out there that smells and tastes just like you do. That will be our missing decoy."

She blinked several times. "Then... what will you do?"

He glanced up, seeing several students approaching in a group. "I'll have to occupy myself doing something inconspicuous while you're busy. We're going out, aren't we? Now, what would two high schoolers who are going out together do when they are alone in a car together, that would not stand out or attract any undue attention?"

Her lips went wide in a gasp of astonishment, right before he kissed them.

Taylor became lost. She could do this all day!

Just as she had opened the zipper on the front of his leather jacket and was snaking her arms inside to feel those toned-up muscles, a dreary, yet familiar noise came and interrupted her moment of bliss.

"Taylor? OMG it is! But look, she's about to give that new kid herpes. Someone ought to help him out. Obviously he does not understand what kind of a whore she is."

It was Emma's voice.

That was enough to penetrate her buzz and kill off Taylor's bliss right there.

The car had started to be surrounded by a dozen or more athletes by the time Jared, or Rick she supposed, broke the kiss.

Emma's coterie did not include any of the major gangs. The druggies tended to drop out and forget hygiene, she wasn't Asian, and the Empire tended to snub her because her best friend was Sophia, who was black. Except for their taste in friends, ie Emma, Jared supposed as he pushed clear of Taylor's grasping for comfort and got out of the car to stand up against the aggressors, that made them a selection of some of the best kids on campus.

Or just rich.

As the popular kids and athletes surrounded him in a press of bodies, Emma called out from a safe distance away. "Hey there, new guy. Nice car? Hey, you wouldn't want to hang out with Taylor. She's got, like, all of the venereal diseases. Why don't you come with us? We could show you around."

She flashed him an insincere smile, trying to be cute but somehow both underselling and overselling it at the same moment.

He gave a very polite smile in return, trying to be nice. "Hey, that's very comforting. But I don't actually attend Winslow, and I'm not about to start. I'm only here dropping my girl off for the day. She and I were just saying goodbye, and you came up to say something rude. Now that's not nice. But it's alright. I know you don't mean it, so I'll just let you apologize and explain you did not mean to cause hurt feelings, and I'll be on my way."

Emma's expression had soured in ways that made spoiled milk look inviting, and her crowd of hangers-on started jeering. One of the junior varsity basketball players pelted Jared with an empty soda can, while the big, senior players on the team crowded in close. One, probably the team captain, lifted Jared up by the lapels of his jacket, sneering, "You don't get to say mean things to Emma. Now apologize, dick!"

Jared was not a small man, his Nordic ancestry had been commented on as giving him both height and muscle, and his Rick disguise reflected that. But this basketball player was probably looking to go pro, because even as a teen he had nearly a foot on him - and the other kids were laughing about the situation.

"Now people are offering violence," Jared ignored the meat-tower in his face to look over at Emma. "I hate it when people do that. Look, if there was anything to be gained by you putting down your classmate, you achieved it long ago. Now you're just beating on a dead horse. You've proven yourself superior in this social contest. If there was any rivalry, you've won. Why can't you just take your winnings and go home happy? I mean, do we have to get the cops involved?"

He put a finger on just the right spot behind the basketball captain's thumb, causing the guy to let go and shake his hand. After landing and straightening his jacket, Jared addressed a final plea to the redhaired bitch who was now openly scowling at him. "So, please. I'm asking in the nicest possible way, to lay off and leave my girl alone, okay?"

Emma's face was thunderous.

The jocks did not need any further instruction. One had already grabbed the back of Jared's jacket to hold him as another sports star, the one with the sore hand, drove a powerful punch towards his midriff.

Only Jared wasn't there, having dropped out of the jacket to the ground and rolling out of the tangle of the press of violent athletes, leaving the basketball captain to punch the guy holding the empty leather jacket, doubling the other player over.

In the brief fraction of a second he was down there passing by, Jared lashed out and hit both of the basketball captain's legs, shattering them. Outnumbered like this his instincts were all screaming that foes he took down had to stay down, or he was a goner. And his limited precognitive abilities were in full agreement. An angry mob will frequently beat on someone till they die before even realizing they'd done it. If they got hold of him, he was a dead man. And every D&D player knows your enemies WILL hit you at least 5% of the time, no matter your skill or defenses.

For all his confident talk, he was in very real danger. So he had to thin the crowd a bit if he was going to have any chance to escape alive.

The star senior went down screaming.

Being Brocktonites and alert to all kinds of danger, attention focused their way from all across the parking lot.

Jared came up from his acrobatic roll at the outskirts of the little crowd that had been pressing him, next to the junior varsity player who had thrown an empty soda can at him. Not knowing the extent of the captain's damage, predictably the junior took a swing, acting on previous animosity.

Jared, still smiling, merely took a step backwards so Mr. Junior Varsity hit the next person there on the edge of the crowd, who happened to be a girl named Julia, one of the bitch-trio's primary hangers-on. Never having taken a punch to the face before, much less one with a boy athlete's full strength behind it, she went down, dropping like a sack of potatoes.

Now even angrier, Mr. Junior Varsity took another swing at Jared, who was happy to help that along, stepping outside of the arc and grabbing the boy's wrist in one hand, forcing it outward, while his other struck at the boy's elbow, forcing inward.

The arm shattered, pasty bits of bone poking out from the destroyed elbow as the jock went down screaming.

Two boys drew weapons, one a gun, the other a knife.

Jared's snap kick lashed out at the crouching gunman, hitting him in the face with a crunch that might have been the boy's jaw, or might have been his neck. Either way he went down.

The knife fighter went for one of those dramatic "I will stab you" poses that look so dynamic on movie posters, but that real fighters realize leaves you as open as an unwalled bathroom. He got sucker punched. But before he went down, something happened to change the tone of the fight entirely.

Pop!

A blossom of blood appeared on Mr. Knife Fighter's jersey.

Pop! Pop!

Quickly followed by another, then one of the girls in the crowd going down bleeding and screaming.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

Emma Barnes had drawn a pistol from out of the depths of her purse, and was punching the air with it while pulling the trigger, just like various action movies told people to do. Naturally, her shots were going wild all over the place, hitting her friends and flunkies while missing her real target.

Pop! Pop!

Bang!

Jared had gone down into a crouch while drawing his own pistol, now held steady on Emma Barnes, who looked down confused at her injury, the shock not allowing any pain to penetrate yet. Still, upon seeing her injury, something in her mind went "Nope! Not dealing with that!" and she fainted, dropping her pistol and falling over, out cold.

Jared stood up from his crouch, noting everyone who still could had fled, and the parking lot looked empty as those who had been witnessing this scene had taken cover and hid.

Good for them.

The only people around his car were the passed out and the injured. To the injured he quickly and efficiently rendered first aid, binding up wounds and stopping bleeding. But a couple were already past needing that.

Quite a few had simply passed out in the middle of this. Jared noted one burly baseball player, Sophia Hess, and Taylor had all apparently had fainting spells early on in the conflict, all of them dropping like puppets with the strings cut. Taylor had still been in the car, so had folded forward as though merely taking cover from the conflict. Good for her, as he suspected he knew what all that fainting might mean, and it would not do for her to be implicated.

Battlefield triage for adventuring parties was quick, by necessity. Having spent less than a minute on that, Jared took his gun and stood over the jock who'd grabbed his jacket from behind at the start of the fight.

Holding the pistol steady on target between the downed teen's eyes, he said. "Now, we're not going to need to have this discussion again, are we?"

The teen frantically shook his head.

"Good," Jared agreed, giving him a nod, pistol unwavering. "Because I would truly hate to be forced to come back here and finish what I started. It always gets so unpleasant when folks insist on being disagreeable. Why, if you guys hadn't started anything, none of your limbs would be broken, and you'd all still be alive. Let's keep it that way, shall we?"

Frantic nodding.

Jared's friendly smile and even tone somehow made it worse, when he told the injured athlete, "Good, now when the cops arrive, I want you to be honest, and tell them how this girl Emma here and her two close friends, Madison and Sophia, have been treating certain other girls this past year and a half or so. Just so we can avoid any future misunderstandings, ok? Because it would truly be unfortunate if you, thinking with your dick, tried to please her by lying to protect the little bitch. Why, just think of the trouble that's caused you already."

Again, more frantic nodding. The jock wet himself with terror.

Jared, smiling and polite all the while, looked around the rest of the crowd of students lying around groaning in various degrees of pain. "Now, is there anyone here who takes issue with this little arrangement, or should I just assume that you agree, and it applies to all of you? Speak now or forever hold your peace."

He looked to be answered only with silence, until the future basketball star clutching his broken legs told him to "Go F- yourself! This is NOT over! I'm gunna GET you! I'm gunna KILL you!"

Jared, his polite, friendly smile never wavering once, walked over to the swearing teen, frisked him, produced the teen's wallet, then proceeded to read the boy's address aloud from off his ID. Then he said, "I am going to assume that you said that in the heat of the moment, and didn't really mean it. Because threatening a guy who has a gun to your head when you are unarmed and already down with two broken legs might just qualify as stupid enough to justify removing you from the gene pool for the good of humanity, at least by some people's standards."

Jared then slapped the wallet closed and politely tucked it back into the basketball player's pocket, before patting him lightly on the cheek. "But me? I'm a 'live and let live' kinda guy. Still, you come after me, I'll come after you, ok? Because now I know where you live."

He got no more backtalk after that.

Seconds later he was driving off in the car, reaching over to try and rouse Taylor, who came awake blearily, having slipped almost entirely down into the passenger side foot well during her faint - luckily not a bad place to be when there was lead flying around.

"Well, did you get it?" he asked as they pulled out of the lot. At least there were no more students about gawking, as they'd all taken cover.

Taylor's head felt filled with white noise, even as she realized where she was and began to crawl out. "Get what?"

"Your body double. Did you get its location?" he demanded, eyes on the road as he tore off at a somewhat unsafe speed.

Quickly shaking herself back to reality, reminded of her mission, the bug controller resumed her seat and replied. "Yes. It's in a dumpster, out behind the school. I think it's arms and legs are tied together with something, it... it's not moving."

"Is it alive?" he demanded.

"... no," Taylor felt ashen at that thought. It had no body heat. Her bugs would be able to tell. "I think it froze to death. I think they left it there, and it's been there all night."

Jared's face was grim and he turned right and made good speed away. "Then they killed her. Exposure does that, and bound she could not save herself. Recall, that dummy was exactly like you. It had every means you did for escape, except for powers. So, not knowing you had any powers, they did that to something they thought was you. They are murderers, Taylor."

Her face was white, her body clenched tight with fear. "You don't sound so surprised by that."

"I'm not. I read it in Emma's face. Sophia also made it plain she'd expected you to die, and Madison was wondering how you'd survived. All three were surprised to see you. Emma felt insulted when she saw you happy and well, especially when she saw you looking successful in new clothes, with a new boyfriend, in a new car, like all of her bullying did not matter. She wanted to kill you right then, some urge to prove her own power. Hang on a moment."

Pulling onto a side street, Jared 'dialed' on his pantomime phone. Getting a ring, he held up a hand to Taylor for silence.

"Nine-one-one, how may I direct your emergency?"

"Hi," Jared said timidly, causing Taylor to jump with how well he imitated a teenage girl. In fact, he sounded like a freshman in one of her classes. "Look, um, I think there's been a murder..." he continued timidly.

"Go on," the 911 operator commanded, gently trying to coax out more information from the caller. "Where are you, miss? And who are you?"

"I'm at Winslow. Look," Jared blurted in this teenage girl voice. "There's this three, Emma Barnes, Madison Clements, and Sophia, who is in track. They've been really mean to this girl Taylor for over a year now. And now... some kid was saying last night he saw some of Emma's friends throw her body into one of the dumpsters out back. And now this morning Taylor Hebert isn't here, and... and I think she might have died, and this would be the second time they've tried to kill her! I saw those three shove her into her locker earlier this year, and they left her there for hours! Look, you've got to come do something! They're all popular kids, so the principal lets them get away with whatever they want. The rest of us are all afraid to say anything, for fear of what they'd do to us. OMG! You don't think she'll learn I've told you! You won't tell on me, will you? OMG, I've got to go!"

With that, he hung up.

Putting the car in gear, he drove off.

OoOoO

One Half Hour Later

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It had been very cynically observed that, outside of cop shows, the police tend to be very reliable about arriving twenty to thirty minutes after the shooting stops.

Police don't like to be shot any more than anyone. So waiting for that to die down was the natural, though not exactly brave, reaction.

The trouble was, people needed their protectors to have more bravery than that.

Still, brave cops very often turned into dead cops in Brockton Bay, so it was nearly thirty minutes before the police arrived, pulling in to Winslow high's student parking lot, to address the events concerning the violence recently concluded there.

Also in cop shows, the police have this wonderful, magical ability of finding just the right clues, and knowing just the right information to focus in on. That's because the script writers have only half an hour or so to get the entire episode's plot in, so they skip the tangle of confusion that is real investigative work and give what is, at best, a summary; without all of the dead ends, things obvious only in hindsight, missed clues, and of course wrong conclusions.

Audiences prefer their protagonists to be correct about things. Cop shows tend to reflect that, in that, unlike real people, the characters on the television set are very rarely ever wrong in their conclusions.

It's wish fulfillment, plain and simple.

But real cops are real people, and real people have flaws, and make mistakes all of the time. This was human nature, and true for all of us. Expecting people to overcome all of their flaws and stop making mistakes was, to a degree, to ask them to stop being human.

So despite whatever job people had, they were still human. And among our human flaws was a strong tendency towards being lazy. Some overcome it, most do not.

All of this was to explain that cops were no different than audiences in preferring easy answers that could be resolved in half an hour or so. So, when presented with an easy answer that looks correct at first blush, human nature tends to roll with that unless something comes along that strongly contradicts it.

Cops had been on campus only a few minutes before finding the naked body of a young girl who had been beaten and bound, then left in a dumpster behind the school overnight. There was no doubt she had died, the only question was to the beating, or the exposure. The labs would conclude after their examinations, that it could have been either. Each was severe enough to have done her in.

Having a body, things became much more serious.

Kicking things into high gear, the cops had a 911 call naming three names. Police like recordings with actual names, and it was if nothing else a good place to start. Even minimal investigation started to return strong evidence. This girl Taylor Hebert had indeed been hospitalized earlier that year for having spent an extended period locked inside of her own locker. A minimal check into school records proved that basically nothing had been done about that event. No investigation, nobody disciplined.

The call's report about the school's principal letting the popular kids get away with anything began to bear more weight, and the investigation began to treat Principal Blackwell as a possibly hostile party, rather than a resource and fellow authority figure.

Without that friendly bias, things began to look pretty suspicious about Blackwell pretty fast, and she got invited down to the station to answer questions, wearing handcuffs in the back of a police car, before the bell rang for lunch.

Soon after she was seen escorted out, suddenly they had witnesses coming forward, students who indeed corroborated most if not all of what their anonymous 911 call had said.

So far things had been easy, and successful.

Cops like easy and successful no less than anybody.

Now, there had been an altercation earlier that morning in the Winslow High School parking lot, where shots had been fired, and eye witnesses reported seeing Taylor. However, the cops had a body on hand, and fingerprints and DNA and everything else matched this Taylor Hebert.

It was her.

So on pressing a little further, the officers investigating the eyewitnesses found a number of holes in their statements. For one thing, all reports agreed the girl seen this morning was most noticeable for all of the ways she was NOT like miss Taylor Hebert. They did not dress the same, for one. Had Taylor ever been observed with this fellow before? No. Had she ever been seen associated with a car like that before? No. Had she ever made out with a boy on school grounds before? No. Did the girl this morning speak? No. Did you ever get a clear look at her face? Mostly no.

Cellphone footage existed. Spotty and shaky coverage, as always, when those filming were trying to avoid being shot. But between the limited angles, tinted windows catching the sun's glare and being impenetrable to the cheap cameras, the short duration of the altercation and thus the filming, plus the fact the girl in question never left the car, and all the investigators could be sure of was this girl had very similar hair.

Most eye witness statements turn out to be garbage because people are lazy, and have lousy memories. They see what they assume they are going to see, more often than not. Things the cop shows do not dwell on is the very often messy business of investigation turns up seeming contrary evidence all of the time. It was down to the judgment of the officers to determine which they felt was right. The importance of similar hair got weighed against their having something in the morgue they could prove without a doubt was Taylor's actual body, and the hair got dismissed as a case of mistaken identity.

Lots of girls in the world have long, dark hair. And the eyewitnesses could not even agree that the girl was Caucasian. Those close up all tended to agree. Then, when pressed, most admitted they'd never looked. Their attention had been locked on the boy, and the altercation that followed. Some had seen the back of her head, but all that just led back to the hair.

But Emma had said it was Taylor, and so her coterie were certain it was.

So it came down to Emma's testimony, and that girl was a problem.

On that issue, she was the most questionable witness you could ask for. For instance, it could easily be the case that she chose a random girl with a slight resemblance and falsely claimed it was Taylor as an attempt at an alibi for last night's murder.

Saying that she had seen Taylor that morning, and getting her close associates to agree, came off as an amateur attempt to cover up having killed Taylor the previous evening.

However, the investigation had to move forward without her testimony for now, as Emma Barnes, one of their primary suspects, named in the call, and observed by countless people opening fire with a pistol on a crowd containing her own friends, was spending the day in surgery with the doctors trying to patch one of her lungs back together.

Unlike the PRT, the BBPD did not have Panacea on speed-dial, nor did that heroine attend to every sniffle to occur in the Bay. Some people had to get fixed up the old fashioned way, with surgeons trying to fit all of the puzzle pieces of a broken body back together again.

In any town this size, it was normal to have several people in emergency rooms fighting for their lives at any one moment. But in a town like Brockton Bay, with all of its violence, Panacea would never sleep if they tried to get her to attend to all of the shooting victims.

Her time was precious, and the Brockton Bay Police, at least, were not inclined to shove probable-murderers to the front of the line.

It was a wonder Emma hadn't died. But the bleeding had been stopped long before the police arrived, and the only person who had been seen to offer her any aid was the boy she'd been shooting at. Whatever the goop he'd smeared on her chest was, it was effective. They'd sent the bandages soaked with it off for analysis. But it smelled like something herbal.

The cops had also seen the various phone recordings made of that fight, including some decent quality close range ones done by Emma's hangers on. Those had stopped as the shooting started, as those filming had either dropped or run away. So the investigators had only long distance footage filmed around car bumpers by phones held in shaky hands for the later bits, that had mostly not observed anything useful.

They had plenty of eyewitness reports of the unknown boy with the Trans Am rendering first aid to the fallen, however, and there was no doubt that his doing so had saved several of their lives.

That, plus the fact they'd seen the earlier, close range footage where he was polite even while being set upon by a hostile mob, and the cops were generally inclined to look favorably on him. For while his attempts at conflict resolution had failed, many of them had done worse in situations less dangerous.

Outnumbered more than twenty to one, they could hardly fault him for resorting to perfectly ordinary, if well-honed, martial arts skills to defend himself, his car, and his girlfriend in a very dangerous situation.

They had testimony, but no film or direct evidence, that he had shot the Emma Barnes girl. But due consideration was being given that she had fired off eight shots before he'd fired one, and that arguably he had spared her own friends lives by stopping Emma from firing into the crowd at him (with lousy aim), and none of the investigators were planning on being too hard on him.

It was the clearest cut case of self-defense many of them had ever seen.

Considering that two of those she'd shot had died, and the fact she was already their primary suspect in another murder investigation, and the cops were willing to pursue the rest of the case with the understanding that Emma Barnes was very likely the guilty party in all kinds of things.

Not least because Madison Clements had called her father, lawyered up, made a deal and was already offering testimony on Emma as the ringleader in a whole list of criminal acts and abuses in return for immunity.

As for the third party named, there was only one Sophia on the Winslow track team, and she was a known long-term associate of both Emma Barnes and Madison Clements. That she was observed by countless witnesses and on video at the scene of that morning's altercation, but had fled the scene before the cops arrived, did not put her in their good books. That she was named by miss Clements, who was quickly becoming their star witness, in countless crimes along with Emma, only served to drive the idea home that this was a rotten character.

The fact that DNA evidence would emerge that Sophia had split her knuckles working over Taylor before dumping the body earned her a definite place on the naughty list.

What was taking shape here was a coherent picture. They had a timeline, witnesses, facts, and a body, and everything made sense. It was rare that things went together that easily, but the cops liked it when they did. And if a little bit of pounding round pegs into not-quite round holes was necessary for everything to fit, that was human nature too.

The cop shows would have their protagonist instantly seize upon that one anomalous piece of data that did not fit quite right, and unerringly make the amazing leaps of logic necessary to reach the right conclusion. But in the real world, most humans have way too many distractions to spend that much time contemplating seemingly trivial inconsistencies when things were already coming along nicely, and they had other case loads already waiting to handle after this one.

Cops in cop shows had superhuman detective skills. But that was a fantasy as much as Peter Pan was.

Nobody becomes superhuman by virtue of having been hired into a particular job. And police departments were stuck with interviewing and hiring real humans, just like every other workplace.

Actual cops were often tired and harried, and just as likely to jump for an easy and obvious answer as anyone else was.

Next up was to inform the victim's family.

One of the most difficult duties a law enforcement officer must perform is providing notification to the family of murdered victims. They don't like to do it. It's not pleasant. You see people at their worst a lot in that profession, yet somehow walking in to someone's life and informing them of the loss of a loved one still stood out as almost uniquely unpleasant. Watching them break down is almost never pretty, and you'd have to have the empathy of a stone not to feel bad doing that to them.

But the simple fact was, it's got to be done.

The police department called up one of the local Christian ministers who had volunteered to assist with such things. They arranged for social workers to be present to provide shoulders to cry on (often literal), and deal with the fallout. Then the officer stuck with the duty went and did what was required of them.

Police were good at finding people. They found Danny at work, slaving away at his usual duties.

Guards, receptionists, people's secretaries, these all tended to melt aside as the officer with the grim duty informed them all of the purpose of her errand. Danny looked up to see her enter his office, a crowd of his usual best people loitering around concerned yet at a distance, observing but not wanting to be involved yet.

The officer introduced herself. He would never recall her name. Then the unhappy news got delivered that Taylor's body had been discovered in a dumpster behind Winslow that morning, and she was dead. The officer did not volunteer more details, parents truly don't want the blow-by-blow account of how brutal was their child's passing. Though she did assure him that the probable suspects had been identified by a 911 call that morning, and two of the three were even now in custody, while they expected the third to be arrested shortly.

Danny's strangled reaction, shock, devastation and anguished cry of "NOOOO!" was on the bad end of the spectrum of parental reactions, but not the worst. That the man immediately grew suffused with rage, then despair, before transitioning rapidly between them while muttering denials about how "It couldn't be" was not the officer's favorite reaction, either, but hardly one she hadn't seen before.

Danny's friends and coworkers instantly came around to support him. The officer asked one of them if any of them would mind if a priest and a couple of social workers dropped by to offer what comfort they could, and got the go-ahead, so gave that call.

The officer stuck around for half an hour-ish, willing to answer any questions and offering what help she could. When the social workers arrived they had a data packet, including funeral information and the like, and the priest they'd sent was a good one. Between that and the immediate support of his friends, and the officer slipped out, assured the situation was well in hand.

Two things that did not happen during that meeting that might have changed the outcome, was the police officer did not mention the body had been left in the dumpster overnight, not wanting to upset him more by dwelling in unfortunate detail on his cause for grief. The other was Danny's fault for not communicating properly, a noted fault of his. Had he mentioned seeing and interacting with his daughter at breakfast that morning, they would have had cause to look further into the case.

But they didn't, it never came up, and the opportunity was missed.

Both sides were left thinking they understood the situation, when each side still had important details the other didn't. But, once again, that was fairly typical in human interactions.

One of the friends, Kurt, at one point had drawn the officer aside asked if a boy had been involved in the killing. But the answer was, no, the 911 call had identified three girls as the killers, and so far the evidence collected supported that strongly. One of them had even confessed, turned State's Evidence, and quite thoroughly implicated the other two. So it looked to be an open and shut case.

So Kurt was satisfied and the officer slipped away to deal with her own emotional reaction to having delivered the sorry news.

OoOoO

Story Day Three, April 8th 2011, Friday - Mid Morning

OoOoO

"Hey Aunt Sarah, wait up!"

Lady Photon and Laserdream pulled up from where they'd been flying along, allowing Glory Girl to catch up.

"Hello, Vicky? Did your mom call you in on this too?" Sarah Pellham, aka Lady Photon (and whom the press had nicknamed Photon Mom), asked casually.

"Yeah, something about unexploded bombs," Vicky brushed strands of her long, platinum blonde hair out of her eyes as she joined her aunt and cousin, who all resumed their flight together.

"What do you think happened?" Crystal, aka Laserdream and Sarah's daughter asked. "Did your mom tell you?"

"No," Vicky replied. "Just something about showing up here to help the police deal with some unexploded ordinance."

"I am afraid your mother was not terribly communicative with me, either," Sarah sighed. "Just to show up, and to bring Eric and Crystal if possible. But Eric is in school now..."

"So it's just me!" Crystal called out gladly. "It got me out of boring biology homework. So here I am!"

Having nothing else to say, seeing each other often there was little new to share, the three went silent for the remainder of their voyage, focused on flying. All too soon they'd arrived, and were coming in for a landing right where they saw a knot of police vehicles, and the white and orange costume of Brandish, aka Carol Dallon, Vicky's mom and Sarah's sister, making her Crystal's aunt.

"Ew!" Glory Girl landed, covering her nose. "What smells like barbecued dog hair?"

"At a guess? I'd say that's the source of it." Lady Photon gestured to the side where three massive carcasses of Hellhound's monster dogs lay.

Crystal snickered. "Barbecued dog hair from barbecued dogs? Sounds about right."

"Brandish, what's going on?" Lady Photon approached her sister, who was talking with some police officers, to ask.

"Gang fight last night between the Undersiders and the ABB left a warzone that reminds some officers of Vietnam," Brandish told them curtly.

"The Undersiders, didn't Lung... err, kill them off last night?" Crystal asked, a little distaste in her voice as she brushed a lock of hair out of her face.

"Brutally," Brandish answered without preamble. "Hellhound's body was found right over there, next to her giant, monster dogs. Two other bodies lay nearby that we have tentatively identified as Tattletale and Regent, only Lung left a footprint where Regent's face was, and he spent some time kicking the ash of what used to be Tattletale, so we'll wait for DNA evidence to be sure. All three were burned to cinders, along with the dogs."

Crystal blanched. That all being a little more horrible than she'd been expecting.

"Then over there, two blocks that way," Brandish gestured. "Police found Grue this morning, along with a fifth, previously unknown Undersider. Both were unburned. Bodies shot in the back four times in the case of Grue, five in the unknown cape's. Shot as they were fleeing by an ABB member who'd tripped over a concealed wire and fell on punji stakes, but had not yet died when the last two Undersiders tried fleeing past him."

"So what are we doing here?" Vicky asked, not liking the grisly details any more than anybody else did.

Brandish considered the police activity around her. "The PRT hauled off the cape bodies hours ago. Although in some cases they had to use an industrial vacuum cleaner to do it. And we're still waiting on them coming back with heavy equipment to lift and carry off Hellound's giant dogs. Other than that, they've left all of the cleanup to the police. Captain Wilkins called me in as a favor to help, once they'd discovered all of the traps strewn throughout the area. They're afraid to enter, so they haven't even located all of the gang members bodies yet. So that's our first job, to do a slow flyby over the area to identify where ABB members have fallen, some of whom may still be alive. Then we'll deal with the booby traps left behind. Crystal and Sarah can take care of all of the bear traps and punji stakes, I'll cut the tripwires, and Vicky can deal with the bombs."

"Sometimes being invulnerable sucks," Vicky groused. "You get all the worst jobs."

"Better it goes off on you than an officer doesn't go home tonight," Brandish chided.

"Any other news? I heard something about a kidnapping, while Lung was attacking the PRT building." Crystal tried to change the subject.

"Yes," Brandish replied. "I was just discussing that with the police. Apparently armed men with assault rifles broke into the Alcott home last night around one AM, right when Lung was attacking the PRT, and kidnapped the mayor's niece. The family have not received a ransom note yet, but police are confident we can expect one any time now."

"Poor kid," Sarah said, as she lifted off to begin her search for ABB bodies.

The unlucky one to first stumble across Oni Lee's remains hurled at the sight of them.

OoOoO

Lisa cackled, actually cackled, as her fingers raced across the keyboard of her laptop.

She had gone early, as in many hours-til-dawn early, and insisted Jared drive them into town where they had power and internet access.

He had agreed, and at her request had dropped them off here, at a former hospital that had once been a safehouse for the Teeth, back when they had been in town. The police had gone through it with dogs immediately after that brutal gang had been kicked out of Brockton by the Marquis, and had cleaned out all of the human remains, but had not had time to do more. So it still looked like a place that had had too many slasher flicks filmed there.

As a matter of fact, it probably had, only the 'actors' had not been acting. That kind of thing was really the Teeth's trademark.

Still, the homeless avoided it because of that association, as no one could truly trust that the Teeth were gone forever, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was present themselves as a ready victim by being in one of their homes should they arrive back unexpectedly.

The Teeth had done some, presumably illegal, modifications so the power and water both ran fine, and the police had not turned those back off. The building was still structurally sound, its only problem was nobody wanted the place because of the association. Frankly, the former hospital was scheduled for demolition, and it was by its mention on that list that Lisa had found it. Only the city did not have the budget for demolitions work. So it languished in perpetual limbo.

Boarded up, unwanted, and abandoned.

And perfect for Lisa's needs.

So long as she got Jared to come through and clean some of the bloodstains from off the walls, that is. The girl had a hardy constitution, but the things her power wanted to tell her about the bloodstains and the ways some of those people had died... Brrrr! So she kept to herself in a small room near one of the entrances to do her thing, a place she'd already had him scour til the paint came off, and then clean.

But she had needed the internet, and she had needed to get to it before anyone in the ABB gang woke up that morning.

Lisa had not slept, spending all night going over the records they'd stolen from Lung's secret hideout when they'd hijacked the trucks carrying everything from his main base to a new location. All of the gang's records had been in there, including how much they made by prostitution (a staggering sum, his pimps alone were taking home 30k a week) but considering how Lung kidnapped young girls and forced them into sex slavery, he was not big on paying them, so profits were obscenely high. He also pressured the young girls in his gang to work at erotic massage parlors. Those he paid, and quite well actually, but the prices were so much higher with a 'willing' girl able to fake enjoying her time with her client, those actually made him more money before the work inevitably burned the young women out.

As it did to virtually everyone who tried the trade. A person could only stand it so long before losing their soul, at which point giving up and dying was kind of routine.

So Lisa considered herself an angel of mercy as she shut down the process.

With the account books kept by experts for Lung (she did not imagine for a moment Lung did the accounting himself), Lisa had the inside information on everything the gang did that either made or spent money. She knew what they made, how they made it, and what they did with the money afterwards.

The ABB had been making money hand over fist, hundreds of millions of dollars per year on prostitution alone - which should not be too surprising, as Atlanta alone had an annual $290 million sex trade that the authorities knew about, and Atlanta was only about 50% larger than Brockton Bay. Also, Atlanta did not have anywhere close to Brockton's homeless problem.

Looking at their numbers, Lisa had to wonder if every relief check from some charity organization meant to ease the suffering of the city's homeless, or merely most of them, had been spent on patronizing Lung's various brothels. But either way, it was clearly a major source of entertainment for Brockton's homeless, as a great deal of their ready cash flowed into it.

She knew drugs to be insanely profitable, but Lung's gang made only about half the profits on drugs they did on prostitutes. No wonder his troops were always kidnapping new girls from the schools and off the streets, the business was always expanding... and replacing the losses from suicides, of course.

Just another business expense on Lung's account books, tossing girls' bodies into incinerators to destroy the diseased evidence.

Lisa felt herself a positive saint while she stole those funds, cleaned out those accounts, scoured the gang's banking for every dime that could be moved out of their reach for good, and basically waged financial war upon the gang using their own ledgers and account books.

The bulk of that had been done before 5AM that morning, using 24 hour online banking to transfer funds away from the ABB accounts for good. Since then Lisa had gotten vindictive, and was preying on the individual accounts of the pimps themselves, taking their money in a gushing flood. Pretty soon, when she was done with that, Lisa had the receipts from when they'd ordered fast food for ABB meetings, and from there could access phone records and could get the credit card numbers they'd used, cards whose accounts she planned to be overdrawn before anyone got up that morning.

Lisa had lived on the street herself for a short time after coming to Brockton Bay, and the sure knowledge of how close she had come to being captured by Lung's men instead of Coil's, and being forced into this life herself, was leaving her angry as [bleep] and ready to spit nails.

So she was taking her temper out on the ABB instead.

Glancing aside to Dinah, who had come down from the Belmont estate with them in the early AM because it was dangerous for anyone to stay in that rotting building all alone, Lisa rather guiltily chose not to mention that Lung did not discriminate based on color, gender, or age when it came to his whores. In fact, a thriving corner of his business' clients preferred to patronize prostitutes even younger than Dinah.

And Lung had been only too happy to accommodate them.

So Lisa felt even more vindicated when she played 'scorched Earth' on the ABB's finances.

Dinah currently lay in a hammock that Jared had provided, and set up in a corner of the small office that Lisa was using, doing a for-her familiar activity.

Dinah was plotting.

She knew, generally, what Lisa was up to, stealing the ABB accounts blind, just as Taylor had taken their ready cash away yesterday. She was okay with that. No, Dinah was calculating the odds of whether she could go home, and things did not look good.

The problem was not Jared. No, he would return her, 98.7652% chance whenever she'd ask him. She knew that even before she first got into the car with him, that day he'd pulled up alongside her. She also knew that he would never hurt her unless she provoked him severely. Since then she'd run more numbers, and about the only way he would not return her to her parents right when she asked him to was if he would be dropping her off into an active war zone at the time.

Which happened with a disturbing 72.625% frequency when anyone called ahead and let them know she was coming home. Coil's men would almost invariably be waiting to ambush her, and very frequently getting into combat with Triumph or New Wave as she arrived.

No, the problem was, Coil had a 93.666% chance to successfully kidnap her within one day of her returning home. About half the time he'd drop off her decoy made of tofu to take her place, which served to convince most everybody she was still at home, and nobody even realizing the real Dinah was gone drastically reduced the odds of anyone rescuing her.

Ever.

The odds of her escaping Coil, once he'd got hold on her, currently hovered just a little under 12%. And what he'd do to her, what he'd already done to her decoy, was not pretty.

So currently, the only safety Dinah could see for herself in the future was to hang around with Jared and his crowd. Her odds for personal safety, living a happy life, just about everything good got better the longer she stayed, although her odds of wanting to go home diminished by the day as well.

But since the alternative was to be drugged to the gills, emaciated on a medical table in Coil's base while he used her as his own personal oracle, using the information gained to expand his control and make more people miserable, Dinah supposed she could get used to this new arrangement.

Even though the current Belmont disguise had only a 23.918% chance of making it long term, Jared's group was still the safest one to hang out with.

Her odds for going to the PRT were almost as bad as if she went and presented herself to Coil. The drugs they'd use to 'maximize her gift' were not as bad, and there was less time spent emaciated on a table, but her chance to be rescued approached zero percent, and unlike Coil, who misused his tools til destruction, she'd be the PRT's plaything for far, far longer, doing things for people almost as cruel.

With a sigh, Dinah resolved to at least ask that someone to send flowers to her decoy's funeral, which ought to be in about a week.

Speaking of, she had to distract Taylor, as if the older girl realized her father thought her dead she'd return to reassure him, and the numbers looked far better if she'd waited a while first - As her showing up alive would derail her tormentor's trials for murder, at the very least.

And Taylor's numbers if those three stayed around to torment her looked very scary indeed. That girl was not nearly as stable as she, or even Jared supposed. And if she should be pushed to her limits...

... bad numbers indeed.

Of course, Dinah had only a 14.215% chance of successfully carrying out this plan alone. So...

"Hey Lisa?" she called to the only other girl in the room.

"Hm? Yeah? What is it?"

OoOoO

Story Day Three, April 8th 2011, Friday - Mid Day

OoOoO

Lung woke around noon to find numbers were very bad for himself and his gang, too.

Apparently all of their money had gone missing overnight.

On the one hand, Lung did not concern himself too much over the setback. Since gaining his powers, money had never been any kind of problem - he just had to threaten those that had some. On the other hand, it was an intolerable insult, not to be endured!

How dare anyone defy his power like this? It was outrageous!

Braving Lung's rage was not for the faint of heart, especially after last night. In fact, only one of his accountants had been there to bring him the unhappy news, and that one only got the courage because they were pretty sure they knew who did all of the computer hacking that had drained all of their accounts.

Shadow Stalker.

Not that the accountants believed she had done it personally. But with the money she'd stolen only the day before, it was obvious she had hired experts to do the rest for her. After all, who else would make multiple million-dollar deposits to the Official Shadow Stalker Fan Club?

Deposits the accountant could trace straight from Lung's secret slush funds?

Three million dollars of Lung's money would be providing fan club members with Official Shadow Stalker merchandise, and the ward herself got a cut out of all donations!

Ever since, Lung had been contemplating his revenge.

He did not dare to attack the PRT building directly anymore - though he would never say or admit to such to anyone else, of course. Still, Alexandria scared him, though that was another fact that he was admitting to no one.

So the question became, how to draw out Shadow Stalker to where he could kill her?

In the end, there could be only one answer. He gave orders for Oni Lee to attack City Hall to draw off the Protectorate heroes... only to be informed that Oni Lee was dead. It had been on the news since it had been discovered by New Wave mid-morning, only Lung had been asleep, and no one dared to wake him to inform him of the unhappy tidings.

So he gave orders for Bakuda... only to be informed that she had slipped in her shower that morning and broken a leg, and while she could Tinker, could not be expected to pull off any kind of field duty, not and be expected to escape afterwards. So if he sent her, it would be a one-way mission.

Unacceptable. He could not risk losing the only other cape he had left, especially not a Tinker! Not when sending her bombs would do just as well.

So he sent gang members armed with Bakuda's bombs, what supply she had anyway, to go set them off around City Hall, the Forsberg Gallery, and one or two other locations like that, so the Protectorate would be busy.

Then he would have some low level gang members attack Brockton's Central Bank!

Thinking they were only going up against unpowered thugs, the PRT was all but sure to deploy the Wards to resolve the problem. They had their own reputation to maintain, after all, and if they could not protect so central a feature as the bank, would the public trust them to protect anything at all?

No, with the Protectorate busy they would send in the Wards. Then they would discover that, instead of being unpowered, his men would be led by Lung himself!

It was a perfect plan!

OoOoO

Totally unconcerned, not having thought through the probable unhappy aftermath of their rather eventful morning, Taylor and Jared had been visiting potential drama clubs, getting familiar with the buildings, walking around the areas outside, going inside where possible to learn the layouts (easily accomplished, one of their first stops had been a bookstore, and Jared had used Scholar's Touch to fully read several illustrated guides on locksmithing and lockpicking to bring his skills current) and in a few cases meeting the people involved, and once even managing to attend a class.

So the backstory of their meeting in their civilian identities was now far more established. They'd even stopped for burgers together at one of the places they'd agreed they'd gone to when Taylor first met 'Rick'.

They had topped this off by visiting a music store and picking up a few things. Jared had called ahead, and found the right place, so they emerged from the shop bearing a new flute in its case - a flute identical to the one Annette had purchased from that very store many years ago, based on the store's record of her old purchase.

Taylor's eyes were shining with unshed tears all of their way back to the car.

Once in the privacy of the car, he held her while she cried. Then they went and tried a couple flute and clarinet duets in the park, laughing when they made mistakes, and when they were done, it was time for Taylor to have more driving lessons, starting out in the city, then going all of the way up that shaded foothills back road until they'd reached the Belmont estate.

By which time, she felt she was really beginning to get the hang of it.

Taylor had had all kinds of ideas about what Jared might want of her, getting her all alone with him in this isolated location. Even if it was just dancing, she was all for it.

Instead, he presented her with a tuning fork, one of a set he'd bought at the music store.

Confused, she took it and met his eyes, uncertain what he wanted for her to do with it.

"Well," he gave her a happy smile. "Strike it."

She did, and it gave off a tone.

It was a tuning fork. That's what those did.

Still confused, she met his eyes again, seeking for an explanation, and he did not disappoint.

Gladly, he expounded, "Just as you have practiced with your bugs, learning to use their senses of taste and smell, now you hold in your hand the key to a far more valuable ability: hearing. That," he pointed to her tuning fork, "gives off a very specific tone every time you tap it. That's what they're made for. Your ears hear and interpret that tone, and your brain knows what it means. BUT! Bugs hear things very differently than we do. They even hear differently from species to species. Only now that does not matter, because you hold in your hand the Rosetta Stone, the key to translating bug hearing. Because whenever you strike that, you know *exactly* what that tone is and means to your own hearing - so *whatever* the bugs sense when you strike that, means exactly the same thing!"

Taylor's eyes went round and her jaw dropped.

"As you can see, I've purchased for you a whole set." He laid open the box before her. "You can experiment with a single species of bug at a time, or surround yourself with entire amphitheaters of every species, at all ranges, however it works best for you to learn to interpret the sounds. Then, once you've learned to recognize the musical notes through them, we'll play actual music, first live, then recorded, first on keyboards, then less precise instruments, until you can understand what you are hearing through them. Then we'll go from strictly instrumental to singing. Then from singing to voice. Soon you'll be able to understand conversations through your bugs, Taylor. And you'll get a thousand times the information your bugs brought to you before, being able to understand peoples' words."

She dropped her tuning fork and hugged him for all she was worth.

A portion of her brain did dutifully note what the bugs senses heard when the tuning fork struck floor as she gave him her first kiss, however.

Well, the first kiss she'd initiated to a non-relative who was a boy, and wasn't Uncle Alan.

It counted.

OoOoO

Two Hours Later

OoOoO

"Taylor, there is a technique called 'Fake it, until you make it' that involves pretending to be more confident, until you actually are. I used it myself to overcome the crippling shyness I had when I was younger. You can too."

The two teens walked, hand in hand into an Empire bar, right as the place was getting ready to open.

The bartender, a man with a carefully cultivated viking look, glanced up at them and barked, "Hey! You two! We're not open yet, and even if we were, I'm not selling any drinks to kids. So get out of here! And don't go lying about yer age, I'm not even gunna bother to card you, now git!"

The bartender waved one beefy arm intending for them to scamper right back out of his domain.

The young man smiled. "Oh, but I'm not here to buy. I'm here to sell."

The bartender gave him a disbelieving look.

The young man shrugged, unconcerned. "No law against having hobbies. C'mon, I've got a stake-bed truck parked around the side. Let me give you a few samples, see if you think it's worth buying."

Closing the cash register he'd been loading up in preparation for the night, the faux-viking gestured for two other men to accompany him, while using the other hand to check the pistol at the small of his back. Finally, picking up a billy club in his good hand, and followed by two other men armed likewise, they followed the kid out.

He did indeed have a stake-bed truck, and the back of it was filled with 30 gallon wooden casks.

Probably rotgut of the worst sort, the bartender thought cynically.

But then, there was a market for that among the homeless sort.

The young man got to the back of the truck and opened up the gate, standing aside with a smile. "Okay, we've got white wines, and reds, dark ale and stout, whiskey and brandy. Pick a cask and it's yours."

"And we're supposed to trust you?" one of the heavies remarked.

But the youth was not offended. "Nah. A lot of people say 'Trust me'. Most of them are liars. Forget that. Don't trust me. Test everything, I don't care. It'll stand any test you give it. Don't trust me, trust your own tests, or experience, or whatever you do with it.

"Don't take my word for if it's any good or not, try it. Pass it around. Test it however you like. It's yours, a good mid-quality wine, or stout, or whatever. Then I'll be back tomorrow to see if you'd like to buy more. I can supply high quantities at very low prices. It will all be the same quality as these, which you can test at any time, and that's fine."

Suspiciously, the bartender got up into the back of the truck, switching out the billy club for a tool he righted one of the casks and broached it. Good aroma.

He tasted it. Good flavor.

Decent kick.

Nodding slightly, he righted the next cask.

They were quite a bit better than mid-quality. He ended up having the men roll six casks from off the back of the stake-bed and into the bar, as much as he dared, writing out a receipt for a criminally small amount, and handing it to the kid. "Hey, we'll pass these around a bit, see if the crowd likes them. If they do, we'll have more business for you. Stop by tomorrow and see."

The bartender hurried inside to call Victor. That cape would be able to tell if there was anything funny about this stuff.

As they were driving the stake-bed truck away, Taylor asked, "So, why are you doing business with Nazis?"

"Several reasons," Jared in his Rick persona replied easily. "You already know the first one. Lisa told me they are the only gang in town to really run any bars. Since the government likes regulating industries to a ridiculous extreme, and I don't have generations of paperwork showing how they had experts properly examine my grandfather's anus before he first heard the word "booze", I can't sell to ordinary establishments. So that leaves only criminal ones to accept my unlicensed, unregulated product."

"But I am going to be bringing in all of that ABB cash, and Lisa surely has found something..." Taylor temporized.

He nodded. "Which brings us to our second point. People who have a lot of money, but no visible income, are just generally assumed to be drug dealers. Anymore, they treat it as probable cause. Now this is a problem, because I've done enough checking now to know that the classic car market is depressed. If those two sell for anything approaching an appropriate price, they won't do it in anything close to an acceptable time. We could be waiting for months, and in the meantime here is Rick living without any visible income. That's bad. As a suspected drug dealer without gang protection, Rick would vanish almost immediately, just to make some officer's arrest record look good."

He made a turn. "And it is far from unknown for police, especially in departments struggling for funds, as Brockton Bay's most certainly is, to plant some drugs on their target themselves in order to make it easier on themselves to prove you are guilty."

"But doesn't that just make this worse?" Taylor asked. "Now they can prove you've committed a crime."

"Not yet they can't," Jared grinned. "And should they start looking, what they will find is not a drug dealer, but a moonshiner. Back to the principle of 'when accused of something big, admit to something small.' Drugs are illegal some sixty different ways, moonshine just boils down to tax evasion. I haven't paid the Federal government what they consider their rightful share of my operation, so I don't have their official permission to operate. It's still illegal, but the scale is so different that's like pointing out that jaywalking is a crime. It's true, but really the only time the cops enforce that is when you've annoyed them for some other reason - which I plan not to do."

"Couldn't you get licensed?"

"Not without production machinery - which I don't have. Employees - which I don't have. Licenses and permits and fees and registrations on equipment, property, and an approved product - all of which I don't have. Complete with inspections - which I haven't paid to have done on those buildings I don't have, and so on. All of which requires a small mountain of money to pay for, which would require I pull out some gang cash to cover, and suddenly I've got money coming from nowhere, which they will simply assume to be drug cash, and suddenly we are back where I started; presumed to be a drug dealer for the crime of supporting myself without a visible source of income."

He grimaced. "It is not for no reason there are so many homeless. Many consider the hassle of dealing with our bureaucracy too great a burden to deal with, and simply give up on trying. Once the system becomes upset at you, which it can do over even slight mis-steps, it is simply easier to give up rather than to try to jump through all of the hoops, hoping to make it happy again. But that's enough on that subject. Reason three for selling to the Empire is that I simply prefer to have their members inside of bars drinking cheap booze, than to be out on the streets abusing minorities."

Taylor bobbed a nod. "Alright, I can see that." Then she turned to him curiously. "Is there another reason?"

"Sure, I was wondering if you'd ask." He favored her with a tight smile. "And I saved the best for last. Because, you see, I don't like the Empire, and would like to destroy them as an organization someday. But I could never do it in a straight-up fight. So I revert to the rule of: before you stab someone in the back it is necessary to get behind them first. As a business associate I gain some limited access to their organization, access that I can use to plant the seeds that will eventually bring it down."

OoOoO

Story Day Three, April 8th 2011, Friday - Evening

OoOoO

Lung had been lying in wait as his ABB minions had charged into the Brockton Bay Central Bank. He'd brought more men that he'd at first intended, because of his accountants pleading for him to steal enough operating cash to build his gang back from its recent losses on.

Bah! Prove your strength and money will come. Still, it was simple enough to shut up the simpering fools, so he had allowed them to enlarge the operation to include a safecracker and a few more people to carry out the loot.

Cracking the safe was time consuming, normally too risky. Successful bank jobs are always done quickly, in and out. But with Lung there to scatter the police, escape for his men could be assured either way.

Then they arrived, the Wards.

At first he could not spot her. Then he had seen her, Shadow Stalker! In among the crowds gathered outside the cordon created by police cruisers around the bank.

Lung had emerged from his vehicle and roared her name.

There had been some confusion, and he had lost her for precious seconds as the crowd split apart and dispersed, but then Shadow Stalker had appeared on top of one of the local buildings, fleeing in cowardice, and the chase was on! Buildings had seemed to fly by in a blur not worthy of his attention. She had glanced back over her shoulder from time to time in increasing desperation, until finally he had her cornered on the end of a pier.

He had charged straight towards her, exploding in flames!

The next thing Lung knew, he was miles out to sea beyond the bay, and no clue what had happened to him.

OoOoO

Standing on the edge of the water, having just tricked Lung into charging for miles off the end of a 40ft pier, Vista removed her fake Shadow Stalker mask and cape. Distasteful things that they were, they had proven useful.

In minutes she was back at the scene of the bank standoff. The crowds were just beginning to pull themselves together again once the fear of Lung had passed, but Vista had no trouble locating the little redhaired girl she'd borrowed the cape from. She went back and presented them to the fan, saying, "Thank you for letting me borrow your Officially Licensed Shadow Stalker Mask, Cape, and Boots. They were very helpful in allowing me to resolve a crisis. Would you like for me to sign them for you?"

OoOoO

Lung came to on his cot again, frostbite blackening his fingers, nose, and who knew what all else, as he stared at Alexandria cleaning her nails on the end of his bed again.

Seeing him awake, she stood up. "That's three more favors you owe now, for a total of six. Unless you'd like to go back to where you were dying?"

Angrily, he shook his head, and demanded, "How did I die?"

"Vista tricked you into dumping yourself in the water again." Alexandria sounded faintly amused as she stood up and left, leaving Lung behind her, glowering.

It had been a perfect plan.

And it would have worked, if not for those meddling kids!

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Vista is sharp and on the ball. When she learned how Alexandria had effectively neutralized Lung the previous day, that went right into her playbook of tactics, as she's just shown here.

"Dunk rage dragon in water, out to sea as far as possible, then disengage."

Now, it's quite probable the ward does not think this is a deadly strategy, after all Lung survived it when Alexandria did it to him. But without Cauldron's interference... Well, lucky for Lung they've got a thing for collecting favors and like to preserve strong capes.

The real Dinah was using her power to avoid Coil's kidnapping attempts, actively countering them insofar as that was possible. However her decoy does not share her power, so without that active blocking, would inevitably have fallen prey to one of those attempts sooner than the real Dinah did in canon.

And hey! The Protectorate and PRT and all of that was all tied up dealing with Lung's rampage. Perfect time to strike! And this time it came up heads, so Coil's mercs bagged one pre-teen decoy.

He is going to be so very frustrated with her that none of his 'inducements' are going to work to get that decoy using Dinah's gift for him, isn't he?

You know, I can frustrate the plans of bad men and have it amuse me all day.

Emma. Ah, Emma. From her point of view, Taylor skipped most of a day of school, then came waltzing in acting as if she wasn't even afraid of her!

Recall, the tofu decoys are perfect physically, not mentally. They try, and they mostly succeed, but those close to them can tell something is off by their blunted reactions. And who knows Taylor better than Emma? Emma, who has been honing and refining Taylor's fear of her over a year and a half, now sees that fear of her severely diminished.

How could she react to this any other way that trying to put down, what was to her this obvious act of defiance?

Aaaand Emma going WAY overboard with her beat-downs of Taylor is how the whole Worm story got started. No Emma, no locker. No locker no cape powers, and Taylor, the original star of the story, doesn't even merit a blip on anyone's radar.

So Emma and her friends go overboard once again in trying to put Taylor back in her place, and the decoy does not survive it.

Emma spends about twelve hours concerned she's going to get caught. Emotions are high.

Then Taylor shows up in the morning, happy and looking well, as though nothing Emma ever did to her even mattered in the slightest.

If she did not blow her top over that 'provocation' she would not be Emma Barnes.

Now would Emma, mentally unwell, and obsessed with strength, actually having a small pistol in her purse strike anybody as ridiculously out of character? Frankly, I could see her father providing it, along with all kinds of instructions that it was for self-defense only, and should never be used unless things were desperate... and I could also see Emma throwing all of that advice out of the window the moment she got upset.

I also see her as a lousy shot who promised her dad she would practice a lot, but who never liked the noise or smell, and so gave up all of that tedium, telling herself she was already good enough.