With a tearing sensation through her entire body, Hemlokk reappeared in realspace. She tumbled forward across a carpeted surface, snarling and hissing in pain; her Rogue powers did not like it when she forced a teleport. Even before she'd stopped rolling she clawed a flask of healing potion from her utility belt and yanked the corkout with her teeth, greedily downing it in one swallow. The burning pain in her bones and muscles faded. Her Ghost Blades were in her hands even as the bottle bounced across the floor--
Slow clapping filled the dark. Clapping from behind her. She spun about, cloak flaring away from her to free her arms, her glowing blades at the ready. By the light of the emergency lamps mounted on the wall she could see she was in what looked like a TV sound stage, control room behind her, news desk and green screen in front of her. The walls and ceiling were skewed and cracked, a reminder of the half-collapsed building directly overhead. Both exits were blocked with rubble.
Seated at the news desk was Jack Slash. He was surrounded by a half dozen or so of Bonesaw's brain-spiders that scuttled and jittered about. He was seated in the lead reporter's seat, feet propped up on the desk, and he was applauding. "Dazzling entrance," he said. "You missed, by the way."
Taylor got to her feet, blades loose in her hands but ready. She did not take her eyes off the applauding man for a second.
Bayleaf… Adrian… had told the rest of the Warcrafted everything he knew, or could remember. On many details he'd been fuzzy-- to his own frustration more than theirs. But he'd recited every detail, chapter and verse, on the leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine. About his ranged cutting power. About his secret, secondary Master ability that let him not only predict other Capes, but pick their psyches apart with a metaphorical scalpel. About how, if he wasn't stopped… with extreme prejudice… someday he would be given the opportunity to use that power on Scion himself, and set off the apocalypse.
The end of the world was sitting in front of her, pretending to make small talk.
Jack smiled to himself as he looked over his… he supposed "guest" was the appropriate term. My, a female werewolf? He'd thought there was only the one. A group Trigger event perhaps? Maybe they were mates? "Ah, charmed, my dear," he said. "Here to kill me at the last. And here I was expecting your male counterpart..."
Something was off.
Something was seriously off. Not that he was afraid, yet. He'd laid too many rumors of what viral or bacterial horrors Bonesaw might have left encapsulated inside him for anyone to just recklessly attack him (false rumors; while he'd let the little moppet augment him in many ways he'd had no desire to have the next bubonic plague hidden inside his kidneys or whatever.)
Whenever he'd dealt with a Cape before-- hero, villain-- he'd always had that familiar something, that Je ne sais quoi, a sense within the first few words of his verbal dominance in the coming dialogue. His words were like puzzle pieces snapping into place. No matter what the other person said, no matter if they were appeasing or defiant or proudly adamant that they would not listen, the puzzle was his, he could see the picture on the box and the picture was always what he wanted it to be. Even when they were stubbornly silent, he could still sense his words snapping together inside their heads as they fell into their ears.
But… not this time. The cloaked werewolf girl stood on the far side of the buried room, silhouetted by the emergency exit lights, her eyes glowing under her hood. She was so absolutely still, such an absolute blank to his powers, that he might as well have been trying to cold-read a store window mannequin. As he watched the faintly glowing blades in her hands began to bleed black. For the first time in years he felt a stab of genuine fear inside. "Ah, ah," he said. He gestured to the spider-bots scuttling around him. "You should know beforehand that--"
He never finished his sentence. Without a word, without a sound the wolf girl lunged. The brain spiders, stupidly loyal as dear little Bonesaw always made them, had gathered in a rough half- arc between him and the girl. The black blades flashed in two arcs and brainspiders went flying in segments, gouting blood and sparks. The last few lunged, the wolfgirl vanished…
And suddenly he found it very hard to breathe. That might have had something to do with the several inches of razor sharp, glowing black blade rammed up under his ribcage. He tried to protest the circumstances but the second blade rammed up through his lower jaw had pinned his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
In his shock he struggled to replay what had just happened in his mind. Just as the remaining brainspiders had dogpiled her the wolf girl had teleported from the far side of the news desk. She was now crouched in his lap, clawed feet on his knees, both her blades buried deep in his body. Her snarling muzzle was an inch from his nose. Behind her there was a bright flash and a sharp bang; apparently she'd left a grenade of some sort behind her when she'd 'ported, thus putting paid to the rest of the brain spiders. To his disbelief she had two of them clinging to her back, viciously stabbing and sawing away, but not quite able to get through her cloak. What was it made of? He'd seen those things slice through kevlar vests, and the acids in those syringes could eat through armor plating in seconds! Her snarling muzzle was an inch from his nose; he could feel her hot breath blowing on his face from between her fangs.
"No," she said, her voice a rusty whisper. "You don't get to talk."
It was a miracle he was still alive. Well, not exactly a miracle; Bonesaw's surgical efforts hadn't been entirely in vain. She had given herself and the other members of the Nine (those with human anatomy anyway) all sorts of improvements and redundancies. The wolfgirl's black blades had sliced through the sub-dermal armor in Jack's throat and abdomen like it was cellophane; his heart was bisected. But the backup cardio pumps on either side of his heart were still going strong, and the tip of the blade through his chin and tongue had come up short against the plating in his palate. But he could feel jagged, icy burning pain-- actual pain; he hadn't felt it in so long-- spreading out in needles from both wounds, and he realized that the blades were surely poisoned. With what, he couldn't imagine; Bonesaw's antitoxin glands and blood scrubbers should have been able to neutralize nearly any attempt to poison him. And yet the burning cold needles spread….
He tried to gurgle out some comment, some phrase to the girl, tried to communicate to her with his eyes. His augments were buying him precious seconds, he could still talk or at least communicate his way out of this--
"No, you don't get to talk," she said again. She shoved against both knives, he felt the burning ice go deep into his chest, higher into his skull. "This is how it ends, Jack. No word games, no clever quotes, no little memetic bombs to screw with people's heads after you're gone.
"You wasted your life using your power and your words to make other people suffer, spreading your nihilistic bullshit for nothing but shits and giggles. Filling this world, MY world, with PAIN. So you don't get any last words." Something numinous and black spread up the handles of the blades she clutched and into his body; his head was a cloud of pain and his chest was a hollowed out chamber of jagged ice. "That's all they're going to remember about you, Jack Slash; in the end, you had nothing worthwhile to say."
All he could see was fangs and burning eyes. Then the blades inside him wrenched upward and inward, and the universe exploded in darkness.
The building was burning fiercely now. Smoke and flame boiled out of the shattered windows. It was kind of ironic, Bayleaf thought as he set a healing circle down on the sidewalk around several wounded PRT troopers, that the tension was actually lower than it had been before the blaze. As he watched, Shar'Din and Lei Ling each summoned a water elemental. There was a moment's alarm among the emergency responders as the two watery titans towered overhead, but it changed to cheers and relief when they obediently began releasing a downpour of water over the burning, half-collapsed office building.
Piggot came limping up, leaning heavily against another PRT trooper with his arm in a sling. They both paused and straightened as they stepped into the healing ring, muttering oaths of surprise. The sling was discarded, and Piggot began wiping away the trickle of blood on her forehead which was all that was left of the nasty gash that had been over her eye. "Good work, Skinwalker," she said. "My men will appreciate that."
"What's the word?" Bayleaf said.
"It's confirmed: the Butcher, Oni Lee, Bakuda, Crawler… hell with it. All the Capes in the Teeth, the ABB, and the Slaughterhouse Nine have either been confirmed dead or otherwise accounted for, save Jack Slash himself." Her smile was more of a snarl. Or maybe a grimace at the thought of the size of the bounty now owed to the Alliance and its members. "We're digging the incursion team out of that damned basement--"
"Lei Ling just got here, I'll have her send an earth elemental down to help--" He sent the message out on his phone; a rocky minion was soon rumbling its way into the ruined and smoldering building. His eyes swept over the building; the tiny cluster of green dots was still there. His heart sank as he counted how few of them there were. "We'd better hurry, they're in a bad way."
Bonesaw was still trapped in the freezer, he noted, seeing the flickering red light. He scanned to the right. His eyes widened, then he grinned in relief. There was now only one green dot where Jack Slash's little swarm of red had been. "And it looks like Jack is accounted for as well. Hemlokk got him." The surge of pride in his heart warred with a shuddering chill at the thought of Taylor facing that villain by herself. Gods, how did he keep getting separated from her side at times like this--?
The earth elemental reappeared. Armsmaster appeared from the smoke and rubble, a badly-wounded Adamant leaning on one armored shoulder. They had three PRT troopers with them; that was all. Bayleaf felt sick.
The earth elemental suddenly became agitated. It began pushing the two capes and the troopers ahead of itself. Lei Ling was watching proceedings from the far side of the street. She began waving her arms. "Get clear, get clear, it's coming down!!"
The building shook. Everyone broke into a run. With a roar, the wounded office building gave up the ghost, collapsing inward on itself as clouds of dust and smoke blotted everything out. In horror, Bayleaf realized Taylor was still inside. "TAYLOR!!"
Everyone hunkered down or dove for cover or simply fell down flat on the ground, covering their heads, as dust choked the air and rubble flew. For several horrible seconds everything was greyed out. Then the dustclouds parted; Lei Ling had summoned an air elemental who was blowing the choking smolder away. Bayleaf got to his feet and staggered toward the ruin, his heart a lump of lead in his chest. "Taylor--!"
Then there was a burst of indigo smoke and she was there. She was standing in the middle of the street, battered and torn and tottering slightly, Azeroth bandages here and there, her cloak torn and tattered, carrying something wrapped in a red cloth bag. In the next instant he was there and had her wrapped in his arms. The bag hit the street with a thump and she burrowed into his chest like she never intended to come back out. "Taylor, are you--" he croaked through the dust in his throat.
"I'm fine, I'm fine now," she said.
Paramedics and troopers closed in. They waved off the former, but one of the latter pulled open the red cloth bag and stepped back hastily. The red cloth was in fact a tattered shirt stained red by its contents, which consisted of a man's head. It had been rather roughly severed, and had a look of outraged disbelief frozen on its bloody face. The trooper muttered an oath under his breath and spoke into his helmet mike. "We have a confirmed, Jack Slash is dead," he said.
Adrian let the paramedics pull him and Taylor away.
Things wound down quickly after that. The scene devolved into the all too typical bloody aftermath of a Cape fight; Troopers securing prisoners, investigators taking pictures and taping off areas, paramedics tending to the wounded and coroners to the dead. The Alliance had lingered on, ostensibly to answer questions and help with the cleanup, but largely because they were exhausted and wanted to stay put in one place for just a minute.
The speed with which the cleanup got underway said a lot about how accustomed to such calamities Brockton Bay was. Work crews (many of them, to Taylor and Adrian's amusement, from the Dockworkers Union) arrived almost as soon as the dust settled. Trucks and heavy machinery were already at work hauling the rubble and wreckage away. Hell, even now there were news crews (Adrian cracked a joke to Taylor about the gossip he imagined going around the news station water cooler about their competitor's demise) and even a sizeable number of civilian rubberneckers (idiots) with their cell phones out, recording everything from the far side of the PRT cordon.
Adrian and Taylor watched the entire proceedings from where they sat on the curb, an EMT blanket thrown over both their shoulders as they huddled together. Everyone else had discreetly kept clear. Taylor had shivered in his arms for a frighteningly long time, but now she sat still, her cheek against his chest as he held her and said inane things to fill the wordless space between them. Even with her warmth against him his heart ached. She'd had to face her world's worst nightmares. She'd had to kill. She'd need… he didn't know what she'd need, he only hoped he could provide it.
Their idyll, such as it was, was suddenly shattered. Workers suddenly began shouting and backing with incredible haste out of the crumbled pit. Bayleaf got to his feet and took a few halting steps, trying to see what it was--
In the middle of the pit of debris they had unearthed a door. It was heavy stainless steel, scarred and scored by the shattered concrete. Someone had flipped it open…
Standing in the opening was a tiny, hunched over figure, dressed in the rags of a frilly little girl's dress, with a tangled mop of blonde ringlets dangling over its face. "Shit," Adrian hissed. "Bonesaw." How the hell had they lost track of her in all the chaos?
Just answered your own question, didn'tcha, his subconscious snarked. The place got flooded with friends, foes, the living and the wounded and the dead, small wonder her little life-dot got lost in your mental map.
Well, she was certainly on everyone's map now. She stood awkwardly in the middle of the ruins, her limbs at odd angles as she swayed back and forth. Troopers gathered at the edge of the pit with weapons limbered even as their commanders screamed for them to hold their fire, the heroes of the Protectorate and the Alliance stepping forward even as the workers hastily decamped and the gawking idiots with their cameras and cellphones crowded in. Bayleaf was there among them (the heroes or the fools? His subconscious quipped; he ignored it). He took a place on the edge of the pit and threw down a shimmering healing circle over the biotinker girl, then another.
"Why the hell are you healing her?" the Trooper next to him snapped, his rifle trained on the little girl's head.
"I'm not," Bayleaf said. He fished for another healing spell and let the aura rain down on the figure below. "I'm trying to neutralize the plagues her body is about to release!" He heard the Trooper choke a little as he reassessed the situation. The girl's skin was slowly growing discolored, with mottled purple patches and blackish veins darkening and spreading down her limbs.
Miss Militia stood on the opposite side of the pit. She pulled out a megaphone. "It's over, Bonesaw," she said. "Jack Slash is dead. The Slaughterhouse Nine are all dead. Deactivate your bioweapons and surrender."
It was eerily silent. "Jack is dead?" Bonesaw's voice was so faint Bayleaf barely heard it.
Then she started to laugh. It started out as a high pitched giggle, wavering and uncertain. It soon evolved into full blown spasms of laughter, her shoulders shaking as she shrieked with laughter. She took a deep breath and threw her ratty hair back out of her face. Her eyes were wild and wept black.
"WHADDAYA WANT, A COOKIE??" she screamed.
Her laughter turned to heaving, rasping breaths, sucking air into raw lungs. "Where have you been? Where have you been? DAMN YOU ALL, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN??"
"Where were you five years ago? ten years ago? Where were you when Unca Jack first GOT me?" Her voice was a caustic sneer. "Where were you when him and the others gutted my family? When they made ME fix them? Over and over again, over and over and---" She laughed, choking and spitting up something, the laugh turning into a sob. "An' I had to be a good girl, I had to be a good girl or they'd do the same to me--!!"
She sucked in another breath, struggling. She ran blackened fingers through bloody hair. "Years and years, years and years till nothing was left of me…"
She rallied. "And now, NOW---! How dare you, HOW DARE YOU ACT LIKE YOU DID SOMETHING SPECIAL!!" Her voice went up to a piercing shriek, echoing in the silence.
Miss Militia tried to assert control. "Bonesaw… Riley… please disarm your bioweapons and surrender. It's not too late..."
Bonesaw cackled. "Not too late? Yes it is," she said. She stopped, jerked and shuddered, continued. "My implants are broken. All the little surprises, the things Unca Jack told me were such a good idea, they're leaking out. My body's fighting them, I made myself as immune as possible, but it's losing." Her joints in her arms and legs looked swollen and distorted; cysts were swelling under her skin. She cackled again. "This was how it was s'posed to go, anyway--- Unca Jack always called me 'his little going-away present--' something he was going to leave the whole world when he finally left it--"
In a flash of green, Miss Militia's multiweapon transformed into a flamethrower. "Go ahead, the fire will just spread everything faster," Bonesaw jeered. She turned in a circle, looking at all the weapons and glowing hands leveled at her. "Go on! Do it! DO IT! DO IT--" The last was half scream, half sob.
"ALLIANCE! Lay down some heals, NOW !" As one every Warcrafted with a healing power began pouring them down on the dying tyke-bomb. Vindicator's golden light came down in a surge; Shen and Lei Ling sent spheres and liquid waves of healing chi chasing after it. Shar'Din infused the others with every boost he had, strengthening their efforts.
It wasn't enough… Bayleaf reached deep inside himself, pulling up a metamorphosis. His limbs swelled, his skin turned to cracking bark. He transformed into the Giving Tree, then went further, growing larger and stronger still, digging into the energies flowing through the earth. His next healing circle fell bright as shining emerald, surrounding Bonesaw, containing and infusing her, trying to reverse the spread of malignant sickness.
It was too late. Her body was more disease than little girl now. She fell to her knees, screaming as the healing light made her skin char and the fluids seeping from her bubble. She looked up, her eyes meeting Adrian's, full of pain.
Ten years of pain… the guilt, the shame, the pity were like icepicks in his heart.
"I'm sorry, Riley," he said. He doubted she heard him. He shifted again, farther still--- He returned to his Worgen shape, his form translucent and filled with stars…
Turbines roared overhead. Everyone looked up in surprise. Hovering overhead was one of Dragon's iconic mechas, its jets roaring as it held position. It was a truly enormous mechanical dragon, gleaming gold and silver. A hatch opened in the breastplate and light blazed down, blinding everyone. Adrian could just make out a humanoid form descending from the open door… a winged humanoid form…
Then singing filled the air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRbiO958ai8
Light, golden and pure, cascaded down on Riley's kneeling form. Vindicator's healing light had been golden, but it dimmed next to this like a candle in the sun. It shone through the girl's flesh, through the stones beneath her. She screamed, briefly, as black smoke rose from every pore on her skin, then itself was burned to nothing in the light. Her ragged clothes burned, and her hair turned to ash.
The winged figure descended, still singing. For a wonder, in a world tormented by the Simurgh, noone opened fire-- but the Simurgh's asymmetrical winged form was nothing like this one, its singing was discordant noise next to this song. The being flapped slowly down, landing gently within arm's reach of the slowly immolating girl. Riley looked up at it with blind white eyes, tear-streaks scored down her cheeks where the fluid seeping from her eyes had burned away. She was beyond pain now. The biotinker terror, the tormented child, looked up and smiled. "It's over?" she said.
The figure nodded, its voice rising in a crescendo. The light swelled. People looked away, blinded. Adrian refused to. In a flash, Riley's body was reduced to a cloud of golden sparks, then to ash, then to nothing.
The singer stopped. The light slowly faded away. The gathered crowd stared, awestruck, at the being before them.
As the glamour of the light faded, they could see it was not in fact an angel, as some had thought (or feared.) It was tall, with a clearly feminine figure clad in a simple white robe. The wings rising from her back were clad in soft golden feathers that matched the ones on her throat and head. Her eyes were enormous, blue and piercing. Her beak curved at the corners in a sad smile as she looked about, even as one clawed talon clutched anxiously at the front of her robe and the other smoothed it out around her plumed tail.
"An Arrakoan," Adrian exclaimed. "And a priestess, if I don't miss my guess."
"A priestess? Of what?" Taylor murmured to him.
"Of the Light," he replied. "Not necessarily religious, though, they-- they're conduits for the Light of the Universe...even more directly than Paladins are. I'll, uh, try to explain later."
To one side the Dragon mecha landed unceremoniously on the ruins. Its loudspeaker clicked. "Before anything goes any further, you should all know that Miss Paige McAbee is now a foreign national, a lawful representative of a nation-state and is under diplomatic immunity… as well as being under my own rather emphatic protection." The dragonbot flexed its claws against the concrete under its feet meaningfully.
"Paige McAbee? Wait, what? A… diplomat?" Armsmaster said. "Of where?"
The amusement in Dragon's voice was unmistakable. "Would you believe the Canary Islands?" she said. Armsmaster shot her an offended look. "…They declared their independence two weeks ago." The offended look didn't change.
"Uh, hello," Paige said. She projects her voice very well, Adrian thought. "My name is Paige McAbee. You once knew me as Bad Canary…? Well, I've, ah, gone through some changes since you last saw me..."
Riley opened her eyes.
But she didn't have eyes…
She opened them all the same, and looked around. She sat…? Hovered…? Over a vast featureless plain under an indigo sky, one that gleamed twilight blue at the horizon. Around her was a parliament of glowing lights.
Hello, Riley, one of the lights said.
Riley would have swallowed the lump in her throat, if she'd had a throat. "S...so I'm dead now?" she said. "And this is… and I'm going to be sent t-to..."
No, no, and No, another light said, gently but clearly amused. This place is… ah, describing it would involve explaining a lot of cosmology and using even more math, and I'd still get it wrong explaining it to you. Let's just say that this is your second chance.
"A, a second chance?" Shame and guilt, long repressed behind a broken mind, surged to the fore. "I've… I've been so bad. Done so many bad things..."
It wasn't your fault, Riley, a third light said. You were enslaved by that evil man when you were five years old. Your mind was broken, you were tortured physically, mentally and emotionally without letup for ten years. And for what little volition you did have, we are willing to forgive you.
Riley felt tears filling her eyes. "I… t-thank you," she sniffled. She wiped the memory of her eyes with the memory of her hands. "Buh, but what will I do? Where will I go?"
The fourth light sighed. That is part of the price of your second chance, it said. You could never live anywhere in peace on your old world. You are too well known, the evils you are known for too great. And no disguise would protect you from your past.
You will have to begin your new life, in a new world as well-- as a new person, with a new face. You will lose everything left of your old life, even your reflection.
"And what's the other part?" Riley said fearfully. "Of the price, I mean."
Where we send you, we will require much of you, a fifth light said. Though we suspect your own guilt and need would drive you regardless. You will spend the rest of your life using your gifts to help others, with as much vigor as you once used to harm them-- as much, and more.
Riley nodded. "I understand."
Good. Then let's begin.
The lights began to orbit around her. "Wait. Where will I go?" she asked.
Oh the options are endless, the third light said with enthusiasm. Worlds of all possible kinds. The spiral began to close, and she found herself drifting along with them over the endless plain.
Tell us, how do you feel about, oh, ponies?