Intermission 7.2
Colin Wallis
2002, February 12: Brockton Bay, NH
I walked into the lab on Tuesday morning and froze. There was a small crate on my workbench that hadn't been there the night prior. Someone had been here before and was either good enough to bypass my security or was authorized to be here. No one was authorized to be here.
I put on my armor and activated my newly built sonic scanners. The pinewood crate was three by four by two and filled with jars of a familiar, chalky solution: Petricite Elixir. Someone had delivered Petricite Elixir to my lab without my knowledge. That should have been impossible on multiple levels and yet, here it was.
After triple-checking for traps, I opened the crate to find exactly what my scanners told me I'd find. There was also a small note that read, "The turtle sleeps, but his potions will be delivered on schedule. Use them well, Beardmaster."
It was written in immaculate, elegant script and though I knew little of penmanship, I could tell at a glance that someone spent hours upon hours practicing their letters. More importantly, it was also completely unsigned, save for the ridiculous name and now internationally famous sigil: Hyunmu's stylized turtle shell.
The crate was a mystery. No one, no one, called me "Beardmaster" save Hyunmu and once he heard it, Hero. No one else had the nerve. Hyunmu was obviously incapacitated and Hero would not have bothered with this cloak and dagger nonsense, so who?
I wracked my brain but could think of none who held the skill to infiltrate my lab, the connections to take over Hyunmu's production, and the familiarity to use a teasing nickname.
I immediately scraped off a bit of the ink and tore off a corner of the paper for forensic analysis. Within the hour, I had their exact chemical composition, manufacturer, and likely point of sale: Brockton Bay Office Depot. Utterly unhelpful.
I then called up some of the other tinkers in the Madhouse as well as Hyunmu's old branch in Phoenix. Potions had been delivered; not just my Petricite Elixirs, but all of them. Thousands upon thousands of bottles had somehow wound up precisely where they were supposed to be. After a single month of hiatus, some mysterious entity had managed to restart Hyunmu's potions business.
After only fifteen minutes of inquiry, I received a call from the office of the chief director that this entity was a hitherto unknown asset and to stop digging.
I was delighted. Baffled, but for once, I could live with the confusion if it meant the deliveries would ensue.
Over the past month, I prioritized the upgrades to my helmet and armor, integrating the scanner from Bluesong as well as several other additions from my colleagues. I hadn't gotten around to reworking my halberd yet, so I was happy to note that my dart launcher would remain at peak efficiency.
I mixed my custom power-negating solution and got to work building a machine to more efficiently pressurize the chemicals into a compact dart. The delivery came at a good time; I was down to my last four darts from my stockpile.
I frowned as I was reminded of precisely why that was. The city was in turmoil. My debut ceremony in front of city hall seemed to have been the sign that the endbringer truce was over and the time of mourning for our nation's lost capitol had passed.
The Ryujin 893, a Japanese group that established itself during Brockton Bay's shipping days to defend against the Empire 88, had swelled in number after Kyushu as refugees flocked to the states. From the files I'd read, they had been aggressively staking claim to territory in the northern half of the city for months now after consolidating other smaller, Japanese-centric gangs.
They used my debut as the cue to conduct a definitive raid against the Dockside Tigers, a mostly Vietnamese and Thai group known for lesser profile smuggling operations: drugs and weapons mostly, but also some illegal immigrants. The attack killed every single member of the Tigers of any relevance, including both capes.
As I'd heard from my new colleagues, this kind of gang violence was simply a return to the depressingly normal state of affairs. Things weren't as bad as they could get, but this low-level simmer of ongoing conflict was Brockton's baseline.
The only real surprise in all this was that the first shot to end the truce wasn't from the Empire. By all accounts, Allfather was a cruel, brutal man who thoroughly embraced his Viking motif. He was a showman who gloried in combat, a stark contrast to the clear wealth demonstrated by the Empire's many and diverse resources. I wondered which lunatic was willing to back a man like him.
The worst part of the Ryujin swallowing the Tigers was that it only seemed to inflame Allfather's rhetoric that the Asians were a pox on the community. Had the Tigers put up more of a fight and taken down at least one of the Ryujin's four capes, he likely would have swept in on the weakened gang and sparked a citywide war. As it stood, he seemed content to fan the flames and scream into his echo chamber.
Thankfully, the other two "major powers," if they could be called that, were likewise reluctant to intervene. They were the Plum Blossom Company and the local chapter of the Black Panthers.
The Plum Blossoms were triad remnants exiled from their homeland by the rise of the CUI and the Yangban. They were a small but shadowy group that seemed to excel in information management, corporate espionage, and other subtle crimes. Much like the triad they originated from, they held seemingly little loyalty towards the idea of "Chinese" as an ethnicity. Instead, their focus was exclusively on money and they showed little hesitation in preying on their own community.
They also regularly sold information to the PRT through unofficial channels. Director Cooper was of the mind that they were small-fry and should be used to take down the other gangs. I wasn't sure if I agreed.
Whether they had thinker support or not was unknown but the current guess leaned towards the positive. Fortunately, for all their cloak and dagger posturing, they had little in the way of direct power.
Lastly, there were the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers professed themselves to be a "civic service organization" dedicated to the defense of their communities. They were that, once. During the sixties and seventies, before the rise of capes, they were a radical if nonviolent group of African-American civil rights activists.
When Allfather and his Empire sank its hooks into the Bay, the African community felt the need to militarize in turn and that enabled idiots preaching about race wars to take the reins of the organization.
They were the most morally complicated of the gangs. I heard from the grapevine that Director Cooper tended to be sympathetic to their cause, though he was not outright supportive of their criminal activities. He saw them as a necessary counterweight to the Empire, especially because they were almost exclusively defensive in their approach to gang wars.
The Panthers only had three capes: Rebellion, Witch Doctor, and Doubletime. They couldn't hope to keep up with the Empire or Ryujin, but got by thanks to their relatively passive posture and the lower position they occupied on our priority list.
An alert crossed my helmet UI to remind me of a patrol. I packed up my gear and headed for the garage. Cannonade was already waiting in his captain's coat and tricorn hat. He wore a simple strip of cloth with eyeholes cut out over his face, the intentionally rugged look matching well with his ship's captain persona.
"Cannonade," I greeted firmly. Contrary to my first impressions of him, Paladin turned out to be the type of man who did not force his subordinates to socialize on the clock. Instead of constantly mixing patrol pairings, he simply assigned me to Cannonade and called it a day.
Good, I preferred things this way. This setup allowed me to get to know my partner more deeply and made us more likely to work together in engagements. It helped that I found the sailor to be the most complementary to my own skillset. Cannonade was an incredibly potent ranged fighter but had little in the way of support or close combat abilities, shortcomings a tinker like me could easily pave over.
His power allowed him to enlarge and duplicate any projectile he launched. Though he had the standard restriction concerning tinkertech that most capes had, in his hands a single marble could become a full salvo of grapeshot. For safety reasons, he seldom resorted to the revolvers belted to his hips.
"Armsmaster, how're things?" he asked, his gravelly voice a professional growl. Luminous once asked him if the growl was something he practiced for PR. It wasn't; he was just a longtime smoker.
"I am ready for patrol. Let's go." I started my motorcycle and took off. He followed on his own bike, stylized so the front looked like the prow of a galleon. Attached to its rear fender was a sly-blue flag with a ship's anchor on it. It looked ridiculous, but it also kept people from questioning the full lethality of Cannonade's powers. "Nineteenth and Crest. Follow the border of Panther and Empire territory before circling back around the city limits."
"Aye, capt'n."
"You don't need to call me that."
"Aye, capt'n."
"Please drop the accent."
"No can do, capt'n," I heard him grin through the mic.
Sometimes, I truly wondered if a command position was something worth seeking.
X
We were fourteen minutes into our patrol when console reported in. "Armsmaster, Cannonade, we're getting reports of a fire. 218 South Weston."
"Understood. Rerouting," I responded. If console saw fit to warn us, it was because the police suspected cape involvement. "Who's involved?"
"Panther territory. House belongs to a suspected Panther lieutenant, possibly a cape. Husband and daughter should be inside the house."
"Empire hit?"
"Likely, sir. No cameras."
"And the lieutenant?"
"Rachel Simmons. Twenty-eight, mother of one. Suspected to be Doubletime, though no hard proof. She's been missing for two days. Put out the fire. Gather some clues."
I grunted in the affirmative. We'd arrived. The fire was impossible to miss, not with the smokestack reaching four stories and climbing. It covered the front of the house and a separate shed, though I was unsure if there was something in the shed specifically worth destroying or if the fire had spread. The fire brigade was already here and had set up a perimeter.
"Cannonade. You enlarge and duplicate projectiles."
"Yes, sir," he replied crisply, his usual nonsense nowhere to be found.
I clipped a capsule from my bike. My custom tranquilizers were a good motivator for developing efficient storage for highly pressurized liquids, but that wasn't where the application ended. It was not useful enough to merit real estate on my halberd or armor, but a pressurized fire extinguisher was an obvious addition to my motorcycle's glove compartment.
"Fire extinguisher," I said as I handed it over.
"Can't duplicate tinkertech."
"Pressurized using tinkertech. Foam itself is standard issue."
He shook it in his hand then fingered the nozzle. "Yeah, I can work with that."
Saying so, he marched past the fire department as they were still hooking up to the hydrant and began to spray down the house and shed. As per usual, creative use of powers often far outstripped mundane solutions.
Cannonade enlarged and duplicated the foam as it emerged from the fan-like nozzle but did not impart any velocity. The result was a dense fog that deprived the fire of oxygen while causing minimal damage to the house, all the better to save potential evidence. Three minutes later, the fire brigade carried the unconscious father and daughter out of the smoking house where they were checked over by the paramedics.
I approached the nearest paramedic. "Will the father be ready to answer questions?"
"He won't," the paramedic snapped, "not today."
"Understood."
I left them to it and made a note to visit the hospital at a later date. Cannonade and I then cordoned off the house and entered to investigate. He hung back in the doorframe.
"Ehh, how 'bout you do your detective work, cap? I'm not much good at snooping around," he said, giving me a helpless shrug.
"Understood. It won't take long."
I did not understand why basic forensics training was not a mandatory part of the Protectorate professional development curriculum. It may not be as publicly noticeable as signing autographs, but it was far more important. I swallowed a reprimand and got to work; Cannonade had other talents.
Twelve minutes later, Cannonade and I rode away from the scene. The fire was caused by four Molotov cocktails sent through the window. There were no fatalities or signs of cape involvement beyond Mrs. Simmons' own suspected identity.
"Are we even sure this was about her possibly being Doubletime?" Cannonade mused. "She was plenty famous in her civilian identity too. Used to organize speeches and rallies and stuff."
"She was," I allowed. "It's a possibility, but she's missing. They are likely not unrelated."
"If you say so."
X
2002, February 13: Brockton Bay, NH
The police were correct in their preliminary deductions; it was indeed a cape-related hate crime. We received confirmation the very next day in the form of her brutalized body hanging from a tree. The skin around her eyes had been peeled off in a macabre facsimile of a domino mask and her lungs had been pulled out of her torso and onto her shoulders.
A bloody eagle, a famous execution method supposedly favored by the Vikings. Between the queasiness caused by the picture, I almost wanted to roll my eyes. There was a time in my student days when I enjoyed medieval history. This execution method came up in several medieval records, but never from credible sources, nor had there ever been a body unearthed with such distinct damage to the spine and ribcage.
More than likely, it was an exaggerated, ritualistic literary device meant to highlight themes of honor and revenge rather than any practiced execution method. It became popular among students of history because it played to the stereotype we had of medieval society, that they were horrible, brutal savages who were quick and creative with violence.
In other words, perfect for a posturing fool like Allfather, perfect for a small-minded, cruel monster who delighted in lording over those he considered lesser.
I grit my teeth and promised to personally make him suffer for his cruelty. Doubletime was a criminal, I held no delusions about that, but she was one out of a sense of necessity.
My legs felt like lead. I strode through Brockton General's burn ward anyway. Caleb Simmons had sheltered his daughter with his own body even as flames licked at his back. Without the potions, he might have suffered permanent damage.
"You don't have to be the one to do this, capt'n," Cannonade said, clearly not pleased to be here.
"I do," I replied firmly. "He deserves to know."
"We have officers for this."
"You can wait outside."
"Nah, I'm coming with. We're partners."
I grunted to show my thanks and knocked on the patient's door. It was a nondescript pastel blue, utterly inoffensive like the rest of the hospital.
"Come in," came a quiet voice, downtrodden and bitter.
I opened the door to find Mr. Simmons sitting up in his hospital bed. On his lap was the TV remote, though he seemed more interested in fiddling with it than watching anything. The man had a slim, athletic build. At twenty-eight, he was toeing the line between the prime of his life and the time when his body would begin to fail him. He turned to us with a scowl.
"Mr. Simmons?"
"That's me. What do the fuzz want with me? Is my house burning down somehow my fault?"
I chose to ignore the acerbic remark. I wasn't good at this. I had no idea how to address bitterness at systemic racism, especially not in a city with a Nazi gang. Professionalism was my armor. "I am Armsmaster and this is my partner, Cannonade."
"Yeah, saw your debut, tin man. You here to question me?"
"No, sir. We found three Molotov cocktails in your living room and one in your shed. Considering the circumstances, you are not a suspect."
"No fucking shit. Well, what do you want then? My statement? Gave it to some pig already, go chase him down."
"We are not here for your statement, sir. I am sure what you told the detective will suffice in conjunction with security footage around the area."
He glared at me. I didn't take it personally; enough stress could cause a man to seek any possible outlet. "Then fuck off and let me see my daughter."
I breathed deeply. Hero once told me that he insisted on visits such as these to remind himself of why he fought. He professed to being as socially awkward as I was but felt a need to sympathize, to take their resentment if need be.
I decided it would be best to rip the band-aid off without delay. "Your wife is dead."
Silence. Silence as his brain registered the words but his mind failed to process them. "What?" he whispered.
"Sir, Rachel Simmons, your wife, has passed away. Her body was found hanging with signs of Empire-"
"THEN FUCK OFF AND CATCH THEM!" he roared. He grabbed the remote and threw it at me. It bounced harmlessly against my chestplate. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE? YOU HERE TO TELL ME SHE DESERVED WHAT SHE GOT? HUH? WELL FUCK YOU, YOU GODDAMNED PIG!"
"That is not our inte-"
"FUCK YOUR INTENT! FUCK YOUR CONDOLENCES! FUCK YOUR SORRIES! MY WIFE IS DEAD! SHE'S DEAD BECAUSE YOU FUCKERS COULDN'T BE ASSED TO DO YOUR MOTHERFUCKING JOBS!"
He lunged out of the bed to grab me by my collar. He exploded into motion as he punched me and tried to topple me, but my power armor stood unmoved. He was doing more to shake himself than anything.
Then, as suddenly as it came, his anger washed away and he slumped like a marionette with its strings cut. I saw the desperate fire leave his eyes as he fell to his knees.
"She can't be gone," he whispered.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Simmons," I said, more for lack of anything else I could say. How did you go about comforting a stranger amidst mind-shattering grief?
"She's gone…"
"She is, sir. I can only express my condolence and resolve to bring the Empire to justice."
"She's gone…"
I knelt to face him. "Mr. Simmons. Please look at me." He did so and I wanted to look away. Those were the eyes of a broken man. I'd seen their like in Hyderabad. Instead, I said, "You have a daughter. You have a reason to be strong."
"Tanya…"
"Yes. You are her father. You will not break down. You will be there for her."
"Oh, God. What do I tell her?"
My mind went blank. I didn't know; I had no children of my own. I endeavored to spend as little time with them as possible. The only child I spent any measurable amount of time with was Andy and Andy… I couldn't rightly call him a child. What did I know about teaching a little girl about death? What advice could I possibly offer to console a girl who'd never see her mother again?
Nothing. Not. One. Fucking. Thing.
I defaulted to procedure and wished I had a tenth of Hero's charisma.
"The truth, Mr. Simmons, the truth as best she can understand it. Please contact a funeral home of your choice. You will sign a release form allowing the medical examiner to release your wife's body to said funeral home. She will be returned to you to fulfill the last rites of whichever faith you ascribe to within one to two days."
"Tanya… What do I tell Tanya?" he moaned. I doubted he even heard me. I left a paper with similar instructions on dealing with the city morgue on the hospital table before heading out.
As I gently closed the door behind me, I wondered what it'd be like to empathize. I wasn't sure that this was what Hero had in mind.
Author's Note
All I know about Brockton Bay prior to Lung is that there were several Asian gangs. I just pulled a few names out of my ass.
Ryujin 893 means "dragon god yakuza." The word "yakuza" comes from a gambling game called oichokabu, which is basically Japanese blackjack. The game is played by adding the smallest digits. 8 + 9 + 3 = 20 and since you only count the smallest digit, 20 = 0, which means you score zero points that round. "Yattsu," "ku," and "san" were shortened to "ya-ku-san" or "ya-ku-za." The word was used to mean a worthless person, literally "someone whose prospects add to zero," but got adopted by criminals who ended up embracing the label.
Once again, I don't do grief well. I think this is the part of my writing that's weakest.