She gets the note just before lunch. She's in the PHQ in less than twenty minutes, then she knocks on Piggot's door politely.
"Send a copy," chirps Rewind's shoulderbot in Lorica's voice. "Bots can feed what's going on into her helmet and she can virtual reality it with them feeding reactions to the copy suit, Glam can dupe her power."
"...That's very clever, Lorica," says Piggot, pinching the bridge of her nose, "but Lung is not operating by the convention according to which it is unthinkable to demand someone unmask."
"See, there are ways to not have my parents tortured and killed by the maniac! Can't we at least, like, have a meeting? Before just dismissing my parents out of hand? They didn't sign up for this, and it works just as well to make our point if we kick that fucker's ass when he tries to blackmail us. I already did the clever thing and actually told you guys about it instead of doing what he wanted."
"Dad has to be theoretically able to pick up whatever he's taking. He doesn't have to actually pick it up or actually touch it - he has to be very close, to the point where he often touches passengers just to make sure he's closed the distance, but technically he has a couple inches or I'd have had to make his armor thinner."
"Pretty fast when he's got a path and doesn't have to calculate on the fly. But certain possible room features could make it hard or impossible for him to appear near her parents on the first try - and I suppose nothing says they have to be near each other."
"Okay, so, from there, either Lung wants to just bait her or he doesn't. If he does, whatever, nothing to be gained. If he doesn't, he has to provide evidence that Rewind's parents are alive, which can come in the form of a recording or be in real-time. If it's a recording and Rewind-the-copy can't convince Lung to provide real-time evidence, also nothing to be gained. If it's real-time, either he'll produce her parents in person or he'll use some form of remote transmission."
"So now we're planning out the produce-parents-in-person branch. There's a strategic difference between what we'll do if they're together or in different locations," they recapitulate. "If they're together, Transit can pop relevantly close to them and rescue them at the same time, correct? What's his maximum distance?"
"Not a lot of tall buildings near the address," the bot says.
"Okay so parents need to be pretty close together, in which case Transit can reliably rescue them if they're not rigged with something. Uh, yeah, that's actually an important branch to the tree, parents rigged or not. So, if they're close together and not rigged, the problem has been solved by Transit popping there and popping out, right?"
"Yes. He can fly to the top of a nearby tower and should have a clear angle to any point in the warehouse."
The unstated reason, whose implication Rewind will hopefully miss, being that the less people are expecting things to appear the bigger their resistance to it.
"Well, I can only conjure stuff if I can notice it's been conjured. Via video or in-person I can make a tiny locator somewhere they're not likely to be looking but which I can see, whereas via the phone it'd need to produce some noise loud enough for me to hear and then they'd hear it, too."
"Not all," Colin says. "There are some slight changes I wish to make. Namely, if enough Wards and heroes suddenly stop patrolling right before the appropriate time, that might tip Lung and the gang off. We will need to adjust their patrolling schedules and routes together in order to seem to not have been notified."
That evening, close to the appropriate time, the heroes are inconspicuously patrolling or in hidden positions far enough away from the meeting point that the thugs-failing-to-pretend-to-be-civilians keeping a lookout don't notice them.
Glam conjures a Rewind-copy inside her armor, connected to the bot network.
"Get rid of the suit," one of them calls.
"But wh—" she offers some token resistance, and the thug points a gun at her and she says, "Alright, alright." The suit is gone, pretend-booped ten minutes into the past.
"Now we wait."
"For what?" Rewind asks.
"Ten minutes."
—and suddenly the bots start receiving a large and shifting number of identical transmissions, new ones appearing and the old ones disappearing after a few seconds, all of them with the exact same parametres but increasingly far from the warehouse.
"Follow him, try to remain undetected, the plan may still work," Armsmaster calls, and the noise of his motorcycle starting can be heard in the background halfway through the sentence.
"Sit," Oni Lee orders.
"Why?" Rewind asks.
"Sit," he repeats, shoving her toward the chair. "Wait." When she does sit, he looks out the one non-boarded window and after a few seconds becomes dust.
Glam conjures another hidden camera there, and after ten minutes, Oni Lee reappears, wearing his more usual demon mask, with Lung in tow, unmasked. Not that that makes much of a difference, even with a mask his heavily tattooed body is always visible, and he'd be easily recognizable in public.
"Of course I came, you have my parents! Where are they? Are they even alive? If you kill me the heroes will know it!"
"I told you not to warn them," he says, voice thick with menace.
"I didn't warn them, but if I suddenly disappear you're obviously the first suspect."
"Hmm."
"Where are my parents?"
"Alive."
"I want proof."
He nods, and gestures at another thug, who goes outside and returns with a TV set on an extension cord. The set shows a video of her parents.
"How do I know it's not a recording?" she asks.
"What do you want?"
"I want power. To unify all Asian gangs under only one."
"What do you want with me?"
"Power," he repeats. "You are powerful. You on their side are a thorn. You on ours are power."
"Then you have to prove to me that my parents are still alive."
"You see them on this video."
"It could be a recording."
"It is not."
"You seem awfully confident in your ability to keep them hidden from me."
Lung frowns.
"You could try to encourage me with something more than threats that will make me try to get creative to avoid?" she asks, and rubs her fingers together in the universal 'money' gesture.
"If you trusted that you wouldn't be holding my parents hostage," she points out.
His frown deepens. "I would prefer having your cooperation."
"And threatening my parents is the best way you could find to have it?"
He remains silent.
"You ever hear of carrots and sticks? You're all sticks, no carrots, and you'll fall, Lung."
He looks at one of his thugs and says, "Kill the father."
"Wait, no—"
"Continue trying to poison him when you can, use your strongest shots," Armsmaster says, and turns his halberd into a long, electrified morningstar which he hits Lung with. "Miss Militia!"
When they disentangle, Rewind says, "I'm going to make him pay for that."
"I got my armor, I can use it on him from afar, and besides, if he suddenly becomes singleminded at me that's not likely to make him tacticaly smarter." She flies in the direction of Lung's lair, but that'll still take a while. Flying's faster than running, but it's not very close.
Oni Lee disrupts their efforts to subdue Lung even more, and the Siberian-strong restraints last only as long as it takes him to notice them and rescue Lung from them. It does buy Miss Militia and Windflower time to get away from the barrelling dragon, but it's not a very good alternative to the teleporter himself, who appears in front of them holding a knife and whose original is elsewhere before they can react.
Miss Militia obliges and ushers Windflower out of the building. The smoke clears.
"Gonna try a flash, see if I can blind all of Oni Lee in one go and slow him down. Three. Two. One -"
The bots light the fuck up.
Rewind's timely arrival and immediate Lung-boopery does, though. Lung is much smaller—the past ten minutes have been intense—enough that he isn't covered in scales anymore. She doesn't retract the chain, just boops her own armor so it returns to her.
And Lung, himself, notices Rewind "for the first time" whenever she boops him, and roars in anger in a comical loop, which allows the heroes much more resources to actually keep him contained while Oni Lee's attention is forced to be divided a hundred ways.
"If you keep booping him he's not going to wind up poisoned or tranqed," says Lorica. "Ugh, we have to get Oni Lee - Any objections if I cut the lights and land a bot on him then?"
Oni Lee is descended upon, quite unable to teleport. Until, that is, Lung explodes in fire, making Lorica notice just how many copies Oni Lee can create in the span of half a second.
(It's twelve. That's how many it is.)
Indeed! The variations in Lung's facial expressions whenever he's booped into an increasingly bad situation are also quite something. Rewind boops him into place a few more times while he's buried in foam, and the variously incapacitated and restrained thugs start being moved into trucks.
And then they're dismissed for the night.
"I don't mind helping. If they let me I will happily maintain Dad's and Rewind's suits, have my bot coordinate copies and send real bots to check things out on an as-needed basis, and provide strategic advice. I will still show up to Endbringer fights. I just mind the command structure and the obligatory extracurriculars and not being in control of my budget and having to account for what I make."
"Protectorate doesn't own it, not the software. I'd have to redesign my suit and the drones if I wanted to go out without you as a proxy and they made a fuss, though. I've got that in the works in the background but I can't do enough work on it for them to claim anything while they've still got me."
"I think they are not cursed. The bots don't run on instinct the way I do; which means the prototype doesn't always work because I'll have an instinct mid-build and they go with the original design; but if it works so will the next one and they don't seem to - draw on my power as much, when I maintain stuff they made."
"I think I have an idea, though. I don't know if I'm right, because it's not exactly a pattern, and if it was, wouldn't other people have picked up on this? Like, say, Alexandria, she's supposed to be super smart in addition to a flying tank, even if nowadays she tries to keep that quiet."
"It's... well, it looks like Jack kinda targets them? At each other and at people. There's very little footage of him, and even less actually public, and I don't have clearance to watch all of the non-public images, but... There's a lot of fighting within the group, too, they sometimes stop rampaging to have a go at each other, but never Jack himself, and he's often... watching?"
"Not necessarily... but maybe. I don't know if I'd even call it a power, if it is it's super subtle, but yeah, based on the videos I think I could justify a master rating, maybe. It'd help if I had access to more files, but probationary Ward means nothing confidential sees its way to my eyes."
"It's... intuition? If I had to describe it in words it feels like she disobeys him more than the others, and sometimes does things that don't really jibe with the rest of the things the others are doing, and this is all on a very small sample of videos and other records so I could be completely off-base here."