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Work Header

Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of ViolenceUnderage Sex

Categories:

F/FGenOtherF/M

Fandoms:

Warhammer 40.000Worm - Fandom

Characters:

Taylor Hebert | Skitter | WeaverSherrel Bailey | SquealerEmma Barnes (Parahumans)Undersiders (Parahumans)Lisa Wilbourn | TattletaleAmy Dallon | Panacea | Red Queen

Additional Tags:

Alt-Power Taylor HebertVillain Taylor HebertPsyker Taylor HebertEarth Bet is a shitholeThe slope is steep and well lubricatedTaylor's boots have poor tractionPsychic AbilitiesPsychic ViolencePsychic BondPsychic MindfuckeryDubious Consent?Power PerversionPsychokinetic Tentacles

Language:

English

Stats:

Published:2023-09-20Completed:2025-01-28Words:289,573Chapters:27/27Comments:1,733Kudos:3,411Bookmarks:853Hits:236,812

A Ruinous Gift

Noodlehammer

Chapter 4: Usurpation

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny stared at the phone long after his daughter hung up, mind awhirl with countless worries. He wasn't anywhere close to as okay as he'd pretended to be for her. The thought of Taylor being out there all by herself was eating him alive. He'd wanted to argue with her, to demand that she come home, but he'd had quite a while to think about the situation before she'd called.

Taylor was too much like her mother, and too much like him. Annete's determination and ability to hold grudges and his own volatile temper. For a long time he had thought that Taylor hadn't inherited what he privately thought of as the Hebert family curse, but the month since she'd been shut in her locker by those three monsters had put paid to that hope. Taylor had the same burning rage in her that he did and his father before him had.

The rage that had driven him to kill a teenage girl.

Sophia Hess had clearly been trying to kill his daughter and was responsible for nearly a year and a half of torment. When he'd seen that, the red mist had come down and the next thing he knew, the girl's head had been smashed to pulp.

He'd always feared that something like that would happen. Years ago, when some lowlife had been getting pushy with Annete, Danny had beaten him nearly to death with a crowbar. This time there was no 'nearly' about it.

But it wasn't guilt that bothered him the most. It was the fear of what his daughter might be driven to do with that kind of anger in her. A teenaged cape, all by herself, hounded by 'heroes' and surrounded by villains. There was no way that could end well.

And he couldn't even beg her to come home, tell her that it was better to deal with the PRT than going at it alone. He'd heard it in her voice, the absolute refusal to even consider it. Just like her mother when she dug her heels in. As far as Taylor was concerned, the PRT had burned its bridges when they turned a blind eye to her suffering. She was full of resentment and more likely to throw molotov cocktails through the windows than walk through the door of PRT HQ.

Just like Annete had been in her college years, angry at 'The Man' and spoiling for a fight. For Annete, 'The Man' had been the nebulous concept of female inequality, something that she had cooled off on as she got older, wiser, and as Lustrum's movement started being less about activism for women and more about hatred for men. For Taylor, 'The Man' was authority itself and it would be a lot harder for her anger to burn out when 'The Man' in question seemed determined to throw more fuel on the fire.

The PRT had tried the soft sell, but it was equally clear that they weren't willing to take no for an answer. Director Piggot had reminded him of a pitbull, unwilling to let go once she had her teeth in something. And with the way the law had evolved around parahumans over the past few decades, they could get awfully pushy. They had given him all the grim statistics for independent capes and when he still refused to sign anything without his daughter's agreement, they had moved on to veiled threats.

The deals on offer would be a lot less favorable after she committed a crime. She was in possession of restricted information and had to sign an NDA. This rule and that law that she didn't know about, but would be held accountable to when the time came. They had also been quite clear as to what would happen if he said anything about Sophia Hess being Shadow Stalker. Not only was unmasking a Protectorate-affiliated cape a serious crime, doing so was also likely to backfire on Taylor as well. That they would be vindictive about the embarrassment it caused them went unsaid.

Looking at it through the eyes of a more suspicious man, it almost seemed as if the system was designed to entrap capes. Taylor certainly believed it, and she didn't have half his information.

And that was why he hadn't insisted that she come home. The military maxim of 'don't give orders that you know won't be followed' also applied to parents. Danny didn't want his little girl to disappear into Brockton Bay's seedy underbelly, so he had held back and only insisted that she call him regularly.

They could work on more later. Hopefully.

XXXXX

February 8th, 2011.

Louie hadn't intended to become a pimp, but he thought that he was pretty good at it. He had a nice thing going with the landlord of the shitty apartment building he lived in. Lots of rooms went unrented, so why not put a couple of girls in them and run a respectable business on the side?

It worked out for everyone. The landlord got a small cut of the profits and Skidmark got a much bigger cut of the profits for providing the girls and the drugs. Louie himself go enough of both money and drugs to keep him going.

At least, he used to get enough. Business always got a bit slow during winter, so he hadn't brought in much money over the past few months and that meant getting less drugs from Skidmark.

And he needed those drugs. He could go without a lot of things, but not the drugs, so he stood out in the freezing cold and prayed to a god he didn't believe in that some blue-balled motherfucker would come along.

Lo and behold, his prayers were answered. It wasn't one of his semi-regulars, which could either amount to nothing or be very good. Either way, this tall, skinny fucker in the expensive coat looked like he had money.

"Hey, man, you looking for a good time?" Louie called out the time-honored greeting of pimps everywhere.

The fucker in the coat didn't say anything, just kept walking towards him. That was cool, some people didn't like to discuss business too loudly, even if there was nobody around to give a fuck.

The potential client came closer and Louie saw that it wasn't a guy at all, much to his disappointment. Of course, there was the off chance that this classy-looking bitch had a taste for cheap whores, but he doubted it.

"You are with the Merchants." She sounded young, like a teenager, but… confident.

Now, Louie liked to think he had pretty good instincts. It was hard to think through the withdrawal, but a realization was crystalizing in his head.

In front of him was a young teenage girl, in the middle of the night, wearing a fancy outfit and her face covered by a black scarf. What kind of teenage girl approached a shady guy like him all by herself, looking that confident, and covering her face?

A fucking cape, that's who. Brockton Bay was lousy with them.

"That's right. Name's Louie, at your service." Louie introduced himself, grinning nervously. "You looking to join up with us? Skidmark would love to have another cape in the gang. You'd be a big deal."

Capes were always a big deal, and Louie would be a bit of a big deal too if he brought one in.

"No." Her eyes briefly glowed blue-white behind her glasses.

Louie felt something come over him… but it wasn't bad. A strange calm, a sense that everything would be okay. He felt stronger, like he could handle the world's shit. His hands stopped shaking, his mind cleared and… that desperate need to snort a line of cocaine vanished.

"Okay then…?" Louie asked leadingly. The fear was disappearing quickly and he didn't feel threatened anymore. This cape wasn't going to hurt him.

"Psyker."

"Okay, what can I do for you, Psyker?"

"Tell me everything you know about the Merchants." Psyker ordered.

The urge to help this cape was every bit as powerful as his need for drugs had been, and he had no reason to refuse.

XXXXX

Taylor kept the frown of consternation off her face as she listened to the pimp talk.

That had gone… way better than she was expecting. The almost painfully cliché pimp hadn't put up any kind of fight at all.

Just like some of the hobos from yesterday and several other people that she'd seen around town, Louie had a gnawing pit in his soul. Now that she had examined it, she realized the pit was his constant need for more drugs. It had hollowed him out, left him an empty shell of a person desperate for his next fix. Every other part of him had been pushed aside by that need.

Taylor had reached into that emptiness and pulled it to herself, winding it around her psychic touch like it was cotton candy. Louie hadn't resisted. Just like the hobos from yesterday, he latched on tightly and pulled back on her. She had felt him offering up the things he didn't want, his addiction and the withdrawal symptoms, and she had taken them away. The pain of them was exquisite – the ache in the bones, the twisting in the gut, the flashes of hot and cold – and his need latching on to her psychic lifeline was even better. She had to maintain constant focus to keep draining it, but that was no issue for her.

The plan had been to get some info on the Merchants one way or another and then see about dismantling Brockton Bay's most contemptible gang, siphoning away their resources for her own use as she did so. The plan had been to take it slow, steady, and methodical. Now that she knew she could do this, however, the plan needed adjusting. Thousands of mental iterations were already contemplating the merits of the pimp's suggestion to take over the Merchants by mastering them. When it was this easy it almost seemed like fate.

"Stop." She ordered and Louie immediately went quiet. "Why are you telling me all this?"

She knew why, but did he?

"Because you asked?" Louie offered uncertainly.

"Do you tell these things to anyone who asks?" Taylor pressed.

"Course not." Louie scoffed, shaking his head. "But you're not just anyone. You're a cape."

"You know I'm going to use this to attack the Merchants, right?" She asked.

"Yeah, I figured." He nodded, apparently unbothered. "Hey, why not take over instead? I can call up Skidmark and we can ambush him easy. Everyone else'll be glad to have you in charge, I think."

Just like that, huh? The Merchants were a disgusting gang comprised of drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes and various lowlifes. Definitely not something she wanted to be part of, but if they were all so easily mastered…

Then she could indeed very easily take it over, turn them into something less shitty and establish a power base to work with. Her powers didn't really lend themselves to any kind of lone wolf behavior – she would need allies (or minions since she was going to be a villain) in order to be effective. The PRT and the other gangs would be spooked, and she would have gone against her father's wishes, but all of those things were unavoidable anyway. She couldn't just keep flinching away from risk and more importantly, she didn't want to.

"And what if I don't want to deal with drugs and prostitution?" She asked.

Louie cackled. "Good luck with that one, Boss. There'll always be drugs and whores."

Taylor frowned, annoyed at being laughed at.

"Take me to Skidmark." She ordered. It was a bit dangerous, but frankly, she was also itching for a confrontation with a cape. With uncountable mental iterations constantly buzzing in her head, she couldn't lie to herself and say that the fight with Sophia hadn't made her feel more alive than she'd ever felt. And more frustrated, because the satisfaction of killing her had been stolen.

"You got it!" Louie grinned wider, gold teeth flashing in the weak light.

XXXXX

It would, of course, be absurd to assume that Skidmark, Squealer and Mush spent all their time hanging around in an abandoned warehouse or factory or whatever, surrounded by mooks, piles of drugs and piles of money.

Taylor was still a bit disappointed when her meeting with the Merchant leadership happened in a disused parking lot. Squealer was sitting in something that might have once been a jeep, and Skidmark was standing on the hood with his arms crossed in a pose that he probably thought looked impressive. Mush was nowhere to be seen.

"So, you want to join the Merchants, the best gang in Brockton Bay?" Skidmark bellowed out as she and Louie approached. He was probably going for 'booming', but his voice was too scratchy for it.

Taylor could only stop and stare at the deluded idiot. Was he for real? Best gang in Brockton Bay? Not only was that a pretty low bar to clear given the current lineup, but the Merchants weren't topping any charts even by that standard.

"I'm considering my options." She lied, already reaching out towards the other two capes with her mind.

Squealer was a familiar black hole of gnawing emptiness, though it was currently fuzzy. She was stoned out of her mind despite being behind the wheel. That seemed… dangerous and something that Taylor found personally offensive, given that her mother had died in a car crash because of a drunk driver. She had also been texting, but it was the drunkard who had crashed into her.

The Tinker latched on just as desperately as Louie had and her mind suddenly flooded with alien sensations. The drugs that she was on were trying to take her consciousness for a ride, but she'd only sent a single mental iteration poking into her head, so the others were quick to put the brakes on that nonsense. Annoyed by the attempt to put a crack in her control, however unintentional, and more confident in what she was doing this time, Taylor anchored her psychic touch into Squealer's need like a harpoon. The pain began to flow immediately.

Skidmark was different, though. He did have the same hole in him, but it was… different. She wasn't getting the sense that it was a problem the way she had with Louie and Squealer and he didn't latch on to the psychic lifeline she extended towards him, rejecting the contact instead. Her second, more forceful attempt, was similarly rebuffed. He didn't want help and wouldn't let her in.

"What's there to think about?" Skidmark asked, jumping off the hood and giving it a smack to make Squealer turn off the headlights. "It's either us, the Nazi turdlickers or the Asians gargling dragon cum. You don't think the Merchants are better than that?"

That was potentially a very big problem. She hadn't thought that drug users would be able to resist her.

His vocabulary was reason enough to despise the Merchants in and of itself, to say nothing of his appearance. Now that the headlights were no longer blinding her and she was adjusting to the dark, she finally got a good look at him. He was a skinny black man with the top half of his face covered in a blue or light purple mask. That was about the extent of his 'costume'. His lips were horrendously chapped and his teeth looked like shelled pistachios.

"There's always the option of staying independent." Taylor shrugged, hiding her revulsion at the state of his mouth.

Skidmark laughed, putting his atrocious dental hygiene on full display. "Independent? A white girl like you, in this town? Empire'll have you sieg heiling in a week, or they'll ship you off to Germany to get both your mind and your cunt fucked."

… That was something that she'd have to follow up on later. She hadn't heard of the Empire doing that kind of thing to independent capes, but quite a few had disappeared without a trace over the years.

"I might surprise you." She stalled, trying once again to psychically harpoon his need for drugs. Once again she was rebuffed.

"Skiddy, I like her." Squealer spoke up. Taylor didn't so much as twitch on the outside, but on the inside she was incredulous. How could a woman built like a pornstar have such a high pitched voice? This was the kind of voice she'd have expected from Madison.

Skidmark grunted at his… girlfriend? That Squealer was willing to have that mouth anywhere near her just so she could keep getting high reinforced Taylor's hatred of drugs a thousand fold.

"What powers you got?" He asked. "Louie said you call yourself Psyker. The fuck kind of word even is that?"

"I prefer to keep that to myself for now." Taylor rebuffed.

"Bitch, you came to us about joining up!" The drug dealer snarled, abruptly angry. "Now you gonna stop jerking me around or do I have to fuck you up?"

Potential for violence hovered in the air. Skidmark glared. Squealer looked at him uncertainly and Louie fidgeted off to the side.

Taylor was mad, mad that this slimeball dared threaten her. "I don't appreciate your tone."

"Skiddy, come on, don't be mad." Squealer spoke up, leaning out of the tinkered jeep. "She seems really cool."

"Stay in the car, bitch! You're fucking high and talking shit." Skidmark shouted at her.

"I feel fine!" Squealer shrieked back angrily, making Skidmark pause.

He looked between his girlfriend – which still felt weird to think – and Taylor, suspicion growing in the cast of his face.

"Yeah, you look fine." The cape drug dealer said suspiciously. "Too fine. What the fuck did you do to Squealer, Assgrease?" That last part was aimed at Taylor.

Did this walking crime against hygiene just call her assgrease?!

"I set her free." Taylor didn't even know she was capable of sneering with so much contempt. "She'll be better off without your poison." And she wasn't just talking about the drugs.

Squealer's Tinker specialty was known to be vehicles. Taylor wasn't any kind of gearhead, but she could think of numerous ways in which that could be incredibly useful. Yet despite that, Squealer had never been considered a particularly dangerous or valuable parahuman, even though it was widely agreed that she was the only reason that the Merchants had hung on for so long.

In any case, the woman herself seemed to appreciate the words, swelling visibly with pride both physically and mentally.

"You mindfucked Squeals!?" Skidmark shouted in outrage and completely repelled her attempts to reach him psychically. "I'm gonna stick a funnel into your asshole and have all the Merchant boys take a piss in it!"

Classy, real classy.

Taylor prepared to fight, readying herself to attack Skidmark's mind rather than extending a helping psychic hand. Her powers weren't the best at direct combat, but she wasn't helpless either. Skidmark was a Shaker that could lay down uni-directional repulsion fields that accelerated anything that passed through them into the direction they were aimed at, and he could layer them on top of each other to amplify the effect. It could be a dangerous power, but required some setup and Skidmark wasn't very imaginative with it, according to PHO.

"Skids, stop!" Squealer shrieked desperately as the Merchants' leader started waving his arms, glowing fields appearing on the ground.

A flare of desperate, protective hostility bloomed in Louie's mind and then a loud bang echoed from right next to her, startling Taylor badly. She looked at Louie and stared at the dirty revolver he held in his shaking hands. She hadn't even known he had a gun, much less expected him to fire it. Numerous mental iterations castigated her for it. What good was being able to pay attention to everything around you if you were missing that kind of critical information?

Everything had gone quiet. Louie was frozen. Squealer was frozen, hanging out of the jeep's window. Even Skidmark was frozen, holding on to his stomach with both hands, blood pouring from between them. In hindsight, he'd obviously been so focused on Taylor that he had completely ignored the normal man standing no more than twenty feet away, and it had cost him.

"Fucking…coagulated… cumstain." The wounded cape managed to gasp before collapsing to the ground.

One of Taylor's background mental iterations tasked with analyzing every word she heard spoken was inappropriately impressed that Skidmark even knew a word with that many syllables. And that he'd alliterated.

"He was going to attack you, Boss." Louie said shakily. His face was covered in cold sweat and if he wasn't as black as Skidmark, he'd probably be downright ghostly. "What do we do now?"

Squealer looked just as uncertain, looking between her and the fallen Merchant leader.

Taylor walked up to the downed Skidmark and stood over him, not wanting to get a whiff of him that her power would force her to enjoy.

"You think you're better than me, bitch?" He spat painfully, clutching at his stomach. "Looking down on me making your cunt wet?"

There was a time when she wouldn't have consciously thought herself better than anyone. It was hard to keep that kind of attitude when you were psychic. Some people were just genuinely garbage, like the specimen in front of her. "I am better than you, and I'll do a better job running a gang than you ever did. I just want to know if you'll squeal to the PRT if I call them to pick you up."

And she was enjoying looking down on him, but that she would keep to herself.

It would be easy to just finish him off and hide the body. The ruthlessly pragmatic suggestion came from within. Safer, too. His disappearance could go unnoticed for weeks. It would buy me time to get established. Nobody will even come investigate a gunshot in this part of town.

Hundreds of mental iterations immediately spun out, constructing pro and con lists.

Main con: The PRT would instantly suspect her of being responsible.

Main pro: They wouldn't know about the Master aspect of her powers just yet.

"Like I'd tell the pigs anything." He snarled. "I'll be back for you when I bust out of jail, then we'll see how high and mighty you look when you're choking on my dick."

He meant it. Taylor knew that he fully believed that he would be able to break out of prison and he fully intended to rape her to avenge this defeat. Her lip curled in disgust and she gave his gunshot wound a light kick, making him gasp in pain and curl up.

"Is that something you do often?" She asked coldly, an increasingly familiar rage burning in her chest. "Rape women who upset you?"

Given how easily he made the threat and how twisted his mind was, it seemed likely.

Skidmark answered with a strangled scream of pain, because she was digging the toe of her boot into the wound. She knew it was cruel, but it was impossible to feel bad about it when she could see the genuine evil in him.

"AARGGh! FUCK YOU!" He howled and then Taylor found herself stumbling backwards.

Shit, his acceleration fields! I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to use them on me in the condition he's in!

That realization came just a moment before she was hurled off her feet and sent tumbling across the tarmac. There hadn't been enough force in it to really hurt or injure her, but her scarf and hood came loose.

She came up furious, both at herself for underestimating him and at him for daring to attack her. That anger tilted her decision and she stomped towards the injured parahuman with deadly intent, fixing the scarf and hood as she went. Skidmark tried to lay down another acceleration field, but he was losing blood, in an awkward position and struggling to focus. Taylor easily sidestepped his attempt and let fly a steel-toed kick right into the set of teeth that had so disgusted her for this entire interaction.

Blood and broken, rotten teeth sprayed out of Skidmark's mouth and he finally passed out from the pain. Taylor took a deep breath, quickly analyzing her actions and decision. She still didn't feel bad about it at all, not for a man like him.

She took another deep breath and once more seriously contemplated what she was about to do. Was she really ready to kill a man in cold blood? Shouldn't she feel hesitation or guilt? But no, the sheer ugliness of his soul almost demanded that she put an end to it, that she make sure it sank into the depths of the dark sea that lurked beyond physical reality, never to trouble anyone again. If he refused to do better, then he would disappear.

On the more practical side, the PRT suspecting her of murder would be less damaging than them suspecting her of being a human Master. She had become convinced that they would care more about her powers than her crimes unless said crimes became truly heinous or somehow threatened their control of the narrative. Even Hookwolf officially only had three murders to his name, even though everyone knew he had killed many more than that. And those three murders had happened in broad daylight, in front of cameras. Clearly, the justice system wasn't trying very hard to convict parahumans of any crimes.

More PRT meddling if she had to guess. After all, it would be hard to pressgang villains into service if they had public rap sheets a mile long and their identities got revealed.

She put her boot on his neck and pressed down hard enough to restrict his air flow. A pleasant rush of adrenaline filled her veins and she tasked several thousand more iterations to examining the feeling. Were her powers so all-encompassing that they were making her enjoy even murder? Taylor hadn't thought they would be, but far the only things that had displeased her were things that went against her desires.

It didn't matter right now. Even if that was the case, keeping Skidmark alive would be a mistake.

"Louie, do you know a good way to dispose of a body so that it can't be identified?" She asked coldly.

"Uhh, I guess I could dump him in the bay?" The pimp said uncertainly.

"That's a shit idea unless you've got a boat." Squealer piped up unexpectedly. "What you need is an oil drum and a bunch of lye."

"You've done this before." Taylor stated flatly, immediately grasping the implications.

"Well… yeah." The Tinker admitted. "Skids gets angry easy and we had to get rid of a few bodies to keep the PRT from pinning any murders on us. If you put a body in an oil drum with lye and water and boil it, it'll dissolve in about a day, then you can just pour the sludge into the sewers or something."

Taylor's boot pressed down harder until something crunched under it. Seconds later, The ugly thing that was Skidmark vanished beneath the dark sea. The only thing she felt was relief and satisfaction.

"And you don't mind doing the same to him?" Taylor asked, taking her foot off the dead man's neck and nodding at him.

"I… not really?" Squealer sounded confused about it herself. "I don't know what kind of powers fuckery you've got going on, but you're making me feel good. Not like the drugs, but like… like I've been asleep all this time and now I'm finally awake."

Huh, even her voice had lost some of its pitch. It was still very high for someone of her build, but it wasn't like listening to a chipmunk anymore.

"Right!" Louie exclaimed, pointing at her. "That's why I wanted her to take over. Skidmark can go eat shit, he treated us all like garbage anyway."

"Yeah, you're right!" Squealer agreed, voice gaining strength and certainty. She turned to Taylor decisively. "I'm with you, Boss Lady."

"Good to hear." This was turning out to be almost suspiciously easy. "Let's load Skidmark into the trunk, then."

"Right, I've got some big plastic bags back there."

That they were prepared to pack up bodies really just made it clear that mastering as much of this gang, as soon as possible, was the correct decision.

Taylor said goodbye to Louie and sat in the passenger seat after the corpse was packed up, telling herself that the greasy feeling on the seat so recently vacated by Skidmark was just her imagination. "Alright, take us to your lair."

While she wasn't exactly keen on living anywhere that Skidmark had spent more than five minutes in, it was better than nothing. Plus, there was bound to be some useful information there that would help in taking over the Merchants. If it was a tolerable place to live, she'd go pick up what little stuff she had from her temporary lair and relocate it there.

"You got it!" Squealer nodded, pulling off her goggles and fully revealing her face, much to Taylor's shock. She knew that parahumans didn't unmask to anyone lightly.

It wasn't a pretty face, not anymore. It was a face prematurely aged by drug use and had a few bloody sores on the cheeks and forehead. Her blonde hair was limp and greasy and her teeth also weren't in great shape, but not nearly as messed up as Skidmark's.

"I don't have much of a secret identity." The Tinker admitted, expertly maneuvering her jeep out of the parking lot. "My real name is Sherrel Bailey."

"Nice to meet you." Taylor said, hesitating for a long moment before pulling the hood and scarf down. "Taylor Hebert."

"Wow, you're even younger than I thought." Sherrel looked startled. "With how tall you are, I figured you'd be closer to my age."

The Tinker was about 5'7'', the male average in the United States, and an inch shorter than Taylor.

"Is that a problem?" She asked warily.

"Nah, there's really no such thing as parahuman children anyway. That shit ages you fast."

Hah, wasn't that the truth? The time before the locker felt like it had belonged to someone else entirely, not helped by the fact that her mind had since then grown so vast. Old Taylor had been so very small and weak.

"So, how did you end up being a villain, if you don't mind me asking?" Taylor inquired, relaxing a bit in the knowledge that her new minion wouldn't make trouble on account of being older. She was curious if the blonde woman was a victim of circumstance like herself – if in a different way – or an unambiguous criminal.

The answer, as it turned out, was a bit of both.

Squealer – Sherrel – explained that she'd been born to a crack whore single mother in Brockton Bay's trailer park community, went to Winslow, got into drugs herself, then got into harder drugs, found her mother dead of overdose in her senior year and triggered with the horrified realization that she was going to go the same way.

If one wanted to be charitable, they'd say that Sherrel Bailey had the deck stacked against her since day one. If not, they'd say that she was a textbook example of white trash and hadn't tried very hard to be anything else. Both statements would probably be true.

"So Winslow was a shithole back then, too?" Taylor snorted, unsurprised. "Was Blackwell your principal?" It would have only been a few years ago, as Sherrel couldn't be older than twenty-one.

"Yeah, the useless fucking cunt." Squealer spat, driving at unsafe speeds with almost supernatural skill. A part of Taylor was feeling a mix of exhilaration and terror at the driving, but the rest of her was noting that the Tinker remained in absolute control as if the vehicle was an extension of her body. A part of her power, maybe? "Is she still bending over for the Empire punks?"

"She's bending over for everybody; Empire, ABB, the three bitches that caused my trigger just because one of them was a Ward." It felt good to vent to someone, even if Sherrel was only this friendly because she was mastered.

"You got triggered by a fucking Ward?" Squealer was momentarily stunned, but her control of the jeep didn't waver for an instant.

"Yeah, Shadow Stalker, a real hero." Taylor mocked.

"Figures it'd be her." Squealer snorted, surprise fading immediately. "She shot up a few of our boys with those fucking crossbows of hers. And I mean real bolts, not those kiddie tranqs the PRT gives her to play with."

"Well you won't have to worry about that anymore." She said with grim satisfaction. "Crazy bitch came to murder me in in my house yesterday and got her skull bashed in for her trouble. Only problem is that she was on house arrest so Armsmaster was right behind her and I got outed, so she screwed me over one last time. I didn't trust the PRT to not brand me a villain to save their reputation, so I ran for it."

"Smart, they definitely would have fucked you over." The Tinker agreed. "Especially since their pet psycho broke the Rules.

Taylor could practically hear the capital letter. "Rules?"

"The Unwritten Rules for capes." The blonde scowled, taking a turn with more violence than necessary. "It's all a bunch of bullshit, but if you get caught breaking them and you're not a badass like Lung, then you're fucked."

She explained a bit further what the rules were. Don't cause too much collateral damage, don't use guns if you can avoid it, don't attack capes in their civilian identities, don't kill defeated capes, don't torture defeated capes, don't rape defeated capes, don't reveal secret identities, if a cape is trying to run then let them do it, don't go after a cape's family or friends. If you break the rules, then nobody will stick up for you when others break them to get at you either.

Some parts of the rules are more stringent than others, and the weaker you are, the less you can bend them. That was how Lung and Hookwolf got away with causing loads of collateral damage and killing multiple people. Well, they did have Birdcage sentences hanging over them, but nobody had actually managed to follow through on that.

Taylor had to take a deep breath to calm her fury at the hypocrisy of it all. Really, it was just more of the same shit that had led up to her trigger event in the first place, the powerful got to do whatever they wanted without repercussion.

"That'll change." She said, already plotting a thousand ways to accumulate power to make sure that nobody could fuck with them. "We won't be bottom feeders anymore. In fact, we won't even be the Merchants anymore."

Mostly because the idea of being part of the Merchants was nauseating. No, the Merchants would become part of her as of yet unnamed gang and disappear, that sounded much more palatable.

"Fuck yeah!" Squealer bounced eagerly in her seat, slamming her foot on the accelerator in her excitement. "And I'll show that prick Armsmaster who the better Tinker is. Fucker thinks his shitty bike is so cool…"

Taylor side-eyed her new minion as she continued grumbling. She knew better than to point out right now that Armsmaster's bike was really cool.

"You're the vehicle Tinker, so you'll definitely be able to make something better." She said instead, making a mental note to thoroughly interview Squealer on what exactly her limits were.

"You really think so, Boss?" Sherrel asked, a hopeful note in her voice and oddly vulnerable eyes.

"It makes sense, doesn't it? He might be able to fit more gadgets in his bike, but there's no way he can build a better one than you." Taylor assured, smiling at being called boss. She liked it a lot more than she expected to.

"Damn right!" Squealer yelled happily, smashing her hands on the steering wheel. "Hey, you think I should get a new name? Rebrand?"

"It would be a good way to make a clean break from the past." Taylor agreed encouragingly, privately just really wanting Sherrel to pick a name with less dirty connotations.

"Gearshift." The blonde said instantly. "That's what I wanted to call myself once I figured out my specialty, but Skidmark liked Squealer better."

"He really was a weight around your neck." Taylor shook her head in exasperation, although she didn't fully believe that.

As disgusting as Skidmark was, he seemed to have had ambitions that Sherrel didn't. Now that the drugs were out of the picture, the impression Taylor was getting from the overly-endowed blonde was that she just wanted to make big cars to drive and show up other Tinkers. She'd probably have still been a villain even without the drugs that led her to joining the Merchants, but only because driving a monster truck through Downtown was illegal or something like that. Left to her own devices, she wouldn't make a lot of waves.

It was a very convenient mindset for a minion to have, she couldn't help but note.

"Alright, here we are." Sherrel said a while later, pulling into the cluttered, junk-filled yard of a house in what had probably been a very nice suburban neighborhood at one point. Now it looked like something between a ghost town and a shanty town, clearly abandoned by the city at large and only part of it in the technical sense. "The owner of this place inherited it from his granny, but he didn't want to live here, so he let Skidmark rent it for a steady supply of drugs."

Goddamnit, that was actually clever. The house's yard was hidden from view by a tall fence, preventing casual peeking into it. And the neighborhood was so rundown that there wasn't likely anyone around to give a shit anyway. Taylor, very reluctantly, raised her estimation of Skidmark's intelligence by a couple of notches. She might have gotten very lucky to have him taken out of the picture so easily.

One of her supplementary mental iterations pointed out that this would likely mean that she would now have to take over the bribery.

"And nobody ever sees you coming and going in obviously tinkertech cars?" That seemed a little unlikely.

"Heh, nope." Sherrel smirked. "Two words: Stealth generator."

Taylor frowned in thought as she got out. From the inside she hadn't noticed anything, but from the outside, the jeep was completely invisible.

Tinkers were such bullshit. This explained a lot about how the Merchants managed to hang on despite being so much weaker than the Empire 88 and the ABB. Well, that and the fact that they had no territory that could be attacked.

"That's amazing." Taylor said out loud. "You really have been keeping the Merchants afloat all by yourself, haven't you?"

"Aww, you keep talking like that and you'll make me blush." Sherrel grinned, pointedly not blushing. Then she turned the car off and threw a ratty canvas covering over it, making it blend in with the rest of the junk. "Come on, I'll show you around."

It wasn't nearly as bad as she feared a place inhabited by someone named Skidmark would be. Sure, there were old pizza boxes, takeout boxes, laundry, and the like lying around. It was dusty and there were some suspicious stains on a couple of walls, but no piles of rotting food or used needles, although there were a few meth pipes around. The toilet wasn't clogged and the shower wasn't moldy. It was only slightly worse than what her own house had looked like back when Dad was at his lowest point after Mom's death.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but not a pit of filth.

"I know it's a bit of a mess, but we can get it cleaned up quick." Wonder of wonders, the recently rebranded Tinker actually seemed embarrassed.

"I suppose you could make a tinkertech roomba." Taylor tried to joke, many parts of her having been thinking about what kind of stuff her new minion could make the whole time. "It's technically a vehicle."

Sherrel's eyes went glassy and distant for a few seconds, then she shook her head. "Nah, my power's only good for things that can carry people."

"Alright, good to know. Did Skidmark keep anything gang-related here? Notes, files, a list of contacts?"

Her hopes on that score weren't high – Skidmark did not seem like the note-keeping type – but she was surprised again when Sherrel nodded instead of denying it. "He had notebooks to keep track of how much product and money the Merchants had and who had what. And I've seen him picking out phone numbers from a little black book. They're in the bedroom."

Apparently, Skidmark had been far more organized than anyone had given him credit for. I really need to stop underestimating him, even if he's dead now. It was dangerous to be underestimating a cape to this degree.

And there was still no sign of any guilt for killing him.

"Show me?" Taylor prompted and Sherrel quickly agreed.

They went to the bedroom and Taylor immediately regretted her life choices. Not because it was any messier than the rest of the house, but because Sherrel apparently didn't believe in hiding her toys.

There was an entire freaking shelf of dildos, buttplugs, vibrators and some stuff that she didn't care to identify, just sitting right there in the open. And they were arranged by size.

"Here." The Tinker said, plucking several notebooks from the nightstand on the less perverted side of the bed. "That's where he wrote everything down. There's also a pile of money under the bed, we never counted how much exactly. And one of the empty rooms was turned into storage for the drugs."

"Thank you." Taylor said, focusing first on the little black book of contacts, but already processing the fact that she apparently now had access to a big pile of money.

Unfortunately, Skidmark's phone book was written in 'code'. Instead of actual names next to the numbers, there was a litany of creative insults. The recently deceased Merchant leader might have known precisely who 'fudgepacker' and 'shitgargler' were, but she certainly didn't. Still, she kept paging through it while following her new minion back to the garage.

"So, you said we wouldn't be the Merchants anymore." Sherrel spoke up as they wandered back into garage after the brief house tour. "What are we going to be? And what do you even want us to do?"

Taylor had dedicated thousands of mental iterations to thinking of a proper gang name ever since the conversation with Louie. It was embarrassing to consider that the Merchants, or the Archer's Bridge Merchants if you wanted to use the original, full name, were the only gang in Brockton Bay with a name that made sense and didn't sound stupid. Empire 88 was a dumb numerical code that translated to 'Empire Heil Hitler' and Azn Bad Boys sounded like something an eight-year-old came up with. Taylor would rather not fall down to that level, so choosing a gang name was serious business.

There were parahuman gangs out there that had good names. The Elite on the west coast, Accord's Ambassadors in Boston, the crazy Endbringer worshipers of the Fallen (they were insane, but they picked a good name for themselves) and so on. Hell, even the Teeth, the gang that followed around the body-hopping Butcher had a good name.

Those were all names that made it pretty clear what they were about with only minimal explanation. That was the kind of name she wanted for her own gang.

Unfortunately, Taylor had never considered herself to be very good at picking out names. Even her cape name was just a variation on 'psychic', that she'd gotten to by mixing and matching syllables until something felt right. For a gang name, she had no such convenient starting point.

She had options, but none of them felt particularly inspired. There was no need to hold back from the villainous-sounding names given the circumstances, but she didn't want something that screamed 'psychotic evil' like the Slaughterhouse 9. It had to be subtle and ever so slightly menacing, but also easy to remember.

Taylor was about to put the decision off until later when her eyes landed on a something in particular. The garage had quite clearly been stripped down and converted into a Tinker's workshop. There were all sorts of things around that she couldn't begin to guess the use of, but others were very familiar.

What caught Taylor's attention were several unopened cans of paint; black, red and yellow. Hundreds of mental iterations collated that together with past ideas, thoughts, ambitions and simple coolness factor.

"Hey, these are for your cars, right?" She asked, walking closer and pulling off her gloves.

"They're supposed to be." Sherrel grumbled. "I wanted to make a sexy beast of a car with all the fucking horse power. That bad motherfucker would have flaming tires and leave streaks of fire all over the road like it was being driven by the Ghost Rider himself, so of course it had to have a hot rod paintjob."

"Of course." Taylor agreed, knowing absolutely nothing about cars or who the Ghost Rider was. "Why didn't you?"

"I could never get it done." The Tinker scowled. "Everything I made always came out ugly as hell and looking like it was slapped together by a strung out whore!"

Her voice rose in anger as she spoke, culminating in a slam of her fist on the hood of the jeep they'd arrived in. Sherrel had said earlier that her trigger event came as much at the sinking realization that she was heading for a short and miserable life of selling her body for drugs as it did from the shock of finding her mother's dead body, and Taylor had been too polite to point out that it had apparently happened despite becoming a parahuman… it had just included selling her tinkertech for it as well.

"I'm sure you'll be able to do better now." She encouraged. Judging by the pleased smile she got back, it had worked. Sherrel still wasn't pretty to look at – at least above the neck – but that kind of expression did quite a bit to offset the drug damage. Maybe she'd even recover enough one day to be beautiful again. "I've been meaning to ask, but are you really okay with me just taking over like this?"

It was a potentially dangerous question, but the Tinker just shrugged. "You seem like you know what you're doing and having you around is… fuck, it's hard to describe, but life just feels better now. Easier to deal with, like all the shit it throws at me doesn't matter as long as you're around. I know that's your power at work, but I don't want to go back to what it was like before."

"I could see that you had a hole inside you that you tried to fill up with drugs." Taylor did her best to explain.

"And you decided to fill it up yourself?" Sherrel pounced on the opportunity with a saucy smirk. "Damn, if I knew that getting filled up by a girl do me so much good, I'd have become a dyke back in high school."

"That's not what I was going to say." Taylor muttered, blushing furiously. Unfortunately, no amount of multitasking would allow her to control autonomous reactions like that. "I'm basically taking away the parts of you that you don't want anymore in exchange for some of my strength. I tried to do the same for Skidmark, but he rejected it."

"Wait, does that mean that you're feeling my cravings now?" The Tinker asked, startled. "And Louie's?"

"Yes?" Taylor replied with a questioning frown, downright startled to see concern in the older woman's eyes. How long had it been since someone was concerned about her like this? "Don't worry about it, part of my power gives me unlimited pain tolerance. To me, there's no difference between a tiny scratch and a broken bone. Hell, I could probably get flayed alive and not flinch. The withdrawal symptoms don't bother me."

She left out the part where she actually enjoyed pain now. After her little blunder with the phrasing earlier, she wasn't eager to be the butt of any masochist jokes.

"That's pretty fucking sweet." Sherrel complimented.

"I thought so, too." Taylor gave a hesitant smile back, before turning back to the paint cans. "Hey, you mind if I open one of these?"

The blonde Tinker blinked in confusion. "Sure?"

"You wanted to know what we were going to be and what we were going to do." Taylor started explaining, taking the lid off the can of black paint. "We're going to be villains, but we're going to be the only villains in Brockton Bay. I won't tolerate Nazis and slavers in my town."

She pressed her hand into the surface of the paint, coating the palm, then lifted it up to let the excess drip off for a moment. Once she was reasonably sure none of it would get on her expensive coat/cape outfit, she lifted it up and pressed her palm against the wall, leaving behind a pitch black handprint. "We're going to be the Black Hand that keeps an iron grip on Brockton Bay's underworld."

Sherrel just stared at her in silence for a moment, then started cackling. "Girl, that's so fucking edgy. I love it."

Taylor cringed a bit, but couldn't keep down a smile as she was able to feel that the older woman wasn't laughing at her. "Thanks. Err, how do I wash this off?"

And then it would be time to start disposing of Skidmark's body.

XXXXX

Lying in the hastily cleaned, hastily furnished room in Sherrel's house/lair/workshop, Taylor stared at the ceiling and thought. It was late and she should be going to sleep, but there was a lot on her mind. It was a good thing she had plenty of mind to go around or that stuff might bother her for the rest of the night.

One of the things she had on the brain was Skidmark's slowly melting body out in the yard. She could just barely hear the crackle of flames as the fire they'd built under the oil drum did its job keeping the unholy mixture of lye and water heated so that it would melt the dead parahuman drug pusher.

Intellectually, she knew that it should bother her, but it simply didn't and she was tired of looking for a way to feel remorseful about it. At this point, it was time to admit that the murder not only hadn't bothered her, but that she felt perfectly justified in committing it. Righteous even. Maybe something to be careful of in the future so that she didn't slide into the truly monstrous end of villainy, but it wasn't like Skidmark had been anything resembling innocent. It would probably be fine.

The other big thing was the new psychic connections she had with Louie and Sherrel. She had to actively maintain them and keep drawing their pain and addiction to herself, but distance didn't really seem to be a factor. Taylor was concerned that sleep might be, however. How was she supposed to maintain the connection if she wasn't conscious?

She closed her eyes and focused, the dark sea slowly overtaking her perception. She still had no idea what it really was, but she knew deep in her bones that it was incredibly important. It wasn't just a way for her mind to visualize psychic phenomena that the English language had no words for.

She really should find a name for it. Calling it 'the dark sea' was not only a bit of a misnomer, but not very descriptive to boot. It wasn't actually dark, so much as colorless and placid. It only reacted to strong emotions… or when people died.

In fact, it rippled especially strongly when people died, albeit briefly.

"Is that where we go when we die?" Taylor mused, wondering what the ripples of her mother's death had looked like.

Mental iterations spun out, not frantically as they did when she needed to think fast, but simply latching on to loose threads of thought. Mostly, she was remembering every moment spent with her mother. Much of it consisted of reading books together.

Mom always liked the classics, said that good stories stood the test of time and shaped a culture's beliefs for generations.

It wasn't long before she remembered her mom reading Dante's Divine Comedy to her, one of the last things they'd read together. Dad had thought it was too scary and heavy for a twelve-year-old, so naturally Taylor had insisted on reading it.

It had been scary at the time. The depictions of Hell had unnerved her, but Mom had been able to focus her on the philosophy and allegory of it rather than on the gruesome punishments of the damned.

They'd gone over Dante's Purgatory afterwards, and then Dante's Paradise. As she recalled those memories, a possible name for the dark sea came to her. It was a bit pretentious perhaps, but she wanted to believe that something of her mother still existed.

"The Empyrean." She spoke the name aloud, testing it out. It felt right. Maybe the strange immaterial place she could see with her psychic sight wasn't exactly the highest reaches of Heaven as described by Dante, but she suspected it was the closest thing to it that the dead got.

"Little souls, lost in the dark." Taylor murmured, feeling poetic. She remembered the priest and his request that she do good where she could. This was probably not what he had in mind, but it was what she had to work with. "I'll never let you go."

She eventually drifted off to sleep, but her consciousness continued floating through the newly named Empyrean, two wriggling tendrils of thought remaining connected to Louie and Sherrel.

Soon, there would be many more.

XXXXX

February 9th, 2011.

"Mush lives here?"

"Yep."

"It's literally a trash heap."

"I know, but his powers make it work for him. Just don't say anything about his appearance, his normal one or the weird spaghetti monster he turns into when he uses his power – he's sensitive about it."

"Right, got it." Taylor shook her head bemusedly. "How do we find him?"

After getting some sleep, she had decided that talking to the last of the Merchant capes was a priority. Sherrel had been confident that Mush would fall in line just like she had, but Taylor was more wary.

"Yo, Mush!" Sherrel hollered, caring nothing for caution. "Where the fuck are you? Got someone you need to meet!"

Taylor had already been searching for any active minds in the landscape of garbage around them. The Brockton Bay landfill was an ugly sight, made even uglier than it would normally be due to the city's decaying infrastructure. Who had money to take care of garbage when they could barely repair the roads that kept getting wrecked by cape fights?

"He's over there." She said, sensing an awakening mind.

It, Mush, was in an awful state, easily the most ruined mind she had ever touched. Like most of the drug addicts she had encountered, there was that sucking void in his soul, but it was much worse than normal. The hollowness had almost completely consumed him. It was the mind of a man who had entirely given up on life and was only hanging on due to the highs he got from drugs.

"MUSH! Wake the fuck up!" Sherrel yelled even louder, voice pitching painfully high. Then she turned to Taylor with an apologetic expression. "It takes a while to get him moving."

"It's fine." Taylor shook her head, already reaching out to psychically touch the unseen parahuman. There was no more doubt in her mind that Mush would be better off as her minion now.

He latched onto her desperately, drawing more and more strength from her own soul to substitute his own fading one. In return, he gave her his addictions and his pain. It might seem like an unfair exchange, but Taylor didn't think so. He would need her, depend on her, and because of that he would be loyal.

"Squealer?" A scratchy, confused voice asked as Mush emerged from the garbage. "What's going on? I feel…"

Taylor averted her eyes in a mixture of embarrassment and disgust. Mush was naked, aside from the garbage covering him, and he looked like a pudgy little goblin of a man. No wonder Sherrel had warned her about his appearance.

"Yeah, you're feeling good, ain't ya?" Sherrel grinned and slapped a hand over Taylor's shoulder. "That's all thanks to our new boss here, Psyker. She's unfucking us with her mind."

"New boss?" Mush repeated slowly, digging the rest of himself from out of the garbage. Thankfully, he left a soggy piece of carboard over his crotch. "What happened to Skidmark?"

"Gone." Taylor said curtly. "He won't be coming back. The Merchants are no more, but I would like you to join the new organization I am forming from their ashes, the Black Hand."

Mush was silent for several long moments, clearly thinking. "Why do I feel so good around you? What did you do?"

"I took away your addictions, and I'm giving you some of my strength." The implication that she had strength to spare pleased her.

"Yeah, okay, I'll join you." Mush decided, his voice gaining strength. "I haven't felt this good in years. What do you want me to do… Boss?"

Taylor felt another thrill at having a second parahuman subordinate himself to her. It felt right, like this was how it was supposed to be.

"First, I want you to change your cape name. Mush was one of the Merchants."

"I already changed mine to Gearshift!" Sherrel broke in.

"Right, that makes sense." He nodded. "What's yours again?"

"Psyker." Taylor said, then pulled down the scarf covering her mouth and nose. "Or Taylor when the masks are off."

Mush seemed surprised by the easy identity reveal and she knew why, but Taylor had no concerns of betrayal. He felt even more loyal than Sherrel, more desperate to cling to the psychic lighthouse she offered as a guide away from the darkness in his own soul. He must have truly wanted to turn his life around, yet could never muster the strength.

"My name's Larry, Larry Laffer… although I haven't used it much recently. Anyone I knew probably thinks I'm dead." The newly revealed Larry rubbed the back of his greasy head. "And I might need some help picking out a name, I was always crap at that."

"Sure."

XXXXX

February 14th, 2011.

Victoria Dallon, or Glory Girl when in costume, loved Valentine's Day. The dates! The romance! The gifts! She'd been looking forward to what Dean had planned for almost two weeks… only to have Armsmaster ruin it all by scheduling a meeting regarding a new villain that he strongly urged New Wave to attend, right in the middle of the afternoon. This was going to eat up so much of her preparation time.

At least hearing about a new villain would be interesting, even if she would have preferred a new hero. Brockton Bay had enough villains already.

All the Wards and adult Protectorate members were naturally already at PRT headquarters, so she, Amy, Eric, and Aunt Sarah were the last ones to arrive.

"New Wave." Armsmaster greeted curtly. "Are the rest coming or is this all of you?"

Aunt Sarah didn't even bother looking annoyed by his attitude; they all knew what the Tinker was like by this point. "They had work, I'll give them the cliff notes version."

Uncle Neil and Mom had work, and Crystal had college courses. Dad was just too depressed to get off the couch.

"Very well, take your seats." Armsmaster nodded.

Victoria sat down next to her fully costumed boyfriend. "So, what's the deal? We don't normally have meetings like this for just any old villain."

In fact, the last time there had been such a meeting was when Lung came to town, before her own trigger event. She really hoped it wasn't another cape as powerful and vicious as him.

"No idea." Dean, Gallant in costume, shrugged.

"Yesterday, one of Squealer's trucks pulled up in front of the Brockton Bay police station and dumped twenty-three dealers, pimps and muggers on the sidewalk. They were all tied up and each one had a list of crimes stapled to their clothes."

There was a moment of silence before Assault spoke up. "Points for style."

He got an elbow to the ribs from Battery for his trouble.

"Why would they do that?" Victoria asked, confused.

"There was a letter left behind along with the criminals." Armsmaster answered. "It explained that Skidmark had been ousted and that the Merchants were being absorbed into a gang called the Black Hand, who was led by a cape called Psyker. Those twenty-three were the dissenters. The Black Hand's stated goal is absolute control of Brockton Bay's criminal element."

Fairly typical for a villainous gang leader, but at least it was more restrained than Lung's displays of strength and machismo. Even the letter wasn't that strange, with some villains thinking it was classy to announce their intentions in some way. The aforementioned Lung had done so by challenging the whole Protectorate to a fight as a demonstration of his power.

"So edgy." Dennis, Clockblocker, snickered.

"Do we have any indication of this Psyker's powers? And what happened to Squealer and Mush? And Skidmark for that matter." Battery asked.

"Skidmark we've heard nothing of, although that doesn't necessarily mean anything just yet. He may turn up in another city eventually. If he doesn't then we can begin suspecting that he was actually killed. Squealer and Mush have accepted the new leadership and rebranded as Gearshift and Lodestone." Armsmaster's jaw tightened. "As for Psyker's powers, given the name, as well as the speed of the takeover, we are suspecting either a Thinker or a Master."

"A human Master." Victoria whispered. It wasn't something she talked about, but she feared human Masters more than any other class of parahuman. The thought of someone taking control of her made her skin crawl every time.

"That is only an unsubstantiated guess." Armsmaster warned. "Until we have more information, treat Psyker with the caution you would give to any unknown parahuman."

Glory Girl would treat them like any other villain – by pummeling them into submission and dragging them into PRT lockup if she found them.

"Are we prioritizing Psyker's capture?" Miss Militia asked.

"If at all possible, yes." The bearded Tinker nodded. "I don't need to remind everyone how precarious the situation between the Empire 88 and the ABB is, they last thing we need is a third element stirring things up."

Vicky rolled her eyes and slumped into her chair with her arms crossed. She'd been accused of stirring things up herself by getting into fights with gang members and the occasional villain. Weren't heroes supposed to bring the fight to the villains? Sure, she might hurt them pretty bad sometimes, but that's what they got for being criminals. Besides, Amy always fixed the worst of it.

Armamaster went on. "At the moment, Psyker is legally speaking not even a villain, as they have no crimes on record. Our terms of engagement will reflect this."

The meeting from then on digressed into talks of acceptable levels of force and Vicky found her thoughts drifting. Bored, she looked sideways and saw that Amy didn't look like she was paying attention to Armsmaster's droning voice either.

"Hey, what are you thinking about?" Vicky asked in a whisper, as much out of boredom as from genuine interest.

Amy jumped a little, clearly startled out of her thoughts. "Nothing."

The muttered and clearly false answer made her sigh. Amy obviously wasn't in a sharing mood, which meant no interesting distraction for her. Then Dean poked her in the thigh with a reproving look at her for ignoring the Protectorate leader.

Vicky sighed again, bored. This new villain was turning out to not be all that exciting.

XXXXX

Coil sat at his desk and thought. Psyker, or Taylor Hebert as he knew her to be thanks to his numerous data taps and moles in the PRT, taking over the Merchants was a surprise development. Her being a parahuman had been a mere possibility, one that he had been content to wait on. With Shadow Stalker having caused her trigger event, there had been oh so many ways to potentially use or manipulate her if she did turn out to be one. Even if her powers were next to worthless, she could still have been used as a way to nuke Piggot and Armsmaster's credibility. The PRT had a strong grip on information control, but not an absolute one

Then Shadow Stalker goes off the reservation, tries to murder her in her home, only to end up dead herself. Next thing anyone hears of Taylor Hebert, she had taken over a gang.

Coil could not think of a single parahuman that had gone from trigger event to gang leader in such a short amount of time, however pathetic the gang in question was. Even ambitious human Masters tended to be more cautious, if only out of the natural fear their powers evoked.

On one hand, this was a disruption. Skidmark and his Merchants had been a known quantity, a minor nuisance with predictable behavior. And easily manipulated to boot.

On the other, it was an opportunity. Psyker would be a far more polarizing figure and, judging by her letter, far more actively hostile to the other gangs. She could very easily create the destabilization that Coil needed in order to oust Piggot and maneuver himself to replace her. With proper support and guidance, she might even be the spear he needed to get rid of the ABB and the Empire. Being a young girl new to villainy, one who seemed to want Brockton Bay restored to prosperity if one read between the lines, she might also be amenable to a partnership with an older, more experienced parahuman with similar goals.

Her rudimentary psychological profile suggested disillusionment with authority, and that was before learning about Shadow Stalker being the cause of her trigger event and Armsmaster's typically unsympathetic authoritarian attitude. It was possible that Psyker and her 'Black Hand' could be folded into his own organization with the right kind of approach.

It was definitely worth expending a few timelines to feel out the possibility.

XXXXX

"We have a surprise development."

Those were not words that Max Anders, Kaiser in his cape identity, liked hearing. He especially didn't like hearing them from his chief lieutenant. He hated surprises.

"Oh?" Max asked calmly.

"We found out why Skidmark has been so quiet lately." Krieg, or James Fleischer since he was in civilian garb, said grimly. "He's gone, either left town or dead. Some new cape called Psyker took him down and took over his gang, renamed them 'the Black Hand', delivered any dissenters to the cops and as good as declared war on all the other gangs in a letter to the PRT."

Max frowned. That was indeed a problem. Not the declaring war part, that was simply business as usual and barely worth noting. No, it was the clear break from the Merchant modus operandi that was the problem. He didn't bother asking how James got this information. They had enough informants in the PRT and regular police to be kept up to date, some of them sympathizers to the cause and some simply greedy.

Not that Max himself believed in the cause. Nazism had been his father's passion. He and his sister had both been raised to believe it as well, but only the woman who would later be known as Iron Rain, the Empire 88's most brutal enforcer, had bought into it.

Max had barely been halfway through his teenage years before he realized how much unnecessary baggage the Empire 88 was carrying around by styling themselves as the successors of the Wehrmacht in America. He was in it for the power and would have preferred to stick strictly to the Norse mythology theme for flavor. In his experience, each race of people had its own particular issues, but they also each had their uses.

Alas, he had inherited a Nazi organization, and so he had to preach something that at least sounded like a Nazi message. He had just toned it down and slowly shifted it away from the 'paint the streets with the blood of the unclean' type of rhetoric, which was where his sister had been heading before he'd arranged for her death. That said death had also led to his father dying had been an unexpected bonus.

Lung and Skidmark had been tremendously useful in this regard. Neither cared about the public perception of them, and both were utterly repugnant. That was why he hadn't tried harder to get rid of them when they were new on the scene. Lung might style himself as a majestic dragon, but in truth he was just a cruel, vindictive, petty thug that semi-openly engaged in sex slavery. Skidmark, on the other hand, was disgusting on a more personal level and repulsed everyone who saw him or heard him speak, although his aggressive drug pushing certainly didn't endear him to anyone. Both had a horrendous public image and embodied the very worst traits of their race. Combine that with the PRT's inability to put them behind bars and you had a perfect breeding ground for resentment.

In the past four years alone, the Empire 88 had expanded more than it had in the past twelve and all he had to do was keep the more unsavory aspects of their organization out of the public eye. There was the occasional idiot who thought it was a great idea to shave his hair off and tattoo a swastika on his scalp, but there were less of those every year.

Selective recruitment, careful action, speeches about protecting the good of their society, and iron control of the minions was the name of the game, in contrast to his father's fire and brimstone approach. Even the young idiot that had gone to murder Fleur of New Wave in her home after that delusional bunch unmasked had given him quite a gift. Not only had he crippled a powerful family of heroes, but by giving Kaiser someone to make an example of, he had been able to significantly push forward his own agenda. Max still sometimes raised a toast to the fool in private.

Another ten to fifteen years and the Empire 88 would be fully reformed in his image, an organization of disciplined professionals serving his will. Perhaps even most importantly, he would fully sever ties with Gesellschaft, technically the Empire's parent organization back in Europe.

His father had used their resources to establish Medhall and the Empire 88, and kept close ties to them. Kaiser had more pride than to be someone's underling.

In the meanwhile, he could funnel the 'true believers' towards Hookwolf. Brad's ridiculous obsession with blood sports was eternally a source of problems, but it was a good way for people to bleed off aggression when he didn't want them causing problems. And since his territory bordered the ABB, the skinheads were at least being used productively.

If only Theodore wasn't such a disappointment.

"What do we know about this cape?" He asked, pushing aside thoughts of his pudgy, timid son.

"Not much." James admitted. "Might be some kind of human Master, might be a social Thinker. Squealer and Mush even rebranded apparently. They call themselves Gearshift and Lodestone now."

In other words, someone far more dangerous than Skidmark no matter precisely what their powers were. If Psyker was white he would at least be able to say that it had taken one of the superior race to get the subhumans to fall in line, but it really wouldn't compare to being able to point at a foul-mouthed, unwashed, disgusting, drug-wasted black man and saying 'see what the niggers are like?'

"I suppose it was bound to happen eventually." He shrugged, privately mourning the loss of the easy propaganda.

"It won't matter." Krieg said confidently. "No matter who leads them, the subhuman rabble will never become any kind of cohesive force."

Max didn't roll his eyes because that kind of gesture was beneath him, but the urge was there. Krieg was a true believer, but quite possibly the only one left among the Empire 88 capes.

Hookwolf and his crew of Cricket and Stormtiger were all former pit fighters who had joined the Empire for its strength, rather than its agenda. The Valkyrie twins were loyal to him and their families more than any ideology. Victor was a sociopath that only cared about being the best. Victor's wife, Othala, could not function in normal society because of a trigger event that had cost her an eye and left her with a crippling phobia of black men. Rune, their newest cape, was racist in the way an angry teenager was racist. Crusader and Alabaster he wasn't completely sure of, but he would be surprised if their dedication to 'the cause' was anything more than lukewarm at best.

Amusingly enough, it was his ex-wife Purity, the one who left the Empire and wanted to be a hero, that most closely embodied the public ideals of the Empire 88. Kayden had always been easily influenced, and she'd been raised in his father's Empire. There was a reason why he'd put up so little fuss when she'd proclaimed her desire for a divorce and a split with the Empire. She would come back after her racism and disgust of homosexuals came into conflict with her flailing attempts at heroism. And if she remained stubborn… well, it wasn't like her attacks against the ABB weren't serving his purposes. In a pinch, it would only take one phone call to have her declared an unfit parent for their daughter if he needed to apply some leverage, although that was a last resort because of how much it would infuriate her.

Night and Fog didn't even need mentioning. Those two had been broken by Gesellschaft before being sent to him. They believed what they were told to believe. Purity had taken them with her when she left the Empire, but they had proved a problem for her attempts at heroics. Last he'd heard, they were currently playing house in Boston, as told to by Kayden. Max could easily imagine the dead-eyed married couple robotically going through the motions of life until they were recalled, creeping out the neighbors with their clockwork routine, repetitive conversation, and empty stares. He hadn't protested them leaving both because they would come back if ordered, because their powers were a bit too lethal to use most of the time anyway, and because they weren't really loyal to him,

Krieg was more loyal Gesellschaft than him as well. This tended to make him somewhat delusional when it came to certain topics.

As if, even if he was inclined to allow the Empire 88 to be used as some kind of foothold for a Gesellschaft cape invasion of the United States, the Triumvirate wouldn't go through them like a harvester through a wheat field.

Max was far more interested in reaching a quiet détente with the PRT and Protectorate, where they would occasionally clash in a show fight to keep the normals pacified, but were otherwise under a ceasefire. He would even be happy to make temporary alliances against other groups with them, as long as they didn't contest his rule of Brockton Bay. And from there, he could start expanding westwards, gobbling up territory as the United States continued to slowly disintegrate.

Really, he was just waiting for Emily Piggot to finally keel over and die. The stubborn woman was more of a soldier than the politician a PRT director should be. She displayed her hatred and distrust of parahumans with every moment that she refused to ask Panacea to heal her ruined body. As soon as she was dead and replaced by someone more reasonable, Kaiser could start feeling the PRT out about making an arrangement.

Notes:

Yes, Mush is Leisure Suit Larry in his civilian identity. Or he was at least. Earth Bet was less kind to his shenanigans and he failed catastrophically.

It was an errant thought and I couldn't resist putting it in there. I regret nothing.

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