Glam talks to Armsmaster about the possibility of maybe being given access to confidential files on the Slaughterhouse Nine and is, somewhat predictably, completely shut down, on grounds that the rules are there for a reason. They try sharing their strategies, Armsmaster thanks them for it and assures them he'll look into the raised matter, but they still need to wait until they're a full member of the Protectorate to take advantage of these resources.
And is that supposed to make them more likely to want to stick around? Ugh.
The three following weeks are fairly quiet and peaceful for a change. No major engagements, the Empire Eighty-Eight has been keeping quiet, the various Asian gangs reduced once more to fighting each other, the Teeth haven't yet rebuilt. Blasto, Lung, and Oni Lee are still awaiting trial, though it's likely the tinker will be given a lighter sentence in some parahuman containment center while the other two will be sent to the Birdcage.
And then, somewhat earlier than would normally be expected, telltale seismic activity is registered in Pretoria, South Africa. The capes wishing to help must make their way to New York, to depart in an hour—small aircraft is waiting at the PHQ for the trip there.
Lorica's on the shuttle.
(As well as the New Wave capes, Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Velocity, Transit, Dauntless, Rewind, Glimmer, and Silica—a.k.a. the Brockton Bay heroes who can help one way or another in an Endbringer fight—and eleven minor capes from nearby towns, including three rogues and one villain.)
"Okay. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm not ready. I hope it works. Will it work? It won't work. It'll work. Will it work?"
In Glam's ear the comm whispers, "Try being under for this one?"
"Probably. Start now, or wait 'til we arrive?"
"It takes a while. It's easier to snap you out of it than to induce. And you need to be calm and I'm not sure you're getting calmer."
"Yeah. But. Probably not start now unless you can do it before we reach New York. And New York's right over there. A hop and a jump away. Barely any time. Probably best to wait."
Lorica hugs them. "Fair enough. But only till then."
The tinker plane gets ready for takeoff fifteen minutes later.
"Ready?"
"I don't know. Am I ready? I think I'm ready. I'm not ready. I need to calm down. Caaaaaalm down. Calm."
...The bot starts murmuring calmingly in their ear. To help. And then a bit more than help.
Glam starts to go under. Slooooowly at first, they're very not-calm, but it'll take about three hours for the plane to arrive at their destination, so there's time.
The bot is careful not to let them manifest any suspicious items in the plane.
And so they don't, but their mask starts reflecting the abstracted, relaxed look that must be on their face.
...well, is anybody watching?
People do sure glance their way every now and then, but well, people glance every way every now and then. No one seems to actually be paying attention to them, though.
...Bot nudges Glam into having a serious emoji on their mask.
Glam, naturally, does as instructed.
And when they're approaching they can construct a standard Glam-at-Endbringer-fight raygun together made of bullshit and trickery. Plausible deniability.
Glam may not be in the best headspace to immediately answer. Or notice that a question has been asked.
The shoulderbot can call up the webisode to cover for this.
And then they start decelerating a few miles away from the city proper, getting ready to land.
And Lorica flies with Glam to a safe hang-back space while her bots swarm out to provide eyes and ears. Some of them carry the gun. (Everyone expects that if three bots cooperate on lifting a thing their builder just helped assemble it will turn out to be light enough for them.)
An Alexandria package cape who was in the plane offers to help carry the gun.
The bots that are hanging back with Lorica and Glam get a good view of Behemoth.
And Lorica waits for the go-ahead from the higher-ups that Glam's supposed to drop a Siberian on him.
Alexandria, however, seems to have taken this momentary pause in the need for an Alexandria package to fly over to where they're standing. "...are they alright?" she asks Lorica.
"Please don't distract Glam, they need to pay attention to the field and the constructs," says a bot, "and Lorica is directing my other hardware in the field. Just say when, we have a system worked out."
"Very well. Where will the Siberian be appearing, and how will she be acting?"
"That's customizable, if there are advantages to particular strategies," says the bot. "Starting inside an evacuated building, running outside, jumping Behemoth, and energetically shredding him is probably the default, but she can appear somewhere else and do something else."
(Behemoth claps in the distance, liquefying half a dozen capes.)
"We're distributing comms," agrees the bot, "estimate five more minutes for ninety-five percent total cape coverage. The exact appearance can also be customized."
"It's probably best if she does look like the real deal so people know what's going on. Estimate for ninety-nine percent?" A sonic boom destroys all the windows around the beast, and she turns around. "We can continue this conversation via comm," she says, and takes off to go after Behemoth again.
"Estimate accounts for capes refusing comms," the bot says over comm. "Marginal improvments after five minutes expected to be low."
"Then pick a building in five minutes and tell me when you're ready."
Five minutes later, "The office building on the southwest corner of the intersection Behemoth's approaching."
He repeats the warning a few more times, and so does Alexandria in a few different languages. Legend then says, for Lorica's benefit only, "Whenever you two are ready."
And Lorica murmurs softly to Glam that the Siberian's totally going to happen right over there and she's going to leap out and wreck Behemoth.
Of course she is. Lookit her go.
And the Siberian appears inside the building. She doesn't move or do much of anything for a few seconds, then starts walking outside at a leisurely pace.
Come the fuck on Glam. -That would not be hypnosisy to say. Lorica nudges the bot and the bot comes up with a hypnosisy way to say that the Siberian is going to move a lot faster than that and do lots of damage.
The thing that happens after is not immediately obvious because Behemoth has chosen just that moment to fry every electronic device within three hundred feet.
There's some bots farther away with scopes. They know this sort of thing is a risk. Lorica prompts Glam for copybots.
Copybots are of course present, why wouldn't they be?
Then copybots zoom in for a closer view of the Siberian to offer hypnotized Glam.
The Siberian slowed down a bit while the copybots weren't looking, but there's a Siberian-claw-shaped gouge along Behemoth's left forearm. The Endbringer tries throwing lightning at her, and she's completely unaffected by it, of course. She jumps into the air and tears through Behemoth's right leg, taking a chunk of meat off him.
Lorica suggests that the Siberian could probably tunnel straight through Behemoth's center mass.
...and yet, she doesn't. She jumps again and lands on Behemoth's head, then starts digging into it with her hands. He tries to shake her off and fails, so he roars. More liquefied capes (and unevacuated civilians).
They should have run more practice tests with hypnosis. Lorica rephrases the tunneling thing.
That, or perhaps the expectations of the hundreds of other capes watching the engagement are shaking out to this outcome. She continues digging, this time in the direction of Behemoth's center of mass, so the Endbringer digs into his own flesh with his claws so he can take the Siberian off him and throw her at some poor unwitting capes. Then arc lightning, jumping from cape to cape and not immediately killing, just burning them enough that they'll have slow, painful deaths.
The Siberian won't hurt the capes ofcourseshe'sveryselectivelikethat. She will go straight back for Behemoth and deprive him of an arm won't she.
She sure will try! But Behemoth will also choose that moment to leap and get a dozen capes within his kill aura, a hundred feet from where the Siberian was. She looks around as if she's confused and then follows after him and grabs his arm. And hugs it. His arm is thick enough that she can't immediately deprive him of it with the hug, but now it's hanging by half as much mass as it was before.
She will of course carry right on with that until the arm falls off. Bots flock after Behemoth.
Off Behemoth's arm goes! But with it goes the Siberian as he flings her once again, this time at the bots. To add insult to injury, he fries them all, and immediately burrows underground.
Replace the bots, Glam, and then the Siberian is going to not hurt the bot that comes to give her a ride, she's going to be light and weightless as it flies her to the new Behemoth location.
...except there doesn't seem to be an immediate new Behemoth location. He's not emerging.
...Maybe he's really smart. C'mon Glam you and Lorica are going for a fly instead of sitting on this roof, she's gonna carry you, your suit does antigrav so you're quite light.
...on the other hand, being carried by Lorica. Yeah, scratch that, they totally need to be carried.
(No sign of Behemoth yet. But some more seismic activity here and there makes it clear he's not gone.)
She goes up until they're out of vertical range of frying attacks if Behemoth should come up right under them.
"We can't find him," Alexandria's voice comes from the comm. "Can you map subtle seismic activity and help us trace him? I'm doing it but your software's probably better."
"Can you give my software your data? It's not made to pick up seismics but it can chew arbitrary data."
"My data is gathered by my own eyes and brain. There are probably tinkers who can help you with that around." She sends a general request through the comm, and finds one whose specialty could be routed that way if you give him three minutes and a half.
Three and a half minutes and conjured arbitrary tools from Glam?
The arbitrary tools aren't strictly necessary, it's mostly a change in software, and then the guy has a map of seismic activity around the city and its environs.
And the bot nibbles on it.
Until, that is, a point at the eastern edge of the city starts concentrating a few of those bubbles.
The bot relays its prediction across the comms.
—five hundred feet from the predicted location, amidst the thickest cluster of people. Some twenty capes are incinerated from within, and another thirty are variously injured by this sudden appearance.
And the Triumvirate are on him.
And the bot with the Siberian goes to drop her on the monster and Lorica resumes narrating about what's going to happen.
The Triumvirate cooperate with the Siberian. Well, actually, Eidolon and Alexandria do—Legend seems to be suspiciously absent whenever she's close to the Endbringer.
(In the background, bots operate the ray gun. Glam is totally here and doing the ray gun thing.)
Behemoth's strategy when it comes to the Siberian seems to be "leap a lot." That may be causing much more damage than his usual strategy of standing around lobbing balls of stuff, incinerating things, and melting people within range.
The Siberian should aim to make leaping ineffective by being thoroughly attached to Behemoth. Maybe take his other arm off. Yes, do that and then try burrowing again.
He manages to get rid of her again and burrows once more. This time his path is very easy to predict, as he starts causing explosions and small volcanic eruptions along his way across the city.
A bot carries the Siberian where he's heading again. Usually he leaves when he's been hit hard enough, the fuck's he doing. Lorica stays in the air.
And then he emerges again, and the Siberian's on him, and off with his arm, and off with one of his leg, and he falls much more heavily than a thing his size and mass ought to fall.
Well, you don't stop hitting an Endbringer just because people are dying. Go Siberian Go.
Now that he's down, the Siberian can actually turn him into a paper weight, completely limbless (even if for less than thirty seconds given his regeneration rate near the core), and he starts demonstrating his ability to cause damage without limbs. He can create lightning out of anywhere, apparently, using his claw was only for show, and the hundred-feet limit to his kill aura was apparently an entirely self-inflicted limitation, as its radius starts expanding. The Siberian continues tearing through him, and he continues causing more damage than he ever has, demonstrating gravity-manipulating powers no one ever suspected him of having and dropping capes around him like flies.
The bot suggests over the comms that it might be expedient to have the Siberian solo him at this point unless people who are sure they're categorically immune to everything he can pull out want to close.
Radio silence. The Endbringer fried all electronics around, much farther than he usually does, and has started glowing ominously while the Siberian continues clawing his flesh off, covered head to toe in his ichor, shrugging off the fire and radiation and everything he tries to throw at her.
Lorica murmurs and murmurs and murmurs about what the Siberian is going to do. She is going to disintegrate him faster. She's going to keep up and then some with his regen. She's going to kill him.
—Scion appears—
—a second too late, as the Endbringer goes off in a mushroom cloud detonation, consuming everything in a rapidly expanding radius—
—not rapid enough for Scion to fail to contain it then, the blinding glow of the explosion being reduced to stillness, the sonic boom reduced to silence, the radiation quickly decaying.
And even with Scion's help, a crater centered where Behemoth was, a swath of emptiness and desolation, with smears where people who didn't get cover fast enough had been standing, and the Siberian right in the middle.
Scion looks at her, and she disappears. He flies away.
- Lorica decides that this is the right moment to wake Glam up. Up you get, Glam, ten nine eight seven six five four three two one.
Glam wakes up and blinks, slowly. They look around, and the first thing they see is the place where Pretoria used to be, in the distance. "What—what happened?"
"You killed Behemoth. He exploded really fucking dramatically."
...they don't look super thrilled about it, watching the cleared battleground where the surviving capes are celebrating.
" - he escalated a lot, first, this looks super bad for a given attacked city, but it's one city and not a dozen more he'll hit, he's, you know, exploded."
"Okay."
"Are - are you okay?" Hug.
"I—not really? I wasn't expecting to—I mean, the first thing I wake up to is—it doesn't look like victory, so maybe I'm a bit in shock. Because what I see is one of the worst days of fight against Behemoth and, what was even the casualty rate?"
"- bad. Should I have left you under longer?"
"I—no? I don't think so? I mean I don't think I'll be able to cheer with—whoever's left, in the plane." Pause. "We should probably start gathering survivors and stuff. Is the area contaminated?"
"No, Scion came by just in time to contain the explosion, we're down to negligible rads. We can do evac, gimme some bots." She lets them go to float on their own.
...but Glam stays there, floating, fidgeting a bit.
...Lorica doubles back to hug them, but then she zooms away to evac people. Bots disperse, except a few hovering near Glam.
Eventually Glam conjures copies and goes help with evac.
There's not that much to evac, but there's some, and the bots tirelessly look for it.
And at one point, they'll ask their shoulderbot: "Was this my fault?"
"Are you asking me or Lorica?" the shoulderbot asks.
"Lorica."
The voice switches. "I was directing you. I didn't know you'd have this reaction to the way he scaled up - I wanted to kill him -"
"I'm—I—I don't—I mean, you were right to want to kill him. Fuck, even if the Slaughterhouse Nine decides to try to kill everyone Behemoth would've killed, they won't actually succeed. But I just—keep thinking I could've planned better, should've figured out he'd escalate, that's what they do-"
"I was a little clumsy getting her to do stuff early on and he didn't leave when his arm was off, I couldn't have very well just - stopped -"
They look again out at the devastation. "I suppose it could've been worse, if Scion hadn't appeared..."
"Yeah."
"I'll wanna watch the footage later."
"Of course."
They sigh. "This was a triumph. Behemoth is dead. Victory. We can't spin this into something bad, it's one of the best possible outcomes," they start murmuring to themself as they resume evac.
"I'm sorry I didn't get it done faster?" says Lorica.
"Not your fault. Never your fault."
"Well, it's certainly not yours."
"...I suppose not," they agree.
"We'll go home after evac and there will be lots of cuddles and - and chocolate?"
"Yeah. That sounds good." Pause. "The Brockton Bay Protectorate probably won't return whole, will it? I don't know if I want to know who we lost."
"- okay, then I won't tell you."
They wince. "Tell—tell me when we're about to board the plane. I don't want to be craning my neck looking around and hoping someone's just late."
"Okay."
Evac evac.
Eventually it seems pretty clear the city's out of live people.
"O—okay. I—guess I'm ready. Who did we lose?"
Lorica puts her arm around them and lists them off. Velocity. Glimmer. Armsmaster.
They lean against her shoulder.
Cuddles insofar as armor can cuddles.
Their shoulder starts rocking lightly as they sob.
Pat pat cuddle cuddle.
A much smaller number of capes will be in the plane once it takes off. And Glam will spend most of the trip cuddling Lorica, dozing off every now and then and waking up with a start a few times.
Eventually they get back to Brockton Bay. One of the surviving bots goes for double chocolate muffins and hot cocoa and brings them back and they retire to Sadde's room.
And in Sadde's room, they go lie on their bed and don't unmask.
Bella gets out of her armor for cuddles.
(Sadde: still in costume.)
"Sadde?"
"Hm? Oh. Um. It's a girl day," they say.
"I'll still hug you."
"Okay."
Hug.
"I guess Leviathan's next, huh?"
"Yep."
"Hopefully he won't explode."
"He'll probably flood the shit out of everything for miles around but, you know, he's already done that, another one and last is worth it."
"If he goes inland he can cause way more damage than he already did, not that completely destroying a country isn't pretty extensive..."
"And he's fast, too, so it might be even harder than it was with Behemoth, but - uh, I think if you kill one you need to kill the next one or people start thinking you can't for some reason -"
"Well, I'm gonna try anyway, and if the reason that stands out is 'he's really ducking fast,' well. No one's ever called the Siberian a speedster."
"Yeah. I think we can do it but there will be collateral damage."
Sigh. "That's their M.O. Everything they do leaves collateral damage, and what Behemoth did before he died just proves my point that they are, in fact, holding back."
"Yeah."
"And if the other two decide to make up for what their lost brother would've done..."
"Yeah, what actually worries me most is that - there used to be only one of them, I don't know if 'three' was the maximum or if we can expect any skipped scheduled smackdowns when there's two. But I don't think not killing the fucking things because we're timid is the right call."
"...oh shit, what if this makes a new one appear? There was four years between Behemoth and Leviathan, and eight between Leviathan and the Simurgh..."
"A new one might have appeared anyway, no one was killing them before, maybe sixteen years post Lausanne we'd have been saying hello to Death Destroyer Of Worlds, but not killing them is the wrong response."
"I'm not saying it is," she says helplessly.
Snuggle. "I'm reminding myself as much as anything. We don't know how they respond to what we do; so we have to decide independently of that; and I am in favor of deciding to make the fucking things blow up. Considering Scion was on hand to contain it I would even describe the explosion as 'satisfying'."
"It sounds like such a childish thing for him to do, like some final act of spite, but I'd probably have done the same in his place."
"I'm disinclined to anthropomorphize like that."
"Yeah, probably makes more sense to think of them as natural disasters."
"And you killed one."
"We killed one."
"All right, yes, we killed one."
She smiles, a little. "So now all we have left are the other Endbringers, the Nine, the Blasphemies, Sleeper, the Ash Beast, Moord Nag..."
"I think the Simurgh you should handle from way back. Like, you have to be within low-delay transmission range but that just means 'right continent'."
"Yeah. And besides, you'll be hypnotizing me so technically you'll be the one killing her, and you're supposed to be her blind spot."
"Right. But in case I'm not a big enough spot to hide you, be not there."
"Yeah. Not there is probably a good place to be."
Snuggle.
"I dearly hope you're a good enough blind spot, though."
"Me too." Squeeze.
"I love you."
"I love you too."
She snuggles up and sighs.
"Wonder what the news'll look like."
"...I was kinda thinking the same."
Squeeze.
"I could conjure a copy and get them to go read the news for us."
"Or the bot could tell us, or we could just wait."
"Or that," she agrees. "I'm kinda curious about what the Protectorate said on the news. A second Siberian would be scary."
The bot looks it up.
Overall, mysterious and not forthcoming with a lot of details and letting quite some space for wild hypothesizing.
The bot summarizes this for the snuggling heroes.
"I suppose that was predictable. But it's bound to leak more, eventually, especially because of non-Protectorate heroes around..."
"Yeah. The bot can let you know if anything breaks?"
"Yeah. It probably won't be linked to me, though. Hopefully."
Squeeze.
She sighs. "But linked to me or not, I'm still gonna have to clean up the mess."
"What do you mean?"
"Whatever the Nine end up deciding to do when they catch wind of the Siberian rumors and inevitably believe them, or just decide that someone smearing the name of the Siberian like that requires retaliation."
Hug.
"They've been pretty conspicuously silent lately, too."
"I don't think that can be anything to do with you."
"No, no, surely not, but usually when they're silent it's because they're planning a big hit soon."
"Then they were already planning it."
"They're nothing if not opportunistic."
"True."
"If they'd been active and, like, visibly going southwest, I'd know to prepare. When they go under like that they can cause pretty much arbitrary mayhem in arbitrary locations."
Nod.
"...this may not be the best conversation for post-Endbringer-victory snuggles. Sorry."
"It's okay, I get it."
"I haven't really been able to relax about this kinda stuff lately."
"You took a long while to go under. I was starting to be nervous it wouldn't pan out, actually."
"Yeah... I was like that because I was nervous it wouldn't pan out, kinda? Except that's not all."
"Mm?"
"I mean, I've been mulling over this and all these possibilities and there was a part of me that didn't want to do the Behemoth thing because then I'd need to do it to Leviathan and the Simurgh and then there'll be the Nine and there's everything else and by that point my brain is dividing into a million."
"Oh love." Hug hug.
"I didn't sign up to save the world from literally everything except I kinda did and this is taking an unexpected toll on my mental health. I was not—nearly as prepared as I'd thought I was to the logical consequence of low cape life expectancy with respect to my social circle."
Hug hug hug hug. "- I mostly try not to get that attached."
"Yeah, I know, but that's not a strategy I can realistically implement."
"Wish I had a better idea."
"I didn't even like Armsmaster, and I think I exchanged all of five words with Velocity since I met him, and I still feel completely wrecked over it."
Squeeze.
Sigh. "And in the end you did get attached to—at least one person."
"And my dad. I've been lucky."
"I'm not sure you really had a whole lot of choice when it comes to your dad."
"Yeah. But still."
"Yeah. But still," she agrees. "...I can't ever lose you. That—would not work. On so many levels."
"Well, I do try not to die."
Hug. "I know. It just—appeared in my brain and was a very bad thought and I want it to go away now."
"I'm alive." Snuggle.
"Yeah, and you'll stay that way for ever and ever."
"...that's optimistic."
"That's a promise, not a prediction."
"How are you going to make me immortal, Sadde?"
"If I knew the answer to that question I'd've done it already! Or I'd've at least told you about it. But surely some cape who can do that will show up, eventually."
"And you'll take it from there with charm?"
"It's taken me this far."
"You are very charming."
"I am, it's true, I even managed to charm you. I will probably feel good about this fact forever."
Giggle.
"One might even say I charmed the pants out of you."
"Off, love. Off of me."
"Yes, that's what I meant."
"I'd be really worried if I contained pants, that would be weird."
"Yes, it would, I mean, where would they even fit?"
"They could be very small?"
"But they're shaped kinda awkwardly!"
"Only matters if they're not very very small."
"Are they, like, doll pants?"
"I was thinking like microscopic pants. I could contain many pairs."
"Oh, you probably have lots of them in your bloodstream, then, instead of red blood cells. Weirdest case of sickle cell anemia ever."
"No wonder I'm so perpetually dizzy."
"Pants anemia makes you dizzy?"
"Anemia in general does!"
"You should get that treated, then."
"It's too late. I shall waste away tragically in your arms." Snuggle.
"...well, see, on the one hand, that's really tragic, because you're amazing and awesome and incredible and wonderful and the world needs to see it. On the other, having you in my arms for a very long time is not something I'm opposed to." Snuggle snuggle.
"I shall ensure it is a prolonged wasting."
"Followed by more awesomeness, I trust."
"Oh, yeah, they discover the cure to pants anemia in 2017 and then I'm fine. I ghostwrite a memoir and go on talk shows."
"Oh, that's good, wouldn't want you to be sick forever. Even if your rad bot can do everything your cape persona needs you to do."
"It pretty much can, except I can't turn it loose on total self-construction and self-maintenance yet."
"Well, you'll probably need to run maintenance on it all the time, anyway."
"On the top level, yes."
"I'm kinda excited for when you can do all this stuff autonomously."
"I'll have so much spare time."
"...ooh, yeah, that, too, I hadn't actually thought about that part."
"What part were you thinking of then?"
"The part where there's a lot of awesome stuff happening because your bots are awesome! Super tech!"
Giggle.
"It may come as a surprise to you that I'm in fact kind of a nerd."
"Nooooo, you? A nerd about capes, even, I never."
"I know, right, who'da thunk."
"Not I. My imagination was not equipped to produce such slander of your character."
"But unfortunately it's true. We can't change our natures, after all."
"Then you are doomed. Doomed to nerd-dom."
"Completely. I should get some horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets."
"Ew, tweed."
"I can feel it calling for me."
"But your all-white look is so flattering."
"Oh, it's only my secret identity that will wear tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, couldn't have people track me down by wearing the same when out in costume."
"Well then. I'm out of arguments. I will succumb helplessly to tweed."
"The tweed isn't even the worst part. There's also the being-obnoxious-about-everything part."
"Oh no. That one might be a dealbreaker."
"I'm dooooooomed!"
"Is there no way to save you?"
"Well, ancient scrolls speak of a forbidden secret..."
"Ooh?"
"I must be snuggled a lot. It's the only way."
"Gosh. How much is a lot?"
"That is not for us to know. Enough that the call of the tweed becomes only a dim voice in the back of my conscience."
"Hmm." Snuggle.
"I'm still hearing it, we must continue doing this."
"Long as you need."
"Good!" Snuggle snuggle snuuuuggle.
And Lorica dozes off.