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Chapter 2-8 - POST, part 8

I swear I was going to go straight to Bakuda. Then Glory Girl turned up and things got talky, BUT on the upside I now have a clear direction for the next part.

Three teenagers gathered under the full moon in a quiet, overgrown backyard. Silvery moonlight shimmered off their faceless masks, wind rustling through the branches of a gnarled, vine-shrouded tree.

There was a clicking sound. A creak, the lid to a disused coal chute lifting open, and moonlight shone on rows of lidless, soulless eyes. Long curved claw-tipped limbs reached out, dug into the mossy soil, and pulled. One pair of limbs at a time, it pulled itself out of the ground, looming over the teens - stretching its limbs, a soft chittering sound in the cool air, madly staring eyes scanning over the quiet yard. Bladelike mandibles yawned wide and drank in the wind.

"Well. That wasn't absolutely horrifying at all."

"How the hell did you even fit through there?"

I chose to ignore Regent for the moment and stretched my legs to their maximum extension, one at a time, and pulsed green at Tattletale. Out in the open, without the low ceiling of the basement hindering me, I loomed over her.

"I might be horrifying, but right now I'm your horrifying," I buzzed back at her. "Tell me I'm any worse than Bitch's dogs."

Tattletale smiled, wide and sharp - she'd figured out the polarization settings for her helmet and while her face was fully covered by the diamondglass visor, she'd left the bottom half transparent both ways. "Well, it's hard to be intimidated by Brutus after the third time he's passed out drooling in your lap." The faint outline of a single stylized eye shone on the upper half of her visor, dark violet on black, her blonde hair spilling freely down her shoulders from under the edge of the helmet. She'd tweaked the crashsuit to be near identical with her original bodyglove, midnight purple with lavender stripes along her body and the same eye icon stretching across her chest. "Besides, Brutus is a sweetheart."

"And I'm not? You wound me. Stand by." I shifted, rotated myself to line my central frame up with the gap between houses. My rearmost two sets of legs spread, flattened against the ground while I angled my forward half up with the other two sets.

###DRONE CATAPULT - ACTIVE

Armor panels slid open on my left flank. Accelerator coils hummed.

###OBSERVER #001 - LAUNCH

There was a sound like chukka! and a dark blur hurtled across the neighborhood, a round disc-shape that described a long gentle parabolic arc in the night. By the time its arc has reached its apex, the saucer-shaped observer drone's simple AI finished booting. Its integrated ion drive came online, a soft hum in the night, gyroscopes thrumming, and instead of slowing down it spun up faster and faster, began to rise and accelerate. Its AI pinged me back and I reached out to it with my comms, slotted it into my tactical network. Another set of camera feeds winked to life in my mind's eye.

###OBSERVER #001 - ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL - Boldly going where no saucer has gone before!

Satisfied the little drone was fully operational, I angled myself a little higher.

Chukkachukkachukka!

###OBSERVER #002-004 - LAUNCH

###OBSERVER #002 - ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL - Second street from the right, forwards until dawn!

###OBSERVER #003 - ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL - There's coffee in that hab-block!

###OBSERVER #004 - ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL - Suburbia, the final frontier!

The downside to working with prepackaged open-source designs is, every now and then you get what you pay for. Whoever designed the AI on these drones, I already disliked them.

Three more sets of sensor feeds popped into being in my mind's eye - 360 degree audio/visual, thermal imaging, short-to-medium-range radar, powered emissions, radio contacts, times four. My cortex parsed the mass of sensory data into a more useful format and shunted the results into my tactical network, piped it back to the Undersiders' helmet feeds.

"Oh, wow." I could hear the smile in Tattletale's voice as she looked through the feeds. "What's the range on these things?"

"Effective communications range is about a kilometer in an urban environment, maybe twenty in the open as long as you can maintain direct line of sight. More if we had a satellite to bounce the signal off of." I set them to a slowly expanding search pattern and let them go. Each drone was slightly over a foot in diameter, nearly silent, and with their smart paint set to active camouflage paired with the heights and speeds they were moving at (they could hit about 200 kph in a mostly straight line at full burn) they were effectively invisible in the night, sweeping over Brockton Bay in a widening circle.

I considered, for a moment, hijacking a couple of Brockton Bay's many cell towers to function as signal repeaters, then decided against the idea. Best not attract that kind of attention. For now, but let's just put a pin in that idea.

###OBSERVER #003 - ANOMALOUS CONTACT - Fascinating.

"On one hand, I'm glad that didn't take any longer than that," Grue muttered, arms crossed, his crashsuit set to a mass of blacks and grays, a slightly pixelated skull leering over his black-polarized visor. "On the other-"

"Fuck me." Regent breathed out as my tactical network pinged, little red blips popping up on our tactical map one after another. Regent had his usual ruffled shirt thrown over his pure white crashsuit, and his coronet was magnetically stuck to the top of his helmet at a jaunty angle. "Are all of those-"

"Bombs? Probably not all of them. Without an actual boom bomb to compare them to I'm doing a lot of guesswork." Still, that was a lot of contacts. More coming in by the moment as the observer saucers swept over streets and parking lots.

We had a plan, though it was - frustratingly vague at points. Step one was to find Bakuda's workshop. Obviously first, it was going to be in ABB territory. Second, considering her love of setting up traps, minefields and other nasty surprises with her bombs, it was going to be trapped to hell and back.

Logic followed that we were most likely looking for a warehouse, factory or other building suitable for creating a Tinker workshop in, that was more than likely guarded by ABB troops - people conveniently recognizable by the fact that a good scan would show a goddamned Tinker suicide bomb in their head - and generally trapped and mined like an absolute motherfucker.

Knowledge is power. (Relatively) cheap and disposable scout drones would let us get a good idea on where to start our search, and let us make an actual plan of attack once we found a likely candidate.

In the meanwhile, there were shenanigans to get into.

But before that-

::|O : Hey. Do you have a moment? It's important.

There was a moment of quiet, broken only by the whistle of wind between the houses and the enthusiastic status pings of my scout drones.

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: oh hi what's up?

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: ames says hi & thank you btw

::|O : Tell her I said hi back, too, thank you. Oh, and

::|O has changed their username to Nexus

Nexus: Listen. I'm heading out to find Bakuda - that's the Tinker responsible for the bombings.

Nexus: More to the point, I'm in my warform and I have the Undersiders with me. I'm letting you know so we don't have any misunderstandings in the field.

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: you're still hanging out with them?

Nexus: I may or may not have accidentally sort of adopted them.

Grue made a grunting noise over our comms. Regent and Tattletale snickered.

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: what

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: wait

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: wtf is a warform?

Throwaway_Tales: Picture if Dragon had a thing for spiders, instead.

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: wtf

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: you're shitting me

Throwaway_Tales: I'm looking at her right now and I wish I was shitting you. She looks like a boss fight from one of Regent's video games.

I affected a sigh. Tattletale's smile just got wider.

Nexus: Look the point is, if any of your family are patrolling the Docks area, I want them to know we're friendlies. If I have to snare somebody out of the sky because they panicked and started blasting, Tattletale's never going to let us live it down and I'm going to be incredibly aggravated at everybody involved.

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: i can be at the docks in 15 min

Point_Me_@_the_Sky: i have got to freaking see this

Well. That put us on a time limit to get a move on before Glory Girl blazed in and found us standing around in my back yard. At least the overgrown state of it was good visual cover in case one of the neighbors happened to glance out of their window.

Before that, however, there was one more thing to do.

I spun up my comms and dialed a number.

"Brockton Bay Parahuman Response Team reception, how can I help you?"

A part of me was equal parts surprised and impressed that the call picked up on the second ring, seeing how the two top floors of the shoreside PRT building were now an incredibly elaborate glass sculpture.

"Hello, good evening. My name is Nexus. I'd like to get in contact with either Armsmaster, Dragon, or one of your coordinators, please."

"I'm sorry ma'am, but due to the current state of emergency-"

"I'm sorry to interrupt you. I'm a Tinker, and I've just deployed several sensor drones across Brockton Bay capable of detecting Bakuda's bombs at a safe distance. I recognize I'm not using the approved channels here, but if you're not allowed to direct me to the appropriate people, can you at least escalate me to somebody who can? Please and thank you."

There was a moment's pause. "Please hold."

Thirty-eight seconds of elevator music later, there was a clicking noise. "This is Dragon speaking. How can I help you?"

Her voice was - friendly, genial, even, with a faint Newfoundland accent underneath a subtle digitized buzz. There was warmth there, the kind of casual friendliness that made you feel like you'd already known her forever when you first met her.

She sounded absolutely nothing like my mother, and at the same time a part of me still felt that familiar pang of loss.

I pushed that part of me aside, along with the part of me that was alternating between fangirling over getting to talk to one of the most powerful and versatile if not the most powerful Tinkers on the planet and sheer embarrassment over my earlier encounter with her and her AGI watchdog.

"Good evening. I'm Nexus, a new Tinker. I'm contacting you because I've just deployed several high-speed sensor drones across Brockton Bay with scan resolution sufficient to detect Bakuda's planted bombs. I'd like to pipe you the relevant data so the mined areas can be properly evacuated and secured."

I could hear the tap of a keyboard in the background, rapid and precise. "Good evening to you, too. Can I ask you some questions about the scanners you're using?"

"Would you have a secure repository I could access? I can upload you the technical specifications and you can take a look yourself."

"One moment." Dragon rattled off an IP address and what I assumed was an access key.

"Stand by for inload." I compiled a technical overview of my observers' sensor packages, along with the list of contacts I'd already built up, and pushed it through. "Transmitting now."

"Receiving." There were a few moments of quiet across the line. "Thermal, visual, X-ray/gamma backscatter.. terahertz radiation? That's a new one. Very thorough. You've basically got most of the EM spectrum here."

"Yes." I tried to not bask in my pride too much. Bad form, when I was using prefab designs. "I have four dedicated sensor units sweeping Brockton Bay and my own sensor suite. If you can put together a protocol I can upload you any potential bombs I detect in real time."

"I think we can arrange something like that, yes." I could hear the keyboard tapping again. "Potential, you say?"

"I haven't been able to actually scan a bomb for direct comparison, so I'm currently running a cross-scan for exotic materials, unusual power signatures, chemical traces, and such. There's bound to be false positives." I paused for a second. "I'd rather mistake a misplaced cell phone for a bomb than the other way around. I'll update my findings as I refine my data models."

"Fair enough." There was another moment's pause. "I understand that you're the Tinker sighted with Panacea at Brockton Bay General the other day?"

"Yes. And no. I use remote operated proxy bodies to operate at multiple locations at the same time. I was also at Brockton Bay General South and Henderson Memorial."

"I see." There was a faint clink of metal on porcelain in the background. A tea mug? "When it comes to legality and regulations, I'm obligated to point out that medical Tinkertech has a rather extensive and involved set of tests and certifications it needs to pass in order to be cleared for general use, and for several very good reasons." She paused for a second. "On a personal note, it's a refreshing change to see a Tinker choose to use her gifts to help people in more direct ways. Thank you for what you did."

I resisted the urge to preen. "Panacea did most of the actual work. I just helped her along. But - thank you. I couldn't leave people suffering when I had the capacity to help."

"If more people thought like you, my job would be a lot easier." Dragon sighed softly. "Would you be willing to send us technical data on your healing devices? Perhaps a sample for analysis?"

"Compiling. Stand by for inload." I reaccessed the repository she'd set up for me and pushed her the technical readout on my nanobandages, followed by a copy of the interface app. As far as I understood it was all something I would've had to do to get my tech certified anyhow, and frankly, if they did manage to reverse engineer the bandages? The more people with wide access to actual healing technology, the better off we were going to be. "I'll have a sample nanobandage and induction charger booth delivered to the PRT building as soon as reasonably possible."

"Thank you for your cooperation, Nexus. Was there anything else I can do for you?"

"Yes, one last thing. Please be aware that I'm currently operating in the Docks area with - a group of affiliated capes. I'd rather avoid any misunderstandings if I run into any Protectorate capes."

"Also fair enough. I'll make sure the word gets passed on. Can I have a description of your group?"

"Three capes in armored bodysuits and full-face helmets, and a large arachnoid synth."

There was a moment's pause. "Come again?"

"The shell I'm using is shaped like a 20-foot diameter spider. If you start getting calls from people who sound like they've watched one too many horror movies, it's probably just me."

There was a long moment of silence, broken only by Tattletale vibrating with suppressed giggles.

"I.. will pass that on," Dragon finally rallied. "Is this your contact number? I'd like to contact you again once I have everything set up for your sensors."

"That'll work fine for now, yes, thank you."

"Well, on my behalf at least, thank you for your assistance, Nexus. Was there anything else?"

"No, I think I'm done for the moment. Thank you for having me."

"Have a good evening, then. And please try to stay out of trouble. Dragon, out."

"I make absolutely no promises. Nexus, out."

"You know," Tattletale grinned, "I could get used to hero life if it means we get to fuck with their heads and not go to jail for it."

"If we play our cards right we'll get paid for fucking with peoples' heads." I did a quick sensor sweep of the area. "Come on, let's get going before one of the neighbors catches us standing here like a bunch of idiots."

"I take it we're not staying out of trouble," Regent drawled, twirling his scepter around his fingers.

"Hell no. We're going to go find ourselves a bomb."

"Holy shit you weren't pulling my leg." Glory Girl swooped out of the night sky, halfcape swirling in her wake, blue eyes wide as she hovered over our little group. "What. What the fuck."

"That's what I said when I first saw her," Tattletale grinned from my flank.

"Not true," I idly protested. "I distinctly recall you said something like Nyeheheek!. I've got recordings and everything."

Tattletale flicked a pebble at me. It went plink! on my upper carapace.

"Why." Glory Girl gestured with her hands, encompassing all of me perched on the sidewalk. "Just. Why."

"Practicality," I deadpanned.

"How in the fuck is any of this practical?"

"Superior 3D maneuverability, built-in safety anchors, I never lose my tools, and you'd be amazed at how many people I can make simultaneous rude gestures at at any one given time." I waved a rear claw at her for emphasis.

Glory Girl opened her mouth. Then closed it, sighed, and brought her hand up to rub between her eyes, blonde hair swaying with the shake of her head. "Fucking Tinkers I swear to God. Because nightmare spiders are exactly what this city needs."

I rotated one of the eyes on my flank to look at Regent. "You think a nice friendly safe paint job is going to make things better?"

"Worth a shot," Regent drawled, amusement in his tone. "My vote's on pink camo."

"You know I bet I could just waltz into Skidmark's hideout like that," I mused. "No, none of you are actually seeing a giant pink spider, you're just aaaalll tripping the fuck out.. Throw a couple Hello Kitty stickers on there, too, for bonus points." I did a quick image-capture of Glory Girl, sampled her outfit, and reconfigured my smart paint. Creamy white and gold spread across my shell, overriding the dull urban camo I'd been wearing. "How about this?"

Glory Girl stared down at me, armored up in the same warm whites and golds as her outfit, complete with my optics set to bright blue and a shock of simulated blonde hair around a painted-on tiara. "No. Just.. no."

"Spoilsport." I thought about it for a split second, then reset my smart paint - I sampled Grue's black as the base layer, threw on hexelated camo in Tattletale's violet and lavender, and topped the whole ensemble off with stripes of Regent's white around my lower arms and legs. "There. Now we all match."

Glory Girl looked at Tattletale. "Is she always like this?"

"Pretty sure it's her first time out fully suited up. Newbie rush. At least she hasn't gone through a billboard yet."

"Hey now, that was the one time - ugh. Nevermind." The blonde Alexandria package shook her head and crossed her arms under her bust. "It's Nexus now, right? How come you're still hanging out with these dorks anyhow?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" I didn't miss the way Grue's stance had subtly straightened.

"Because they're.." Glory Girl gestured with her hands. "You know why."

"Because they're what? Villains? Criminals?" I rotated myself to properly face her, grip pads on my claws thumping and crunching on cracked asphalt. My sensor suite swept over her, angles and calculations and energy readings - aside from a faint, oddly resonant EM field, there was absolutely no sign of any force or thrust effect keeping her airborne, yet she was steadily hovering a good five feet off the ground. "What've they actually done? Property damage, criminal mischief, made the PRT look like a bunch of dipsticks a couple of times. Knocked over one of Lung's casinos and frankly they did the city a favor in the process."

"Hellhound's wanted for murder," Glory Girl pointed out.

"Bitch."

"Excuse you-"

"No, that's what she prefers to be called. Don't ask me why."

"It's a dog thing," Tattletale put in. "And I'm pretty sure she thinks it's funny."

"Swear to god I should've just stayed in bed." Glory Girl rubbed at her eyes with a gloved hand again. "Where is she, anyhow?"

There was a moment of quiet, the Undersiders looking at one another. "She got caught in one of Bakuda's bombs," Grue finally rumbled, arms crossed over his chest. "While saving our collective asses."

"Oh." Glory Girl blinked. "I'm sorry."

"Look. I'm not about to have an argument with you. I don't want to have an argument." I spread my main arms and affected a sigh. "I know what it looks like. I know they're labeled villains. I've done my research, casefiles included - no offense Tattletale -"

"Eh, I think I'd be more offended if you hadn't."

"-and it's not a choice between evil and lesser evil, it's a choice between evil and troublemaking teenagers." I rose a little higher on my legs, swayed my chassis softly from one side to the other. "When it comes to Bitch in particular - do you think she'd mind, TT?"

"I don't think so. She.. doesn't really think the same way most people do a lot of the time."

"Okay. So yeah, she's wanted on a murder charge. Trialed in absentia, because she's a fugitive. They say she sicced one of her dogs on somebody, their house fell down on them, and they died. Right?"

"That's what I've heard," Glory Girl nodded, arms crossed and lips turned into a hard line.

"Okay. And the person that died was her foster mother. Who also, it turns out, had a list of complaints and allegations about animal cruelty and child abuse against her about as long as one of my legs." I waved one for emphasis.

"That still doesn't excuse-"

"Murder? It absolutely doesn't." I put my foot back down and sighed. "I doubt she deserved to die. Absolutely the kind of a person they shouldn't have put in charge of a child - much less one bounced between shitty foster homes since she was little - but still."

"And she told you all of this? She could've just lied-"

"She's barely spoken ten sentences to me, do you think I squeezed her life story out of her? She's an unmasked cape. It's all online, you just have to dig around for it. Look it up. Hell, I'll send you the links." I shook my sensor pod, pulsed my optics at her. "My point is. Forget it's Rachel Lindt we're talking about. Imagine a troubled child who's been described as 'defiant, independent and confrontational' at best and put her in the care of somebody who's strict, authoritarian, uncompromising, abusive.. what do you eventually get?"

"..A trigger event," Glory Girl whispered, blinking rapidly.

"Rachel doesn't Master her dogs," Tattletale put in, voice soft. "She doesn't just magic them out of the thin air, ready to obey her every command. She trains them. She loves them, and takes care of them, and trains with them for hours every single day until they're a part of her pack. It's honestly pretty impressive." She frowned behind her visor. "Now take the power to take a dog and make it really fucking big and put it in the hands of a freshly triggered teenager who's been abandoned, abused, likely scared out of her mind, and probably working with an untrained animal that's just as badly off as she is.."

"Abusive or not, that woman had a hand grenade dropped in her lap and nobody knew until it went off. The fact that she died is awful, yeah, but premeditated murder?" I buzzed dismissive static. "Fuck all of that noise. With a cheese grater. Yeah she's abrasive and suspicious of everybody and absolutely on the hook for the property damage, but she needs therapy and a support structure, not the Birdcage."

"You're a cape. And a Brute at that. I bet after you triggered, you spent ages realizing how fragile everything around you was. Breaking things. Maybe you even hurt somebody by accident," Tattletale hummed. "It's hard to get used to having powers, isn't it? Especially if it's something you don't fully control."

Glory Girl rose a couple of feet in the air. "You did not just compare me to-"

"And you just proved my point," Tattletale gritted, leaning closer to me, one of her hands gripping my leg for support. Beside her, Grue and Regent were bracing like against an unseen wind, moving to put me between themselves and Glory Girl. "Your aura's leaking, miss Shaker/Master."

"Oh. Shit." Glory Girl made a face much like somebody who'd been just caught farting in public. "Sorry."

"I'm a Thinker. I can't exactly turn my brain off, trust me when I say I know how you feel." Tattletale shook her head. "There's a reason I haven't gone on a single date since I triggered."

"Here I thought you were just a prude," Regent grinned, dusting himself off.

"Nah. It's just hard to keep interest in somebody when you know everything there is to know about them after like, five-ten minutes of flirting." Tattletale made a face behind her visor. "Three words: Too. Much. Info."

Glory Girl tilted her head at that, then winced and shuddered in female sympathy. "Ew."

"Yep."

"Back to what I was saying," I decided to steer the conversation back to safer subjects, "Yes, I know who they are. I know what they've done. They're also the people who helped me get back to - my family, when I was lost and hurt and confused after my trigger. They live here, too. I'm trusting them to not stab me in the back until Bakuda's been dealt with, villain or not."

"Just.. don't come crying to me if it comes back to bite you on the ass." Glory Girl shook her head, lips drawn tight. "And don't think I'm taking you at face value for.. all that stuff about Hellhound, either. Bitch. Whatever."

"I don't want you to," I buzzed at her. "Just find out for yourself. Prove me wrong, I dare you."

"I just might." She shook her head. "What are you doing hanging out on a street corner, anyways?"

"Oh, that's easy." I pointed with a manipulator arm. "You see that dumpster over there? There's a bomb under it."

"What." Glory Girl twisted around in midair, halfcape swishing around her. "And you're just standing here?"

"I've already informed the PRT it's there. That's actually the second bomb we sussed out in the area. First one was sitting on top of a water main and I didn't want to fuck around with it in case it cut off running water to half the Docks when it went off or something."

"Very responsible of you." Glory Girl shook her blonde head, then blinked. "Wait. Why are you fucking around with a bomb?"

"Because, paraphrasing a wise man, it's the first half of the scientific method. The second being writing the results down. That bit's very important, otherwise you're just fucking around and finding out." I hunched myself down on my legs, braced myself down, then angled my chassis forwards with the rear slanted higher. "This looks like it's a safe distance but you may want to get behind me just in case, guys."

The Undersiders didn't need to be told twice to hunker behind me. I clamped my grip pads down into the asphalt, braced myself, and turned my chassis into a reinforced diamond shield. My blast shield came down over my main sensor bank.

Nexus: CAUTION - charge detected at coordinates GA27/19/37 - area clear - attempting remote disarm/detonation - STANDBY

Dragon: Wait. You're what?

I fixed my sensors on the innocuous dumpster down the street and the cylinder of metal and electronics nestled between it and the wall. No life signs detected nearby. No important power/water/gas lines in the area.

I spooled up my EWAR module. My communications module realigned itself, centered a focused beam of EM interference on the bomb - or I was pretty sure it was a bomb, either way. Scans indicated there was a main vessel of some sort, and some kind of a receiver module, and a lot of circuitry that frankly made no sense whatsoever from the range and angle I was scanning it from.

If this thing turned out to be some Tinker's misplaced self-heating thermos bottle, I was going to be mildly irritated.

I mentally shrugged and set the EWAR module to work.

"What exactly are you doing?" Glory Girl hovered lower down, dropped back to the street level.

"Cycling through frequencies and protocols, at the moment." One of my secondary eyes rotated her way. I could see the shudder go through the blonde cape when she realized my leg was looking back at her. "It's got a receiver of some sort, so it's designed to take a signal from somebody. If it's a bomb, there's really two signals it's designed to receive - 'detonate' and - assuming Boom Boom isn't a complete fucking idiot and if she went to Cornell she probably isn't - some sort of a safety disarm. I'm hoping to figure out the protocol to turn these things off remotely or at least reliably set them off from a safe distance."

"Oh. That makes sense." She paused for a moment, blinking. "Wait. Did you just call her-"

Shrrrrrackle!

There was a flash of white light. A loud electric crackling noise, and the alley mouth down the street from us suddenly turned into a mass of lashing, arcing - it looked like electrical discharge, but reddish white in color, snaking whips and arcs of energy lashing out, grounding themselves in nearby cables, leaving smoking scorch marks in asphalt and worn brick across the street. My more sensitive sensors fizzed with feedback, trying to parse the mass of contradictory readings into something that made sense.

The light went out. The energy arcs died. For a few seconds, everything was absolutely quiet, safe for the crackle of a dumpster now merrily on fire.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Some kind of an agony bomb," Tattletale murmured at Glory Girl, a soft wince on her lips as she came out from behind me. "If you're caught in the middle of it, it hits your central nervous system with so many stress and pain signals you just - keel over and die from the shock. If you're at the edge of the blast, it just makes you wish it killed you."

Glory Girl looked at the blonde Thinker. "You sound like you're talking from experience."

Tattletale swallowed and nodded. "Yeah. We ran into her and - it didn't go well. I almost got out of the zone when it went off and there was a good half hour where the only thing I could do besides try not to scream was hold onto Grue. Felt like hours, too." She tilted her head at the black-dressed cape, smiled softly. "Thanks for grabbing me."

Grue tilted his skull-faced helmet back at her. "It's what teammates are for."

"Aww, aren't they sweet-"

"Shut up, Regent."

"More to the point, this street? Used on a daily basis most people who live in the Docks area and actually work for a living. Like, say, my Dad." I hissed static and turned down my anger responses. "Imagine that thing going off right when people were heading home from work."

"Oh, Christ." Glory Girl went faintly green.

"Come on, let's find another one. I've got an idea of the frequencies that one was using, I want to see if the others are similar."

Half an hour, three bombs and one half-scrapped turtle-shaped drone (courtesy of Leet) stuck in a storm drain later (the remnants of which were now all brewing away in my assembler for analysis and disassembly, much to Glory Girl's confused amusement - om nom nom tasty rare earth metals) - I glared at the smoldering remains of yet another of Bakuda's 'surprises'. "Sometimes I hate being right."

Tattletale poked her head out from behind my flank. "What's up?"

"She's using cell phone frequencies for her remote triggers. Probably using the transceiver modules from salvaged cell phones for her trigger circuits which, okay, fine, if I wanted to mass produce something like this and couldn't just fabricate bits to my specs on the fly, sure, it works. Low-end phones are cheap to find in bulk or, since this is the ABB, easy to just steal." I popped my blast shield open and pulsed my optics. "Also means that one persistent robocaller could blow half the city to hell at any given moment. Thank god it's not election season."

"Not exactly a thought that inspires joy and confidence, there," Tattletale winced.

"Reality's a harsh mistress. The faster we get Bakuda out of my goddamn town the sooner everybody can start going back to their lives."

"Your town?"

"I live here, don't I?" Several of my secondary eyes rotated up towards Glory Girl, hovering above me. "Brockton Bay is a soulsucking shithole but it's my soulsucking shithole and I'll be damned if I let some egotistical Cornell dropout who can't come up with a better name than fucking Boom Boom burn it to the ground."

Glory Girl blinked. "Is that what her name really means? You can't be serious."

"As a heart attack. It's either that or Bomb Girl or maybe Boomette, neither of which are any fucking better-"

Glory Girl's thigh beeped.

"Hold that thought, I need to take this. Sorry." She boosted herself higher, digging out her phone. "Vicky here.. oh, shit. Where? .. I'll be right there." She dropped back down to our level with a swish of her skirt. "I need to get going. Shielder just spotted E88 gangers moving in on ABB territory. It's going to be a bloodbath if somebody doesn't intervene."

"Before you go, there's something you need to know. Bakuda - ABB have been augmenting themselves with forced conscripts. People grabbed off the streets, out of their homes, them told to fight or the bombs sewed into their heads are going to go off."

Glory Girl went a vague shade of green. "Are you serious? Tell me you're not serious."

"I wish I wasn't. I've seen it happen myself. One of them went off when I was helping Panacea earlier. It's not just conventional explosives, either. Pain bombs, glass bombs, fire bombs, hell only knows what and I wouldn't trust your force field to protect you from all of that. Be careful. I don't know if any of them are rigged to blow if they go down or are captured but don't get too close to any of them." I buzzed a sigh. "Most of them don't even want to fight but they're terrified and people do stupid things when they're afraid. Pass the word."

"Jesus fucking Christ I'm beginning to hate this town."

"I told you it's a shithole." I shifted, opened my fabricator, reached under myself with a leg to pull out a curved half-band of diamondglass. Transferred it to my hand, flicked it dry of suspension fluid, and handed it to the blonde Brute. "Here, take this before you go."

Glory Girl took it, then made a face at the slickness of evaporating suspension fluid. "What is it?"

"Short-range comms visor. It'll teach you how to use itself. When it's on and transmitting - you're connected directly to my comms. I'll see what you see. I can show you what I see." I tilted my sensor pod and pulsed green at her. "Chances are we'll be going into the same direction. This way we won't be stepping on each others' toes all the time. And I've got lots of toes to step on."

"I suppose that's fair." She flipped the band in her hands a few times, then shrugged and placed the clear band over her eyes. Its smart diamond construction immediately conformed itself to her features, the ends adhering to the skin of her temples while the middle sculpted itself a little notch over the bridge of her nose. "Huh. A lot more comfortable than I thought it was going to be. Okay, I'm going! Stay safe."

"You too. Don't die, alright?"

"You too." She paused for a moment. "And hey. Thanks for the headsup." She lifted her hands up, and fell up into the sky.

"So." Grue's voice was a deep thrum over our comms as we tracked Brockton Bay's very own teenage patron saint of collateral damage hurtle across the sky. "ABB, E88, and New Wave. What are the odds Bakuda is right in the middle of all that?"

I directed one of my observer drones to pace Glory Girl. "I believe that's what we call a sucker bet. Let's get moving."

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