The Owl in the Abyss - Chapter 16 (Patreon)

The doors to the cargo elevator rose up to reveal the kneeling gray form of Henry the sentient statue.

“Welcome to Fortress, Henry,” I smiled.

“Thank you,” he said, then delicately shuffled off the elevator and rose to his feet after checking the ceiling would accommodate him. Thankfully, the former Endbringer shelter had to be generally built to move around large equipment and Coil had similar needs.

It was now late in the afternoon and the city lockdown had been partially lifted, with only the area around the SCP train still off-limits. This allowed dad to grab one of the Fortress cargo trucks from the construction site above the base and transport Henry here with little to no problems.

“So this is what a supervillain’s base looks like?” he asked with amusement

“Well, this one at least does,” I shrugged and gestured for him to follow.

“It needs a bit more signage then it could really double as typical of a number of Foundation facilities I’ve been to,” he explained. He had to walk slowly to accommodate my tiny stride in comparison, but didn’t seem to mind.

“That’s what I was hoping you could help with.”

“Really, so it’s not just for my wonderful company or to reduce the chances of me being spotted by the public or the authorities? Back to containment?”

I looked up at him in alarm, then saw his large face twisting into a teasing grin, “Of course not, Henry. In fact, I wanted to offer you a full paid job in Fortress, which will include the offer of even building you a house specially to scale and even carefully managing your disclosure to the PRT and public if you so wish.”

That had the man made out of supernatural stone almost missing a step and gaping at me. “You’re… you’re serious?”

“As a heart attack,” I said with a determined nod. “We are both SCPs here. I’m not going to be the Foundation, Henry. I might borrow a few of its best practices, but this is Fortress, and I want that to eventually mean something good in this world. Locking away sentient SCPs simply for the sake of protecting humanity from the mere concept of the supernatural is a ridiculous notion.”

He nodded, seeing my point. “So what is this job offer? Sell me on it.”

“Managing Director of this entire base, which we will be using to house, help, manage and study incoming SCPs.”

“You remember that some SCPs will be instantly hostile?”

“Yes, we’ll just have to play that by ear, if it’s too dangerous we’ll have no choice but to destroy it if possible, containment if not.”

“Going GOC then are we?” he chuckled.

“GOC?” I frowned at the unfamiliar acronym.

“I didn’t brief you on them because it was extremely unlikely we’d ever have anything to do with them and you have enough worries on your plate. Yet I can see your curiosity burning, so I’ll explain. On the Earth and the universe I come from, as diverse as humanity naturally is, so is its reaction to the anomalous. This means that the Foundation was not the only organization or group that formed as a result of it. The GOC or Global Occult Coalition is one of these groups and they are what can be considered the post-WW2 UN’s reaction to the anomalous. It’s a relatively young organization, in comparison to the Foundation - who has been around in some form officially since the Renaissance - though time travel has put that into question and at this point the Foundation’s true age is a disputed issue.”

I gave Henry a pointed glare.

He raised his hands in surrender and smiled before continuing, “I digress. The GOC formed from the remnants of defecting occultists, psychics, priests and scientists from Nazi and then Soviet states, when Stalin went on a rampage against them. All fled to the Allies and then they were organized by the newly created UN as a response. They largely have the official backing of the postmodern world and governments, therefore they are very political and see themselves as the police of the paranormal and use the best modern technology to ‘respond to the threat’. This means they will kill SCPs if possible.”

“And that naturally brings them into conflict with the Foundation,” I reasoned.

“Yes, though not always. There have been occasions where the two have cooperated grudgingly on containing high threat SCPs that are impossible to destroy. In those cases, the GOC will generally let the Foundation have its way and take over containment of the SCP.”

“Interesting, so your reasoning for us not ever dealing with them is because they would first tend to destroy any SCP that would theoretically allow them access to our universe?”

“Correct,” he answered as we turned a corner and walked up to the guard post protecting the executive offices. Myers was there and reflexively stood at attention at my approach only to completely break discipline and gape in astonishment at Henry.

“I see you’ve wasted no time in putting your unique touch on the place and its people,” Henry smirked at me. How could a statue’s eyes twinkle?

“Yes. Oh relax, for heaven’s sake, Myers.”

“Yes, mistress. Sorry…” the man stammered somewhat. “I know you explained… but I think it's only really sunk in now.” He gulped and looked up at Henry, who now towered over him.

“Yes, Myers, this is Henry, aka the Sentient Civil War statue. Henry meet Sergeant Myers, who’s currently my guard and part of the mobile response force of Fortress.”

Henry bent over and held out a friendly giant hand for the young mercenary to shake. To Myers credit, he adapted well and gingerly shook the offered hand.

“Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“And I you, sergeant.”

“Henry might become your new immediate manager, Myers, at least when it comes to operations while I’m not here,” I explained.

“I see, mistress. Then I… look forward to working with you, sir.”

Henry nodded and we walked through the checkpoint and auto-turrets. He had to kneel to get into my new office, and looked around with curiosity and eagerly studied the very old desk. It had been one of Coil’s few vanities regarding his former office.

“So what other organizations are there?” I asked, sitting down behind it in the comfy, high backed office chair.

“Too many to go into reasonably, as of last census there are 43 organizations with knowledge of the anomalous and either use or fight against it. I could write multi-volume books about most of them. You are supposed to try and recruit me for your job, remember?”

I shook my head, “Henry, don’t do that to me. What more can I offer? You’ll technically be the director of this entire planet’s response to SCPs, only answerable to either my dad or me as the owners of Fortress. You’ll get a house you can fit in. We’ll arrange to disclose you to the PRT, trying to pass you off as a Case 53 of sorts. You’ll get legal standing and personhood. If any busybody or bureaucrat tries to deny you, you’ll have me, dad and Fortress behind you, we’ll fight in court if we have to.”

He stood very still for a while before he smiled ruefully. “Well, that’s certainly a big step up from the gilded cage I had been in. I won’t deny trying my hand at just being able to somewhat live like a normal person - it has a major appeal.”

“But?” I asked, somewhat dreading the answer.

He scratched his stony face in thought, “Will you also help me publish here? I had a ton of scientific work on the backlog, that was pending approval. I’m going to have to get my doctorates here again before I can recreate and publish all that work.”

“Of course, we’ll help with that,” I said automatically. “How did you even manage it in the Foundation universe?”

“Well, for the Foundation, with their power and access, it was quite easy. One of the governing council members of the Foundation was the Dean of Oxford in his day job. He proctored me and slipped through the paperwork. From then on, I could publish remotely.”

“Ah, so now we’re going to have to do it the more conventional way,” I said in thought, thinking back to mom’s talks of university faculty life and the day to day. “Would you care where your accreditation comes from? Brockton Bay University isn’t the biggest in the country, nor is it Ivy League, but it’s not got a bad reputation at least.”

“While I’ll miss the prestige of an Oxford doctorate, my work can stand on its own and I do not fear any peer review. Very well, if Fortress will help me in that direction, then you have my employment.”

I automatically stood and reached out to shake Henry’s hand. “Thanks, Director Henry Hawkins.”

He stepped forward, then used his thumb and forefinger to lightly shake my hand. “You’re welcome. I won’t deny that the decision was easy, but I had to make you work for it a little.” I laughed and sat back down. “Now, as my first act, I’ll brief you a bit on the other groups of note, if only because it's more likely that we’ll encounter SCPs that relate to them or are even made by them. The first is, Are We Cool Yet?”

I frowned weirdly at Henry as my mind struggled with the question out of nowhere.

He coughed and smothered a smile. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a tradition among the Foundation for new recruits when this briefing comes up. And no, that’s not a question I’m asking. The organization’s name is literally ‘Are we cool yet?’ or AWCY. They’re a collection of artists and anarchists who have merged the ideas of both. They can barely be considered a ‘group’ as we define the term because they inherently despise any concept of hierarchy and organization. We’ve seen them work as loners or loosely congregated groups or cells that occasionally form and then drift apart after a collective project is finished. It’s those ‘projects’ that usually bring them to the Foundation or the GOC’s attention. The projects are usually anomalous artwork or what AWCY considers art and they’re invariably hazardous and even deadly to anyone who encounters them. I pray and hope that we won’t get any of their work delivered onto our doorstep, but with our luck…”

“Any examples you can give?” I asked.

“SCP-024-FR, a Parisian ham sandwich, looks utterly delicious, perfectly made, but is rather large, over fourteen inches diameter. Anyone exposed to it will begin to obsess over it, then try to eat it all in one gulp, literally, even if they have to dislocate and break their own jaw to do it. Or the delightful collection of audio CDs that will force you to listen to all 72 minutes of anomalous music, while inducing some form of anomaly to occur; such as giving the listener quintuple vision to moving objects, listening to another CD will cause your body to exude elemental cesium which kills you from the resulting burns, some will either age you to 5 days old or 5 years old… I can go on and on.”

I was left somewhat gaping at this point. “How has the Foundation or GOC not killed these bastards off?”

“Their one strength is their disorganization. They’re effectively a memetic terrorist anarchist collective that has no headquarters or leadership to dismantle or target, Taylor. Some in the Foundation has said that trying to kill AWCY is like trying to kill an idea.”

“Well, let’s firmly keep a hold of that. In fact, my first order to you is to never brief anyone else on the existence or the possibility of AWCY. Okay, so who’s next?”

Henry chuckled and looked at the clock mounted on the wall, “How long do you have?”

“I set aside an hour for this meeting, after that I need to go give Coil his final hypnotized orders that should button him up nicely and make sure that he’s comfortable in his new cell. I’ll need to brief you on him afterward.”

“Very well, next is Anderson Robotics…”

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Despite our best efforts Dad and I only left Fortress at nearly nine in the evening, leaving Henry in charge and keeping a constant eye on Coil.

The debate on what to finally do with him was still ongoing. For the moment, he was too valuable as a source of knowledge and intel on his plans and operations. In addition, his power, despite its useless utility when it came to SCPs, was still perfectly functional when it came to everything else, especially parahumans.

We took one of the four rather fancy Ford sedan company cars that were on site. There was a fifth one that Coil used specifically when traveling from the home of his civilian persona of Thomas Calvert, PRT Consultant. It was so tempting to use, simply because it might as well have been a James Bond car taken straight from Q-Branch. It was armor plated to withstand high velocity rifle fire, it had articulated auto-shotgun mounts that popped out of the front bonnet, it had hidden flamethrower nozzles pointing sideways from underneath the car to give anyone approaching from the sides a very bad surprise, run flat tires, and it could drop multiple spreads of tire destroying caltrops behind it.

Even dad couldn’t help but marvel and geek about that car, but had to reluctantly bow down to wisdom in not using it… for the moment. We had no idea about controlling those systems or how they functioned. The thing was a tank in disguise and operating it without at least reading Coil’s notes on the thing first was a bad idea.

My main priority anyway as we left was to get dad a much needed medical checkup by a professional. I didn’t want him driving, so I bit the bullet and got behind the wheel to drive us to the hospital. I had my learner’s permit but had yet to get around to taking the final exam for a full driver’s license, so with dad next to me, we weren’t breaking the law and the car had all its paperwork neatly ready in the glovebox. Coil did not want his men or an entire operation busted because of a routine traffic stop.

I felt quite a bit conspicuous and was weary of getting near high SUVs or trucks, who would clearly see if they pulled next to me that I wasn’t wearing a stitch.

The ride to Brockton General was also punctuated by me wondering about the vagaries of my own powers and SCPs in general.

Right now, I had a seatbelt clipped on me and my skin was showing no rejection symptoms.

Was it because, technically, the belt was actually attached to the seat, which was bolted into the chassis and structure of the car. I was therefore, technically, wearing the entire car and so my powers didn’t consider it a violation of my ‘SCP rules’.

The other can of worms my mind was working on was the fact that it was entirely possible for me to actually create an SCP.

After Henry’s briefing on the various factions, such as AWCY and especially the group known as Doctor Wondertainment; a collective or individual (it wasn’t known which) that made SCPs which always thematically resembled children’s toys and in some cases was even made for them. It left me asking Henry the obvious question.

“Yes, you can. Yes, I can teach you. Your studies in ontokinesis will happen under my eye, always. No experimentation at home. You will also teach no one unless we can both agree on its absolute necessity. Is that understood?!”

It was the first time I had ever seen Henry act so scary, fully showing the dangerous being he could be.

The danger of it I could well understand. It was knowledge with which, if spread recklessly, could cause the end of the universe. That Henry was willing to teach me at all, was simply because it was dangerous at this point for him to keep it to himself. If something happened that incapacitated or even destroyed him, that precious knowledge would be lost. The Foundation only used ontokinesis in the process of creating technology that could contain SCPs. Strangely,  he didn’t tell me about what they actually used.

“No, it’s best if you developed your own method. I can’t explain why, because it’s a cognitohazard.”

That was all he needed to say.

The blast of a car horn to my left, pulled my half-focus fully in that direction. A neighboring SUV at that moment had clearly caught an eyeful of me. I saw three very approving, teenage male faces squished against the car windows. There was also an argument going on I could vaguely hear. It required my true sight to make sense of the auras and I detected the woman’s aura in the driver’s seat.

Ah, a mother and three teenage sons, the poor thing. I mentally wished her luck in raising them, gave a friendly wave to the boys, before the light turned green and I pushed down on the accelerator.

Dad chuckled wearily, clearly struggling to stay awake, “Nicely handled, Taylor.”

I shrugged, turning the wheel to bring us onto the left lane for the upcoming turn into the road for Brockton General. “Not gonna use my powers on a bunch of boys just for being boys. My public hero persona is thin enough, it's entirely possible that they’re cape geeks and know that they just saw Escort.”

He merely smiled with approval and gazed at the now looming buildings of the hospital.

I didn’t want to cause a fuss, so I accompanied him invisibly as he presented himself at the ER as the victim of a gang ambush. Which was rather darkly amusing, because it was true if you counted Coil’s mercs as a Brockton ‘gang’.

He ended up getting an x-ray of his ribs and a general ultrasound of his abdominal area just to confirm that everything was okay in that region.

Just doing both required nearly two hours of waiting in queues and he eventually left with bindings for a few stressed muscles, a general painkiller and a doctor’s note that he could use to take the next three days off work.

Finally, at eleven in the evening, I drove us away from the hospital.

Dad was struggling mightily to fight off sleep at this point.

“Traffic is light at this hour, fifteen minutes to home,” I said optimistically.

The Void yawned open.

I cursed in a way that drove the sleep from dad as if I had lit his butt on fire. I also had to fight my reflexive twitch to keep the car stable.

I was mostly successful, as the car only swerved by a few inches out of the lane. The engine over revved for the gear as my foot depressed it slightly too hard.

My eyes scanned frantically as I tried to find a spot to stop.

Thankfully, my driving gaffe had happened on a road with almost no traffic and just a few minutes from the hospital. We hadn’t reached any major route yet.

“Taylor!? What’s going on?”

I turned the car onto a streetside parking spot and braked, “Dad, void event, check around for anything strange behind us!”

The instant I had the car stopped and the parking brake was on, I misted and whirled around.

We both spotted it immediately.

The thing that didn’t belong.

It was right in the backseat of the sedan with us.

The fact that my normal eyes only saw a roughly 16 inch high safe with a multiple dial combination lock, didn’t stop my heart from wanting to launch itself out of my chest.

My true sight saw the yawning space and blurred contents of millions of safes, in adjacent dimensions, waiting to burst open and drown us in their contents. If that happened there would be nowhere to run or even mist in time to escape the sudden expansion of that much volume intruding into reality.

“Taylor!”

Dad’s voice snapped me out of my largely rational fear and brought my wits back.

No…

My true sight finally saw that I had not just been delivered an unfathomable bomb and I remisted and fell into the driver’s seat with the wind thoroughly out of my sails, breathing hard and trying to calm down.

I sent a figurative middle finger to the Void entity in my mind. “It’s okay, dad… it’s okay. It’s… safe.” I cringed at the pun that snuck through my guard.

Dad gave me a mild grin and shook his head, then returned to staring at the safe, “Really little owl, you’re going to send me into an early grave. A shot of natural adrenaline is not what I need now.”

“Sorry, there’s just no getting used to that feeling.”

“It’s okay, we’re here, alive, calm down and get your feet under you. I almost feel like I should break out the Jack Daniels for both of us.”

“That’s illegal for me,” I waved an admonishing finger, even though we both knew I wouldn’t be able to keep a drink like that down.

“Take your time, unless this thing is going to explode on us?”

I shook my head, “No, I was afraid of that at first, considering what’s beneath the exterior… but it’s stable.”

“Do I want to know?”

“From what I can see, it’s actually a safe, and it has the things you would generally put in it; except one of the closest volumes actually has an ice cream and a handgun in it for some reason.”

“Sorry, volumes?”

“Yeah, what you’re looking at is actually millions of safes conceptually squeezed into that space.”

Dad gave the thing a wide eyed look and settled down into his own seat. He rubbed his head wearily, “I think I need to take another painkiller. My brain just tried to work out how much total volume that was and utterly failed.”

“Let me worry about writing the SCP report, dad. We need to get home.”

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Dad grabbed himself a small snack before collapsing in bed and promptly passing out. He didn’t even bother to get into PJs, merely pulling off his shoes. He hadn’t even pulled the blankets over himself, so I grabbed an extra set from the closet and draped them over him.

That done, I headed downstairs into the basement to begin work.

The safe was now sitting center stage on the desk and its multifaceted aura scintillated like a diamond reflecting light with infinite fractals.

I sat down in front of it, opened my SCP file, paging to a new section to begin a new entry.

“Now, what to call you?” I asked aloud.

It was unlikely that I could discover what the Foundation had designated the thing, unless Henry knew, so I defaulted to my own system - Anomaly 6 or A–06.

Description? It was a matt black painted safe made out of…

I tapped it with a finger to listen to the resonance, then felt the general texture, hardness…

“Iron,” I nodded and wrote that down. Next the tape measure revealed precise measurements of 16.5 inches in height, 13.8 in width and 13 inches of depth.

“Lock has seven dials.” I carefully reached out to the first which was currently set to ‘0’ and carefully moved it down and it showed a ‘1’.

Nothing outwardly happened but its infinitely complex aura visibly shifted and I could see that the primary aura that had been there before shifted backward, swallowed by the vast complexity, whilst a new primary aura rose to dominance. I also did a quick scan of the basement to see if anything around me was affected as well.

Nothing.

I breathed a sigh of relief and shifted the dial again to ‘2’. The same pattern of aura swapping happened.

Shifting to ‘3’ did the same and I continued, eventually it reached ‘9’ and went back to ‘0’.

“Okay, so nothing anomalous necessarily about the dials themselves or the effect they produce on the area around me. They only cause the internal volume of the safe to change.”

I did the same with the remaining six dials, wanting to be thorough, again nothing anomalous happened to the environment.

I used my thumb to quickly turn all the dials to ‘0000000’. I took a deep breath, put my hand to the lever and twisted it.

The safe made the typical clang and twang of an internal mechanism working. The door popped open with no resistance and I carefully pulled it open.

“Nothing, wait…” I squinted and reached for the desk lamp, pointing inside to get better light. “Compartment triple zero, triple zero, zero, has sawdust,” I said, writing that down.

I closed the safe, then moved the right dial onward to ‘1’.

The handle twisted open again, only to reveal that the inside of the safe was now a pristinely clean emptiness.

“So is there no combination that will actually lock it?”

As a random test, I ran my fingers over all seven dials simultaneously, stopping as the dials settled on ‘2632346’.

I twisted the latch again and as the door opened, the overhead light caught something small and shiny. I shined the desk lamp inside and of all things it was a small metallic pendant in the shape of an owl, its front painted an aqua blue with two comically large black eyes. It was extremely cute and something I wouldn’t have worn, but would’ve at least bought to display in my room at a curio shop.

It was very tempting to reach out and take it, but I didn’t dare. Henry had warned me enough on SCP investigation that I should never take anything an SCP produces without thorough testing and examination first. That even my ‘true sight’ could be fooled by a sufficiently powerful SCP entity. That little owl pendant looked perfectly normal, but it could be hiding a powerful and insidious ontokinetic effect or was even a form of cognitohazard in itself.

The safe could even have made it specifically for me.

I firmly shut the safe door and latched it shut. Writing down the test results and presence of an ‘owl pendant’ and the possibility the safe was trying to psychologically manipulate me.

I made another random selection. In combination ‘4959302’, the safe was filled with hundreds of silver-white paper clips. It spilled out and I misted immediately to retreat, letting the overflowing clips clatter to the floor.

I remained insubstantial for a few minutes, awaiting any anomalous effect from the paper clips, but nothing happened.

To clean up the mess without touching the clips, I ended up having to go into the garage to get two garden trowels, using one to scrape them into the other. I kept the clips from spilling out by simply putting the safe on its back and letting gravity do the job.

Mess cleaned up, the safe closed and back in its usual orientation, I wrote down the results.

“Safe is seemingly unable to be actually locked and will always open on the corresponding volume.”

My pen tapped against the file as I thought about the math and dimensions involved in this thing.

Seven dials, beginning at ‘1’ and would go to ‘9999999’, so mathematically there should be just under ten million volumes.

I brought forth my scientific calculator and began writing down the basic math problem, then set to work.

“Twenty nine point six billion square inches of internal volume in total. Converting to feet, two point four six billion square feet.”

My pen fell onto the file as I developed a headache trying to actually imagine that total volume and think of a possible logical reason for anyone actually making this SCP.

An practically infinite storage space for valuables? Ridiculous, who would have so many valuable items that you needed just under ten million safes? You’d need to keep track of which safe combination you put it in. Then again, it would neatly bamboozle any thief trying to crack this safe, especially if you filled the other volumes with nasty traps or glitter bombs even. So it was actually security through the power of quantity.

Whoever was the actual owner and maker of the safe, probably had a very valuable item that he wanted to keep secure. So instead of trying to protect it with the world’s best and most technologically advanced safe, which was expensive and most likely would eventually be cracked anyway in the neverending battle between crime and security - he or she made an anomalous safe.

As long as they remembered the code and never wrote it down, then the valuable item would be secure. Thieves would die of old age or be caught long before they could ever retrieve the priceless item.

The next issue that occurred to me was another bit of physics that the safe was either ignoring or mitigating. Even if the majority of the safes were empty, that still left thousands that were not. That meant it was negating the mass of all those items placed in it. When I had carried it down into the basement, I had no difficulty and strain whatsoever. No Brute rating required at all.

Now, how to actually accurately weigh the thing?

I eventually ended up going upstairs to dad’s room to grab the body weight scale our family had been using since I was five years old. I measured myself then picked up the safe and stepped on the scale. It was rather awkward because the bulk of the thing was in my line of sight, preventing me from seeing the digital reading. I had to lean but eventually spotted it, and did a quick mental subtraction.

23.7 pounds

I put it down on the desk and noted that in my file.

Then I shifted the combination back to ‘0000001’ and put in an exercise dumbbell of five kilograms, which I had to annoyingly convert to pounds because it was from an imported set that dad had used at one point in his youth.

I closed the safe, picked it up and measured it again.

No visible difference, any jumps up and down was because I was initially fumbling the thing, trying to stabilize myself.

So it was either negating the mass increase or spreading it out evenly among all ten million odd safes, meaning the accuracy of my scale was completely insufficient to detect that.

My next experiment was based on what I had seen inside one of the volumes via true sight - the ice cream.

The temperature inside the safe was consistent with the air of the basement. None of the compartments opened so far had noted any difference in that respect. That the ice cream I had briefly spotted was still frozen properly, indicated that perhaps there were volumes inside that were below 32 Fahrenheit.

Randomly trying to find that specific ice cream again or its specific combination would take forever and was potentially dangerous. I realized how lucky I was that nothing truly bad had jumped out of this safe at me yet.

There was definitely a much safer testing methodology that I had to work out, something I would consult with Henry about. Maybe doing it in a secure room at Fortress, with a video camera recording. Some sort of remote robot rig that could at least operate the lever of the safe door.

I still wanted to at least try this last one.

A quick trip to the freezer and I had a tray of ice cubes that I was carefully putting into the 0000001 compartment.

The safe was closed and I set a timer for ten minutes in my smartphone’s stopwatch app.

When the timer beeped again, I opened the safe and regarded a tray of perfectly frozen ice cubes. There should’ve been some melting going on, even with how relatively cold it was in the basement at the moment in the early hours of the morning on a February. It wasn’t freezing down here.

I decided to try again, but instead take a single ice cube out of the tray and only place that in the compartment. My hand’s heat from the brief touch already had a visible effect, so at least some of the laws of thermodynamics still applied to me.

The result after another ten minute wait was more conclusive this time.

The ice cube, totally exposed, with no insulation from the tray and other ice cubes in proximity to keep them at a low temperature… remained exactly the same in the safe.

The only conclusion was that the safe was also mitigating the effect of time on whatever it contained.

That made sense if whoever built the safe, wanted to store something valuable that would also degrade with time as well. Valuable artwork perhaps? I recalled reading a story of how carefully some valuable old paintings had to be stored in extremely controlled conditions to prevent further degradation. Well, this safe would be the perfect answer to that, even if its interior wasn’t pressurized or carefully isolated from the atmosphere. Time had no meaning for whatever was locked inside it.

I sat back in my chair and reviewed my notes, before dumping my pen onto the file and standing.

Yeah, it was time to stop half-assing my experimentation.

I had the money.

I had an entire company, an entire underground base full of hunky mercs.

I had Henry. We could recruit and hire actual scientists!

The safe door was firmly closed and I twisted the latch into the closed position. Then I patted the safe on top, “Don’t you worry, we’ll study you nice and proper. See what secrets are hidden in you.”

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After the sun rose, dad seemed to allow himself the luxury of sleeping an extra two hours before he trudged down the stairs and into the kitchen. He had at least changed into a casual tracksuit now. He found a spread of eggs, bacon, toast and freshly roasted coffee waiting for him.

He eyed me waiting expectantly for him at the table, “Wow, good guess, little owl. This also looks amazing.”

“Thank you. No guess really needed. You always take about two hours of extra sleep when you can. The eggs are just me imitating what Uber showed me.”

He sat down with a huff, took up his knife and fork, before sprinkling some salt on his eggs. “When you see him next, tell him he has my sincere thanks for his help in my rescue, will you? I would do it personally, but I can see the problem with that.”

I nodded, “Yeah, those two could easily ID my civvy persona at this point, but they don’t. Having you ‘officially’ meet them is problematic.”

We lapsed into a comfortable silence as he continued eating. When he was done, he was idly sipping on his cup of coffee, staring broodily into it.

“There are two issues we have to deal with today, the first is my pickup.”

My brain struggled to make sense of why he was worrying about it, before it finally clicked and I gave myself a good slap to the forehead. “What happened to it? Where was it?”

“Wilson, Stewart and Mccarty, yes, I found out who they were, nabbed me just a block from the DWU. They used one of those fancy tasers that the cops can shoot into a car that disables the electronics. The moment I stopped, I was pulled out at gunpoint, bagged and dumped into a van.”

“Do you remember where exactly? And didn’t we retain those three on Fortress payroll?”

“Mazzilli Avenue, it's only about a quarter mile long, so it should be easy to spot from the air, if it’s still there,” he sighed, clearly not feeling optimistic. “Also, while I’ll never be friends with them, I can accept them as employees and all three apologized without needing any coercion or prompting from me.”

“Well, they probably figured it was the only thing they could do to actually keep their jobs,” I pointed out.

“That and while I don’t trust Calvert as far as I could spit in the wind, he was a diligent CEO who ran a tight ship and was a perfectionist when it came to business admin. His performance reviews for those three were excellent and it would’ve been foolish to lose them.”

I saw his point, however there was clearly going to be many an awkward meeting in the future when Fortress operations involved those three and dad was the one to give the orders.

“What’s the second issue?”

Dad’s body language almost began to remind me of the bad old days in the weeks after mom’s death at this point and a tightness of dread began to develop in my stomach.

“You haven’t looked at me with true sight lately, have you?”

I frowned in confusion at the question. As a habit, after I had gotten a hang of it, I had begun to avoid using it on dad, simply because I saw no reason to. It was quite an invasion of privacy in actuality.

“No… it’s just, we had lost so much trust between us after mom died. I opened up, you did, and to keep using it on you without due cause-”

“Not even after I had been beaten up and Pitter brought me to you?” He asked.

I took a deep breath, “No, using it to diagnose medical issues is not exactly a direction I’ve explored at all. Dad, what’s going on?”

He sipped the last of his coffee and put the mug down somehow with a finality that rang in my ears. “Use it on me, please, little owl. You’ll see.”

“Okay…” I focused on it automatically, his aura blossomed into brilliant colors, motes, barbs, and I immediately wished I hadn’t.

It felt like my stomach wanted to fall through the floor, as my brain comprehended what I was seeing. I closed my eyes immediately, my hands balled into fists that strained with anger and I began breathing hard.

The temptation to smash and break something became nearly overwhelming.

I fought against the anger and impulse, because it wouldn’t solve anything. I wanted to mist, then zoom back to Fortress and rip Coil’s head right off his shoulders. I nipped that impulse in the bud, hard. Again, it wouldn’t solve the problem, just maybe give me a bit of gratification and possibly cause massive issues in the long run.

I could feel my teeth grinding and my jaw muscle flexed as I also resisted the pointless urge to scream and curse up a storm worthy of a drunken dockworker.

My breath hissed through the gaps in my teeth as I mastered myself enough to speak somewhat properly, “When did it happen?”

“Maybe the third beating, lost track of time, Coil wasn’t there at the time,” he said gravely.

I opened my eyes again and looked at dad… then up behind his head as the distinct aura of a parahuman manifested there. Then the stupid misplaced guilt settled on my shoulders like an awful oily cloak.

Dad was taken to target me, his ordeal had been traumatic enough for a trigger and I hadn’t even noticed, simply because I didn’t want to use the True Sight on dad. He had been dealing with all this on his own, only thinking about me, then falling into getting the Fortress situation sorted out.

I felt his right hand settle on my left hand, which was still balled up into a fist on the table. “Don’t, little owl. I know exactly how you feel. I got my pound of flesh when I beat the snot out of him.”

“Dad, a one two punch is not enough for-”

He squeezed my hand to interrupt me. “We cannot start down that road, dear. Comparing hurts, eye for an eye. Calvert is now practically a prisoner in body and mind to you. I like to imagine there’s a small part of him that is unaffected and is experiencing every moment of torment at being unable to escape or meaningfully affect anything. He’s trapped as I was and that satisfies me. No petty revenge from me can match what’s already happening.”

I tried to cast off my own anger, but it was clinging to me stubbornly. I knew I needed time to process this or vent it off somewhere or somehow.

“I need to-”

He now grabbed my fist, “Do not go out like this, little owl. The pickup can wait or be in a thousand pieces, I don’t care. I care about you and going out there in your state of mind currently isn’t a good idea. Be honest, are you not going to imagine the first ganger you meet has Coil’s face?”

“Well, what do you expect me to do then? You’re the only person I currently love in this world, and you were traumatized enough to trigger,” I hissed.

“Love you too,” he smiled ruefully. “You’ve certainly learned these last few years how to deal with the Hebert anger, applying what your mother taught. Twisting it into a positive force and motivation to endure. It certainly helps when you’re dealing with emotional and physical bullying, but this is on another level. We’re now dealing with much bigger issues, life changing ones. You cannot turn torture, triggers, trauma, near-death and fighting for your own life or a loved one, into a positive. Using them as fuel or motivation will poison your mindset.”

“Then what…” I took a deep breath in and out, “...do you recommend?”

He sighed heavily, rubbing his face. “Honestly, at this point I want to sign us both up to therapy. Heck, I’ll hire one full time to work at Fortress. If we have to deal with not only this parahuman crap but also SCPs, making decisions that could influence the entire universe, then we need to be able to make rational, level-headed decisions.”

My mind boggled at the idea. “Dad, where would we even begin to find a therapist that is possibly qualified to that level or one which we could trust?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted gloomily. “After twenty-four years of parahumans in public there has to be someone who’s looked into it or studied in that direction. Anyway, that’s in the medium to long term. I think for both of us, in the short term, we need to fall back to the old ways.”

“What are the old ways?”

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The old ways turned out to be in the house garage. Dad carried in a large red punching bag that had seen a lot of use, wincing visibly with every step.

“Dad, I would’ve carried that for you?”

“I know, but I’m only injured, not an invalid.” He dropped it onto the bare concrete floor with a huff of effort. “I will ask you to pick it up and hang it on that hook though.” He pointed to a steel hook that had been screwed into one of the overhead beams since forever.

“Oh, so that’s what that thing was for all this time?”

“Yes, in the first few years of marriage and in this house, before you were born, I took out my issues on this bag.”

I scooped it up easily whilst dad placed a step ladder under the hook for me. The only struggle was managing the position of the bag under one arm so I could hook up the multiple straps. That done, I patiently waited for dad to take away the ladder.

“So, we’re going to be punching our issues, dad?” I said with amusement but also a bit of skepticism.

“It works, or to be more accurate, the exercise, exhaustion and endorphin release works. I also figured you could use a bit of pointers in actually punching someone, since it’s actually your job to punch criminals now. You can’t count on the fact that you’ll always have ‘15 with you, someone might actually have the skill, strength or even technology to disarm you in some way. Okay, now punch the bag… but not hard enough to destroy it.”

I shrugged and made a fist with my right hand-

“Stop,” said dad quickly. He stepped closer and took my right hand, before manipulating my fingers and thumb into a fist again, but with a difference. “Thumb between the first and second knuckles on your index and middle fingers. You had it between the second and third of your index. You’ll end up stabbing your thumbnail into the guy before your punch lands.”

I regarded my fist in its new configuration for a moment. “Yeah, drawing actual blood from criminals… not exactly heroic is it?”

“No, now go ahead.”

I threw a straight forward right handed jab into the punching bag. Even with my tentative, moderated strength, the bag flew backward on the hook significantly, nearly reaching a full 90 degree tilt and smacking it against the garage ceiling.

Dad shook his head, “Thank goodness you had ‘15 with you. At that strength, you’d have killed or severely injured someone depending where you hit.”

I winced at the thought, “Yeah, I’ve been using my cellular self-control to ramp up my strength factor lately. I looked up the muscular structure of gorillas for inspiration. I’m not exactly at that level, because a lot of that has to do with skeletal factors and I didn’t want to make myself look inhuman.”

“Please be careful with that, dear. I don’t want to wake up to Taylor the gorilla one day,” he said seriously, but the twinkle in his eye and a twitch of his mouth showed his actual amusement.

“Of course, ‘inspiration’ dad, not imitation.”

“Good, but you still need to moderate your strength further. Your technique is, of course, amateurish. First, the strength of a punch comes from your core, just below the navel, with your feet properly anchored to the ground.” He stepped in front of the bag and demonstrated. “Knees slightly bent and-” He unleashed a punch that thumped in a satisfying manner, rocked the bag backwards and sent it swinging a fair bit. “Until you can moderate your strength to that point and use proper technique, no punching bad guys.”

I nodded and imitated his stance, focused on the bag and my own strength, trying to dial it down further, before throwing a jab.

The bag was still sent swinging hard and I ended up having to catch it, to stop it from smashing into me.

“Better technique, still too strong. Don’t look directly where you’re aiming to punch, a good opponent will see that and counter or block easily. Focus beyond the bag, whilst taking in the whole bag.”

I tried again. Thump. The bag swung marginally less this time.

“Good, better, we’ll first focus on you getting this down, keep using that jab. Then we’ll look at other types of punches and strikes, their benefits, drawbacks, then we’ll talk about where to punch someone in a way that’ll knock ‘em out cold.”

Punch, thump, still the same.

“I’m rather surprised you haven’t asked yet,” he smiled knowingly as I continued punching.

It was very much the elephant in the room at the moment. In a way, I was burning to know what his power was, yet also feeling like I didn’t want to. It was stupid, of course I should know, but every time I saw it… I knew that stupid misplaced guilt would resurface.

My next punch rocked the bag higher.

“Fine, what is it?” I said, gritting my teeth and sending another punch; same result.

He walked over to the small, high, garage window that faced backwards into the yard and opened it.

Abruptly a small flock of roughly a dozen birds flew in. I recognized them as black-capped chickadees because of how common they were in the area. They fluttered and flapped around randomly at first, before quickly landing and standing in a perfect line in front of dad, as if they were soldiers waiting for orders.

I slightly pinched myself to check I was awake. My true sight opened and I saw that each bird had a dimensional link into ‘nowhere’ above their heads, almost similar to what every parahuman had, but much smaller and simpler.

“You can control birds?”

Dad nodded, “Yes, but also insects, arachnids and rats. Naturally, I didn’t want to demonstrate by having those come in here.”

I shuddered at the thought and imagined the amount of cleaning we’d have to do afterward. “So you’re a Master as well, what range?”

“I haven’t exactly measured it, but three, maybe four miles in every direction from me.”

My brain tried to imagine the amount of critters and birds that now fell under my dad’s domain. “Holy… you could do a fair impression of a biblical plague, can’t you?”

He thought for a moment, “I suppose I could, now that you mention it.”

“How can you possibly keep all that info in your head? The position of each, what each critter is doing?”

“I don’t,” he explained. “It’s all there, but I’ve been holding off. I tried it once, while I was captive… but knew immediately I wasn’t ready. So far, these dozen at once are the best I can do without developing a splitting headache. Their senses are the biggest problem, not exactly compatible with the human mind, but I also feel I’ll get better at it.” A dozen birds, controlling and seeing through them, was already quite impressive. He’d easily be able to keep watch over a large area if they flew around. If he could also build that up, learn to control more - his potential for recon and a localized omniscience was massive. “There’s more.”

“Oh?”

He really looked uncomfortable now. “I can also use them as… vectors to channel and infect my emotions onto people.”

“You mean, land a bird on their shoulder, then make them feel… angry, sad, depressed?”

“The bird doesn’t need to land,” he said, grabbing the small foot ladder and sitting down on it. “My bird just needs to see a target.”

Fuck, that was… the potential for disruption and destruction was huge! Even if he sent positive emotions, if that happened at the wrong time, it could be devastating. Send amusement and laughter while driving; multiple instant accidents with no way to stop it or even possibly identify what was causing it.

“Dad, your power is terrifying.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do? You know you can’t not use it. You’ve seen the research.”

“Now you truly see why I want a therapist, with Fortress and the DWU already on my plate, I don’t see how I can add moonlighting as a hero on top of that. I’d go nuts.”

“Let me and Henry handle Fortress, dad, we don’t sleep.”

“I need to be involved, dear.”

“Not full time you don’t, just… twice a week or something.”

The birds began a fairly complex dance of sorts on the concrete floor that dad idly stared at. “I suppose that can work. Now the question comes about the PRT and Protectorate.”

I sighed, “It’s your life and choice at the end of the day, dad.”

“I suppose I should at least inform them about my powers, come up with an alias.”

“Let me get an hour of practicing punches down, then we’ll begin some research and brainstorm ideas. We’ll get through this, dad… together.”

He nodded, his face sporting a half-smile, “Together.”

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SCPs mentioned only:

"SCP-024-FR" by INT_Translator from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-024-fr. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

"SCP-092" by Unknown author, rewritten by Quikngruvn, Drewbear and Voct, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-092. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

SCPs in this chapter:

"SCP-216" by psh, from the SCP Wiki. Source: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-216. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

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A/N: Queen Admin is not content to be passive anymore, when there's truly new [DATA] to be had. Enjoy the weekend!