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Chapter 76: Depravation 8-1

Depravation 8.1

"So? How are they?"

Lisa fingered one of the golden studs in her ears, brushing over the deceptively simple rune etched into its surface.

"Pretty nice, actually."

"No discomfort?" I asked. "No itching or reactions or anything?"

"No more than a normal earring," she answered. "Actually, I forgot they were even there for a while."

I nodded, pleased to hear it. Pendants were simple things, chains equally as simple. Earrings were a bit more complicated, because a little more went into making sure they could stay in place. I'd been a little worried I would get the clasp wrong and they might cause problems or be too uncomfortable to wear, but I'd modeled them off of a pair of Mom's old earrings and that seemed to have worked out just fine.

"And…they worked? They did what I made them for?"

She grinned. "I found a gold dollar while I was out."

She produced the coin from…somewhere with a flick of her wrist and showed it off, giving me a good view of the head stamped into its surface in profile. I might have been more impressed if I wasn't focused on making sure the earrings actually did their damn job.

That, and magic tricks weren't quite that cool when you could do, you know, actual magic. Illusion and sleight of hand were hard to compare to the real thing.

"That's it?" I asked, a little disappointed. I'd been expecting something a bit…more.

"Nope," she replied, still grinning. "See, when I bent down to pick up that gold dollar, a businessman on his way into work didn't see me and spilled his coffee down the back of my shirt."

"That doesn't…"

That sounded like bad luck.

"Not finished!" Lisa sing-songed. "After he spilled his coffee on me — a double shot espresso with enough sugar to send me bouncing off the walls, let me tell you — he apologized profusely, opened up his wallet, and handed me a hundred dollars to go and buy new clothes."

Here, she gestured down at her body, where, I noticed now, she was wearing a different shirt and a new pair of jeans. Not radically different, which was why I hadn't noticed earlier, but different enough to be obvious now that I was actually looking for it.

"That's… That's actually really good," I said. Under my breath, I added, "Maybe a little too good."

I'd meant to rebalance her luck and her karma, so that she didn't have to worry about random catastrophes striking her when and wherever she went. Giving her the kind of luck that was probably good enough for a winning lottery ticket? That hadn't been where I'd meant for things to go.

On the other hand… Did I owe her a little of that good luck? Maybe I did. That geis was the entire reason why it was necessary in the first place, and even if it had made perfect sense at the time, I wished I could go back and shake my past self and tell her not to be such an idiot.

I also kinda wished I could go back and shake Lisa's past self and tell her not to be such an idiot as to go through with the bank robbery, but that was neither here nor there.

"I think it's just swinging back to the other extreme while it balances out," Lisa said, waving it off. Because of course she'd heard me. "Make up for the whole losing arm thing, you know? Things'll probably be back to normal by next week."

"Right." And if they weren't, well, I'd deal with that when the time came. It might even be a better idea to leave it be, so that Lisa could avoid the trouble of the gangs and the looters who were making the rounds in the aftermath of the flooding and the damage from the battle. "Oh, speaking of, how's everything with your arm? No strange feelings, no awkwardness, nothing unusual?"

Lisa grinned.

"Nope. It's good as new, like I never lost it in the first place."

Because I'd used the same spell that had given Vista back her arm, so that was the way it should be. For all intents and purposes, that was what the spell did.

That didn't mean I shouldn't check and make sure everything was okay, though. Vista had an entire bureaucracy with checks and balances to keep an eye on her health, probably half a dozen doctors and scientists to do tests to make sure her arm functioned properly, and if anything had gone wrong or started bothering her, Panacea had been just a phone call away.

Right now, Lisa only had me. Maybe Amy, if I could convince her to take a look at a girl she didn't like very much.

"No weakness or tremors?"

She laughed.

"Isn't this the sort of thing my doctor should be asking? Where's Amy when you need her?" She shook her head. "Come to think of it, she's the closest thing I've got to a primary care physician, isn't she? That's kinda sad. Anyway. Everything's fine, it all checks out. The only tremors I get are after one of our workout sessions."

Against my will, my lips pulled up at the corners.

"On that subject," Lisa went on, "how am I doing, Chief? It's been a while since I got a progress update."

"Rank C," I informed her. "So you're about where I was at the bank."

"And the Wards? Please tell me I'm ahead of them. I need something to lord over Vista, because she'sso fuckin' cute when she's flustered."

I shook my head. "Rank C. Same as you."

"How the hell are they… Ah." She nodded sagely, like she'd figured it out on her own. "The rate of progression increases the more people you're teaching, right? So the Wards are learning faster because you're teaching them all at once."

And it didn't surprise me that she had. Lisa could be really insightful, sometimes, scarily so.

"Basically, yeah. I'm…not really sure how to get into it without getting confusing."

The exact specifics were a bit hard to explain, but that was the heart of the matter. It helped that my own rank had increased quite a bit from when I'd first started giving Lisa lessons, so the speed of progress was more rapid because of that, too.

At its core, that Noble Phantasm was about "bettering oneself." Or maybe "achieving greatness through self-effort." It wasn't about becoming a mentor to a great hero, it was about bringing out a person's full potential, because that was what the great heroes of the past were: realized potential. Cúchulainn was a great example of this very thing, because if Scáthach had not mentored him and nurtured his talents, then the legend of Culann's Hound would never have gotten any further than his engagement to Emer.

The hint was in the name. Fun bit of trivia? "Láech" also meant "layman." In Aífe's time, it could mean either, and so the "Aite Láechrad" was not merely the mentor of heroes, but the mentor who turned laymen into heroes.

Therefore, the stronger my own grasp on what I was teaching, the faster my students learned. The more my students learned, the stronger my grasp on what I was teaching. Naturally, the more students I was teaching, the faster my grasp on what I was teaching grew.

If I'd known that from the beginning, I might have actually been tempted to join the Wards, back in February. I could've mastered these martial arts in a week or two.

Lisa shrugged. "Can't be helped, I guess. You planning on taking them all the way, or are you just gonna stop once they're strong enough and fast enough for your liking?"

"I… Maybe? Piggot might be a little nervous about having a bunch of teenagers who can punch through solid steel, though."

My grasp on her character wasn't perfect, but… Yeah. I couldn't see the Director letting me turn everyone into high level Brutes and Movers. I wasn't sure I wanted to, either. It was one thing to teach people self-defense, but it was another entirely to give people the strength to commit mass murder with a single punch.

"Yeah, that's one of the reasons I haven't made the jump and joined the Wards," said Lisa. "One of the reasons I didn't in the first place, back when I got my powers. Too many people telling you what you can and can't do with them."

Uncomfortable, I shifted and tried not to think about my own problem on that front. Instead, I pivoted and changed the subject.

"Did you get a good look at the rest of the city?" I asked.

The knowing look Lisa gave me told me she knew exactly what I was doing. Fucking Thinkers.

She went along with it, though.

"I didn't go around and inspect everything," she prefaced it, "but I got a decent enough look at the damage, yeah."

"And?"

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table.

"Well, Downtown is pretty much untouched. There's a few buildings that will need to be fixed up, some holes that will need to be filled in, and the municipal authority or whoever keeps track of that stuff is probably going to give the water mains some pretty thorough inspections, but on the overall, something like ninety-five percent of it all isn't any worse off than it was two weeks ago. There are a few buildings that will probably need to be demolished, if they can't be repaired, but like I said: Downtown is essentially untouched. Hell, the mall reopened basically the day after."

A minor miracle in and of itself, and at least some of that could be laid at my feet, for keeping Leviathan's attention focused on me for the majority of the fight and denying him access to the bulk of the bay. If he'd been free to roam as he liked and use the ocean to try and drown us, the damage would've been much more significant.

I should've been happy about that, but I was just disappointed and a little frustrated. Sure, things could've been worse, great, but if my original plan had worked, then there wouldn't have been any damage at all.

"The real issue there is water damage," she went on. "Most of the places on higher ground are fine, but a lot of Downtown was covered in two or three feet of water. I could see the water line on the sides of several places. It's going to be weeks for all of that to get checked out and make sure that everything's still structurally sound and there's no mold hazards and stuff. Any businesses based out of those buildings are gonna be facing some tough choices until they're all cleared. Tough choices like closing up shop in Brockton Bay or moving their headquarters to another city."

In other words, even with the damage limited the way it had been, Brockton Bay would probably see another economic collapse. Just like it had with the shipping industry a decade or two ago.

Whatever uncertainties I might have had before about Leviathan and his role in the future, they were now easily dispelled, in the face of all the lives that would be ruined in the aftermath of his attack. I'd just have to come up with a better way of facing the end than relying on the Endbringers to be there to help.

There was probably some kind of irony to that.

"And the rest of the city?"

Lisa grimaced and let out a sigh.

"The Docks and Old Town are a shitshow," she told me bluntly. "I didn't go in, so I don't know too many details about who's doing what or who's taken what territory, but the majority of the damage Leviathan did was out there. Just because he couldn't bring in a bunch of big waves doesn't mean he couldn't grab the water that was in the bay and hit the city with it. There's a bunch of places where buildings got torn down like that, and some of them were just in bad enough shape that they only needed that little push in the first place."

She carded a hand through her hair.

"I'd give it…maybe twenty percent of the infrastructure down there is in ruins," she went on. "Maybe as high as thirty. That means a lot of people who were squatting in those buildings no longer have a place to sleep. It's okay for now, because we've got FEMA and disaster relief to help out, plus whatever donations start rolling in as support for killing an Endbringer, and a lot of those completely homeless people can go to one of the camps, but once that starts to dwindle and things settle back in, there'll be a lot more riots than we've been seeing the past few days."

I briefly closed my eyes and let out a breath through my nose.

Better, perhaps, than things had been after the battle Khepri fought against Leviathan, but not a perfect result. I was probably a fool for thinking such a thing had ever been possible, and maybe it wasn't, but…

That perfect ending, I wanted it.

But Lisa wasn't done, yet.

"The Boardwalk is in rough shape, too. It's not totally gone, but a good chunk of it got torn up, so most of the businesses there are either gonna have to pack up and leave or lose tons of money while things get rebuilt. I don't have any idea what the Trainyard looks like, but it's probably not in pristine condition, either."

"In other words," I translated, "even though I killed Leviathan and prevented tons of damage to the city, things are bad enough that this whole place might get condemned anyway."

Lisa grimaced and sighed, shaking her head. "You're not stupid. This city has been on life support for nearly a decade. All Leviathan did was push up the inevitable collapse from ten years to maybe ten weeks."

I let out another breath through my nose, harsh and short.

"Yeah. Guess so."

Some part of me had always known, ever since I was old enough to understand it. Brockton Bay had been surviving on the support of the big businesses downtown and the cash that flowed into the Boardwalk. For everyone else, life had been getting steadily harder and jobs had been trickling away, and it had been like that for as long as I could remember.

But this was still my home. It might have been a hellhole where hopes and dreams went to die, but it was my fucking hellhole. My house was here, the house where I had grown up, where I had spent so many afternoons with Emma, where my mother had raised me, where all of my best memories had been made. Mom's grave was in this very city.

Through force, Khepri and her Undersiders had kept Brockton Bay going, after Leviathan. After Echidna, they'd had the portal, and the portal had brought with it enough economic opportunity to keep the city on its legs.

Here, I wasn't a warlord carving out a territory to protect and nurture. Here, there was no unified Undersiders to prop things up. Here, there was no portal to offer an economic boost, a metaphorical shot in the arm.

There was just me. Me, the Protectorate, and the PRT. I wasn't sure that would be enough to keep the city alive. Not even with Lisa's help.

"Well," said Lisa, "we might have some hope."

I frowned. "Yeah?"

She grinned. "You're the Endslayer, after all. Leviathan's Bane. The Hopebringer. I think 'Phoenix' was another one?"

I rolled my eyes. Yes, using Excalibur, I'd killed Leviathan, and sure, that was impressive, and yes, no one else had ever killed an Endbringer, and maybe no one had ever believed anyone but Scion even could, but all of the epithets I'd suddenly been stuck with on PHO had gotten very old, very fast.

"You showed that it was possible to kill an Endbringer," Lisa went on. "After…what, almost twenty years? After twenty years of attacks and losing city after city, where the best possible result was forcing them to retreat before the entire place was razed or sunk or forced into quarantine, you killed one. That? That's a big deal. There are loads of people who are going to want to be a part of that, which means tourism and businesses who see an opportunity to cash in on it and plenty of people who will want to show you their thanks and support with cash. I won't be surprised if some people make it a religious pilgrimage, or something close to it."

Which made me really uncomfortable. The idea that so many people, all of them strangers, would want to come and shake my hand and thank me for killing Leviathan… No part of me had wanted to be a hero for the fame of it. In fact, I could just as soon do without the notoriety.

Cash and businesses? That was more useful. Hell, maybe Dad would finally get his ferry project back on wheels, now that the Boat Graveyard was gone and we might see an influx of money and stuff.

Of course, the point Lisa made also had a dark side.

"Including the Fallen?"

Because even if none of that other stuff came true, that one would almost certainly happen. I'd killed Leviathan; there was no way they were going to ignore that.

Lisa's grin fell and any trace of her good humor went with it.

"Oh," she said. "Oh damn. I hadn't thought of that. Fuck," she hissed. "Fuck, yeah, there's no way they'll pass this up, huh? Not when one of the Endbringers is dead."

"They came last time," I told her solemnly. "And that was a Brockton Bay that had been attacked, not one where Leviathan died."

"Fuck," she agreed, grimacing. "Yeah, we'll definitely be seeing one of them. Think Piggot knows? This could get really ugly, especially if they're all gunning for you. I mean, I believe in you, Chief, and I'd put money on you in any kind of fight, but the Fallen have some pretty scary Masters in their ranks, and the only thing scarier would be having to fight you under their control."

"She probably does," I said. "But I'll make sure to bring it up, next time I get the chance. I don't…"

No, that was a lie, and I couldn't even say it, it was that obvious of one.

"I'm not sure how to stop…" No, that was just as much of a lie. If I was going to move past Khepri in her entirety, then the one thing I had to do was stop lying to myself, as much as I could.

I sighed. "I don't think Piggot will let me stop them."

Lisa's eyebrows rose. "Whoa. Seriously?"

The expression on my face was grim, and she shook her head without needing me to answer aloud.

"Well," she said, "I'm not sure I want you fighting them, either. If they get you, then things'll turn really ugly really fast, and it'd be — that's not what you mean."

"I could…probably stop them from entering the city," I admitted. "But something like that… I can't see Piggot — or any of the PRT Directors — being comfortable with how. They'd probably say something about usurping the lawful authority of the US government or something like that."

"Okay," Lisa started, a hint of surprise still in her voice, "okay, yeah, if I'm understanding you right, holy fuck, yes, Piggot would flip out if you tried that. She'd probably flip out if you even suggested it. Do you have anything that isn't likely to get you arrested for treason?"

I shrugged a little helplessly.

"I could…build something, sure. Some kind of monitoring system or something, maybe? Keep track of capes who enter the city or something? But it'd take me weeks to set up and get right, at the absolute minimum, working basically nonstop, and —"

"We probably don't have that sort of time, no," Lisa agreed. "Any other ideas, aside from that?"

"Right now? No." I shook my head. "I —"

My phone suddenly chimed, letting out a shrill tune, and I reached over to swipe the screen and turn off the alarm. I let out a sigh and stood.

"I'll try and think of something," I went on. "But whatever I do, it's going to have to get approval from the higher ups. It's going to have to be something that Piggot won't reject from the word go, which is going to make everything that much harder…"

I shook my head again and slipped my phone into my pocket.

"For now, though, I'm scheduled for a patrol. Catch up to you later?"

Lisa nodded.

"Sure. I'll try and brainstorm something, in the meantime, see if I can't come up with any ideas that might work. We can compare notes when you get back."

A grim smile flashed across my face.

"Sounds like a plan."

With a little wave, I left and made my way towards the door, mentally consulting my map of the building so I knew where I needed to go. I was just about to reach for the knob when Lisa's voice called out from behind me, almost hesitant.

"Hey, Taylor?"

I stopped and half-turned, looking back at her over my shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Next time," she said with a half-hearted smile, "can we go out together? PRT troopers…aren't the best conversationalists, you know?"

I hesitated, because it might not be up to me. With Brockton Bay in a state of emergency as things tried to go back to normal, when we weren't on patrol, the Wards and the Protectorate were basically confined to HQ, just so that everyone could be on call in case something big happened. That was the entire reason why Lisa had been forced to have a plainclothes PRT trooper as escort and I hadn't been able to go with her.

There was no telling when that was going to end, and considering who I was and what I'd done and my powers, I might simply be too valuable to get the sort of free time to just…hang out with Lisa, like we used to.

But…

I gave her a smile and a nod.

"Sure."

Even so, I made her that promise.

"It's a date."

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

NOTES

Exposition and setup ahoy!

It's not a very exciting chapter to come out of hiatus with, but there's a whole lot of stuff that gets set up for later in this chapter, both for this arc and beyond. Several hints have been laid out, some obvious, some not so, and some that rely on knowledge I haven't revealed, yet.

As for why this is later than I had as my latest estimate, a friend of mine died quite suddenly a couple weeks ago, and that kind of threw me off my game while I dealt with that. Sorry, I didn't have much in the way of methods of telling you guys things had been delayed a further week, so the only ones who got told were the Sufficient Velocity crowd.

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