Earning Her Stripes Pt 24 (Patreon)

Other Pieces on the Board

[A/N 1: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: I apologise for how late this chapter is coming out. The month has been horrendous.]

The Undersiders' Hideout

Grue

Brian was in the middle of a workout when his phone rang, sitting on the coffee table nearby. "Somebody get that, please?" he grunted.

"On it." Lisa leaned past her laptop and scooped up the phone. "Coil," she reported, her nose wrinkling. "Are we accepting jobs from him these days, or have we finally put him on the no-call list?"

Coil wasn't exactly Brian's favourite person either—the man gave the impression of someone who would absolutely play fast and loose with the rules if given even the slightest excuse to do so—but money was still money. "See what he wants," he grunted, pulling another curl.

"Gotcha." Lisa swiped the Accept icon and held the phone to her ear. "You've reached the Undersiders," she intoned sweetly. "If you're representing the PRT or Protectorate, we don't exist. If you're anyone but Coil, we're open for business. If you're Coil, please deposit a fee of one thousand dollars to continue this call."

Brian couldn't hear the exact words of Coil's response to Lisa's joke, but his tone didn't sound impressed. He spoke for a few moments, with Lisa interjecting "Mm-hmm" and "Uh huh" from time to time. Finally, he stopped, apparently awaiting a response.

"Well, it's definitely an interesting offer," she said neutrally. "I can't speak for the others, though. We'll talk it over and get back to you." Before he could answer, she cut the call.

Pausing his game, Alec turned to face them. "So, what'd that snake want?"

Brian set his weights down, frowning as he did so. "I thought you didn't care about the jobs, just the money."

"I don't," Alec said. "But I also don't like dealing with snakes like Coil. He reminds me too much of someone I came here to get away from."

Grabbing his towel, Brian wiped his face and the back of his neck. "Well, before we decide one way or the other, what did he want us to do?"

A smirk creased the corner of Lisa's mouth. "He tried to dress it up a little, but what it boils down to is this: he'll pay us ten K each and give us two shot-calls, in return for solid info on the Real Thing. Names if possible, weak points in the team, and power weaknesses."

Shot-calls were the only reason any of the villains in Brockton Bay did business with Coil at all. As Alec had noted, he was an odious man at best. But his power let him call the shots on any venture depending on pure luck, and be right every time.

The Undersiders had made use of his abilities before, paying him a cut of the take, and every move had been dead on the money. But no matter what he offered, no capes they knew were actually willing to work for him. Because he was also a total asshole.

From what Brian had heard on the underworld grapevine, Coil had come into Brockton Bay a few years back, supremely arrogant and flaunting the attitude of an old-time mob boss. Between the PRT knowing their business and the local villains refusing to play along with his self-importance, every attempt he'd made to expand his operations had fallen flat. When capes chose not to accept employment with him, he'd tried to hire international mercenaries, only for them to be intercepted by the authorities and deported again.

"Twenty K each, four shot-calls, plus one for the job against the Real Thing," Alec retorted, apparently by reflex. "We all know he's undercutting when he makes an offer like that."

"Why are we even considering doing any work for him?" demanded Rachel, not looking up as she brushed down Brutus. "He treats people worse than people treat dogs." For her, that was the ultimate insult.

"Because he does get results," Brian reminded her. "Like him or hate him, he's good at what he does."

Good, but not infallible. Coil's powers had failed him on a few occasions, but they'd managed to get him far enough away that he wasn't caught up in the fallout. The most spectacular of these flops, as far as Brian was aware, was the time he'd bribed a construction company head to build him a complete underground base in the format of an Endbringer shelter, only for his own personal use.

The local PRT analysts had figured out what was going on, allowing a dawn raid to nip the entire plan in the bud. While the construction guy went down hard, Coil had barely escaped capture. The word on the street was, he was still pissed about that.

Lisa turned back to her laptop and clicked open a few more tabs. "There's something more to this than him wanting to know about the new players in town. Let me see …"

"Hey, Brian," jibed Alec. "You've seen the footage of Firebird kicking ass. Think you can take her?"

"She's good," Brian allowed. "Scratch that: she's very good. But she doesn't have my reach, and a good big guy can beat a good small guy more often than not."

"Forget it," Lisa said absently, still clicking through links and typing the odd command. "She'd clean your clock. It wouldn't even be a contest. She automatically adapts to counter whoever she's fighting. Whatever the weak points of your style are, she'd use them against you."

Brian frowned. "Is that actually her main power?" 'Kicking ass' wasn't a legitimate power … was it?

"Yes and no. It's … whoa." Lisa sat up straight, staring at the screen. "I fuckin' knew there was something hinky about how badly he wanted us to take this job."

"Why?" Alec leaned over and began to blatantly read off the screen. He actually stopped a couple of lines in and did a double-take. "The fuck?"

"What?" asked Brian, coming over to the sofa. "What did you find out? Have they joined the Wards, or accepted a contract on his head, or something?"

"No." Lisa was staring at the screen as though mesmerised. "There was a fight on the Empire/ABB border about half an hour ago. The PRT is trying to keep it under wraps, but Coil must've gotten a whisper. Hookwolf, Menja, Fenja, Crusader and Rune, versus Lung and Oni Lee."

Brian couldn't see the screen, but he could juggle the odds in his head. "So, about even then."

"Something like that," Lisa agreed with a nod. "Then the Real Thing showed up. Blockade did a 'death from above' on Lung, then waled on Hookwolf like a fat kid looking for the last bit of candy from a piñata. Monochrome KO'd Menja and Fenja on the way down, then beat up Lung and choked him out. And Firebird neutralised Rune and Crusader, kicked the snot out of a dozen ABB goons, then did the same with Oni Lee before dropping him at Armsmaster's feet."

"Uh." Brian's thought processes locked up and skidded to a halt as they utterly failed to make sense of the concise description of events. "Firebird … beat … Oni Lee?"

"Beat the ever-loving crap out of," Alec corrected him. "Says here that Lee's got a mild concussion, a broken arm, and multiple contusions. Firebird owned him like he was bought and paid for."

"And Hookwolf …?" The Empire Changer was one of Kaiser's big hitters. He was one of two capes in Brockton Bay who'd been tried in absentia and sentenced to the Birdcage. The other was Lung. Brian had trouble equating Hookwolf with someone who got 'waled on', in Lisa's phrasing.

"In PRT custody, not looking too healthy," Lisa reported. "Blockade was pissed that he got away last time, and wasn't going to let it happen again. That's directly from the PRT report of the handover."

"Good." Rachel didn't look around this time, but there was a fierce approval in her tone. "Hookwolf likes to make dogs hurt each other. He deserves all the hurt he gets."

"Yeah, so, Lisa?" Alec gestured at the phone. "If we tell Coil we're going to take the job, we're gonna need a hundred K each, up front. Because I'll be leaving town. I'm not staying in the same state as some girl who can one-shot the Nazi Playgirl twins and choke out Lung like that's a thing that can happen. Not after we out them, anyway."

"Don't want to do it anyway," Rachel added. "They stopped a dogfight and beat up Hookwolf." She went back to brushing.

"Well, that's two against," Lisa noted. "What say you, o fearless leader?"

Brian blinked, not liking the fact that he was suddenly on the spot. "If Firebird took down Oni Lee unaided, then you're right. I probably can't take her." Lisa let out a fake cough that sounded suspiciously like 'she'd cream you', but he loftily ignored her. "More to the point, we can't take them. They're powerhouses."

"I'm not saying we should do the job," Lisa said carefully. "But as you just said, they're definitely a step up from the usual independents who come into Brockton Bay. I suspect they could give New Wave a run for their money. Some might say it's in our best interests to weaken them as much as possible, so they don't just steamroll over the top of us."

"Others might say it's not a great idea to give Coil any sort of leverage over them," Brian countered. "Heroes gonna hero, and we've gotten along so far by not sticking our heads up and drawing attention. I'd like to keep it that way. Tell him no."

Lisa shrugged. "Okay, but he's not going to be happy." The grin on her face belied her words.

"Ask me if I care." Brian went back to working out. The money would've been nice, but some risks just weren't worth it.

<><>

Director's Office, PRT ENE

Emily watched the footage from Armsmaster's helmet cam for the third time. The first viewing had been just to get an overall idea of what had happened. When she watched it a second time, it had been to observe the tactics of the attack; who did what and where. Now she was pausing the action to take in specific details, and the only part of it that was making her any happier was the fact that four villains were in custody, two of whom were already destined for the Birdcage.

Not that she was unreservedly thrilled about that aspect, either. Having such notorious capes under lock and key was almost begging for something to go wrong; either an attack from outside to free one or the other, or a failure of the systems that kept them where they were supposed to be. As far as she knew, the ABB had no other capes, but their intel on the gangs had been wrong before. And of course, the Empire Eighty-Eight still had powered members, despite the whittling-down of their numbers over the years.

The clip came to an end, and she looked up at Armsmaster. "There's no footage from the rooftop?"

He evidently understood what she was referring to. No footage of the fight between Firebird and Oni Lee. "No, ma'am," he admitted. "I would've given half my Tinker budget for the year to see how she handled him."

"I'm not about to disagree." Clasping her fingers together on her desk, she frowned thoughtfully. "Have they been deliberately sandbagging until now, do you think? Or have they just been coasting because they couldn't be bothered to pull out the big guns until an appropriate target came along?"

Either way, it was a concern. The Real Thing had shown themselves to be very much the real thing, and they were in Emily's city. She liked to think that the PRT had been keeping the villains securely in check while the city gradually dealt with its problems—crime had been down again for the third year running—but these new young heroes had decided to flex hard, throwing off the carefully managed balancing act.

If the Real Thing cleared out the villains altogether—the PRT were obliged to arrest said villains once captured, after all—she feared a reprise of the Boston Games, with a whole new influx of villains who didn't know how the cape scene worked in her city. Civilians would get hurt or killed, the infrastructure would suffer, and she'd have to clamp down again.

Nobody liked it when she stopped playing Ms Nice Director.

She didn't blame the Real Thing, exactly. They'd only been capes for a relatively short time. Shadow Stalker hadn't filled them in because either she didn't know or didn't care about the unspoken agreement between capes.

Some likened it to playing 'cops and robbers', but Emily discouraged that kind of talk. Far from being a game, it was a deadly serious ploy to minimise the issues created when villains outnumbered the heroes. And it had worked.

Mostly, anyway. Lung and Hookwolf had been a perennial thorn in her side; Lung because he was too powerful to capture easily without serious property damage (and he knew it), and Hookwolf because he'd been broken out of more than one Birdcage transport, and gone straight back to being a neo-Nazi asshole. This time, if she had anything to do with it, they'd both get there.

Her problem with the Real Thing wasn't that they'd captured villains. It was more or less what they were expected to at least try to do, after all. The trouble was that they'd done it so brutally and effectively. The footage hadn't gotten out yet, and she hoped to maintain that state of affairs for as long as possible; when it did, it would likely spook more than one villain. And spooked villains were unpredictable.

She hated unpredictable.

But her needs and wants were so often neglected in the grand scheme of things. It was the way of the world. And there were other matters to address. "How are we restraining Crusader?"

Armsmaster actually chuckled, the sound a little out of character for him. "You're probably not going to believe this, but Blockade supplied us with another one of those cuffs. She's apparently made a bunch of them. With it secured around Crusader's neck, he can generate his ghosts but they can't actually leave him. He looks like an upside-down bouquet."

Emily blinked. "You're shitting me." Then she recalled who she was talking to. "You're not shitting me. That actually works?"

He spread his gauntlets. "Just as well as it stops Shadow Stalker from going anywhere once she goes to shadow. I'm not even questioning it anymore."

Which reminded her. "Do you have any answers out of the piece of 'good steel' Blockade gave you?"

"Not yet, but I have a cold-beam that I patterned after Legend's lasers trained on it. Let's see what a week at just above absolute zero does for its structural integrity."

Just as Emily was thinking that this sounded exactly like what a Tinker would do, her intercom buzzed, routed through from Renick's office. "Ma'am, do you have a moment?"

She pressed the button. "Certainly. Come right in." Looking up at Armsmaster, she nodded. "Keep me posted. Dismissed."

"Ma'am." He turned and walked out; the door closed behind him.

A moment later, the connecting door between her office and Renick's opened, and she swivelled her chair to face him. "What's the situation?"

He stepped through and closed the door. "You've seen the latest footage of the Real Thing?"

"Armsmaster just got through showing me," she confirmed. "Have you got something new on them?"

"Possibly." He frowned, apparently unsure. "One of our outside consultants has made a claim that they're directly responsible for the destruction of Winslow High School. I haven't seen the evidence yet to make a judgement call one way or the other."

Even without evidence, it was a serious allegation. And if Emily was being honest with herself, their show of force against Lung and Hookwolf made her even more likely to accept that it could be true. "Who made the claim?"

He didn't need to check any notes. "Calvert. As I recall, he's actually ex-PRT."

Emily grimaced. "He is. We met, briefly, after Ellisburg. Around about the time Hero and Legend and Eidolon were scorching the whole town down to bedrock. He said he'd shot his captain when the man didn't climb the ladder to the chopper fast enough. I'm still surprised he didn't end up behind bars."

"It was a rough time," Renick observed; a rare understatement for the man. "He knows capes, I'll say that much. But is he on the money about the Real Thing?"

Emily was tempted to just take the report at face value. The Wards could use every cape they could get, and the Real Thing at least pretended to try to be heroes. Two things stopped her from doing just that: there was no actual proof (yet) … and she didn't actually trust Calvert.

"I have no idea," she prevaricated. "Wasn't Calvert on the short-list of consultants we thought might be trading info to the villains, a few months back?" They'd had to shelve the investigation when all the leads (and leaks) dried up, but they'd narrowed down the list of possibles to half a dozen. Unfortunately, all the evidence had been circumstantial, which meant the whole thing could've been sheer bad luck on the PRT's part … but Emily didn't believe in bad luck.

"I seem to recall that being the case, yes." Renick frowned. "You suspect that he's not on the level with this?"

"I suspect that someone like Calvert will do what is best for Calvert first, and the PRT a very distant second." She tapped her desk with a fingertip, thinking. "Get back to him. Tell him that any evidence of wrongdoing by the Real Thing is high priority. Even if it's flimsy. Anything's better than nothing, and so forth. Let him think that we're eager to go after them."

He looked puzzled for a second, then his expression cleared. "Ah. I see. I think I see. You want to find out if he's willing to fabricate evidence to bring them down?"

Emily nodded. "If he's our leak, then he's probably got a stake in villains being able to do their thing. The Real Thing threatens that." It made sense in her head, anyway.

"Understood." From the look on his face, Renick seemed to think so as well. "I'll get right on it."

He hustled back through the door and shut it behind him. Breathing deeply, Emily leaned back in her chair and stretched. Brockton Bay was a long way from being perfect, but it was her city, dammit.

I pull the strings around here, Calvert. Not you.

<><>

Coil

Thomas Calvert stood up from the laptop and walked to the window. The safehouse that he'd acquired wasn't nearly as big and secure as the base he'd failed to get, but at least it was four walls and a roof over his head. Looking out over the street, he watched people go by on their business and his palms itched with the need for control. Control over his own career, control over those little people, to use and discard as he saw fit on his inexorable rise to the top. Control over everything he surveyed.

His own rise to power had yet to start. He'd come to Brockton Bay thinking that Cauldron would at least give him a little assistance in setting up as a mastermind villain, but … nothing. Worse, the local PRT were sharp. Nothing he couldn't handle, of course, but it was … problematic.

The one time he'd tried to assemble a team of patsies, they'd split off on their own before he had time to really cement his hold over them, and now they were doing well on their own as an independent villain team. Was that honestly fair? In his view, they owed him for the impetus of getting them together, but at the very most, all they were willing to do was pay him for the use of his power. And they'd even refused this last job from him.

He'd gotten sick and tired of Tattletale's smart mouth once upon a time, and he'd tried tracking her down. He'd intended to either beat her bloody or even abduct her to use as a pet oracle, he couldn't remember which now, but she'd out-thought him and he'd been intercepted by Grue and Bitch. That had been one timeline he'd been glad to discard.

But now the Real Thing were encroaching on crime in Brockton Bay. He didn't want to be next, so he'd told the PRT that they were behind the Winslow incident. There was no evidence, of course, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that they were looking at the Real Thing rather than at him; he hadn't forgotten the scrutiny after the idiot villains he'd sold information to got a little clumsy with it.

And after that, once they inevitably screwed up, he'd be the man of the hour. He was well able to parlay that into more and more influence as he went along. All he needed was a starting point.

He'd rule this city yet. He could feel it.

<><>

Taylor

"Well," I said, looking out over the city from the deck of the Gatekeeper. Perched on a derelict winch, I had a pita wrap in my hand. "I think that definitely went okay."

"It did," Madison agreed. Her armour was partly folded up, on standby, and she'd set it to sweeping the area in case anyone came too close. She was currently sitting cross-legged on top of it, with a sandwich and a juice popper. "Thanks for giving me a proper chance at Hookwolf."

I shrugged. "Thanks for softening up Lung for me."

Emma, sitting at the far end of the same winch—it was a big winch—turned toward me. "Thanks for trusting us, and okaying the fight. We totally kicked ass."

I eyed the bruises and bandages on her arms; I knew there were more on her legs. "Oni Lee tagged you a few times. I didn't think that was possible."

"Sometimes you've got to take the hit," she said off-handedly. "When you're going up against a teleport-spammer, you either play defense or you play offense. Playing offense meant I had to take a few glancing blows, but I got the collar on him before he could realise how badly it was going and make a run for it. And after that … well, he's actually fairly crap at fighting once you take away the teleport schtick."

"And you'll be okay for school on Monday." It wasn't a question; I already knew how fast she mended from cuts and bruises.

She grinned, her teeth very white in the dimness, and toasted me with her iced coffee. "Totally."

We fell silent, then, looking out at the city. There would be obstacles in the future, I had no doubt. But we were coming together as a team.

So far, so good.

Part 25