Summoner - Chapter 13 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series
Chapter 13
Notes:
"I can guess you're not home often." Lisa quietly commented as she drew a smiley face into the dust covering her desk, and Taylor made a sound of acknowledgement as she rifled through her closet.
"Not really. Here. Black sweatpants and a black hoodie. They're baggy on me, and they'll be worse on you because you're short-"
"I'm not short- "
"-but they'll do until you can get a shower tomorrow." She finished, and extended the bundle to Lisa, who huffed, and took it.
Taylor dove back into her closet, and took out a pair of black underwear, a gas can and a lighter she'd hidden in the corner, before presenting them to Lisa as well, who just gave her a questioning, incredulous look.
"... It can't be comfortable wearing clothes without underwear. Or sanitary. They'll be tight on you because you're curvier, but they'll probably fit. They're for tomorrow. The gas is to burn your current clothes. Downstairs, on the kitchen counter under the toaster is the key to the back door that leads to the backyard. There's an unused fire pit there. Once you've changed and we're done talking things out, go throw your clothes in there and burn them. And I mean to ashes, okay? Now, change, I'll turn around." She said, and Lisa sighed, before grabbing the gas can and lighter with one hand in an awkward movement, then moving the pile of clothes in her other hand forward.
She dropped the underwear on the pile, and turned around.
"Why did you have a gas can in your closet?" Lisa asked.
"So in case this place gets raided in any way, I can light my room on fire to destroy everything that might give a Thinker or a good investigator clues about me, or DNA, or whatever else, escape, and then immediately call the fire department to save the rest of the house."
Lisa paused, the sudden silence more than enough to signify a lack of movement.
"Taylor? Do you take some kind of schizophrenia medication I should be aware about?" Lisa asked, half-serious, and Taylor rolled her eyes.
"Ha. Ha. Funny. Anyways... There's a lot to say between us, and not too much of it is personal, so don't worry, I don't expect you to tell me your life story or anything. And while I'd love to ask questions, I feel like you're in a worse spot than me so you'd appreciate some answers more. So, what do you want to know? Besides asking if I'm a paranoid schizophrenic?"
Lisa chuckled, the sound of a zipper being undone swallowing most of the sound.
"You could have said that in so many less words, you know? Like ' ask away'. "
"Yeah, I know, I'm kind of stiff right now. Not sure why." She mused, and Lisa made an 'ah' sound at her blunt honesty.
Silence, the shuffle of clothes.
"I guess… what's the reason you're doing this? You seem… meticulous, to some extent. Your way of talking, the way you insinuate you want to do things, the power you have, your general paranoia, your-" Lisa paused to snicker a little. " -minions, everything just screams to me that you're not a common villainous thief, and your goals are probably nothing quite that petty or small. Which, while cool, is a little intimidating, I won't lie. So, that's the question. What's the goal, why are you a cape?" Lisa asked, voice growing increasingly strained, before grunting in exertion as the sound of stretching rubber mixed with the sound of a zipper breaking.
Wardrobe malfunction, probably.
"You sure don't ask light questions." She murmured, and in the darkness of the room, she stared at the wall for a moment, gathering her thoughts.
"As stupid, naive, and far-fetched this might sound, I'm hoping to make this world a far better place to live in. I want to get rid of every monster or maybe make them my slaves, until the only monsters left are me and mine. Then I'll probably just retire to some tropical island until something else horrible pops up and the world will need me." She said, completely even and not an ounce of humour in her voice.
"You know, that is naive and far-fetched, but I like it. I was expecting something boring like ' I want to control my own criminal empire ', or something."
She couldn't help it, she snorted.
"Lisa, that's the first step ." She empasized. "Brockton Bay will be my base of operations, if you will. I've lived here my whole life. I like this place, even if it's a shithole. So I'm planning to make this city mine, both to use its resources and establish myself, and to fix it, by force if I have to. Then when I've done that, I leave behind defenses, make this city something an Endbringer can't even fucking scratch, and go after the real monsters."
Lisa hummed.
"And what would a real monster be?"
"Nilbog." She gave an example, and the shuffle of clothes abruptly stopped. "Ash Beast, maybe Jack Slash, Heartbreaker. You understand the type. I don't mean a cruel gang leader or something."
"Yeah. I guess those do quality as real monsters…Though I hope you understand if I'd much rather take backline during any such fights, right?" Lisa said slowly. "What did you mean when you said make them your slaves?"
"Yeah, that's more than fair. You're a Thinker, it would be cruel to have you in the frontlines versus bastards like Jack Slash. As for the slave thing, one of my powers allows me to Master people from close range with eye contact. It's permanent, even if I die. Imagine if Heartbreaker's power didn't go to a subhuman sleazy shitbag, that's basically it. It's also a bit time consuming and very obvious when it's happening however, and my eyes glow gold when I do it, so stop getting all alarmed, I haven't touched you." She said, mildly offended, and Lisa let out a short sigh.
The aura of sudden wariness around Lisa faded.
"Yeah, okay. Fair. So, what's the gameplan to your first step then?" Lisa asked.
"The first step to my first step starts in three days. I'm joining the Wards."
Lisa's emotions shuffled a bit again.
"Wait, you said something about being the… yelling… thing? I forgot. We were talking about a lot of stuff and It kind of slipped through the cracks."
Taylor groaned in dismay, rubbing her eyes.
"I don't know how long you've been here, but something like three-ish, maybe four months ago, there was a whole commotion at Winslow? A giant purple thing that started screaming a lot?"
"Oh!" Lisa exclaimed, and Taylor whisper-shouted a ' Quiet!' back at her almost immediately.
"Right, right, dad, sorry. Just, holy shit, you're Shrieker? " Lisa exclaimed, then immediately gasped, an immense satisfaction and realization filling their air as several puzzle pieces clicked for the Thinker. "No shit you're so paranoid about your real identity, your trigger event was probably at your own school, and so public it would only take a bit of time to find out who you are. Not to mention one stupid fucking kid blabbing to the gangs and unmasking you…"
She frowned.
"Yeah, that already happened. They know who I am, they just don't know where the fuck I am, and why I haven't come back home yet. I'm planning to keep it that way. Also people are calling me fucking Shrieker? Really?" She asked, incredulous at how unoriginal and villainous that sounded.
But granted the context, that wasn't… the worst assumption?
"Yep. At least that's what the news were saying. You got on TV." Lisa snickered, and Taylor groaned in distaste.
"That's just wonderful, isn't it." She bit out, and Lisa hummed, sure as hell taking her sweet time changing. But she had been wearing a catsuit and that looked like a damn pain to get off.
"How are you planning to hide yourself though? If you join the Wards and start turning into that purple monster in the streets, the gangs will know exactly who you are and that you're back, right? And what's the point of joining them in the first place? You don't strike me as the type to have such grand ambitions and be willing to listen to be bossed around." Lisa asked, and she sighed in reply.
"Hiding myself will be quite easy, actually. All I have to tell the PRT is that when I transform I go completely batshit insane, and then prove that I'm a Brute without the transformation to begin with, and they'd agree in a heartbeat to have me patrol as a normal, average, boring cape. As for why I'm joining, it's simple. Espionage. I Master a few employees to use as moles, make them request transfers and work themselves to the bone to rise up the PRT ladder, and use the PRT's resources to train and better myself on their dime, get used to how the hero side of things works and how they think, how they operate, then just ditch without saying anything. Let them make their own conclusions." She shrugged, still staring at the wall.
Lisa let out an impressed laugh.
"Fuck. I like how you think, T. Even if it's a bit… difficult to go from being a thief to whatever the fuck you expect me to be while with you, you seem to not be nearly as reckless and cocky as I thought you'd be."
"...Thanks?" She asked, unsure of how to take that.
"Hmm... considering your paranoia about your civilian identity, I feel like I gotta ask if you know what the unwritten rules are." Lisa asked.
"The unwritten rules of what?"
"Capes. You know, heroes, villains, et cetera. Rules of conduct, of sorts? Ring a bell?"
"... There are rules ?" She asked incredulously, damn near turning around in her complete confusion before remembering why she'd turned away to begin with.
"... How much time have you had to get ready for the cape life?"
"About four days. I was thrown into a mental asylum for the past three to four months because my trigger event fucked with my head a lot. Got out like a week ago." She explained, and Lisa let out a long, soul-deep groan.
"Man, I'm never gonna fucking sleep at this rate." Lisa grumbled, then walked over to plop herself down on Taylor's bed, thankfully clothed.
She walked over and sat down, and just because she felt like it, she gently flicked Lisa's forehead to draw her attention, prompting an amused-confused glance.
"Stop moping about your shrinking beauty sleep and explain."
"That sounds arbitrary, very loosely enforced if at all, and completely irrelevant if you are strong enough to ignore it, like Lung."
Lisa opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"You know, had Lung's questions not all been directed towards trying to unmask every cape he could think of until he got bored or annoyed with me trying to explain to him that I can't do that without a lot of information on them, I'd have probably argued more about the merit of it all. Now, I kind of agree that yeah, it is."
Taylor grimaced, staring at the ceiling as they laid on opposite ends of her bed, their feet on the floor.
Then a very random thought came to mind, and her brain-to-mouth filter deactivated just in time for her to blurt the joke out before she could second-guess it.
"... If you get kidnapped by a dragon and taken to his tower, does that make you a princess?" She asked, and after a beat of complete incomprehension, Lisa barely managed to turn her sudden bark of laughter into the world's most undignified snort-choke laughing noise, hands clamped over her mouth.
Taylor's lips twitched up.
It wasn't even that funny, but with how many nerves were coiled up inside Lisa, even a mildly entertaining thought seemed to be enough to get her body to take the chance to release some of them.
Eventually though, Lisa had finished laughing, then her breaths returned to normal, and then her emotions moved to apprehension as the looming silence between them stretched, both staring at the dark ceiling.
"We've… kind of gotten really derailed on things. I barely told you anything about myself, what I can do, or whatever. And I'm not going to share my deepest darkest secrets or anything, but I'll share, I promise. I do have one final question though, and it's important. What are you willing to do to accomplish this… noble goal of yours?" Lisa asked, her emotions reading like she was bracing herself.
She decided to be honest.
She stared at her ceiling, dark blue tinted by the moonlight, and imagined an endless desert of glittering golden sands.
Imagined a sky turning purple, imagined a world crumbling under the weight of impossible enemies.
A world like Earth Bet, but one whose death was a spear through the chest, while the one she occupied right now would die by a thousand tiny cuts in a bottomless spiral.
Most people didn't know or chose not to know, but she was one of those who did. Those who had once bothered to check the population graphs of countries and notice nothing but a downwards-leaning graph, public sentiments for the future getting increasingly more depressing and apathetic year by year. And all of it for an essay that never made it to the proffessor's desk.
Earth Bet was slowly, slowly dying.
She reached her arm up to the ceiling, hand open, eyes glazing as she imagined the undefeated, the horrors, the forces of nature and the mad, all within the palm of her hand. Her palm curled shut, crushed them within its unyielding grip, a mass of gore and fragments and misery turned to nothing but a seed for the future, a seed she wished to plant.
She imagined a world like Earth Aleph. A world that was even better than that.
And it all had to start with hope, with its restoration. Hopeless people didn't improve things. They didn't make children, they didn't raise them, they didn't create things, they didn't contribute, and they just didn't care.
Hope was the most important thing to preserve.
And she could not count on merely killing the Hopekiller to achieve that. It wasn't a guarante she would ever be able to.
"Whatever it takes, Lisa. I don't expect you to agree. I don't expect you to do the things I'll do. And while I have lines, rules, rules that prevented me from just forcing you to look into my eyes and be turned into a mindless puppet for me and will prevent me from doing the same to countless innocents, there is no game of cops and robbers to be found for me. And there won't be one for you either, not with me. I'm going to try to fix this world, or die trying."
Lisa was silent, digesting that, resolving some inner conflict.
Eventually, so much time had passed that she'd started to forget her exact words, and that was when Lisa seemed to come to a conclusion.
"You know, I cannot explain why exactly, but something about all this, your attitude going into this, just... you in general… they remind me of someone else. Makes it a real bitch and a half to walk away from." Lisa murmured, then sighed. "Okay. Not much else to say to that. I'll do my best to help you until I'm not at danger of being someone's Thinker slave, and then… we'll see. I'm not sure I want to be involved in something this huge, you know? But those plans of yours sound very long term, so for now… okay. Now that I'm out of questions, what are yours?"
Taylor spoke the moment Lisa stopped, fast enough that it was obvious she'd been thinking and holding onto this question for metaphorical ages.
"How exactly does your power work, and what are its limits? How can I best use your power to know as much as possible?"
"And you said I didn't go for easy questions." Lise scoffed.
Then she began from the basics of what she knew.
Notes:
im zoomin these uploads.