"Regent's father is Heartbreaker. His power is making people fall slavishly in love with him. Regent is one of... twenty or so children, and their mothers-" She meets Shen Wei's eyes, knowing he can draw the correct conclusion without her saying it.
"And all of Heartbreaker's kids have some variation on his power. Regent used to use it to get whatever he wanted. He experiences through the person he's controlling, like I do with my bugs. He can't really do more than one at a time, and it takes a few hours to establish control, so it's not something we- the team- used regularly. Until we captured Sophia. And then Shatterbird. He'll still have Shatterbird, when I get back, and I- I have to decide what I'll do about that."
Shen Wei's expression hardens. "And this is allowed to continue? No one stopped him?" It might not be directed at Taylor, but his tone is frosty with tightly controlled rage at the very idea that, in a world with the kind of powered beings she's told him of, no one has exercised that power to prevent this abuse.
And then he draws in a slow breath, blinks a couple of times, and almost visibly wills the rage away. "And why has your team made use of this ability at all?"
Her expression doesn't react to his rage, utterly mask-like. But she feels it, a cold front that's suddenly entered the space between them.
"Sophia was a hero, one who Brian and I both have violent history with. We used her to infiltrate their base when our boss wanted us to secure some information. When we were done with her, Regent made her expose her own prior behavior to the PRT, and she went to jail. Shatterbird is a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. We needed the additional firepower to defeat them, have a chance at stopping the end of the world. We failed," she added, tone flat. "But she's too dangerous to release."
He regards her solemnly for a long few seconds. "And can you not imprison her? Or execute her, should her crimes justify it?" He uses crimes very loosely here, with no particular regard for the legalities of a system which he knows is deeply corrupt. He trusts Taylor's assessment of her adversary, as he has trusted his own for millennia.
And of course that's only the first question, he'll follow up with the next after he hears her answer to this.
"We can't hold her. Killing her when I get back is my plan, but I don't know if I'll graduate with that still the case." She exhales, a little crack in the shell. "She killed thousands, when she first came to town. She almost killed my dad. My judgement isn't unbiased."
"There are times when execution is the only just and viable option." He doesn't like to kill, he never has, but he long ago accepted it as a necessity.
"If she can't be contained and she can't be set free-" He presses his lips together and then continues- "A clean death would seem preferable to life spent as a puppet."
She leans back in the chair, thumb rubbing along the edges of her bandage. Healing skin itches, she remembers, even if she doesn't feel it now.
"I know it's what I'd want, in her case.
"And I won't be able to let Regent stay in the team. Which- will break the team apart. Aisha will side with him. Brian will side with her - they're siblings. Bitch will stay with me, and I don't know what Tattletale will choose."
"They would if he were still using it the way he did when he was younger. But since he joined the team, there've been strict rules and he's held to them. Only with unanimous consensus." Her expression flattens again at the implicit self-incrimination. "And only if it protects the team. I am- I was squeamish about it. But not enough to say 'no, we can't do this.'"
"And was it worth it, do you think?" Despite what he said about mind control being unforgiveable, and his quick flash of rage at hearing how this boy's father had used and abused his own power, he sounds mild and calm and simply curious.
Slowly, Taylor nods. "With Shatterbird, I think it was. She would have killed so many more, and if she'd been in the fight, I don't know if we could have contained Mannequin and Crawler long enough to kill them. The PRT certainly couldn't have risked bringing in the bombers, she could have fried them in the air. We neutralized her, and had a weapon to use for the good side.
"Simply killing her would not have been sufficient?" He's been desperate, fighting what seemed at the time a losing battle against a much more powerful opponent, and he's not entirely sure that he, or at least his side, as he'd not been the commander of the Alliance forces, just of his own Dixingren contingent, wouldn't have taken advantage of such a tool had it been at their disposal. And that despite having seen the horrors that the Rebel chieftain inflicted on not only his foes, but often his own people.
"At the time... her side had just taken Brian. We thought we'd trade them, with her under our control. But they already knew she was compromised. No trade." She sighs, shrugging, and her fingers find the scar in her hair, as they always do when she has to think of Bonesaw.
"And I wasn't ready to- to directly kill a captive."
He presses his lips together, brows furrowed and head tipped down. "It is a hard thing, to kill someone who is helpless and in your power." He knows that in the human world it would be considered a war crime. "But there are few easy decisions for a war leader... and sometimes there are no good ones at all."
"No," she agrees, her voice grim. "Everything about the Slaughterhouse Nine - that was all the worst I've gone through, as Skitter. The hardest. They tried to recruit Regent and Bitch. This... cult of serial killers, wanted two of my friends for members. I wasn't in time to protect my dad, and he got caught in Shatterbird's first wave. I embarrassed Mannequin and in return he came for my civilians. He killed Doctor Foster to laugh at me. I told Sundancer she was clear to take the shot when there were still victims alive in her radius - they wouldn't have survived anyway, but it matters. Shot didn't even kill Bonesaw." She shrugs unsteadily, her throat feeling hollow. She knows most of those names don't mean a thing to Shen Wei, but she has to speak them, anyway.
"I didn't realize Brian wasn't leaving the fight with us, when he was caught. And he had to rescue me.
"And in the end- we lost. We captured two, killed three, but... All that mattered was that Jack Slash not get away. And he did."
The names don't need to mean anything to him; they mean something to her, and he understands the importance of remembering one's dead, and one's failures. A leader is their losses as well as their triumphs, and their painfully learned lessons.
"What do you want to fix when you go back?" he asks, rather than continuing down this path. At least for the moment.
"I know exactly what my deal would be - that the mass fatality event predicted by Dinah Alcott to Coil, myself, and Tattletale on the 12th of May 2011, never take place.
"The world has to keep existing for any wrongs to be righted."
She shakes her head, expression grim. "We'd have to know the right question to ask to know. Her power only expresses the future in probabilities. We know that if Jack escaped Brockton Bay, it would be 4/5 odds within two years, 1/1 odds before eight years. If he died, it would happen in 15 years. The first round of deaths will be at least a hundred million, group by group instead of simultaneous, 93% chance of zero survivors about a year after the event begins." That part is dry, a recitation of what Dinah told them, there in Coil's base, before begging for more drugs to ease the pain of prophecy.
"Jack himself probably can't do this. Spatial distortion powers, the edge of any blade he holds can stretch out to miles long. But he'll definitely go out and start recruiting to refill the Slaughterhouse Nine. It might be a new recruit. It might be someone who triggers because he targets them or their city, or just someone he makes snap - I've seen him do it, he's a genius at it. It might be he sets his sights on the Endbringers and riles them up enough. Or maybe it's just him and he goes through a second trigger event and gets that strong himself. We don't know. But now that he's escaped, we've definitely lost the chance at 15 years to plan."
Shen Wei frowns, brows drawing together as he listens to the dry facts and figures of a staggering horror. "What is the Slaughterhouse Nine? And the Endbringers?" It might not matter that he knows, but the information feels... incomplete without that knowledge.
She nods - yeah, she's prone to tossing around these names. Everyone at home would know them, it's like referencing Santa Claus or George Washington.
"The Slaughterhouse Nine are a club of powerful capes whose mission is just destruction and destabilization. They come to places that are already strained - like Brockton Bay after Leviathan hit - and fuck it up worse. Jack Slash is the leader currently. Then there's also Shatterbird, who controls glass and silicates to a range of almost 10 miles. The Siberian, who is both immovable object and unstoppable force because she's only a mental projection. Crawler - his power was that anything he survives can't ever hurt him again. Mannequin was a Tinker who specializes in sealed environments. He turned himself into a ceramic giant, all his parts sealed away and protected. Burnscar, fire kinetic, made solid flames. Cherish, who can influence, sense, and control emotions. And Bonesaw, child Tinker who can do anything surgically and make it work, at least for a while." Her voice strains on the last - she's spoken of Bonesaw before.
"Together, they're just this juggernaut of destruction. Shatterbird and Siberian alone could probably level a city together, if they wanted to.
"And the Endbringers are Leviathan, Behemoth, and the Simurgh. They're- maybe aliens, maybe parahumans, no one really knows. Leviathan is a giant Godzilla-type with tsunami and water-generating powers. He sank Newfoundland and destroyed Japan. Behemoth is radioactive and causes earthquakes and magma eruptions. And the Simurgh is- she tore open reality and traded Madison, Wisconsin in Earth Bet for its parallel in Earth Aleph, just ripped them both out of the ground and swapped them, with a ton of destruction. And through the tear came so many monsters, no one knows where from. And anyone close enough to hear her singing eventually does something murderous. Maybe a week later, maybe years down the line, they do something. Kill their kid, try to start a war, something. These days, anyone in her range is kept in quarantine afterwards. Forever. Every time she comes down out of orbit, she fucks up a city, and the physical damage is always the least of the problem."
He positively bristles at her description, at the horror of such beings enacting violence on the helpless simply because they can.
"I thought that... capes are what supposed heroes are called in your world?" Perhaps he'd misheard, though, perhaps all those with powers are called such.
"I'm a cape," she shrugs. "Anyone who uses their powers aggressively - defense or offense. The only parahumans who aren't capes are ones who use their powers for things like - I know one who wanted to do fashion design, or there's a lot in like music and acting, things like that. It's not really common for someone to have powers and not wind up a cape, but it happens, of course."
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"And all of Heartbreaker's kids have some variation on his power. Regent used to use it to get whatever he wanted. He experiences through the person he's controlling, like I do with my bugs. He can't really do more than one at a time, and it takes a few hours to establish control, so it's not something we- the team- used regularly. Until we captured Sophia. And then Shatterbird. He'll still have Shatterbird, when I get back, and I- I have to decide what I'll do about that."
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And then he draws in a slow breath, blinks a couple of times, and almost visibly wills the rage away. "And why has your team made use of this ability at all?"
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"Sophia was a hero, one who Brian and I both have violent history with. We used her to infiltrate their base when our boss wanted us to secure some information. When we were done with her, Regent made her expose her own prior behavior to the PRT, and she went to jail. Shatterbird is a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. We needed the additional firepower to defeat them, have a chance at stopping the end of the world. We failed," she added, tone flat. "But she's too dangerous to release."
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And of course that's only the first question, he'll follow up with the next after he hears her answer to this.
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"If she can't be contained and she can't be set free-" He presses his lips together and then continues- "A clean death would seem preferable to life spent as a puppet."
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"I know it's what I'd want, in her case.
"And I won't be able to let Regent stay in the team. Which- will break the team apart. Aisha will side with him. Brian will side with her - they're siblings. Bitch will stay with me, and I don't know what Tattletale will choose."
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"But we shouldn't be keeping her."
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"And I wasn't ready to- to directly kill a captive."
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"I didn't realize Brian wasn't leaving the fight with us, when he was caught. And he had to rescue me.
"And in the end- we lost. We captured two, killed three, but... All that mattered was that Jack Slash not get away. And he did."
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"What do you want to fix when you go back?" he asks, rather than continuing down this path. At least for the moment.
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"The world has to keep existing for any wrongs to be righted."
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"Jack himself probably can't do this. Spatial distortion powers, the edge of any blade he holds can stretch out to miles long. But he'll definitely go out and start recruiting to refill the Slaughterhouse Nine. It might be a new recruit. It might be someone who triggers because he targets them or their city, or just someone he makes snap - I've seen him do it, he's a genius at it. It might be he sets his sights on the Endbringers and riles them up enough. Or maybe it's just him and he goes through a second trigger event and gets that strong himself. We don't know. But now that he's escaped, we've definitely lost the chance at 15 years to plan."
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"The Slaughterhouse Nine are a club of powerful capes whose mission is just destruction and destabilization. They come to places that are already strained - like Brockton Bay after Leviathan hit - and fuck it up worse. Jack Slash is the leader currently. Then there's also Shatterbird, who controls glass and silicates to a range of almost 10 miles. The Siberian, who is both immovable object and unstoppable force because she's only a mental projection. Crawler - his power was that anything he survives can't ever hurt him again. Mannequin was a Tinker who specializes in sealed environments. He turned himself into a ceramic giant, all his parts sealed away and protected. Burnscar, fire kinetic, made solid flames. Cherish, who can influence, sense, and control emotions. And Bonesaw, child Tinker who can do anything surgically and make it work, at least for a while." Her voice strains on the last - she's spoken of Bonesaw before.
"Together, they're just this juggernaut of destruction. Shatterbird and Siberian alone could probably level a city together, if they wanted to.
"And the Endbringers are Leviathan, Behemoth, and the Simurgh. They're- maybe aliens, maybe parahumans, no one really knows. Leviathan is a giant Godzilla-type with tsunami and water-generating powers. He sank Newfoundland and destroyed Japan. Behemoth is radioactive and causes earthquakes and magma eruptions. And the Simurgh is- she tore open reality and traded Madison, Wisconsin in Earth Bet for its parallel in Earth Aleph, just ripped them both out of the ground and swapped them, with a ton of destruction. And through the tear came so many monsters, no one knows where from. And anyone close enough to hear her singing eventually does something murderous. Maybe a week later, maybe years down the line, they do something. Kill their kid, try to start a war, something. These days, anyone in her range is kept in quarantine afterwards. Forever. Every time she comes down out of orbit, she fucks up a city, and the physical damage is always the least of the problem."
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"I thought that... capes are what supposed heroes are called in your world?" Perhaps he'd misheard, though, perhaps all those with powers are called such.
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