Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 19: Cleanup (Patreon)

AN: OOPS. I seem to have forgotten to post this one... double chapter! My apologies!

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“You did what?” I asked Lisa, moderately furious. She cringed back from me, and I dialed it back 80%. Just enough that she could feel the weight of my displeasure, not enough that she’d be pants-shittingly terrified of me. Sometimes I felt the poor girl was on a bit of a hair trigger, then I remembered. Taking out all the supervillainy stuff, she was a kid who’d been effectively homeless, with no parents or guardians. I didn’t know all the details - had there been a whole ‘living on the streets’ era, or straight from home to a lair - but I was seeing enough hints that reminded me to be gentle.

Well. As gentle as the situation called for. Being a complete idiot did require some… displeased noises. 

“We… might have robbed a jewelry store while you were gone.” Lisa said as quickly as she could, like that could possibly get me to change my thinking. “But don’t worry! Nobody was hurt! The place was insured! I checked! The only people losing money were the insurance companies, and they’re greedy, evil bastards in the first place.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Kids. Had to love them, but sometimes they just didn’t think. I didn’t know where to start on all this. Well, education was always a good place.

We were inside my pest-free [Manor], where Lisa had begged me to let her have a room. She didn’t have to ask very hard, I was happy to share - it was half the point of having a large, nice place - but had been unpleasantly surprised that ‘adult supervision’ was back on the table. To my surprise, she accepted that as the price of sticking around. Bedtime, chores, no internet access at night? She pouted, she grimaced, and she kept it all to herself and sucked it up. It wasn’t like there were no benefits. Like me teleporting more drinks over, one for each of us. I took a deep drink of my fruit smoothie before I started educating. Lecturing.

Same thing.

“Insurance companies aren’t going to shrug off a loss.” I started to explain. “They like profit. All they’re going to do post-robbery payout is increase their rates on everyone else. Instead of harming one person, you harm everyone. Then what happens if the rates get too high? If covering parahuman robberies gets too expensive? Then insurance stops covering it entirely, and you’ve fucked over everyone. Stealing. Is. Wrong. Even if it’s insured, that doesn’t change the hurt, it just spreads it around.”

Lisa shrunk more and more into her chair, trying to hide behind her cup.

“But-!” I could see the effort it took her to clamp down on her tongue. “Sorry.” She meekly said. 

“On a more practical, civic-minded note. You were trying to build a reputation as mercenaries. Taking payment for a job, then explicitly not doing that job is a huge no-no. Word gets around. ‘The Undersiders aren’t reliable’ and the like.”I shook my head.

“Mercenaries. Adventurers. This is why I don’t like working with either of them.” I said. 

Hmmm. I did have to do something about that, didn’t I? Trying to keep things peaceful and quiet, a big kicked-up fuss… yeah. I’d tried the carrot, now I had to apply the stick.

Lisa clearly wanted to say something, but kept changing her mind.

“I won’t be mad.” I told her. “Well, madder. You’re trying to repent and make amends, and that goes a long way in my books. Lots of kids screw up.”

Lisa hung her head.

“We had a boss.” She said. “He insisted we do the job. Told us that his power would shield us. That he controlled destiny.”

I snorted.

“Fat lot of good that did you all. Who was your boss, anyway?”

“Coil.” She said bitterly. “Forced me to work for him at gunpoint. Had me assemble the Undersiders. He’s a slimy, creepy…”

The floodgates were open, and wow this Coil dude sounded like bad news. Granted, the source of the information was, admittedly, incredibly biased, but a number of easily verified factoids would be enough for me to bring the hammer down on him. Like if he actually had various cells prepared for Lisa. Nobody making their own personal prisons was up to any good. Tattletale really, really didn’t want me going after Coil until we’d figured out his power, but like… she was convinced he wasn’t a Master or Stranger. Cool, at which point my day job was basically going after powerful Classers with unknown skills and powers. This would just be another day. Lisa finally revealed the reason she’d thrown herself at my mercy and was willing to do anything to stay inside [Manor] while I slept. She was convinced that Coil would manage to kill her if given the chance. She believed it was impossible under my healing aura, but she wasn’t always there. 

I sensed her brattiness would skyrocket the moment Coil wasn’t a threat to her… but I wasn’t going to celebrate a kid being so obedient because they were terrified out of their mind. The sooner I could help, the sooner she could start to heal.

“Sounds like I’ve got some cleaning up to do.” I said as Lisa finished her story, which included several different bases Coil’s base could be. Or, equally possible, that the man had multiple bases. 

“Thank you!” She practically cried.

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell the other Undersiders you didn’t sell them out.” I said as I left.

“Wait. WAIT! No! Not like that!” Lisa protested as I left. Sorry kid. 

I had paid them to leave well enough alone, and they hadn’t. Lisa had thrown herself at my mercy, confessed, and was willing to make amends. I knew she had been in contact with the rest of the Undersiders since then, and they hadn’t decided to see the error of their ways. Everyone made their decision.

As little as I liked the PRT/Protectorate and was generally being a nuisance towards the local government, I did respect the fact that they were a fully functional law enforcement agency. Unlike the entire Empire - which they couldn’t process in any reasonable length of time, not with the numbers involved and community ties they had - or with Emily and Colin, who worked for them, dropping off a number of relatively small-time criminals with them shouldn’t be a problem. Plus, it’d help with my image. I was rapidly becoming the local PRT’s #1 priority.

I zipped across town, and flickered through the PRT’s walls.

“Evening! Hello! Merry night shift to you!” I said to the various troopers I encountered. I might have been deliberately selecting a path that brought me in front of as many troopers as possible. Before long, the alarms were ringing, blast doors were closing, and the pounding sound of the trooper’s boots was echoing through the base. 

Excellent.

I finished what I came here to do - namely, acquiring a large number of confoam grenades, seriously, the stuff was the BEST - then flitted back out.

Coil’s lair was closest, and I checked it out first.

Welp. This was a strong point in favor of Arachne’s ‘I’m going to monitor the entire city and crack down on the absolute worst crimes’ surveillance web. Pun intended. 

Coil himself wasn’t there, but he had mercenaries. Sure. He had an armory, check. Way too many computers, I don’t know what else I expected.

However, unless his base was using a novel Supervillain 3000 insulation - insulating against what - that wasn’t insulation in all his walls, and those were some very fancy electronics connecting to it. I came up with a number of possibilities - unknown substance, mysterious electronics, it could be anything - but the most dangerous possibility was tons and tons of high-yield explosives. Or maybe a nuclear bomb, I had no idea.

That needed to go… and then there were the cages. Coil didn’t have one room ready and waiting for Lisa, he had half a dozen, and one of them was occupied. By a preteen with a mask over her face, her eyes rolled up into the back of her head.

Ciriel curse it. I made grabbing a sample of the drugs high on my priority list, higher than catching Coil. If people here could beat my healing? That was bad. That was very, very bad. Wouldn’t be the first time someone had gotten around me, wouldn’t be the last, but there were only so many ways to attack the human body. Each time I shut one down, it was shut down for good, and I’d lost count of the ‘clever’ Classers who thought they’d found a new workaround, only for whoops! Already countered. Interestingly, I’d tried funding a program at the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft to find novel attack vectors, but they hadn’t managed to find anything new. I pulled the plug on that one after 64 years of the finest minds trying to crack the problem.

And someone had done it here in mere months. 

Then there was the I-don’t-know-what in the basement, a bunch of people wearing capes, cars, and all that other good stuff.

Welp, no time like the present.

I hit them hard and fast, going for the prisoner first. [Teleportation] took care of their equipment, the explosives, and countless other devices, including the drugs, into one of my equipped rooms. I scooped up the poor girl, zipped into [Manor], dropped her off in a bed, and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out what had gone wrong, and how to fix her.

After all, I was [The Healer], [The Elaine]. Healing was my [Oath], my calling, my reason to be. I was fine with everyone else escaping if it meant I was able to treat and help the poor girl.

It took me far longer than I would’ve liked, but I worked out the drug’s mechanism of action. It was going to take a 6 page paper just to describe what was going on and how it bypassed everything, but I managed to add healing along that axis to my standard persistent image.

I wondered if I’d get home in time to add the details to the next edition of the Medical Manuscript: Minor Addendums. I’d gone thousands of years without needing that particular part, and like many other maladies and medicine in the Minor Addendums, it was really only good for hurting people magically and reversing the hurt. No need to make it part of the standard curriculum. 

Like, for nearly everything, it was better to educate everyone… but widely publishing the Minor Addendums would nearly triple the education every [Healer] needed, while providing a ‘how to’ manual for any Miasma classers to flick through and pick one at random. 

I was getting distracted. In my defense, it had been ages since I’d seen a cool new medical thing.

“Lisa, sorry to put this on you, but look after the kid please.” I told her, before leaving.

Medicine done. Kid healed. 

Coil was going down.

I didn’t know where he was right now, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find him. I popped over to his office, ignored all the ringing klaxons, and sniffed around. Given how often he’d sat in the same chair in the same office, I caught his scent quickly enough. I got slightly tripped up in the parking lot. He took the same path to his car every day, but didn’t take the same route, and the scent was on the more faded end of the spectrum. I picked a fairly strong one and followed it. Either it’d loop me right back here and I’d try another strong one, or I’d get Coil.

I struck gold on the first try. To my minor surprise, I caught him in a car, driving like hell in his pajamas. I didn’t want to cause a car crash - couldn’t cause a car crash, not with ‘do no harm’ - and teleported into the passenger seat instead.

“Hi! You’re under arrest.” I told the tall, skinny man.

“How!?” He wailed. “At least let me know! How are you doing this?!”

I tilted my head, confused.

“How am I doing what?” I asked, only to be met by total silence. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Please pull over.” I demanded. “Stopping you at high speed is going to make everyone hurt.”

He drove on for another five seconds in total silence before indicating and pulling over. He was unusually cooperative as I handcuffed him. He was so passive I didn’t want to risk sticking him in [Manor], in case he was up to something.

“This is going to be awkward, just bear with me.” I said. At a speed so fast I blurred, I knelt down, grabbed his ankles, and picked him up. I took off quickly enough that his head didn’t hit the ground, but slowly enough that I didn’t give him whiplash or worse.

A quick trip to the PRT building later, and I was landing on the roof. The troopers were well and truly riled up, and a dozen guns were trained on us as I landed.

“One Coil, hand delivered!” I told them with a flourish. There was a beat of silence.

“Commander Calvert?” One of the troopers asked.

I held up a finger.

“Okay, pause. This sounds like it’s going to be incredibly complicated and there’s a high risk he’s going to walk out of here. Nevermind, I’m not handing him over, off to exile you go!” I dropped Coil into my [Manor], along with a confoam grenade to keep him from moving around.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for that.” I told the troopers, ignoring their cries about ‘you’re under arrest’ and other such related complaints. “I’ll have the Undersiders for you in a bit. Unless one of them’s secretly the director’s kid or something.”

One of them tried to spray me with confoam. I blocked it with a shimmering shield of starlight, then took off.

Hmmm… I’d done the tundra, I’d done the rainforest, where was relatively close but still remote enough that Coil wouldn’t be bothering me again? A deserted island was tempting, but finding one large enough to have a reasonable expectation of survival was tricky.

In the end, I dumped him in the middle of one of the gigantic forests the USA had, and was back before dawn.

Time for the Undersiders!