Chapter 18 - Analysis (Patreon)

“So let me get this straight…”

My finger began tapping a steady, quiet rhythm against my crossed forearms. I wasn’t angry, in spite of my carefully cooled and monotonous tone of voice. Well, maybe I was a little bit, but it wasn’t all-encompassing. If what she told me was correct, her little sidequest had went off without a hitch with the assistance of Pod 084, and I was hardly the type of boyfriend to be like ‘you need to tell me everything you’re doing at all times’, but this was motherfucking Coil we were talking about.

Wasn’t handling the nazis enough? Did we really have to throw more food on our plate? It was half past midnight and I was tired - couldn’t we wait ‘till the morning, at least?

“You were hired, anonymously, by some random person on ‘Ali Baba . com’ to hack Coil of all people and bug his communications? All for twenty five grand?”

Cassie’s eyes were downcast, her lower lip trembling a bit as she pulled her knees up to her chest and looked away from me. “...And his emails, instant messages sent via wifi, and when he uses his bluetooth coffee machine…” she murmured morosely.

My left eye twitched.

Right, I wasn’t mad. If anything, I was impressed since Coil was a paranoid, slippery fuck that was, quite honestly, worse than a cockroach. Still, without 084 around it was possible that something bad could’ve happened while she was traipsing through his digital network like a wildcat. The dude casually hired mercenaries and equipped them with state of the art Tinkertech guns that shot lasers - what were the odds that his computers weren’t similarly souped up with Shard-empowered fuckery?

Probably pretty high.

My gaze switched to Pod 084, who was…just hovering over Cassie’s shoulder.

“You got anything to say for yourself?”

“Negative. I did as directed by you and answered all of Cassie’s questions.”

A wry smirk began to pull on my lips, and I glanced at the pouting girl. “And she just so happened to ask some very specific questions, eh?”

“Some of her questions involved hacking into the network of the supervillain ‘Coil’, mysterious criminal mastermind that holds territory in Downtown Brockton Bay.”

I blinked slowly, looking between the two. Cassie blushed a little.

“084 needed more data to cross-reference his own capabilities with the tech here on Earth Bet, so I just…pew pew’d.” She awkwardly and gingerly made shooting gestures towards the floating robot, and it responded by hovering a little further away.

“You shot it?” I raised an eyebrow.

“No! I made a program to funnel a bunch of information from the internet into one location for him to download.” Cassie’s pout became even more pronounced, and the sight of her bottom lip puckered out reminded me of the whole ‘sweaty hot sex’ thing that had been building up, before all of this happened. The reminder took the rest of the air outta my sails, replacing it with tiredness and heat. Damn her for having such a fuckable-looking mouth.

I sighed, stilling my incessant tapping and uncrossing my arms. Cassie twitched when I drew close, silently watching until I was practically standing over her.

“Put your arms up,” I murmured quietly, my voice still tired and monotonous.

I could practically see the gears whirring in her head, confusion and embarrassment colliding in the scrunching of her face, but Cassie obediently raised her arms above her head like a good girl. I moved quickly, picking her up like a koala bear and holding her against my chest with one arm. The other moved to help lower me down into the comfortably warm leather swivel chair that my girlfriend was previously occupying.

“O-oh!” Cassie yelped when I plopped down, her thighs clenching around mine as the soft, warm spot between her legs collided with something much more firm. Her previously despondent face shifted instantly, the dusting of red on her cheeks conflagrating into scarlet when she looked up from our joined bodies and caught me staring straight into her eyes. “Jason…?” she murmured, puzzled and soft, her lidded gaze dipping down to my lips.

There was electricity in the room, a constant static jolt that shot through my brain and muscles, pressing me to fall to more base needs and fuck this pouty, submissive bitch into the floor.

And holy shit was it strong.

It was so strong, that I was actually thankful for getting cock-blocked by our new Pod friend. I doubted that Cassie’s computer desk would have been able to keep up with my recent sex drive, and we still had real shit to talk about

“Report: This Pod has finished analyzing the data given to it on Earth Bet. Compiling possible strategies and countermeasures for different parahumans denoted as ‘villainous’ in the Parahuman Response Team’s warning page and the Parahumans Online wikipedia.”

It whirled around, facing the two of us fully. “Proposal: Eliminate the lieutenants of the Empire Eighty-Eight as soon as possible.”

There was nothing like the sound of a robotic, masculine-voiced AI to cool the fire in your loins. Ignoring Cassie’s annoyed sigh, and the associated minty breeze against my face, I swiveled in the chair in order to face the hovering Pod. “Already on my shit list, homie - Hookwolf’s down and getting prepped for the Birdcage, Cricket’s probably headed to big girl prison, and…”

“The rest of the Empire’s gonna be pushing to pop their head attack dog free,” Cassie finished quietly, a frustrated yearning clear in her gaze before she wiggled off of my lap. Before I could complain about the lack of warmth, she did this awkward little half-skip that she does whenever she was aroused and embarrassed about it, and moved over to her desk. Immediately, she began typing into the console, her fingers sliding over the keys like some sort of musician.

“084, activate the Ice Pick 2.0 and prep access into the PRT’s recent correspondence on Hookerwolf’s capture. We need to see when they’re gonna be moving him.”

I blinked, watching owlishly from my reclined position.

The Pod moved with purpose, quickly floating over to another computer tower and resting on top of it. The screen attached to said tower abruptly flickered on, words flashing down the monitor at a speed that even I would be hard-pressed to follow.

“Ice Pick 2.0 Program engaged. Accessing classified information, data breach initiated in 10, 9, 8-”

It was almost like she could feel my bewildered and inquisitive stare in the back of her head. Cassie turned around, flashing me a teasing, toothy grin.  “084 gave me a few pointers on how to improve my programs. Watch and learn, hotshot.”

…God, she was sexy when she was illegally accessing sanctioned government secrets.

“-2, 1. This Pod has assisted the Ice Pick 2.0 in breaching the PRT’s database. Approximately 16 defense mechanisms were disabled temporarily. Proposal: Gather the necessary information quickly.”

The click-clacking of her keyboard increased in volume. “Nice! Alright, let’s see here - downloading the emails between ‘Deputy Director Renick’ and ‘Chief Warden Amaya’ at the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center’. It’s not too many, thank god. Suits drone on and on and it’s so annoying.”

I scooched a little closer in my chair, glancing past her shoulder to look at the screen, but my understanding of code was limited to Microsoft Visual Studio and the two years of Computer Science that I completely flunked out of in college. Long story short, the letters on her screen were better off being ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to me.

A few seconds later, Cassie let out a high-pitched cackle and pressed one final thing - the ‘Enter’ key - with dramatic aplomb. Judging by the scuff mark and worn paint on that one specific key, this was probably a common occurrence. “Hehe, finished. Patch it back up, Pod!”

“Affirmative. Commencing Program ‘Back-Alley Cleanup’.”

When Cassie turned to me, a bead of sweat on her forehead and a proud grin on her face, I had only one burning question living at the forefront of my mind. Well, two, but one was much more important than the other. “First question... Why ‘back-alley cleanup’?”

She blinked. “It’s a super cool name, right? Sounds shady and mysterious, like a proper hacker-ninja.”

“It sounds raunchy and murderous,” I remarked dryly, before cracking a crooked smile. “But I fuck with it. Second question; since when did my ‘hacker ninja’ girlfriend become partners in crime with my robot assistant?”

Cassie turned back to her computer and started sliding things across monitors - email archives, I realized after a cursory glance. “After you left to drop Sabah off, we started talking - or, I started asking him a lot of questions. About hacking, programming, code…he’s the first Artificial Intelligence I’ve ever met! Of course I got curious.”

There was a twinge of nervousness in her voice now, warbling beneath the thin veneer of confidence and ‘coolness’ that she often tried to use as a shield. She was probably worried that I’d be, what - annoyed? Jealous? Insecure that she was utilizing the little buddy more efficiently than I could?

Hidden Intuition was saying that it was all three.

I chuckled warmly. “I’m not blamin’ you, silly girl. And I wasn’t pissed at you before, just…concerned. I don’t get mad that easily - ‘least not at the people I care about.”

Something eased in her shoulders - a drawn tenseness that was as clear to my eyes as anything else. “Okay…” she murmured, a small smile in her voice. Her fingers began clicking and dragging again. “A-anyways, it turns out that he can interface with my Tinker programs and juice ‘em up! I’m not too sure how it works to be honest, but the syntax gets modified, changing some of the code into…what’d you call it again, Pod?”

“Angelic, an ancient language that this Pod- this Pod-...This Pod apologizes, but further information is inaccessible.”

Cassie sighed. “Yep, same thing as before. Still, this ‘Angelic’ script, whatever it is, seems to make my software work at a higher level, almost just…like magic. Straight up efficiency increases across the board. Whatever it is, it definitely beats Python.” She snorted a bit at some inside code-geek joke, but I was too busy analyzing this ‘angel’ code that she was referencing.

The characters were littered throughout the console window that she was looking at, and much more common in the one that 084 was manning. They looked a little like…the Latin alphabet? Or the Unown from Pokemon; Regardless, seeing them didn’t trigger any memory, so I shrugged and wheeled away. Whatever it was, it probably had something to do with the world that 084 was pulled from - and if it was enhancing Cassie’s specific type of Tinkertech, I’d trust that it was a good thing. The Sanctum was made to cancel out and dissipate any magical bullshit that was harmful to those living inside, after all - the code probably would’ve been erased if it was magical bomb commands.

“Whatever it is,” I smirked, swiveling the chair in a 360 and slapping Cassie’s ass with a loud ‘smack’ on my second spin, “Keep it up you two.”

She jumped and yelped at the sharp slap, but the smoldering glare that she threw over her shoulder was heated in a completely different way. “Just you wait, asshole. That butt is mine.”

“Sure,” I said easily, before gesturing towards the emails. “But for right now; What’s the schedule lookin’ like? How much time ‘till they muzzle and pack up the mutt?”

“Mm,” Cassie bit her lip, her smoldering glare intensifying, before she swished around to analyze her screens again. How she managed to keep over six monitors placed perfectly on top of each other was a complete and utter mystery to me. “Let’s see…going off of the correspondence, the time table is still in the air until they can get transportation hard confirmed.”

I frowned. “Pretty useless.”

“Pfft- it’s been like five hours, Jay. They do have talks in the work of expediting the process, though - this ‘Renick’ guy is pushing for February 2nd due to the possibility of the Empire springing a premature break before the week’s out, and he’s pushing pretty hard. Routes and personnel haven't been discussed just yet…”

“How hard would it be to get back in and grab more information in, say, a couple days? Knowing what route they’re planning and what sorta security I’ll have to deal with would be helpful.”

Cassie hummed below her breath. “The Cleanup program leaves a data marker behind - not anything that can be picked up normally, but just something I can pick up on with my own stuff to resume in the same spot I was in last time.”

“Like a save point,” I muttered, impressed.

“Exactly!” The excitable Tinker grinned. “It should be a piece of cake, especially with 084 helping me out.”

The Pod whirred agreeably. “Affirmative. Proposal: Master should assign Cassie administrative control over this Pod. The previous 68 minutes have been very informative and efficient, and giving Cassie access to this Pod’s mainframe would increase our usefulness to Master.”

That threw me for a loop; not because I was against it or anything, but because 084 sounded almost…excited about the work? Which wasn’t entirely impossible, since it was an AI and AI were probably able to feel artificial emotions when given certain stimulus. Still, work as a stimulant was a bit odd - but then again, I was a lazy individual and my idea of fun was having sex, playing video games, and most recently, fucking up assholes.

Hacking wasn’t on that list.

“Alright,” I said simply, turning to the Pod and speaking clearly and loudly. “Pod 084, Cassie is hereby granted administrative privileges. Give her access to your fucking ‘mainframe’ or whatever, you dirty bastard.” I grinned.

Cassie was staring, her eyes wide. “Wait, really?” she asked softly, naked surprise coating her face. “You-you’re giving me a freaking AI?!”

“Not giving,” I snorted, rolling forward to boop her on the nose. It wrinkled instinctively. “Coparenting. It’s our baby now.”

“Refusal: This Pod is not a baby-”

“Eeeee!”

Cassie lunged through the air like a particularly adorable bullet, glomping the hovering Pod and knocking one of her powered-down monitors to the ground. My form flickered, and I appeared right beside the desk, casually catching the neck of the widescreen monitor with a booted foot.

It was a testament to the Pod’s own strength and durability that it didn’t dip down even an inch when Cassie’s entire upper body wrapped around its chassis, her legs dangling towards the ground. The orange light on its ‘head’ flashed a bright green, which I took as a…good thing?

“We’re gonna kick so much fricking ass, 084! The dark sorceress and her trusty familiar. Ooh, we gotta get some spray paint too. I can make that boring old gray pink and black. Maybe some blue on the wires?”

“This Pod did not agree to a redesign, Mistress.”

“Eeee! You call me Mistress now, too?”

“Referring to Mistress as ‘Cassie’ when deployed in dangerous territory would be foolish.”

“No, no, I like it. Makes me feel powerful. I wonder if I can override Jay’s designation and have you call him ‘Dickbutt’...”

I flexed my ankle, flicking my foot upwards and sending the computer monitor leaping upwards a few feet, like a soccer ball. My strength, it felt like, was growing everyday I challenged myself, whether it was mentally, physically, or even emotionally. My body felt surer than it ever had, I felt more in control of every minute bodily moment than ever before, and catching the airborne screen by its ‘neck’ and placing it on the desk felt as simple as placing a can of soda in the fridge.

“Try it and you’re divorced.” I turned back to the only other two ‘people’ in my ‘team’. Cassie was still clinging to 084, who was simply hovering six or so feet in the air and accepting the added weight. “Now, back to the previous topic.”

She tilted her head. “The emails? I can check through the back door again, but-”

“No,” I frowned, tapping my finger against the desk’s smooth wooden surface. “Coil, and what we’re gonna do about him. And the Empire, after we take out their heavy hitters - ‘cause I know that Kaiser’s bitch ass won’t be coming to pop out Hookwolf.”

Cassie’s face became pensive. She let go of 084, falling somewhat gracefully back onto her feet. “The Coil situation is handled, remember? We bugged his network - I just gotta send the program over to the client, and that’s 25 grand in our laps.”

Right, the client. A client that just so happened to possess the ability to enter Coil’s base, unimpeded, and slip a Tinkertech chip into his bluetooth coffee machine. The same client that wanted access to the man’s entire information infrastructure for some mysterious, unexplained reason. That client.

In other words, Lisa Wilbourn - the same foxy blonde I met a few days ago at the pawnshop. Like Hell I was giving that specific bundle of drama and smugness all of Coil’s secrets on a silver platter. I didn’t hate her, or even dislike her all that much, but I didn’t necessarily…like her? I definitely didn’t trust her. If she had contacted my Cassie in canon, off-screen, it was possible that Cassie failed at her task, got tracked down by Coil’s mercs, and killed in cold blood. That Cass didn’t have the assistance of a high tech Tactical Support Unit from NieR.

What would change, now that Cassie actually succeeded? What could Lisa do with all of that juicy information? With the man’s bank accounts? His secret identity?

Probably something suitably big-brained enough to get out from under his thumb. Or she could fuck up and trigger some unforeseen event that laid me out on my ass due to lack of information.

I wasn’t willing to take those chances. Coil was an issue, the Empire was an issue, and honestly, in the midst of all this, I no longer cared too much about the Merchants. They were roaches, but I could always spray ‘em out later on.

For now…

“New plan,” I grunted, moving over to Cassie’s keyboard and opening up a new Google Document. A few keyboard clicks later, and I gestured for her to come over.

She did so, eyeing me warily. 084 hovered overhead.

“...Plan: Downtown Domination?” The confusion was audible in her voice.

I smiled thinly, and wrote a few more lines beneath the header.

Step One: Fuck the Empire in the ass.

Step Two: Brutally murder Coil in the ass.

Step Three: Occupy Downtown territory.

“Jason,” Cassie said slowly, hesitantly. “You do realize that they’ll probably see you as some sort of villain obsessed with power if you start pushing hard like this, right? Not to mention, owning like half of the Bay’s territory will be next to impossible, even for someone with powers as bullshit as yours…” Despite the hesitance in her voice, however, I could tell that she wasn’t necessarily against my ridiculously short plan. Just concerned.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Hear me out first.”

“Okay.”

“Brockton Bay is fucked.” The statement, as casual and dismissive as it came out, was deathly serious. When Cassie rolled her eyes and went to look back at the monitor, I lightly gripped her chin and brought her gaze back up to mine.

She frowned, bemused. “I know it is, Jay, but how-”

“Do I plan to unfuck it?” A sardonic, vaguely self-deprecating grin began to pull at the thin smile on my lips. “I don’t know. I’m not good at planning ten steps ahead, or being the chessmaster making plays from the shadows. Shit, I don’t even care too much about ‘making the Bay great again’, or anything super generous like that.”

“Then why this plan? What happened to just beating the nazis and trying to survive? Being cleared by the PRT?” Her questions were soft, yet guided - Cassie had an inkling of an idea on where I was going with this, the smartass, but she wanted me to lay it all out for her.

So I did. I let go of her chin, my clawed gauntlet tapping a dull melody against my pants leg as I began to pace the room.

“Because shit’s not as simple as I thought it was a few days ago. You know it, I know it - I just didn’t wanna take that responsibility on my back, because I’m inherently a lazy and selfish dude. But…letting Brockton Bay implode and go to Hell because I decided to ring a big ass dinner bell for every hungry villain group in the East Coast is the bitch way out, and while I am lazy and selfish, I’m definitely not a bitch.”

“So,” Cassie muttered, head moving left and right as she watched me pace back and forth. “You plan on dismantling the Empire and Coil’s group, killing the leaders, and claiming Downtown as your territory all because…you’re not a bitch?”

I stopped pacing, clenching and unclenching my fists in order to cease the incessant tapping, and nodded. Once. “Yeah.”

She let out a loud, drawn-out sigh. “I don’t even know what I expected from you.” Weary amusement and fondness was laden heavily in her suddenly tired voice, and she collapsed back into the computer chair.

“Excellence. Showboating. The occasional overreach that ends with me getting humbled every decade or two.” I grinned like a loon. It felt…nice, to have a more solid plan in mind. As chaotic and spontaneous as said plan was.

“Question is, hotshot, how are just the three of us gonna occupy roughly half of a huge city, already on the verge of collapsing to gang violence?”

That was…a good question. With my Archmage perk, I was pretty damn confident at leading and managing a guild that spanned a whole fucking country, nonetheless half an East Coast city, but guilds usually had members.

I just had a bratty Tinker, an adorable robot, and infinite magical potential.

‘...Huh,’ I thought, my grin turning crooked and smarmy. ‘Maybe it won’t be as hard as I thought.’

Cassie’s nose wrinkled at my expression. “Blech, you’re doing it again babe! No kidnapping independent heroes and forcing them to be your minions!”

“Proposal: Create powerful androids with absolute loyalty installed in their software, and use them to form an army capable of-”

“No! And no killer robots, either!”

“Affirmative. Disappointment raised by five point two percent.

“Pfft!” My loud, wildly amused cackles echoed throughout the entire Sanctum.

The Celestial Grimoire gently offering me a ‘Rat Repelling Statue’, of all things, shifted the loud cackles quite solidly into ‘maniacal’ territory.

Maybe it was the exhaustion of the day catching up, or the relief of settling with an actual long-term goal, but I felt free. Free and invincible.

The mind blowing, bed-breaking sex Cass and I had afterwards only heightened that feeling.

'Assholes of Brockton Bay, mark your calendars. A certain reckoning is coming, and its name is Avalon.'

Powers Rolled:

Rat-Repelling Statue - 200 CP (Declined): You have a small cat statue that somehow, without any visible power source, constantly produces ultrasonic sounds that will scare away any mundane vermin in any building it’s located inside or at the entrance to. Alternatively, it can be a painting of a cat that has all the same warding power.

450 CP Remaining.