Chapter Text
2010
A giant serpent humped unnaturally out of the waters of Boston Harbour. If it were anything else, Splicer figured that there would be panicking civilians, but at this point, most everyone had been desensitized to the presence of Fauxgopogo — as Blasto had affectionately named him.
In a way, Splicer was a little disappointed. It had been fun making crowds run away screaming from her hyperefficient algae-eating pet, but it was also nice when she could just wave to people as she was ferried down the Charles River. There was something to be said about reactions. It was important to play to the crowd, to riff on or subvert expectations; to know when to give them what they wanted to see, and when not to.
In most cases, they wanted to see the heroes win, which was always a crowd-pleaser, but boring if overused. Fortunately, giant monsters didn’t lose their charm, and she could use that to balance things a little.
Back when she first got her powers, she struggled with the conundrum of how to use them. There were a nigh-infinite number of applications for her abilities. Fortunately, before she’d thoroughly neutralized him, Jack Slash had taught her a very valuable lesson, and when she met Blasto some months later, he helped her refine it: Superpowers weren’t about good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong. They weren’t about making the world a better or worse place. Superpowers were about the opportunities they presented, and figuring out how best to apply them. While monologuing like a smug dimwit, Jack had claimed his work was art, and Blasto seemed to share that opinion, though he was far less stupid about it. However after seeing the population of Boston cheering for their Wards as they wiped the floor with one of Blasto’s monsters, Riley had what she could only describe as an epiphany:
Powers were theater! And life was the stage.
2005
When Riley left home, she was only six-years-old. She felt a lot older, though. She couldn’t exactly stay with mommy and daddy though. She’d miss them, and her brother, and Muffles, but after what she did to save them, she didn’t know how to face them. Also, she wasn’t feeling right.
She had, after all, sort of filleted a grown man on her kitchen counter and put his brain in mommy’s food processor for safekeeping. And then buried his body by the tree in the backyard. But that was only part of it.
After hours, or maybe days, of desperately trying to fix mommy and daddy and Drew and Muffles as Jack killed them all over and over again, she’d finally realized that he wasn’t going to stop killing them.
The words ‘Be a good girl’ as her mother died again etched themselves into her mind like a curse.
“What’s wrong, Poppet? Don’t you love your mommy?”
The smug self-assurance coating his voice like oil had stopped making her scared or angry or sick.
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No. I don’t love mommy.”
Not enough to do what she said.
When the paring knife she was using as a scalpel suddenly dug into Jack’s neck, he hadn’t seen it coming. And that was because she wasn’t looking to hurt Jack Slash. She was going to make him better.
When she was finished, Jack Slash’s entire nervous system had been recoded to function as a five-legged machine she’d rigged up out of a mixmaster and the aforementioned food processor. The mixmaster was for the plastic casing. The food processor was for Jack’s brain. Not that there were any sharp implements that he could use, or even create. The nerves from his arms and legs were all attached to rubber handles from a set of serving utensils. Attempting to sharpen them would not be a fun experience. The legs were also detachable, so if he started making a fuss, she could just immobilize him.
Putting her family back together had been so much easier after Jack stopped cutting them apart. She’d also pulled all the memories of the attack out of her family’s brains, with the exception of the first few minutes, just to explain their injuries. But there was still a problem. Life couldn’t just go back to normal now. She realized she wouldn’t be able to stay with mommy and daddy. She wasn’t lying to Jack when she said she didn’t love mommy anymore. She didn’t know where those feelings went, but she couldn’t find them anymore. So she did the only thing she could; she went looking for them with her new friend.
Then she made sure that he could never get his body back by deboning him and filleting him like a salmon. Something about that seemed like it should have felt very wrong, but again, she wasn’t feeling right. It was for the best anyway, right? This way he had no chance of hurting anyone ever again. She found about a hundred and fifty dollars in his jeans pocket. She wasn’t sure why Jack would need money considering that he killed almost anyone he met. He’d just take stuff from dead people. The more she thought about it, the creepier the possibilities became, so she stopped trying to figure out that puzzle, and just took his money. She’d use it better than him, anyway.
Riley didn’t bring much with her when she left the house. A few packages’ worth of granola bars, some of her daddy’s tools, like his set of tiny screwdrivers, a regular philips-head screwdriver, a wrench, and some needle nose pliers. She also took her toothbrush and toothpaste, some dental floss, several rolls of thread, and some sewing needles. Her sleeping bag from that one sleepover day from day camp hung from the back. She packed her spare clothes in the sleeping bag.
At the very bottom of her backpack, buried under everything else, were Jack’s ‘spider-box’ as she called the mechanical creation with his brain inside it, and a box containing Jack’s skull. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt like she might need it. Something about his teeth. The last thing she brought were the paring knife, and Jack’s knives. She beat him fair and square. That meant she got to take his stuff.
Jack probably wasn’t too thrilled with his new body since it couldn’t swing a knife, but it was so much more efficient! He didn’t need to eat, or sleep, and he could see and hear without eyes or ears. Also, his old body was buried in her backyard, and that took forever, so there wasn’t much she could do about that.
Eventually she found herself in Boston, and that was where she found herself caught on the fringes of a fight between a branch of the city’s Wards and a gigantic creature that by her estimation was an ingenious creature that looked like no animal she’d ever seen. It was roughly the size of a city bus, and had a lithe body coated in reddish fur. Quills flared up along its spine as it reared up on its hind legs and took a swipe at one of the defending capes with bear-like claws. Four of them and a dewclaw. Its head was roughly tube-shaped, almost equine, but for its long muzzle with jagged teeth, and pitch-dark eyes. Riley was fascinated. Chances were that the creature was either not going to survive, or be captured and retained by the PRT for study, but it had to be the creation of another biotinker, she was sure of it. She had to find the person who made it! She just had to!
Once the threat was dealt with, immobilized in containment foam and carted off in a truck, and people started to come out of hiding, she wandered over to one of the capes who’d fought the creature.
“Hello, sir. I’m new here. I just moved to Boston with my papa and mama. Are there a lot of funny monsters like that one here?”
The man sighed.
“Yeah, Blasto churns out a new freak of nature every couple of weeks. We’re usually able to contain them, but if you ever see one, make sure to call the PRT immediately. And never — …wait. No. Always make sure to keep a safe distance between it and yourself. Can you remember to do that for me, little girl?”
“Uh huh!” she said, eagerly nodding along, playing into her appearance as much as she could. Fortunately, he didn’t ask what she was doing all by herself in the middle of Boston, and she didn’t have to fumble for an explanation. He was probably preoccupied dealing with the aftermath of the whole messy affair.
But she wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. It had been way easier than she expected, and she had what she wanted.
Blasto.
It was a place to start. Now all she had to do was get herself situated.
It took a few days, but she eventually found the storefront from a bakery that had probably gone out of business only a few weeks earlier. The lock wasn’t a problem for her, and once she was inside, she found that it wasn’t unbearably dusty, and the power was still on. It was also an especially lucky find because the break room still had a fridge and a microwave. She obviously couldn’t stay there forever, but it would be a fine stand in until she had a better place to go.
In the meantime, now that she had a fridge, she was going to do something she had wanted to do ever since she left home:
Spend all of Jack Slash’s money!
She may not have thought this through.
She had bought milk, waffles, soda, and all the cereals that her parents would only buy for her once a month. Oh, and neapolitan ice cream. Everything, including running away, was better with ice cream. And because she was being a good girl, she bought a few bags of peas and corn, too. Some pears and bananas, and a juicy watermelon. Then three loaves of bread, peanut butter, and seedless strawberry jam, because the clumpy stuff with seeds was gross. She also bought a bunch of toiletries, because soap was important.
There was no way she was getting all of this stuff back to base. Willikers, she was only twice as tall as the shopping bags!
Using Jack’s money was one thing, but how was she going to do this? She didn’t want to throw all her new food away. Could she convince someone to drive her back to the bakery? No, she didn’t want to get too much attention. She only had five dollars and twenty cents left so she couldn’t get a taxi. Maybe—
…Was someone shouting?
She looked up from the shopping bags laying on the sidewalk in front of her to see some weirdo with lots of metal accessories and too many piercings on his face run past her carrying a shopping cart.
Hmmmm…
Stealing was bad.
Buuuuuut… what if she just stole it from the person who stole it first? Was it still bad if she stole it from a bad guy? Because she could really use that sho—
—scrrEEEEECH!—
—thud—
Riley wasn’t sure whether it was worse that the boy was probably bleeding out, or that the driver that hit him stopped for a moment, but then still drove off. That implied understanding and making a choice not to care. Whoever was in that car was a bad person and their mother would be ashamed.
Fortunately, she could fix this. She’d kept the sewing needles from the day when she left home with her ever since, and one of the things she just bought was more dental floss. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it’d be good enough. She ran to a payphone, called 9-1-1 just like she’d been taught in school, named the intersection, and then hurried back to her patient.
The truth was that she didn’t want to operate on people again just yet. Not after last time. But she didn’t want this boy to die, either. Actually, she found she didn’t really care, but she knew she shouldn’t want the boy to die. Even if he was a weirdo with four lip piercings and wearing so much eyeshadow that he could probably drink it out of a thimble.
She got to work quickly, and by the time the ambulance arrived, she had managed to ensure that he wouldn’t die on the way to the hospital.
And, you know, run off with the shopping cart he stole. Her ice cream had melted by the time she got home, which kinda sucked, but she did a good deed today. And if anyone questioned why he had floss holding a bunch of his muscles together, they’d hopefully just pass it off as some passing cape and would never suspect a little girl of stitching internal wounds shut.
Since she was being a good girl, she said thank you to Jack for letting her use his money. How he had money on it was a question she didn’t want to ask herself, mostly because if her feelings went back to normal, she didn’t think she’d want to know.
Jack had never explicitly stated that she could use his money anyway, but his opinion was fairly low on her scale of Important Things To Pay Attention To.
Now that she had food and a roof over her head, it was time to get to work.
It was going to take some doing. If her Mysterious, Interesting Biotinker Future-Friend #1 a.k.a. Blasto-Probably was smart, they wouldn’t just push their creations out their front door. She started by recruiting a few seagulls. Sure, a few people would be confused by the sight of seagulls wearing cybernetic implants, but it wasn’t like they were shooting lasers from their beaks or anything.
Wait…
Laser seagulls… The very notion gave her butterflies in the best possible ways. The things you could do with an army of seagulls with lasers… With power like that, she could… dare she consider it? Rule the world!
…okay, probably not the whole world, but maybe at least twelve square yards of it? Yeah, that sounded reasonable.
For now though, just little cameras on top of their heads. The cameras were set up to broadcast a neural signal that went directly into her left eye as long as she had some light. If she kept it covered, she wouldn’t see anything. So she could wear an eyepatch to keep from getting disoriented. It still took some time to get used to seeing dozens of different viewpoints all at once, though.
Laser seagulls… her mind kept wandering back to that idea. She could definitely add them as a feature.
Until then, she had to find a way to keep herself afloat. There were already rumors circulating Boston about a mysterious cape who had sewn up an injured teenager using nothing but dental floss, so she decided to play into that. She went to the library and created a PHO account on one of the computers there. And then she had to go home because she couldn’t think of a name. After three days of wracking her brain, she just gave up and went with The Surgeon. She chose not to verify herself. The folks online would do their speculation, and she would be off the hook because no one was going to expect this cape to be a child.
Unfortunately, a few days later, not only did the power cut out, but she got caught. By a cape, no less.
…
Why was she a cartoon?
“So, Riley, you can’t go home?” said the woman with the curiously cartoony face. She had said her name was Sylvan, which was probably her cape name. “Can you tell me why?”
“I don’t think you’ll believe me,” said Riley.
They were sitting in the back of the bakery, the room only illuminated by the glowing neon lines running along the woman’s red tinkertech armor.
“I dunno. I’d believe a lot of things.”
“It’s sort of a many-part not-believing sorta thing,” she added.
“We live in a world with superpowers. Look, I’m carrying a sword that’s as tall as I am,” the woman gestured over her shoulder with her thumb at the admittedly massive slab of metal. She smiled at Riley, and it was more reassuring than she expected it to be. “So try me.”
“Jack Slash killed my parents.”
The smile on the woman’s face withered and died.
“Oh.”
“And my brother and my dog. I fixed them, but not before he messed me up. I can’t feel things right anymore.”
Sylvan’s expression had grown deadly serious.
“What do you mean by ‘fixed?’” she asked. She sounded scared, though Riley didn’t understand why.
Riley shrugged.
I sewed them up, restarted their brains, and they’re fine now, but I don’t really think I want to see inside another person for a while.”
“Wait, you’re a cape? No, forget that, you can bring people back from the dead?! ”
“Um… I guess? But I don’t want to join the heroes.”
“Why not?”
“Because I also sort-of killed someone.”
Sylvan’s face was… conflicted? Was that the right word? She needed to get an English textbook as soon as possible. Even if she wasn’t going to school, she couldn’t fall behind in everything.
“How did it happen? Was it when you triggered?”
“No, it was just a little after. I realized that Jack was never going to stop killing mommy and daddy and my brother and Muffles — he was our dog. So I cut his head off. He’s still alive, technically, but he’s a brain preserved in a sealed jar. I wanted to study him later.”
Riley was worried this would happen. Sylvan looked upset. Was it because she killed Jack, or did she say something bad?
“Okay, stop it. Riley, people have been trying to kill Jack Slash for decades. No one’s been able to do it. It’s not that I don’t believe your family got hurt, but there’s no way you were able to overpower Jack Slash.”
“I didn’t. I just cut into his neck and he didn’t see it coming. He would have gone into shock, passed out, and once I repaired the brain damage and sealed him up in mommy’s food processor, he was trapped. He’ll never hurt anyone again, but I’m keeping his brain. There are so many things I could learn about parahumans using it. He wasn’t that hard to beat either. I’ve been wondering ever since why he’s been such a big deal.”
“Yeah, you and everyone else. But there’s no way you were able to do that.”
“I have his skull in my bag over there.” She pointed to the wall where she left her bag. “It’s in a box. I also have his knives. Do people know what kind of knives he used? The rest of him is in my family’s backyard. I kind of cut up the body a lot to make sure that if he ever managed to escape from me, which is unlikely since I can remove his legs, so he’d never be able to get it back.”
Silence.
Sylvan’s mouth hung open.
“Do you want to come with me for a few hours?”
“Ummm… why?” Riley asked.
“You have an urgent appointment at the bank.”
Huh?
She had an appointment? Who made it? When was it for?! She didn’t know! Wasn’t someone supposed to tell her if she had to see someone? Also, why the bank?
“I’m going to show you something,” said Sylvan, pulling her phone out of a slot in her armor, she tapped a few things on the touch screen and turned the phone around to show Riley the text on the screen.
Jack Slash
Wanted for:
- Murder in the first and second degrees
- Conspiracy to commit murder
- Manslaughter
- Vehicular manslaughter
- Torture, both physical and psychological
- Public indecency
- Disturbing the peace
- Various other crimes
Reward: $19,000,000.00
“Oh,” said Riley, staring at the number. That was a very big number. How many boxes of Froot Loops would she be able to buy with nineteen million dollars? She could afford lots of snacks if she could get the reward. But… “How do I collect the reward if I don’t have a bank account?”
“That’s why we’re going to the bank before we hit up the PRT.”
Oh. Okay, that made sense. But wait…
“Aren’t you worried about me having a human skull in my backpack?”
“Normally I would be very concerned, but if it really is Jack’s, then I don’t think we have a problem. Also, I feel like killing Jack Slash is less like committing murder than it is like committing community service.”
Riley considered that for a moment, and decided she agreed.
Sylvan made her a bank account without any trouble. Just a small account that she could use to keep her allowance, but that very importantly didn’t have an upper limit on how much money could be stored. There was a very low rate of interest, which apparently meant that by leaving money in her account, it would turn into more money, but that didn’t seem very important. Even with lots of money, it was only a few extra dollars every year.
Once they moved on to the PRT to collect Jack’s bounty however, things got more complicated than she expected, though not for the reason she had expected. Instead of questioning her age, the PRT sent her to a holding cell while they identified the skull. Sylvan was nice enough to hang around outside with her, after fetching her a blanket, a pillow, and a few books that she offered to read to her. Riley decided that she liked Sylvan. Even if she did have a funny cartoon face.
Riley was wrong, though; they weren’t able to figure out who he was by checking his teeth, although they did ask him where the rest of him was, and she gave the agents who met with her her family’s address and told them to dig up her backyard around the tree.
“The DNA sample came back with a match,” said the PRT representative they sent to speak with her. “Jack Slash didn’t actually have any dental records or health records, but we still got one. There were a few instances where people managed to at least get a hit in against him, so there are blood samples we were able to compare against the organic material still left on the skull.”
“Stop,” Sylvan interrupted, holding up a hand. “What do you mean he doesn’t have dental records?”
“I mean he’s been to dentists, and he’s killed all of them the second they finished with him. There are no X-rays, there are no records, and he did the same to every doctor he ever visited,” the PRT representative explained. “Up until he was fifteen, he actually had never seen a doctor or a dentist in his life.”
“What the hell? How does that work?”
“Language, Ms. Sylvan.”
“Sorry.”
“It seems like he was never taken to a doctor or a dentist.”
“What?! And they weren’t arrested for child abuse?” Sylvan shouted, “…not that I give two shhh… uhh… not that I care what happened to that psychopath.”
“No one found out,” explained their host. “They lived in Plumsteadville. It’s a very small town in rural Pennsylvania, less than three-thousand residents. We’re investigating the situation, but it’s looking FUBAR. It seems likely that his mother gave birth at home and they kept the child hidden.”
“So, no medical records at all?” Sylvan confirmed.
“None. Anyway, once he made his first public appearance… well, you can imagine what happened to any health professionals he visited.”
Riley definitely could. The image her mind painted for her was actually more gruesome than what he did to her family. His only motivation was to hurt as many people in as many ways as he possibly could. It wasn’t like she had any particularly lofty ideals or anything, but he was irritatingly far below the baseline for what anyone should want to do.
At least they let her out of the cell after a few more hours. She was able to stop thinking about it. An important looking man shook her hand on the way out the door. That was silly.
Riley was just finishing up her latest operation when Sylvan came back to her lab. Mr. Pigeon #3’s stitches were all secure, and all that was left was to put the cast on. The poor thing looked pretty sad with most of the feathers on his left wing plucked, but she’d set the metacarpals, which was more important. The feathers would all regrow within a year, and after a few weeks, the broken bone would be fixed, and… well, pigeons didn’t really fly very much, but at least now not flying would be his choice, instead of his requirement.
It had been a few days since the visit to the PRT, and she wasn’t surprised that Sylvan had that ‘conflicted’ look on her face.
“The police are looking for you, and they know I’ve been helping you,” she said. “I can sort of understand why you’re worried about going back to your family, but are you sure you can’t at least visit to tell them you’re okay?”
“No. Mommy told me to be a good girl,” Riley murmured. “I know that a good girl would come home when her mommy and daddy call her, but a good girl also doesn’t tell lies. And a good girl also wouldn’t kill someone. Not even bad people. I don’t think even a bad girl would usually kill someone.”
What would she tell her parents if she saw them? Would she have to say she wasn’t hurt? That she was safe? Were they worried about her? Or maybe they were scared that she might do something bad? Good girls weren’t supposed to kill people after all. Not even bad people.
“I don’t think that they would hold it against you for stopping Jack Slash, of all people,” said the tinker.
“But things wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be able to talk to them,” Riley whined.
Why did Sylvan have to take their side? She just didn’t get it. How could she understand what it was like not to be able to feel things like she was supposed to?
“Can’t you see that I’m too dangerous to be around my family?”
“You know, a lot of parahumans aren’t conscious of that. I mean, they can’t tell. That you can already gives you a leg up over them.”
On an intellectual level, Riley understood that Sylvan was trying to help. She probably saw a girl who had run away and actually wanted to go home despite claiming otherwise. What Sylvan didn’t know was how much Riley’s power was actually telling her.
Didn’t know what sorts of things she dreamed up just because she knew she could make them. Things like flesh-eating locusts that self-replicated upon exposure to sunlight. A virus that could wipe out humanity in a matter of months, completely asymptomatic until the host suddenly dropped dead. A bacterial strain that could turn living flesh necrotic and could spread unchecked throughout any living organism’s body.
These things weren’t things she would have difficulty with. They weren’t things she even felt an aversion to creating. She wanted to make them just to see if she could, and she knew she could. All it would take were a few petri dishes and some blood. Changing the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts in the DNA sequences in the right places, and she could unleash these things on the world. And Sylvan thought it was a good idea to send her back to her parents?
No way. It was obviously too dangerous. She wasn’t going. Riley could at least use money now, though. And she wasn’t blind to the fact that as long as the police were looking for her, she was putting Sylvan in a bad position. And even if the older tinker was being annoying about this, Riley liked Sylvan.
The truth was that she didn’t have much choice. If she didn’t want to mess with Sylvan’s life, she needed to leave.
How does a six-year-old human survive without food or water?
The answer, of course, was obvious: Just embrace autotrophy! Hair was tricky because it was on her head, but she managed. She just cooked up some dangerously powerful chemicals, got in the shower, and washed her hair with them in an experiment that she was compelled to inform Sylvan should not be tried at home.
There weren’t any nearby children, so she made do with the eighteen-year-old tinker.
Anyway, her hair would grow back in a few weeks, and until then, the autumn-colored leaves on her head would support her daily activities with photosynthesis! She really should have thought of this sooner: Everyone was going around eating three meals a day when they could just pour a bucket of water over their heads and stay out in the sun! Suckers. Everyone should have photosynthesis hair-leaves! Why would anyone take the less fuel efficient option?
So what if the compound she’d used on herself had a 40% chance of causing skin cancer within three days? Cancer was easy. Also, it had been five days now, so she at least was in the clear. The fish she had tested it on? He was having a bad day. And was probably going to have several more bad days before not having any more days of any kind whatsoever.
Luckily he was just a fish. Very few people cared about their opinions, and those who did often weren’t taken very seriously.
All in all, she was basically out of the danger zone.
…at least as long as bananas didn’t start growing from her ears, then she’d have a completely different but equally serious problem.
The important thing was that without using any of her money, she was able to avoid a lot of attention that she would normally get. She could start making withdrawls once the correct authorities forgot why they were watching her account. Riley wouldn’t have any trouble hiding from police trying to send her home.
The next time a big monster showed up, she caught it immediately via her aerial surveillance network. It was basically a giraffe if giraffes were lizards. And in a world where superpowers and biotinkers existed, who really had the right to tell a giraffe it had to be a mammal? She was sure this one’s parents told him that he could be anything, and he decided to be a brontosaurus.
Its neck was more snakelike than a giraffe’s, and far, far more flexible. It also had the ability to spit globs of what looked like regurgitated food suffused with some sort of biomass capable of electrogenesis. Icky. But also way cool. What did that thing have in its stomach?
Unfortunately, just because she was interested didn’t mean she had the time to check it out. And just because she saw where it showed up didn’t give her an easy means of finding where it actually came from. It had climbed out of a runoff drain from the city’s sewers. Meaning that Blasto, whoever he was, could be anywhere in or under Boston. This complicated things, but she wasn’t a quitter. She just poured herself another bowl of Froot Loops, and started working on a new plan.
What Riley churned out after a few hours was similar to what she had done when she first arrived in Boston; after settling in — though before finding her defunct bakery hideout — she made it her first order of business to say hello to all the local fish. Even the ones at the supermarket, staring up at her in that forlorn way that only the recently aquatically deceased were capable of. Why she did that she couldn’t remember, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
This time, she was going to make friends with all the local rats. From her lair inside the bakery’s back room, she concocted a pheromone pill that would allow her to produce a scent that would make the rat population docile and friendly while she was around. She could take one tablet to produce the pheromone passively from her pores, and two to make the effect more potent. Three tablets and she’d be able to understand the rats like they were speaking English, but she’d have a terrible headache afterward and start feeling the effects herself though. And she didn’t want to drug herself. You were supposed to say no to drugs. That’s what they taught her in school.
She also went to the library and did an online search on the kinds of diseases sewer rats typically carried, and then made counters to all of them. After mixing them together and putting them into a spray bottle, she was confident that Boston was going to have the healthiest rats ever.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to find any more raw materials to build spy cameras out of, so she found herself faced with only two options: Either start asking around town like a very suspicious little girl, or take three pills and talk with the rats.
Decisions, decisions…
‘Food first! Then tell big rat where big not-rat thing is!’
Riley dropped a banana on the floor of the sewer, and the rodent in front of her dug into it with gusto.
It took her a while to give the rats their shots, but fortunately, thanks to the pheromones, they didn't hold it against her.
Rats apparently had very simple thoughts. Most of them thought almost only about food, mating, and avoiding predators, and their ‘speech’ came in halting patterns of simple words. Ultimately, the closest she could get them to understanding what she was looking for were with the words ‘big’ ‘scary’ ‘thing,’ all of which were simple enough concepts for them to grasp. They all pointed westward with their snouts.
It got a little awkward after that. After getting back aboveground she went through several variations of ‘what’s over that way?’ before getting the answer; Allston. The neighborhood was apparently home to Blastgerm, which seemed to confirm what she got from her rodent intelligence network. She had narrowed the range of her search down significantly. Victory was in sight.
Or so she thought.
Blasto was pretty good at staying hidden from people who wanted to find him. It made sense, she guessed. If he wasn’t hard to find, he’d probably be in jail.
This delay did mean that she had to move back in with Sylvan after two months when her leaves fell out and her hair started growing back. She decided that next time she needed to achieve photosynthesis, she was going to make her hair into a wig first.
2007
One-and-a-Half Years Later…
Riley groaned, stretching out behind her worktable. This was getting kinda wacky. She’d been hanging around town forever and all she had achieved was…
Well, actually, she’d gotten a lot done while living with Sylvan.
Claire. Her name was Claire. Riley was still getting used to that. As long as they were living in the same house together, Claire had decided to trust her with her civilian identity. Riley knew she should be touched, but like everything else, it felt muted. Still, she appreciated it.
…although it had been kinda freaky when Sylvan took her head off and it turned out that the cartoony face wasn't really her face, but a boring helmet with a tinkertech projector. Claire's real face had asian features that would probably be considered attractive, and mousy brown hair. The rest of her armor was equally boring when her tinkertech was turned off. Everything about her appearance was either holographic or illusory. Tricky tricky. And super cool.
The year was 2007, and she had done all sorts of strange things with her power since she’d gotten it.
First off was her inoculation of the local pigeon population against Bird Flu, Regular Flu, Centaur Flu (her own invention) and syphilis.
She also invented Centaur Flu. It was like the Regular Flu, but with more man…horse…(?)ness…(?) Also a fatality rate of 20% among her lab fish, which were genetically predisposed to have human-like immune systems.
She kept Centaur Flu behind glass. She didn’t want it getting out into the wild.
Oh! She had updated her spider-box design. They could now provide safe injections of deadly diseases (and the vaccines to deadly diseases) while playing Bicycle by Queen. For some reason, she couldn’t get the rest of the playlist to work…
Jack’s model couldn’t play music, he hadn’t earned the privilege.
Creating Banana Syndrome was largely an accident that happened while creating her photosynthesis leaves. It wouldn’t solve food shortages since the banana growth consumed nutrients from the organism the bananas were growing on, but it still could work well as a prank.
Oh! Right! How could she forget?! Laser seagulls! They were seagulls! With lasers! Seagulls! Lasers! They just went together. Like peanut butter and jelly. Or peanut butter and bananas. Or peanut butter and rotisserie chicken! Okay, that had been a horrible mistake that she and Claire had agreed never to speak of again, but the point was that she had done it, it was possible, and they could go together even if it was a horrible idea and hazardous to the natural ecosystem. Even at her early age, she knew there were mistakes so dangerous that you just couldn’t admit to making them.
The seagulls came in really handy, too! When Glass Jaw got into a fight with Aerobat, he managed to subdue the Protectorate cape… right up until an army of seagulls with burning-hot laser beams swarmed him like he was an abandoned cart of french fries on the beach. Glass Jaw was known for his ability to collect glass to wear like armor, and then detonate it outward if something managed to pierce it. Her seagulls’ lasers were successful in that regard. They were less successful when it came to surviving his glass explosion, but there were few things more humiliating than winning a fight with your assailants only to find yourself covered in three square feet of dead seagulls. They truly were rats with wings, and as fun as they were, Riley wasn’t going to deny that they didn’t waste five minutes finding new diseases to riddle their bodies with after she had given them their shots. Rude!
Didn’t anyone care enough to show some real appreciation? Truly, tinkers were cursed with being rejected by those they sought to impress. In Riley’s case—that day, at least—it was the seagulls. For Armsmaster, it was Hero. Though in Hero’s defense, it wasn’t his fault that he was dead and couldn’t appreciate the work of one of his biggest fans. For the now Birdcaged String Theory, it was herself.
As it turned out, laser seagulls did not give her the power to rule the world. It was simple really. As that British guy in that movie she watched the other day said, supreme executive power derived from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. By that logic, it only made sense that a farcical avian ceremony with funny birds shooting laser beams probably wasn’t going to work either.
Speaking of seagulls, she had long since removed the neural transmitter allowing her to see through their eyes. It was useful in a pinch, but until she finished working on a control module for ocular implants, she was leaving it out. Come to think of, she probably should have started with that.
As an homage to Claire, Riley had decided to invent the world’s first ever biologically projected hologram. It worked, too! She could now project holograms of her memories from her eyes. Unfortunately they only worked if she consumed twice her body weight in pistachios within twenty-four hours, so it was kinda useless. That had been a pretty bad day. Cool experiment, though.
She’d even temporarily cured the common cold. Which resulted in her learning something that she probably would never have discovered otherwise: Among the things your powers don’t warn you about is that the common cold will remember your insult and will return carrying the unquenchable fires of vengeance. She didn’t get a fever, but she was sneezing so often that she could barely get any tinkering done for almost two weeks.
Her crowning achievement to date though, was Coyotemera. She was Riley’s first pet since Muffles and was a completely symbiotic organism made from the pieces of several other animals. Regrettably, many, Claire included, saw poor Coyotemera as a Frankensteinian monstrosity due to her three heads, but Riley made sure to love her unconditionally. Even if she did scratch up her arm that one time.
Coyotemera started out as a local coyote and a raccoon that had gotten into a fight, rolled into the road, and been struck by a car. Neither would have survived had she not cannibalized both bodies for parts. Only about half of her internal organs came from her original body, and the others were transplanted from the raccoon. This wouldn’t have worked if Riley had been a normal veterinarian. The coyote’s body had taken a real beating on both ends. The raccoon’s tail replaced the coyote’s as did the raccoon’s forepaws.
The coyote had also sustained significant brain damage, and while Riley could repair some of it, there was no chance of a complete recovery. Thus, the Coyote’s head was shifted slightly to the left, and the raccoon, whose head was undamaged, became the dominant head. She also got a great deal on a live chicken intended for slaughter at home — for the discerning individual with obviously disturbed tastes — so she put the chicken’s head to the right of the raccoon’s. From the chicken, Coyotemera would receive the savagery of its direct ancient ancestor, tarbosaurus, of the tyrannosauridae family.
Or maybe she’d just develop an inherent taste for corn. These sorts of things were unpredictable. You could never tell how they would work out. Whatever the result, there was no question that the chicken was the most aggressive head.
Riley had worked very hard to ensure that the animals in question would get along no matter how nature dictated they should interact. She had the raccoon’s innate intelligence and penchant for cleaning her food, while maintaining the coyote’s natural aggression, territorial behavior, fondness for anvils, and trust in ACME Corp.
It was almost time for Coyotemera’s daily walk when something shook the house around them. Riley looked up from her current project and looked at Claire, who was doing some tinkering of her own at the workstation opposite hers. They nodded with tacit understanding and hurried outside. A massive pillar of smoke billowed into the sky from the direction of downtown Boston.
“That’s a lot of smoke,” Riley noted. It didn’t look like anything was on fire, but obviously something pretty bad had just happened.
Riley heard a strange whistling sound. Before she had chance to figure out what it was — or what hit her — Claire had picked her up and took off at a sprint.
And then everything was exploding.
