Handwriting of God 1 (Commission, The Boys) (Patreon)

I flipped through the dossier on this ‘Starlight’ that Vought was bringing in to replace Lamplighter. The girl would almost certainly be less likely to cause problems than Lamplighter would. For starters, when she inevitable fucks up because she can’t control her power as well as Vaught’s going to advertise, she’ll only blind people or maybe knock them on their asses instead of potentially burning down whatever city she’s in.

Taking a moment, I let my vision slip slightly out of focus, taking in the numbers as I considered everything I’d read. The odds of her being another shitheel I’d have to constantly clean up after like the rest of my so called team were relatively low. Didn’t mean I was going to skip developing a contingency or two for her.

I let out a quiet breath, that was a touch unfair to Noir, and Translucent at least was easy to clean up after. Fucking pervert at least kept his hands to himself, and only did his shit on the weekends.

Speaking of the little shithead, I glanced over to where he was sitting at the table, going over the copyright documents that had been sent out to us this morning. I’d already read them, memorized them, and fixed nearly a hundred math errors in them before the ink had dried. It was one of the reasons I hated dealing with accounting: they were paid to make Vaught look like it was losing money when convenient and seeing record profits when it was time for shareholder meetings.

Before I could berate the walking sex scandal, the doors opened and Miss January entered. Her gaze roamed over each of us, pausing on my mask on the table next to me, its placement such that no matter where she was while en route to her seat, the black, empty eyes would appear to follow her. A minor test, to see how she’d handle something of an unsettling nature.

“Starlight,” the Chief Shit himself said from where he was looking out the window. “Don’t want to be late for your first official meeting.”

“Sorry, sir,” Miss January said as she made her way to her seat.

“Please, Homelander’s fine,” he said as he made his way to his own chair.

“Cut the pleasant crap John, the sooner she’s told what it is we really do, the better,” I snapped, both verbally and the dossier I was reading. Homelander glared at me, even as Miss January sent a puzzled look my way.

“Harbinger’s right, can we please get back to this?” Translucent half whined, tapping his documents with a pen.

“Before you start,” I said, holding up a hand and doing my best to force back the resigned disappointment. “Is that the file that was sent from Accounting this morning, or the followup I sent out after fixing their math?”

The long silence was answer enough, and with a frustrated sigh I reached into the briefcase at my feet and dropped the fixed numbers in front of him.

“Now, while Sully is reading up on the matter he should have read hours ago, let’s get to brass tacks,” I said, lacing my fingers and resting my chin on them. “The Seven, each and every one of us, are highly paid, over-marketed, glorified dancing monkeys for Vaught. In order to get this far, you will have signed six NDAs, a five year contract, and bare minimum a dozen other agreements to ensure that you stay as a member of the Seven.”

I didn’t need to look at her to know that she doubted what I was saying, but it didn’t matter. She’d learn, soon enough.

“Now, you already know Homelander, John, he’s the flying brick combined with laser eyes that can melt steel beams,” I began, getting the introductions taken care of. “The phantom idiot to my left is Translucent, who as the name suggests can turn invisible and becomes bulletproof in the process. Maggie, Maeve, is what happens when you take John, watered down and with both the dick and the interesting parts of his powers removed. Black Noir is a mute and our resident stealth expert. A-Train’s a jackass who runs faster than his brain can keep up. And myself, Harbinger, the one member of the Seven who didn't get the physical enhancement that basically every supe gets.”

Even without looking, I knew that everyone, bar Black Noir and the newbie, was glaring at me. For once I didn’t look at the numbers to see who would snap first. I didn’t need to.

“The fuck you get off on-” A-Train began, rising to his feet before I cut him off.

“Today was the third time in as many years,” I snapped, leveling my own glare at him, and making the majority of the Seven sighed in frustration. “You can protest my words when you stop doing shit like that. Every time you do it, by the time it’s dealt with it costs Vaught bare minimum one point two six million dollars. Maybe you’ll start sticking to speeds you can handle if Vaught starts taking it out of your bank account.”

A-Train sat down, still glaring, but even the new girl could tell that it was to mask how close he was to crapping his suit. Speaking of her, she turned her gaze, curiosity plain to see on her face, from the man who kept killing people because he couldn’t handle running anything but his fastest possible speed to me.

“What did you mean, when you mentioned physical enhancement?” she asked, clearly not sure what she’d gotten herself into.

“Exactly what I said,” I told her, slipping one of the several throwing knives I carried from the sleeve of my kevlar tuxedo, putting the tip on the table and setting it spinning like a top. “Nearly every supe gains some measure of enhanced physical capabilities from Compound V. I didn’t. All of my feats of physicality, despite what Vaught’s advertising department claims, are the result of intense physical training.”

There was a little bit more to it than that, my power let me see the precise numbers I needed to do any certain feat, but I still needed to have the physical strength and agility to do them. If some maneuver required me to hit with more force than my muscles could produce, then I was shit out of luck.

Thankfully, nothing major happened during the rest of the meeting. The only thing of interest was Noir pulling out his art supplies and drawing a comic about some insane mix of a talking cat and Call of Cthulhu. The rest had been on pretty good behavior outside of official functions for the last week as well, outside of A-Train’s fuck up this morning.

[hr][/hr]

A few hours later, I was back in my room, having done a short training session to vent the usual frustrations I felt when dealing with the overgrown children that were my teammates, showered, and now I was relaxing. Some would think it odd, that my choice of relaxation method relied pretty heavily on my power, but with or without my power I would design the mathematically perfect wargame.

It was still in the very early design stage, I didn’t even have the base mechanics finalized yet. The majority of the lore would come later, at the moment the lore was limited to the minimum needed for the thirteen factions to have their own distinct feel and abilities.

I was in the middle of writing down the faction specific mechanics for the necromancy faction (one that would let them use the defeated units of enemy players and whose own primary units would have a distinctly vulture themed aesthetic), when my company phone let out a chime that told me there was a notification from higher up the chain.

Setting aside the paper notebook and pencil I had been using with a sigh, I stood and made my way over to the phone and picked it up. After entering the twenty six digit passcode, I read through the memo I had been sent. After a minute, I grumbled lightly.

Sure, it wasn’t as bad as babysitting the Mentally Challenged Six, but making a guest speaking appearance for a Mathematics course at Godolkin University still wasn’t my idea of a pleasant day. Leave me alone with a book or notebooks to work on my wargame, and I’ll be happy as a clam.

Silver lining: it would mean a day or two I wouldn’t have to be the one responsible for cleaning up A-Train’s latest fuck up. The boyfriend of the woman that was turned into chunky tomato paste would be receiving a settlement, which was something I’d managed to wrangle into being Vaught’s standing policy back when I’d first joined up, the same day I’d be leaving for Godolkin. Either way, it was something that I wouldn’t have to deal with.

In hindsight, thinking that was probably how I found myself quickly crunching the numbers of the boyfriend in question the next morning, having bumped into him as I was leaving Vaught. I wasn’t in costume, so his nervousness couldn’t be from recognizing me.

The last time I’d seen these kinds of numbers around someone, which was the first time A-Train had done this shit, they’d tried to pull a gun on the egotistical shit weasel. While he wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was, a lone gunman still was something that A-Train could handle. If he couldn’t, the security staff were trained to take down rampaging supes. A grief stricken boyfriend was nothing compared to that.

And on the off chance that he succeeded in killing A-Train, well, there went one of the biggest sources of headaches I was constantly babysitting. So with that in mind…

“Sorry about that,” I said to the young man as I helped him to his feet, my thought process having finished in under a minute. “First time here? You have that look on your face.”

“Uh, yeah, yeah,” he said, in a little bit of a daze, his mind elsewhere.

“Well, enjoy it,” I said, giving a grin. “Not everyday you see the headquarters of the Seven. Who’s your favorite? I’m partial to Harbinger, but you strike me as an A-Train kind of guy.”

The boyfriend took a deep breath, his jaw clenching, and I was feeling more than a little petty towards the shitheel on my team, so I continued, “Don’t buy into the internet rumors, if you meet them in person, the idea of Maeve getting black out drunk, Translucent hiding in the women’s bathroom, or A-Train running through people becomes ludicrous.”

Well, even without the numbers telling me, I could tell that nerve was well and truly touched. I gave a goodbye before making my way towards the parking structure, where my ride to the airport would be waiting.

[hr][/hr]

I pursed my lips as I looked over the crime scene. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like Translucent, but he was the headache that caused me the least problems. Now? Now he was doing an impression of Jackson Pollock if he painted with beef stroganoff.

“Do we have suspects?” I asked as I continued my examination.

“None so far,” Stillwell answered. “How did you-”

“Homelander gave me the general area,” I interrupted, continuing to turn my head like I was looking, but I’d already seen everything I needed to. “From there it wasn’t hard to find. From the looks of it, I’d say the cause of death was a small explosive. Probably inserted either orally or rectally. Pretty much the only way someone not on Vaught’s payroll would be able to kill him.

“Plus the fact that the room looks like someone set off a firecracker in a few gallons of pasta sauce,” I finished with a shrug, causing the woman to glare at me. I met her gaze and said flatly, “He was the smallest headache maker, but he was still a source of problems for us. Perhaps now we can find someone with some measure of mental stability. Starlight was a good start, but we need more people who won’t end up causing more problems than they solve.”

In the meantime, I needed to figure out who it was that killed Translucent. Even ignoring the fact that I was in most ways the most vulnerable member of the Seven, something like this had...potential.