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Wretched Joy

Chapter 1

-VB-

You know, being a powerless mook sucked when you lived on Earth Bet.

What else would a PRT agent be? Being a federal officer just made me a federal mook but a mook nonetheless.

"Hey, Phil."

Phil, an Asian-American of ambiguous ethnicity, looked up and grinned. "Sup, Alan. Shift starting soon?" he asked without a hint of accent in his voice.

"Yeah," I sighed. "And you know me, always pissing off someone."

"Oof. What are they having you do?"

"Guarding the prison transport."

Phil winced. "Damn. Who the hell did you piss off to get that death sentence?"

Prison transportation jobs killed the most PRT agents per job. Sure, active field skirmish killed the most overall, but that's because it involved Endbringer battles as well as the immediate and long term chaotic aftermath.

"Director Piggot. I may have snickered when the new Ward misspoke her name."

"... damn, man. It was nice knowing you."

I glared at him. "Oi, I ain't dead yet."

I said my goodbye before moving to the locker rooms.

I was a PRT mook instead of being an advisor with my precognitive knowledge of this world's timeline because no one could or would believe me. I even tried to contact Cauldron but the fucking cosmos intervened whenever and wherever.

The first time I tried saw me getting food poisoning.

The second time introduced a stray bullet that shatter my windows.

The third time involved a cape battle trashing several apartment buildings, including my own.

I gave up after that because, clearly, whatever brought me to Bet also kept me from taking full advantage of the foreknowledge. It was also fear that stopped me. Each time I tried, the outcome had escalated. What was to say that my fourth try wouldn't kill me?

It also didn't help that the memories of my past life had come to me in pieces, never in order, and sometimes not even in whole pictures over the course of my teen life. I grew up with what I had initially thought were bad dreams. It wasn't until I was over twenty years old and already in the PRT that I had enough of the memories to make sense of it all.

Even now, I lacked quite a few memories. The most prominent example being… who the fuck was Skitter? Like, I knew that Max Anders was Kaiser, the Chief Director of the PRT was Alexandria, and the funny man Assault used to be the the most troublesome prison transport breaker Madcap, but Skitter, the girl who broke the back of a god, was unknown to me.

I huffed as I finished changing and headed to the armory.

"Quartermaster Jack, I'm here for my prison guard gear."

The old man - "I'm only forty-nine!" - looked up and grimaced. "Shit job."

I shrugged. He tossed me a key, and I went to the locker associated with it. As I put on the PRT equivalent to riot gear, I couldn't help but feel a chill in the air.

---

I knew something was wrong.

I grimaced as I pointed my nearly useless foam launcher at the Empire Eighty-Eight capes and their mooks who'd come to request Alabaster, who was in the upturned and wrecked prison van behind me.

Assault and Battery fought valiantly, but outnumbered as they were in their fight against Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Krieg, I had no one else to turn to for help; all of my coworkers were unconscious, dying, or dead all around me.

I … had to hold.

"Get that dog out of the way," Cricket snarled, and nine shabbily armed racist gangsters charged me.

I dropped the foam launcher and pulled out my M9 pistol.

BRATATATA!

Just like that, three went down thanks to my one thousand hours of aim training.

The other six nearly skidded to a halt at the sight of lethal self-defense.

Cricket, ignoring it all, jumped at me like her namesake. Her jump easily cleared six foot of height and she came down on me with her kamas held up.

I turned my gun up and tried to shoot but the bitch opened her mouth and everything turned to a painful blur for me. I still pulled the trigger, but I must have missed or had the gun pointed elsewhere because it didn’t stop what happened next.

I screamed as blades tore through my armor and into my body.

Two more slashes later, I fell to the floor with a gushing gap on my stomach and my eyes slashed open.

I gurgled in pain and curled up as people walked up to me.

Then boots came down. Metal bats shattered my bones.

One of them picked up my gun and pointed at me.

I barely managed to look before-.

BAM!

-VB-

I opened my eyes and let out a hiss.

It was a nightmare. Oh God, that-.

When I pulled my hands up, I smacked them into a wall.

What?

My other hand came up as well and I felt… wood?

I couldn't see.

My hands pushed and pushed but-.

I immediately bit down on my lips and held my breath.

They buried me alive!

I slammed my hands onto the wooden board with what little room I had.

"Help!" I shouted in panic before holding my breath again. Air in the coffin was limited. If I hyperventilate, then I will die from carbon dioxide poisoning.

I gasped as I ran out of air and slammed my hands into the board again.

I- i- I was going to die in my coffin. I was …. I was going to die, no no n on o no. No n o-!

[Destination]

I saw them. The Entities.

Genocidal asshole, they may be, but they were beautiful.

I saw…

[Intervention]

I sat there.

Oh shit.

I just Triggered.

I winced as I felt three burning motes within me but not in my physical body.

'Is this what I think it is…?' I asked myself. It's been years since I was born here. Not a lot of my old life remained in my memories simply because of how the memories had come and because time eroding them down, but things about Earth Bet and Worm did remain with me.

I gulped audibly as I hesitantly pushed the motes towards a certain concept in my mind.

Nothing happened.

'Okay, so what is it?"

[Item.]

I jolted inside the coffin, smacking my funny bones. I hissed in pain for a moment before I regained some composure.

"... hi, power?"

[Greetings. Energy. Item.]

Cool, my power talked to me. It also just told me that I couldn't make powers directly but empower items instead.

I felt the steel ring I wore everyday. All of my family had one for each death within two generations. It was some kind of family tradition dating back to the 90s. The 1790s.

I let out a shaky breath and pushed the motes into the ring.

My "grandma" steel ring lit up in my mind.

'Teleport,' I thought and the three motes attached to the ring morphed.

Suddenly, I knew what the ring could do now. It let its wearer teleport to any location they have seen before.

"Home," I croaked as the emotions finally got the better of me.

And I dematerialized within a millisecond, leaving behind an empty coffin.

-VB-

I arrived home and found most of my belongings already in cardboard boxes for shipping.

I … was half-tempted to go back to the PRT. Aside from not losing my identity, I knew a lot about how much the PRT would help their own agents who became parahumans. In fact, it wouldn’t be false to say that the PRT prioritized their former comrades compared to strangers who joined the Protectorate from the outside.

Was it nepotism?

Well, not really…?

See, the PRT valued their former comrades for a simple reason: loyalty.

Someone who revealed their powers upon getting them was someone who could be trusted (most likely). This was the reason why among the Protectorate ENE, Velocity received the most respect from the PRT because while the man may not have been from the PRT itself, he did transfer from the army, which was “federal” enough for the PRT’s goons to recognize Velocity as one of their own.

It helped that Velocity was a decent and kind man with very few flaws.

The problem with that was that I joined the PRT out of desperation.

The problem with telling the PRT that I had powers was that I died in the first place because of petty job assignment. Piggot manually assigned me to be a prison transport for Empire Eighty-Eight’s capes, which was known to be the most dangerous job for PRT ENE agents.

The fucking director got me killed in the first place. Why the hell should I go back? So that I could then be used as canon fodder for Endbringers?

The longer I thought about it, the more I grew angry and distasteful of joining the Protectorate.

No… I wasn’t going back to the PRT. ‘That said,’ I thought to myself. ‘I still have friends in there…’ Phil was a friend. I couldn’t think of anyone else. ‘Okay, I have a friend in there,’ I grumbled to myself for the correction. However, Phil wasn’t someone who had power in the hierarchy of PRT. He was just a grunt. I could trust him with a secret or two, but that was the limit to what I could ask of him.

Besides, I didn’t want him in danger, so I couldn’t depend on my only friend.

So I was left to work by myself.

Even so, I wondered about the limits of my power. So far, I got those three motes of energy that I used to make my steel ring into a teleporting tinkertech (or tinker-enchant?). I instinctively knew that I could teleport to anywhere I’ve been or seen (even if I only saw it in a picture or video), but it was limited by how many times I could teleport: thrice a day.

It was a great emergency exit tool but nothing more than that.

… Was this the limit, though? Could I have more or was this ring the only thing I would have?

I really hoped it wasn’t.

I stared at the packaged boxes of my belongings.

And then I had an epiphany.

I had power.

Even if it was a shitty power, I can do something about the world now. I clenched my fists as I remembered how I died.

Empire Eighty-Eight.

Those white supremacists Neo-Nazi pieces of shit needed to die. No ifs or buts. They needed to die. Civil society hated death because finality of it took their “freedom of choice” away, but fuck society!

They slashed my stomach open!

They slashed my eyes out!

They beat me, broke my bones, nearly broke my skull, and then painted the street with my brain!

They killed me, so I will kill them in return.

I rose up from the dead for my due. I will have it no matter what.