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Rating:
Mature
Archive Warning:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category:
Gen
Fandoms:
Parahumans Series - Wildbow亜人 - 三浦追儺 & 桜井画門 | Ajin - Miura Tsuina & Sakurai Gamon (Anime & Manga)
Characters:
Taylor Hebert | Skitter | WeaverDanny HebertBrockton Bay WardsLisa Wilbourn | Tattletale
Additional Tags:
Canon-Typical ViolenceCanon-Typical Body Horrorshard-altered psychologytags to be added as we go
Language:
English
Collections:
Timballisto's Curated Works
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Published:2019-05-24Updated:2020-03-11Words:99,568Chapters:29/?Comments:226Kudos:730Bookmarks:266Hits:29,369
(Restricted) The Shadow Over Brockton Bay
Temeritous
Chapter 6: Draugr: Interludes
Chapter Text
1.c
"Report."
"Contact went well. She hasn't told anyone about the file and doesn't plan to. Whether she'll stay a hero... I don't know. That part was hard to read."
"Disappointing, Tattletale. I don't keep you around for scraps."
"I told you, she's a hard read. I could give you the dozen theories my power threw at me, but there's no guarantee that any of them are accurate. Why don't you pull her into one of your alts for a quick interrogation?"
"...."
"Shit, you did? Are you losing your touch?"
"Would you like to find out?"
"Her resurrection power gives her a high resistance or tolerance of pain. She's experimented with it... everything she could think of, including fire, electrocution, and possibly freezing to death. Ha! You tried to torture the girl who burned herself alive just to see what would happen."
"Quite. Do you have anything else for me?"
"She's bad at social interaction and doesn't have any close friends. Her family is her lever - her dad, I think. Mom's probably dead."
"Acceptable. You'll find your usual bonus in your account. I'll contact you soon with another job."
1.b
"When will you be coming back?"
Pathetic, Emma thought. God, you couldn't have sounded more like a whining little kid.
Everything was falling out from under her. Sophia was gone, forced out of Brockton Bay by the stupid PRT and their rules; school was interminably boring without her, and Emma was losing the support of the track team girls without Sophia to keep them in line. Half her power base was gone, and none of the possible replacements were even remotely tolerable.
And to top it all off, it looked like Taylor was gone for good.
If you had told Emma a couple weeks ago that Taylor would drop out, she'd have laughed and cheered, "Finally!" Finally, the last reminder of the weak little girl she had been was gone. No more seeing Taylor and remembering everything she hated. No more spending so much time putting the other girl in her place - like trying to keep ants out of an old house. A year and a half of work paid off.
Instead of triumph, Emma felt... empty. Unstable. Without Taylor to put down, she was finding that she didn't feel as tall.
I know where she lives. I could.... Shit, am I that desperate?
Almost. Almost, but not yet. Taylor would come crawling back - she didn't have a choice. She wasn't old enough to drop out, and she didn't have the grades or the connections to get into Arcadia, Emma had seen to that.
She should be crowing over her victory, but it didn't feel like one. It felt rather like she'd been left behind. Taylor, giving her that strange half-smile as she walked out; Sophia, quiet and furious as she told Emma that the PRT was moving her to Chicago. That it was Chicago or prison.
How do parahumans get powers? she wondered, looking it up on a laptop at home. If the night she met with Sophia wasn't sufficient to become one, what horror was?
Sophia had never told her about her trigger event, although she had explained them in general. The idea of putting herself in a situation like that again made her nauseous; powers weren't worth that. Nothing was worth that.
Still, she searched. Parahumans Online was a huge forum full of people with no credentials, but the good ones provided links to sources. Links to pages, hoaxes, rumors about how the desperate and the wealthy could buy power. Parahumanity in a bottle.
Emma didn't find anything, but her search did not go unnoticed.
1.a
"Door."
Alexandria found herself facing a plain white door, which meant Doctor Mother had requested not to be disturbed. She knocked anyway; this was important.
She waited, arms crossed and the relevant file tucked under one. Her fingers drummed on it impatiently, lips pursed in thought. Finally, the door opened.
"Alexandria? What is it?" Doctor Mother asked, standing aside to invite her in. The meeting room was empty and showed no sign of whatever the doctor had been doing. Contessa leaned against the table, her head cocked to the side.
"Ajin," Alexandria said, tossing the file onto the table and sitting down. She reached up to remove her helmet and shook her hair loose. "It's what we feared."
Doctor Mother closed her eyes and swore softly; Contessa reached for the manila folder.
"None of the paths have changed yet," she reported, flicking through the pages. "But they are a blind spot. Lazarus?"
"She's well aware of her nature," Rebecca said dryly. "She's some sort of Master for the black matter. It's literally the worst case scenario."
"There are a lot of bad scenarios," Doctor Mother pointed out. "We never decided which could be the worst. At least she's chosen to be a hero, surprising considering the observed effect their ability has on the psyche."
Rebecca grunted, nodding at the folder. "Page sixteen, psych eval. She's not heroic, she just likes the money and her father is a strong attachment. He's apparently a very moral man."
"She's right," Contessa said suddenly, looking up from the folder. "This is the worst case scenario. This is the first Ajin parahuman that we know of, but it's also the only Ajin parahuman the entity needs. It's a Master for the black matter. The first thing her agent did, according to this, was experiment with the black matter and its resurrection abilities."
"She did that," Rebecca pointed out. "Psych eval says there's some very unfulfillable suicidal tendencies."
"Sometimes there can be very little separation between the parahuman and the agent," Doctor Mother said. "No way to tell if it was her choice or her agent's urging."
"Psych eval is wrong," Contessa added.
Rebecca reclaimed the file, pulling out the psychological evaluation in question. "You said you're blind to Ajin."
"I can model the idea of them from what we know of the Japanese experiments before Kyushu, and I can path the person who did the eval. Their conclusions operate under the assumption that she's human, and she isn't. Doubly over, she's more than human. The evaluations aren't that effective for parahumans to begin with."
"Regardless of the driver, she shows that the agent can control invisible black matter," Doctor Mother stepped in. "Which means nothing good for our goals."
There was a moment of grim silence as everyone followed that to its natural conclusion.
"Do we think it works on entities?" Rebecca asked finally, looking to Contessa.
"I can't say for sure. No one but an entity itself probably could." Her mouth formed a straight, tight line, "But we need to proceed as though it does. Scion can't be allowed to know about that shard, or harvest it." After a moment of troubled thought, she added, "We don't even know the time limit for resurrection, and we do know that the entities can manipulate time. He might even be able to resurrect his partner."
Rebecca watched Doctor Mother close her eyes, put both hands flat on the table and lean onto them, head dipping just slightly.
Eventually Rebecca asked, "What are we going to do?"
"We have connections in Brockton Bay," Doctor Mother said, raising her head and standing up straight again. "Although we've been largely hands-off in the area before now. I think we'll need to keep a closer eye on things in that city from now on."
"You could just take her," Rebecca suggested, gaze shifting to the door and beyond it. "Put her with the others, where she can't gather the data they want."
"I'd rather not take a risk like that as our first course of action," Doctor Mother said. "Especially when she may not be as large a threat as we fear. In order for the black matter to be useful to the entity, she'll need to figure out how to make it work on people other than ajin. We can't afford to alienate an ability like that, not when you and the others are out there risking your lives every day.
"No, let things lie as they are for now in Brockton Bay. We'll keep watching, and step in if necessary..."
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