Chapter Text
Even though they’ve never seen it, sea turtles know to go to the ocean as soon as they’re born. Maybe it was for this reason that it had been familiar, that first time. This familiarity had not come from movies, or from childhood fairy tales about mermaids. Nor did it come from the imitations on either side of her hometown: the two lakes frothing up onto land, bubbling over the little feet of geese. Something out there in the waves was recognizable to the animal within her.
Noelle remembered it clearly. Virginia Beach, the club tournament, after the last day’s matches. Jess and Luke sprawled on a big towel, attempting to tan. Oliver fiddling with the music player. Marissa, who lost one of her clip-on earrings while hunting for shells with Cody: a little faux pearl that probably got buried in the sand by the stick he dragged behind him.
The memory became more ironic to her as time passed. That image of them in their swimsuits, dry and sandy on the beach, contrasting with her, playing alone in the water, wearing the T-shirt and shorts. Fabric clinging to her arms, the hem of her shirt fluttering around the skin of her stomach like seaweed.
It had been the familiarity that coaxed her into the water, where her body and everything else came from. Water, inside and out, wound up to her shoulders. Every so often, with each one leading into the next, the rocking of a wave. With it, her feet rising from the seabed. Suspending her in the ocean’s womb. She had been—for one second—weightless.
~ ~ ~
Things were best written down; then they couldn’t change. In school there was always a journal within arm's reach; her mom caught on to how fast she filled them up and kept an eye out for nice ones to buy her. In one notebook, she recorded Marissa’s Song of the Week in color-coded markers. The spectrum of purple-blue-green was for ones she liked; red-orange-yellow was for ones she didn’t. Her songs usually had names like Violin Sonata in G Major and I'm So Sick (Of Feeling Miserable). Paradoxically, Mars resorted to the violin music on the bad weeks and saved the punkish emo for the good.
Mars did the same for her songs, going over each row in highlighter according to their color scheme. Their lists came to resemble a wildfire. But these sorts of rituals weren’t to be messed with. So week after week, with dogged loyalty, they shared their clashing tastes with each other.
In another notebook that she opened when she was alone, she tracked her match records, her cycle, and her calories. If she missed a day, the next day would feel wrong and out of place. The next day, even worse than that. Before she knew it, everything went nuclear.
It was like a corded rope, how she braided her life together. It was a lasso or a belt. The land stretching taut over the water and splitting it into two. As a kid, she'd had nightmares that one day, the city would collapse under its own weight. The two lakes would become one again. The town with all the record stores and cafes and coastal transplant students would go tumbling down into the water.
So Noelle had always lived claustrophobically. This way of life did not begin in backs of vans, or in noisome hotel suites, or in any of the other places where she wasted away for months and where rescue never arrived: the isolated apartment penthouses full of furniture she'd broken, the cramped underground cells where the ceiling bowed down over her head. The others never really understood this, that the prison had always been the boundary of herself.
Nematode
(a story about monsters)
In short, here was what happened. After rampaging through Brockton Bay, Noelle spent a week at the Cauldron compound, where she was tested and treated intensively. She emerged from the other side of it with a brand new sort of body. She and the body were released back into the wild as one.
In the meantime, more and more news came out about the organization called Cauldron. The incident that exposed them—the so-called Echidna incident—was kept under wraps. The rumors, the leaks, the resignations and public statements and international backlashes, were not.
Despite the PRT’s public disaffiliation with the conspiracy, strings were pulled to get her a position at WEDGDG, at the Investigation and Analysis Department of the Parahuman Sciences division. Like many of the capes that worked at the research and intelligence arm of the PRT, she was not a hero of public record. There existed no information about her online. Still, she imagined a cape name for herself on her first week and was privately embarrassed of it by her second.
This name was born from homesickness: that was the name for this terminal sickness of hers.
The others in the department called her Noelle, because that was what everyone had always called her, except for on that one day, the very worst day of her life. Once she was asked by a well-meaning research assistant—“What made you choose the name Noelle?” She was confused, then put off when she remembered that she was supposed to be a Case 53. One of the few who stuck around. If the prosthetic lower half didn’t give it away, it was the tattoo below her left ear. For her it was a mark of service.
Being a presumptive Fifty-three afforded her temporary documentation, identity papers, government wardship, and the like. After all, she wasn’t the only one from another world. She just had to be careful not to tell any childhood stories.
The division lead was her boss and sort-of-technically her guardian. He had been kind to her, the restrained sort of kindness that was safe enough to accept. One day he procured a few mail-order catalogues taken from his own home. One for furniture. One for home goods. An already leafed-through collection advertising “indie sleaze” from LA—it had to have been meant for the girl in the picture frame on his desk that he never mentioned.
He told her to mark down anything she needed and he’d have it ordered to her address. She protested, then acquiesced when he said he’d take it out of her salary.
For the next week, boxes awaited her on her doorstep day after day. The final package came on a foggy Sunday morning. It marked the beginning of her third week in the city. She spent the afternoon maneuvering her body around the apartment, slow and laborious and with great focus, assembling furniture, washing new clothes, putting things in place. The next day she came into work and learned that her boss had been killed. They'd found him in the parking garage of the Las Vegas PRT building. He was sitting in a rented car, the door hanging open, an apron of blood dried down his front. He had been leading a secret, internal investigation into PRT capes suspected to be working with Cauldron. Her salary came in at the end of the month: the full amount, untouched.
She kept her distance from her coworkers after that. She limited herself to exchanging pleasantries during elevators and lunchtimes. It was lonely but it was also salvation. To be surrounded by people who, for once, had never known the ugly creature that she was.
On the papers, she was just Noelle, no last name, as if to remind her that she had no family here; Noelle, Thinker, comprehensive power sensor. No one knew about the rest.
She found herself helping PRT teams root out capes with inexplicable abilities. She assisted researchers. She struggled through paperwork. She stayed alone at the government-issued apartment, down the street from the main building. She looked out at the view from the west window. She laid restlessly on the bed that her dead boss had bought for her. In these moments, when her immediate surroundings were quiet and still, something else came into focus. All the distant feelings and conflicted impulses of her creations, like muddled, overlapping silhouettes from behind a curtain; the clones that were out there still, living and breathing. She lived there for six months. At night, the moon painted itself across San Francisco and the scent of the ocean embraced her.
~ ~ ~
Noelle liked to think that she had no connection to the monster. She didn’t think the monster’s thoughts. She didn’t eat the monster’s food. The monster had been worlds away, and she'd had nothing to do with it anymore. But the monster was still alive, and it lived in this very building. Somewhere near, out of sight. She could sense it, even behind the closed door of the room.
This building was the Cauldron compound, and the room was the office of Doctor Mother, the founder of Cauldron.
Doctor Mother was saying: “Recruitment is informal. There’s no reason they wouldn’t take you in.”
“In Boston?” she asked, dubiously. She’d been in Boston before, and felt a chronic echo of anger flicker at the idea of returning there. She wanted to tap her foot in agitation; perhaps the nerve signals were firing, but it wasn’t within the range of functions for her prosthetic. The foot remained in place.
“Loosely speaking, they have a headquarters in the city. In reality, they follow where the contracts take them. Mercenaries with a cause, these Irregulars.”
“They’re not wrong to hate you,” said Noelle.
The Case 53s were created and spat out by Cauldron; victimized by failed power experimentation, memories erased, trapped in warped and alien bodies. Many more were still held captive in the compound. The ones that had been released, upon learning how deep the rot was in the organizations they once trusted, left and went independent, becoming the Irregulars. Revenge being an area of expertise for her, Noelle was acutely aware that the cause that the Irregulars organized themselves around would be in some way oriented against Cauldron. She recalled that chilly Monday, the morning the deputy director had grimly informed them of the department leader’s death. She wondered, then, why they hadn't already dealt with the Irregulars in the same way.
Then it suddenly became clear how they were intending to deal with the Irregulars; it was happening right now.
Perhaps seeing some change in her expression then, Doctor Mother was quick to say, “We might be their enemy, but they’re not ours. We’re not asking you to stage a coup d’etat. We’re letting them operate as they wish. Even though their goals are at odds with ours, Cauldron believes that their cooperation is necessary in saving the world. Still, our Thinker has investigated and believes it worthwhile to embed a contingency measure in their group.”
“A spy,” she said.
“You could put it that way.”
“You knew when you put me at Watchdog—that it was going to be my cover story.”
“Yes,” said Doctor Mother.
Her eyes drifted to the Thinker, the woman standing by the desk. Doctor Mother’s shadow; Cauldron’s éminence grise. Noelle had only exchanged words with her once before. It had been the week after Echidna.
Six months ago, when she was being initiated into the conspiracy, Contessa told Noelle about Scion and the two years remaining in the timeline. Two years was as much as they could hasten the end. At one point, following the path, Contessa used a phrase that prompted Noelle to compare it to a memory of a club match where disasters were accumulating—it must have been sophomore year—she’d done something similar in hopes of pulling their team out of a certain loss. Noelle recognized this manipulation, made unknowingly. This was before her half-year at WEDGDG, before she’d become familiar with all that went into the art of reading the future. She’d been fresh out of confinement then, caught in the middle of Coil’s thinker girl and the psychic Endbringer. She had felt the scarcity of free will and for that guarded it all the more ferociously. At that moment, she had resolved never to be in the same room as the Thinker again.
Now, it was difficult not to look. Her power was unutterably divine; the smell of it overwhelming and strikingly different from any other she had come across before. Her hand twitched forward, as though she could grab it with her fingers. These alien senses, these destructive cravings, proved to be more powerful with her proximity to it. The monster being kept alive somewhere in the compound beneath her.
Doctor Mother said, “Take the night and go over the files. We’ll door you out tomorrow.”
“Remember,” said the bodyguard with the divine power, “that no two worlds are ever truly disconnected.”
Remember, was the advice; so Noelle would do her best to forget.
~ ~ ~
Her lower half was all prosthetic: chunky and white with a metallic shine to the joint pieces. It attached, via an inch-thick dark metal ring that circled her waist, to the upper half of her suit, which covered her actual body. The suit was fitted white fabric, not quite skintight, with plating on the bottom to attach to the ring. It covered her neck, arms, and hands, leaving no open seam, no exposed skin. A helmet with a clear face visor out of hard plastic, like an astronaut’s, completed the ensemble.
At WEDGDG, Noelle wore a dark-blue company coat over her suit. Aside from the helmet, her outfit beneath the coat might have suggested, at a glance, that she was wearing a white turtleneck and loose pants, and a dark belt. It had been to her relief that the “costume” did not look costumelike.
When she returned to Doctor Mother’s office the next morning to hand back the dossier, she had exchanged the lab coat of her old workplace for a sweater, loose and forest green, with sleeves that threatened to swallow her gloves. It had come from that catalog, and she had chosen it because it reminded her very much of something that Jess wore back on Aleph. Every little single thing like this was still an extraordinary luxury to her. Her possessions were few and miraculous, chief among them this unchanging body.
When she left the office, someone else was waiting outside. She was tall, had black hair, and wore sunglasses. Noelle recognized her power scent. It was firm and unyielding and crisp. Uncomfortably, she knew from the familiarity of the scent that Echidna had consumed her before, and it had been much the same then. But something about it was different.
“You’re not the same as before.” The realization was made aloud. She winced. Being here was wrecking her impulse control. And six months away had made her doubly incautious. She’d forgotten how to battle the mind of the monster.
“So you’re that Noelle.” Her voice was sly, reserved, and perhaps a little regretful. It was as though the woman could recognize Noelle's scent too, and recognized it for the same reason Noelle did hers: that is, as the consequence of having committed some injustice against her. This was abruptly given context when she said, “I should be upfront here—I killed an old coworker of yours, a few months ago. I didn't have much choice in the matter.”
Noelle opened her mouth, then, having nothing to say, closed it. It was as good an example as any of how things worked in Cauldron. They governed themselves with an apocalyptic, almost cultish ethic, in which there was never any choice but to do what they did, because what would be lost otherwise was everything.
“Anyway, I'm Pretender,” the woman added. “Your cape name?”
Noelle was going to have to get used to it. The inorganic one from Brockton Bay, the one the files had called Weld, led the group she was going to be a part of. Different as her appearance, powers, and demeanor were from the monster, a name might still have been enough to connect the dots.
With some embarrassment, she told the woman the alias she was going to use from now on. “Lanterna Magica.”
“An honor to finally meet you,” said the woman, with a delicate nod of her head. Noelle nodded in return, feeling a heavy dullness in her head. It was as though the last six months had been a strange dream. Then Pretender stepped forward, laying her hand on Noelle's shoulder as she passed. Noelle could not stop herself from flinching.
Touch was like violence for her, in that it was something to be feared as much as it was craved. She had been conditioned that way by the last couple years; or maybe her entire life.
Pretender noticed the flinch. Apologetically, she raised her hand away from Noelle. Then she walked into Doctor Mother’s office, and the door shut behind her.
The story of Noelle’s cape name, and how it related to her power, would have been obvious to anyone who knew her back home. She had developed a reputation with it in the scene, after all. When a player took The Lanterna Magica, they learned the skill sets of everyone on the other team. That was it. It was an unusual item; it did not make one stronger or provide bonuses throughout the match, the way another item would. In that sense, it held no concrete benefit at all. All it did was tell them things they would find out over the course of the match anyway. The only difference was that they got the information a little bit sooner.
It was not a popular choice. In fact, Noelle had almost never seen another player take it in a professional match. On the other hand, it was the first item she took in nearly every game.
Now she took a step forwards, facing the opposite wall. She stood there for a few moments alone in the corridor.
Then she said, “Door to Boston, USA…”
There was a split second where something welled up inside her, and it must have been a symptom of that terminal sickness of hers, the lump that formed somewhere in her esophagus and burned in her throat. It wanted to spill out of her mouth and into her visor. If this emotion had a taste, perhaps it would have been vomit: acidic and regret and desire all out of control.
Then she steeled herself and spoke the final word of her destination.
“…Bet.”
The wall yawned open, inviting Noelle back to her planet of exile.
Light and noise and smell began filtering into the hallway. The sound of a train, the tile of a bathroom wall, the crowded scents of people. Now she was in the space between doors.
In the office behind her, six months ago, Noelle had first met the person who kept her from dying. She did not know it yet, could not have guessed—but as she walked through the portal open in front of her, she was on her way to meet the person who would one day save her life.