Amy was nervous. It had been an emotional rollercoaster of a day, between awakening to find herself in a bubble of ooze, finding out she had a new body, making out with her fresh new girlfriend, to learning about who her biological father was. Then, after all of that, they were arming up for what seemed like a full-on war tonight. All of her family had been provided with bulletproof vests to wear under their costumes, which was wild.

  The thought that Morgan was her girlfriend now made her all warm and tingly, from her scalp down to her toes. She’d pined after her since junior high, but never felt like she’d been her type, or that she was attractive enough to catch her eye among all the other beautiful girls at Arcadia. But they’d slept with each other, and that was before she got her makeover. She was thankful that her memory of the latter part of her rescue was foggy; Eclipse had explained it was a known side effect of the drugs she used to incapacitate people.

  After the excitement with her family had died down, Amy had realized that she had different dimensions, and a new crashing wave of anxiety hit her. She might not fit inside her suit, which she really wanted to wear for the attack tonight! One mild panic attack later, and she got to work. She was able to get into it, but it was uncomfortable, so it would need some tweaking. The gloves and boots had to be altered to accommodate her new fingernails, as she hadn’t been able to find anything that would cut or shape them.

  She’d been sitting on her stool in her workshop with her suit, feeling frustrated at her inability to do something as simple as cut her own nails. It was pretty cool that she could scratch ribbons out of the metal surface of the workbench, but downright annoying that she couldn’t trim them. She was staring at them angrily when she felt an itch on the back of her neck, where her tattoo was. A moment later, a wave of strange sensations radiated down her arms to her fingertips, and her nails retracted and changed shape right in front of her eyes, becoming close-cropped, like she normally kept them.

  She felt like she was seeing things. Several pokes and experimental fists later, nope, she confirmed that she was not seeing things. They’d changed. She stared at them hard, trying to imagine fancy French tips. That same itch, a similar wave, and they slid out of her fingertips and squared off. Her heart started to race, which felt weird because she was pretty sure that there was more than one in there, if the light pulsating sensation in her lower abdomen was any indicator.

  It was time for another experiment. She grabbed a compact from her backpack and stared at her reflection. Nothing happened. She concentrated and focused her attention on what it was she was trying to do. A tingle once again, at the very base of the back of her neck. Her freckles faded away, leaving no trace at all behind. She felt the skin on her nose and cheeks. Just a clean, clear complexion and skin wherever she felt and saw.

  She couldn’t get over how she looked. She still recognized herself in the mirror, but she just looked… extremely hot. She had a body to drool over, and she was embarrassed to admit that she found herself quite attractive. She’d never looked in a mirror before and really felt any particular way, unless she had a bruise or something. Now she looked in the mirror when she was naked, and it gave her tingles. Did that make her a narcissist? She frowned and pondered the question. No, it wasn’t a personality trait. It was something different… what was that called…

  She looked back in her mirror and restored her freckles with a moment of concentration. This was going to require extensive experimentation, but time was short, and she had to get this suit modified. At least she didn’t have to change the gauntlet design now; that was going to be one of the harder parts. She reverted her fingernails back to closely trimmed and got to work. She needed to extend the legs of the suit a few inches and adjust it in a few other places where it was tight. The hips, rear, chest, shoulders, neck, top of the head, and boots needed to be refitted. It was silly, but she was going to be walking in heels inside her boots when she finished growing in the supporting sole.

  Maybe I'll go and entirely redesign the foot later, when I have more time. Seems like a lot of wasted material that might be better in a different configuration.

  She pulled out a few of her buckets of biomass materials and got to work. She had a few new ideas as she made the sizing and fitment adjustments. She started tweaking the nervous system of the suit, removing some of the old and now redundant systems. Things were going pretty well overall when there was a knock on the door. Amy pulled up from her concentration and looked around.

  “Come in? Door’s unlocked.”

  The door opened, and Taylor slipped in. She stopped and stared when she caught a good look at Amy. “Uhh…” She trailed off.

  Amy looked down at herself, at her hands, arms, shirt, and skirt. Did she spill something all over herself?

  “Sorry,” Taylor quickly apologized. “I heard you were all recovered and down here, nobody told me that uh… You had changed.”

  Oh my god. Taylor’s doing that thing where guys just go empty-headed when they try and chat Victoria up… but with me!

  Amy’s cheeks flushed, and she held her new, larger chest, coughing lightly. “Yeah, new me, or whatever you’d like to call it, haha.”

  “You look really good, Amy, and I’m relieved to see that you’re back up and moving around. I’m really sorry that I wasn’t here and you got kidnapped.”

  Taylor had her helmet off and rubbed her face with her gloved hands. “I feel like things would have gone differently if I’d been here. I would have caught them sneaking in, maybe could have gotten you an early warning, or fought them.”

  Oh no, I don’t know what to do right now. What would Morgan do? Yeah, okay, I’ll go with that.

  Amy slid off her stool and walked over to Taylor and held her hands out. Taylor glanced down at them for what felt like too long a stretch, but she reached out and took Amy’s hands. Amy gave Taylor a soft squeeze.

  “You can’t be everywhere all the time. Besides, Morgan told us that you took down Mannequin with Assault and Battery. It’s not like you weren’t off fighting the Nine yourself. Please don’t beat yourself up over it?”

  Amy made eye contact with Taylor, who no longer towered over her as much as she once did. Taylor’s cheeks warmed.

  “Your eyes are really beautiful, Amy. How do you feel about your changes? I know it wasn’t like you had a say in them like I did.”

  Amy felt her own cheeks warming, and she smiled at the compliment. This was all so new and strange to her–not just the wealth of new information all her overclocked senses were hitting her with, but the way people were acting around her and treating her.

  “It’s going to take me some time to get used to them, all five senses are cranked way up, I feel like I’m stronger and faster. I can fold myself in half, which is crazy. If I’m being honest, the part I’m having the hardest time getting used to is um…” Amy nibbled her lower lip. “Looking attractive? Feeling attractive?” She knew that her insecurity was creeping back into her voice.

  Taylor studied her face and nodded slowly. “I feel sort of the same way. Morgan… She really had to beat it into my head repeatedly that the way I think I look and the way I look to others aren’t the same. I couldn’t see it, no matter how much she told me. I’d look in the mirror and I felt like there was this long-armed, wide-mouthed troll looking back at me.”

  Taylor let out a nervous laugh, and Amy squeezed her hands.

  “It wasn’t until she literally copied me and let me sort of… explore myself from the third person that I started to realize that maybe there was something wrong with me and the way I saw myself. After she did that, it was like the funhouse mirror glass shattered, and now when I look in the mirror, I see myself. But it’s uncanny, and strange, because I don’t recognize myself, even though that’s how I truly look.”

  Amy suddenly pulled Taylor into a tight hug. Taylor stiffened at the contact, then relaxed and rested her head against Amy’s head and shoulder.

  “She’s not wrong, Taylor. You’re undergoing a late puberty because of that hormonal issue we fixed, so you’re still in that kind of awkward, lanky phase where your proportions are still changing. But you’re not ugly, you never have been, since the first time you took off your mask in my backyard. I agree with her, you could be a total head-turning lady with just some minor tweaks to your dress and style.”

  Taylor hugged Amy back at that. “I guess we’ll go through this thing together then?”

  “Mhm. I’d like that,” Amy said. She pulled back from the hug, still staying close, and resting her hands around Taylor’s waist. Taylor fidgeted with her hands, seeming unsure as to what she wanted to do. Amy made eye contact with Taylor again. “She likes you, you know,” Amy told the other girl.

  Taylor canted her head just slightly to one side, and her brows twitched. “You mean like…?” She trailed off.

  Amy nodded. “We talked about it earlier. She was extremely nervous about admitting that she had feelings for you, because we like, officially started going out.”

  Taylor blinked slowly as she took that in. Her cheeks warmed several shades deeper from the faint pink they had been. “I–I don’t understand why you’re telling me this?” Taylor questioned, sounding as much as if she was asking herself as she was asking Amy.

  A smile teased at Amy’s lips. “Because I just found out what it feels like to realize that you’re desired and attractive to someone who I thought was way out of my league. It was a giant self-confidence boost, and I figured if it helped me feel better about myself, maybe it would help you, too.”

  Taylor broke eye contact and turned her head to the side, hiding her face behind her curls. She didn’t pull away from Amy’s loose embrace, though. “I’m… I’m not gay, though. I mean, sure, she’s hot, and I…”

  Amy nudged Taylor, saying, “You what? Go on, don’t clam up on me.”

  “I guess I do feel differently about her than most people,” she muttered.

  Amy wasn’t quite as handsy as Morgan, and she didn’t have the boundless confidence the other woman oozed at all times, but Amy had a gut feeling, and she was pretty sure she recognized what was in front of her from her own past experiences.

  “Taylor?” Amy asked the other girl softly. “Will you turn back so I can see you?”

  Taylor swallowed and turned her head back to face Amy. Cheeks still rosy, and her eyes were moist.

  “I could tell you with certainty if you were gay or not, using my power. But I’m not going to invade your privacy like that, okay? I’ll just tell you that I was in the closet for a long time myself, and I only wound up coming out because Morgan came out to me and Vicky. I felt this sudden anxiety, that if I let that moment pass, I might never be able to face it again. So I came out too.”

  Taylor held Amy’s gaze and was once again fidgeting with her hands.

  “The thing was, that for a couple of years, I was trying super hard to convince myself I wasn’t different, I wasn’t some deviant, or any of the other awful things people say and try to connect to being gay. I was sure I was straight, and I went on dates with guys my sister set me up with, but I just… didn’t really feel strongly about them. I could see they were handsome and appreciated it, you know? But that was about it.”

  Taylor nodded slowly.

  “Anyways, it’s something I struggled with for a long time. I still feel kind of awkward about it. I don’t think I could fly a giant pride flag in front of the media.”

  Taylor’s face broke into a grin, and she laughed. “Yeah, uh. She has a way of things, doesn’t she? Director Piggot was pissed, but I guess the Director of PRT Image and PR is very flamboyant and was thrilled at the idea, and she got it pre-authorized.”

  Amy giggled, and Taylor’s face became a bit more serious.

  “But what if… What if I do like guys, though?” Taylor asked Amy.

  “You mean guys and girls?” Amy pressed her.

  Taylor brought a gloved hand up and lightly scratched her cheek with the claws. “I mean… I guess?”

  Amy just grinned at her. “People forget that bisexuals exist. Or maybe you’re something like a demi? The point is, it doesn’t matter who you like; what matters is being honest with yourself. When you do that? You’ll feel better about things, I promise.”

  “What–huh? What’s a demi?” Taylor’s intense curiosity was piqued, and she was focusing intently on Amy now.

  “Demisexuals are people who are sexually attracted to people they are closely bonded with, and it’s less about body type or anatomy, and more about the individual and their personality,” Amy explained.

  Taylor’s eyes widened a bit upon hearing that. “Wow, I didn’t even know that was a thing? I guess…” She glanced upwards at the ceiling and nibbled on her lower lip. Her brows were twitching as she stared upward, looking like she was in deep thought. “I guess I might be… Bi? There are people whom I don’t have a bond with, some who I don’t even like, but I still think they’re attractive.” She took a deep breath and sighed.

  Amy pulled her into a tight hug, squeezing the lanky girl like she was a stuffed animal. Taylor let out a grunt and wheezed as she was all but bear-hugged.

  “Geez, Amy! You’re really strong!” Taylor complained.

  Amy squealed and rocked backwards, and Taylor’s heels lifted off the floor. “Whoa! Gosh, what’s the big deal!” Taylor cried out.

  “Say it, Taylor! This is such a big deal, how can you not be excited right now!?” Amy dropped Taylor back down and snatched the other woman’s hands, interlacing her fingers and doing a cheering motion with both of their hands, laughing and grinning.

  “I’m um… Bi?” Taylor’s eyes darted around.

  “You’re queer! I’m queer! Morgan’s queer! Lily’s queer! We’re all queer together!” Amy bounced up and down and laughed. Taylor’s cheeks went a deeper shade of red as her eyes wandered. Still, the excitement was infectious; she found her lips curled upwards, and she started to get into Amy’s celebration.

  “Yeah, uhh… I’m queer!” Taylor said, then laughed as Amy threw their hands up in the air.

  They enjoyed themselves for a few minutes, then calmed down. Taylor straightened her hair and parted it where some strands had fallen in front of her face.

  “Yeah, okay, fine, fine. Morgan’s hot. Vicky’s hot. Crystal’s hot. You’re hot.” Taylor told Amy.

  Amy smiled, showing off pearly white teeth and overly developed canines. She poked a finger into Taylor’s armored abdomen, jabbing her between the armor panels insistently. “And you’re hot too, you know. Let Vicky and Crystal fuss over you when all of this is over with, they’ll give you a makeover, that’s like their secret passion.”

  Taylor rubbed the back of her head bashfully, then gave a few tugs to her suit to straighten herself out. “Okay, fine. I will. I stopped doing that kind of thing because one of my close friends growing up was really into it, and then she turned around and became a giant, awful bitch to me, so it sort of put me off it, you know? Like it was a reminder. But I guess if I’m not trying to remain stuck in the past, I need to get over that hump.”

  “Exactly!” Amy nodded sagely. “Oh, what was it you came down here for originally, anyway? We got super side-tracked.”

  Taylor made her way over to the workbench to look at Amy’s suit. “I wanted to talk to you about a few powers-related things. I had an idea, and I wanted to revisit that thing you and Morgan talked about, about making relay bugs. Those could be really helpful for tonight.”

  “Sure, we should do that. And what was your idea?” Amy asked.

  Taylor reached forward and tapped the suit. “I had an idea when I was thinking about how you’d gotten kidnapped. What if I could use my power to try and connect to your suit remotely? I wanted to ask you about the possibility of grafting a bug into the suit and seeing if my power would recognize it? Does the suit have organs like eyes and ears to navigate itself, if it were able to?”

  Amy’s eyes went wide, and her brows crept up her forehead. “Oh wow! I would have never thought of trying that! Uhh… let me think.” She took a seat on her stool and faced the suit, drumming her fingers on the tabletop. “Oh man, oh man! Wait, I wonder if I could…” She got a focused look on her face. “Is Morgan upstairs still?”

  Taylor nodded. “She’s in one of the meeting rooms right now talking to New Wave.”

  “Okay, we can wait on that until after. What’s the smartest bug you have?”

  Nibbling her lower lip, Taylor said after a moment’s consideration, “Probably jumping spiders. They have really good eyes, and they can do problem-solving, manipulate the environment better than other spiders, which are already fairly smart, and a bunch of other stuff. They sort of stand out among most insects.”

  “Do you have any?”

  “Oh yeah, they’re very common,” Taylor replied. A bee flew off her back and deposited a small spider on the tabletop.

  “So I’m not a huge fan of bugs, but I have to admit that one is kind of cute as far as spiders go. He’s got such big eyes!” Amy said while lowering a finger for the spider to climb onto. The bug hopped straight on top, and Amy brought it over to the suit. “So what I’m going to do is try and leave most of the body intact and encase it in the suit, connecting it to the suit’s nervous system and circulatory system so it’ll have everything it needs to live. I’ll have to make a lot of modifications, but we’ll see how this works.”

  Amy stuck the finger with the spider in it up inside the upper back of the suit, where it was fairly heavily armored. Reaching out with her foot, she pulled a pair of tote bins over, slipped her sandals off, and stuck her toes into the gray, shapeless goo.

  “What’s all that?” Taylor asked as Amy worked. “And why are you sticking your feet in it?” She added after a beat.

  “It’s processed biomass I’ve made that has the basic components most organisms would need, and the minerals the suit needs. I work with biomatter, but if I have something that has exactly what I’m looking for already, there’s less waste. The suit stores a couple of liters of this inside, so I can repair or modify it in the field, and then it eats something similar. It has more storage for that liquid as well.”

  Amy closed her eyes and appeared to be concentrating. “As for why I’m putting my toes in it, I have to touch it to work with it, and I can’t reach with my hands. It just sort of passes through my body and into whatever I’m working on; location doesn’t matter.”

  “And you can just do sort of… Whatever you want with your ability? As long as you can touch it?” Taylor asked while leaning in and observing. Nothing visually apparent was happening with the bins, but the suit was making little crackling and popping sounds, and the limbs and torso seemed to be shifting around. After watching for a moment, Taylor seemed to realize that it was growing larger.

  The mostly-transparent faceplate of the suit rippled and shifted, turning into a bone-like material like the other armored parts of the suit. There was a recessed horizontal and vertical section, forming a T-shape over the face, like one of those old gladiators’ helmets. Within the recess, little beady eyes appeared, and more appeared elsewhere on the suit in cracks and recesses where they’d be shielded from harm.

  Amy pulled her feet from the bins and removed her hands from inside the suit. “There, all done! And yeah, pretty much, to your question. If I have material to work with and can maintain contact, I have a blank slate.”

  “That’s incredible, what a powerful ability,” Taylor murmured. “So healing people is… what to you?”

  Amy sighed. “Basically, a side effect? I feel much better about myself doing this, creating new things and modifying existing things, than I do just being stuck healing people all day. Since I’ve started doing this other stuff, I don’t feel nearly as bad about healing people or doing little side projects, like what we did with you. It was just when I was doing it all day, every day I worked… it was horrible. I’m not going back to doing that.”

  Amy stood up. “One moment, I have to take my shirt off, but I have a sports bra on underneath.”

  She undid the buttons on her shirt and slipped it off. She went to reach for the suit, then stopped. “Actually, Taylor, see if you can control the suit?”

  Taylor closed her eyes and frowned. “I can feel it; it feels weird, but I think that’s because I’m not used to more complex organisms. Give me a minute to experiment?”

  “Mhm, sure.”

  The suit on the table twitched a few times. The right arm, then the left. Right leg, then left leg. The tail, then the gauntlets. Then it sat up, turned to the side, and hopped down from the table. Taylor ran it through some stretches and moved it around.

  “This is incredible, Amy. I can feel it, and I can see and hear through it just fine. I have these sorts of vague impressions of it having… bladders, essentially?”

  “Yeah! Those are the fuel and biomass bladders! I call it fuel, it’s basically food, but it would be disgusting for you or me to eat.”

  Taylor hummed under her breath. “It takes a bit of concentration for me to use, so it’s not exactly like one of my bugs, where I can control as many as I want, but it’s not bad. I think with a little practice, I could operate this in the background. Opening my eyes and looking in the same room as it makes me a little dizzy, but I think it’s just a perspective thing. I don’t think it would bother me if I wasn’t looking at it, while it looks at me.”

  The suit walked up to Amy, turned around, and split at the back so she could enter it. “What ah… how do you make all of that?” Taylor asked her, gesturing at the bins.

  “It’s sort of gross?” Amy cautioned.

  Taylor shook her head. “Doubt it will bother me, I have my insects feed each other, and they’re mostly carnivorous and eat each other, or trash, or something.”

  Amy chuckled. “Yeah, okay. Fair. I use plant matter for some of it, and then I basically make a bunch of it from compost. Food waste, bones, scraps of meat, spoiled foods, that kind of thing. When I wasn’t living here, where we have a lot of that available, I’d use stuff like groceries, meats, that sort of thing. You saw when I healed Melody, I was using chicken and water.”

  Taylor nodded and opened her eyes. Amy started to work her way into the suit, and Taylor’s eyes tracked her as she did. Amy’s skirt was barely keeping her decent with the way she had to stick her butt out when climbing into the lower half of the suit and working her way into the upper half.

  A moment later and Amy was in, and it closed with several clicks and a hiss. Amy connected to her suit with her expanded tattoo, and it felt more or less the same. Maybe a slight improvement, but it was hard to tell. What wasn’t a slight improvement was the changes she made to the suit. Making it so the suit had its own senses that she relayed through her connection was a huge improvement. She had a far larger field of view, and the faceplate was no longer the weakest part of the suit, but one of the strongest.

  She tested out the suit, doing diagnostic checks and going through the motions to verify the fit was just right. While she was at it, she expanded the capacity of the quills on the arm and tested out the function of one of the new additions she’d made: a boxy apparatus that sat on the end of a short articulated arm. It could rotate and slot into a cup in the back armor so it was mostly flush, or it could pop out and rotate up so it was just over her right shoulder. The apparatus on the end of the arm could rotate to face nearly any direction other than the blind spot created by the head of the suit.

  It contained a rack of quills and their launchers, a bunch of shielded eyes and narrow, focused directional ears, and a nozzle that she could adjust between a super-fine spray and a larger stream. A large artery ran through the arm and connected the nozzle to a bladder in the back she could pressurize with muscular contractions. It gave her the ability to handle people sneaking up behind her, like happened last time, and options with how to deal with them, from adhesives to flammable liquids.

  “Taylor?” Amy asked through the suit.

  “Hm, yes?” Taylor looked up at the faceplate.

  “Can I see one of your black widows? I want to see if I can make a larger organ to produce webbing. It’s easier if I can copy it off something I can touch than trying to make it from scratch.”

  “Oh, sure, of course,” she said, and Amy held her palm out, with the thick leather of her glove facing upwards. Another bee dropped off the spider into her palm. A few moments passed, then Amy told her she was done with it. “Just like that?” Taylor asked.

  “Yep! Let’s try this out.” Amy raised her left arm and shot what looked like a small pebble at the far wall of the workshop, and a strand of silk trailed behind it. It adhered to the wall on contact. It was quite thick relative to a spider’s silk, but still quite fine, at only a few millimeters in diameter. Amy tugged at it, and it didn’t go anywhere. “Huh,” she said, and braced her legs, giving it a harder pull. “Holy shit, this is like, really strong!”

  Taylor stepped forward and ran her fingers over the line, bringing her face right up close to it to examine it. “The way it’s woven looks a little different, but you’re able to just… spit this out of your suit like that now?” There was wonder in her voice.

  “Yes, I can, but if I’m going to use it often, I’ll have to change around the ratios of the materials I’m storing in the suit. This uses quite a bit of protein to make,” Amy said.

  Taylor nodded. “I could make this too, but it’d be slow, I’d have to spool it maybe a few feet at a time after it was woven, and then have the spiders feed, or swap them out. I’ve been thinking of making some silk rope to carry around.”

  “Okay, stand back. I’m going to see if I can break this,” Amy said. Taylor took several steps back, and Amy took the rope in both hands, spread her feet, and planted her tail behind her to catch her if she fell. She hauled on the silk, engaging her full strength, amplified by the suit. As she loaded up more and more force into the rope, she could feel it start to stretch, then there was a loud bang! A shallow disk-shaped piece of the wall peeled away and flew across the room, hitting her in the chest and shattering into fine dust.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Okay, well. It’s plenty strong. Here, take the end and spool it, and I’ll run like twenty or thirty feet out for you to use?” Amy asked.

  Taylor hurried to pick a few remaining pieces of concrete off the ball on the end, then looped the rope as asked. Amy detached the other after producing a good amount more and wrapped that end around a small, dense sphere of bone.

  Taylor formed the rope into a small bundle and grinned at Amy. “Beats zip cuffs, and it’s way more stylish, too. And I bet I could use it for other things, too. Maybe climbing out of a window, or something.”

  “I sort of want to try a quick experiment while we’re still here, before we head out. Do you want to try and see if you can control the suit while I’m hooked into it?”

  “Sure, let’s see here…” Taylor closed her eyes. “I can feel it like it’s a part of my swarm sense. It feels different; I can easily identify it from the rest.”

  A moment later, Amy felt a jolt of electricity run up her spine and what felt like an explosion of fireworks in her brain. She was instantly overloaded with sensation, not unpleasant, but extremely disorienting. She felt dizzy and had a sense of vertigo.

  She realized she was squeezing her eyes shut and was on her hands and knees on the floor.

  There was a presence in her head.

  What the hell is going on?

  I don’t know, it’s very disorienting.

  Why–how did you answer that?!

  Because we’re talking?

  No, we’re not! I’m thinking in my head!

  Oh, you’re right. Wait…

  Taylor?

  Amy?

  Can you disconnect, or whatever? This is probably a big deal, but we don’t have time to experiment with it right now.

  A moment later, Amy was back to normal, panting slightly inside her suit.

  What the fuck was that!?

  Amy stood back up and faced Taylor, who looked a bit dazed and confused as well.

  “Okay. So we don’t do that until we have lots of time to experiment. But you can control the suit just fine when I’m not in it, which is huge. Give me a few bees or dragonflies or something so I can modify them to try and be relay bugs for you. Pick whatever you want. I’m going to get out of this until we’re ready to go.”

  It wasn’t long until the time arrived for action. They decided to modify eight horseflies, as they were extremely fast fliers. Amy modified them to be much bigger and hardier than normal, which they were already sort of huge for flies. When she was done, they were two and a half inches long and mean-looking. They took off and attached to the spines on Taylor’s armor where other insects were nesting.

  The two made their way up to the upper levels of the station after locking up, and Amy met with Apex briefly to pirate the design of her eyes. She made her suit cyclopean, with one big Apex eye in the middle of the T-intersection on her face shield. As soon as it was grown in, she was stunned by the wealth of information it was providing. Morgan wasn’t kidding. Her eyes were crazy. She couldn’t begin to imagine having fifteen or sixteen of them at the same time.

  Apex must perceive the world in an almost alien fashion to the way we do. This explains the additional brains. Things are slowly making more sense to me as I learn more each time we use our powers together.

  They shared their final words with one another, hugs were exchanged around their group, and the two split and headed in different directions. Amy was part of Team Coil, and her nerves calmed some when they met up with the Protectorate and Wards. They had a huge task force here for one villain in his lair, although the threat of the mercenaries was real.

  I can’t believe Tattletale switched sides, and that we’re not just working together, but I’m having to follow her orders.

  Grue and Imp met them near downtown. They talked briefly with Tattletale, then joined the full group. Another cape wandered out of a damaged storefront. He looked like that voodoo figure, Baron Samedi, with the way he was dressed. Rather than face paint, he wore a red facemask that fit the back and red motif of his three-piece suit.

  Miss Militia, Tattletale, Grue, and the Baron look-alike talked for several minutes, then Tattletale waved Amy over to join them.

  Anxiety was picking up as she walked over. She entered the tight circle that the smaller group was in, a good ten yards away from the rest of the main group. “Yes?” She asked, facing Miss Militia and Tattletale.

  “This is Trickster, leader of the Travellers. He wants to talk to you, to see if we can come to an agreement,” Tattletale said in a voice low enough that it was clearly intended for only their group.

  Trickster looked her over. “You’re Panacea? The Panacea? Greatest healer in the whole world?”

  Amy sighed, the sound carrying through her suit. “Yeah, that’s me. I’m doing a rebrand, but that’s still me, at least for now.”

  Trickster took a closer look at the suit. “Is this…?” He asked.

  “Yes, I made this. I can do more than just heal people. It’s why I’m rebranding,” Amy explained, frustration creeping into her voice.

  Is now really the time for all of this?

  Trickster fished around in his jacket pocket, and Miss Militia twitched. He winked at her and chuckled, then pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, stuffing one in his lip and lighting it. He took several deep drags from it. “Want one?” He asked her.

  I could go for one, but I promised Dad I'd quit. Plus, I can't exactly smoke it in here without making modifications.

  Miss Militia flexed her jaw and looked fairly irritated at him, then she sighed. “Yeah, sure.” He passed her the pack and the lighter, and she took one and lit up herself.

  Lisa was grinning, as usual. Amy didn’t know that Miss Militia smoked.

  “Quit, pulls one out every now and then,” Tattletale told Amy.

  Miss Militia shot Lisa a look.

  Lisa held her hands up. “Sorry! She was trying to figure out if you smoked in the girls' bathroom at work.”

  After Trickster had speedily smoked nearly half his cigarette in relative silence, he looked back at Amy.

  “What are the chances that you can save someone who’s… pretty heavily mutated from the waist down?” He asked Amy.

  Amy blinked inside her suit. “I’d need to know more. Uh, let me think here. How far does it go up their waist? Can you indicate with your hand on your body? Is the upper body totally untouched otherwise, like there’s a hard divide? And what sorts of mutations are we talking about?”

  Trickster indicated a spot right around the top of the butt with a gloved hand. “Her upper body is not visibly changed at all beyond that point. And imagine almost literally like a centaur sort of thing with how the body attaches. Everything below that is…” He took a drag off his cigarette and blew a plume of smoke upwards at the darkening night sky. “A big messy jumble of different sorts of creatures. Mammals, mostly, but twisted, and all wrong.”

  “She? Okay, so let’s say worst-case scenario, and we just took a metaphorical laser beam and chopped her in half where you indicated. Normally, she’d survive, she’d have some disability issues, like mobility, and she’d likely have to have tubes, you know… down there, for bathroom stuff. But she’d be able to live a pretty normal life, otherwise. That’s without me doing anything, just regular old modern medicine.”

  Trickster ran his tongue over his gums, nodded, and motioned for Amy to continue.

  “And just to double check, this is Noelle we’re talking about, right?” Amy asked.

  Trickster gave Tattletale a sidelong glance.

  Tattletale looked right back. “It is need to know information, and you won’t find someone more need to know than her.”

  Trickster sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Just, I’m protective of her, I don’t want her to get hurt, or worse, shoved in some research lab, or something.” He looked back at Amy. “Sorry, yes, this is Noelle. Please go on.”

  “So if we did that same thing, I could just grow her new legs that are all her own tissue, plug them in, and use the blueprints already in her body to replace anything else that’s missing. She’d be… basically fine. Good as new,” Amy said.

  Trickster frowned. “You say that like it’s an easy thing.”

  “Because it is. Trivially easy. Look, I can cure plagues, cancer, and every disease known to man with just a touch. Regrowing a limb is easy stuff compared to curing someone with stage four metastasized cancer in every part of their body. And even that isn’t hard, just time-consuming. But here’s the thing. I can fix her body, but without knowing exactly what caused the mutation in the first place, I can’t promise you that she won’t just mutate once again after I do. For that, I’m going to need more information. Like, literally everything you know.”

  Amy huffed. “Sorry for being testy. I just–I have heard the same thing like eight thousand times in a row, it really gets on your nerves having everyone question you constantly.”

  “Hey, chica. If you’re as hot shit as you say you are, power to you! I just want my girlfriend’s life saved, because I don’t know how much more of this she can take.” Trickster took another drag off his cigarette and gave Lisa a look.

  Lisa spoke up. “Grue, sorry to ask this, but would you mind stepping out for this last part? It’s very private for Trickster and Noelle.”

  “You sure?” Grue asked, his voice warped by the black smoke slowly flowing out of his mask.

  Lisa nodded once. “Yes, please. We’ll be fine, I promise you we won’t talk about anything that you should be included in.”

  Brian bobbed his skull-masked helmet and held a leather-clad glove out to Trickster, who shook his hand firmly, then he headed over to the main group to talk with his sister.

  Trickster motioned the three others to step into the storefront with him, and they walked into the dark interior about halfway before he turned around. He looked at Miss Militia for several long moments. “I have your word that you’re not going to fuck us on this, and that what I tell you isn’t going to get us put in some gulag or blacksite?”

  Miss Militia crossed her arms, her cigarette dangling between two fingers. “If you provide us assistance with this matter, you have my word. I can’t make promises about anything involving possible criminal charges from your past, but I think that’s a different matter, and nothing you’ve done is going to get any of you sent to the Birdcage, from what I know.”

  Trickster looked at Amy and Tattletale. “Is she good for it?”

  “She’s about as fun as throwing rocks, but she’s not a liar, and she is the number two in command. The Director, who is the actual boss, does listen to her. If either she or Apex made a stink about it, they could get their way, were the Director to have thoughts otherwise,” Lisa said.

  Trickster nodded and looked over at Amy.

  “New Wave has never had any issues with the PRT or Protectorate here, or the Wards, for that matter. My mom gets catty with them because we’re sort of rival hero groups, but we still do business with one another and haven’t had any issues,” Amy said.

  Trickster rubbed the center of his forehead with one white-gloved thumb.

  “Fine. But I’m only telling you this because you’re the best shot at fixing what’s wrong with Noelle.”

  He took a deep breath. “First things first. We call ourselves the Travellers, not because we wander around, but because we’re not from here.”

  Miss Militia’s eyes narrowed, and her brow creased. “You’re not telling me what I think you’re telling me, are you?” Her tone was neutral, but Amy could feel a tension present.

  Trickster held up an index finger. “Listen. Hear me out, before you start going all supercop on my ass, please.”

  Miss Milita gave a curt nod, folded her bandana twice until her lower lip and chin were exposed, and stuffed her cigarette between her lips.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. We’re not from here, Earth Bet. We’re from Earth Aleph. But before you go hauling me off to mega-jail, I have to tell you the how of it. We didn’t do it. We were victims, caught in some wild shit, and dumped here. We didn’t want to be here, trust me. This place fucking sucks ass compared to home. Although,” he chuckled. “...Having powers is pretty fucking awesome.”

  “Do you have a tattoo?” Miss Militia asked, seemingly randomly.

  Trickster shook his head. “No, not like the one you’re thinking of, or maybe, the two you’re thinking about.” He puffed on his smoke. “But you’re on the right track. We’re originally from Wisconsin, the lot of us. We went to university there, we’re all dorm-mates and friends.”

  Oh fuck, surely not…

  “Madison, specifically,” Miss Militia gestured with her cigarette.

  Trickster nodded, his tophat exaggerating the motion.

  “But wait,” Amy said, a thought teasing at the back of her mind. “Aleph doesn’t have parahumans. So you shouldn’t have a Corona Pollentia in your brains. They don’t exist in Aleph. So, how do you have powers? And for that matter, how do every one of you have powers?”

  Trickster grinned in the shadows, his eyes gleaming, and he shook a bright white index finger at Amy. “Not just a super healer, but also real smart too, I see. That’s good, that’s really good.” He looked back at Miss Militia. “You’re right. We didn’t. We found something. A briefcase, full of vials, and instructions. ‘Drink me!’ they said, and had about six hundred pages of liability waivers and a bunch of contractual gobblygook."

  He looked at Lisa, Miss Militia, and Amy’s suit in turn.

  “So it’s true, then,” Lisa said. “Powers in a bottle. Drink one, and you get superpowers of your choice, or close to it.” It was Lisa’s turn to cross her arms. “Only caveat being that there’s a non-zero chance that you wind up with some rather unfortunate side-effects. But that’s a small price to pay, to be a superhero, isn’t it?”

  Miss Milita looked at Tattletale with sharp eyes. “How do you know all of this, and where did you learn about it? This is true, it’s real?”

  Lisa’s smirk grew to insufferable levels. “Well, we weren’t 100% on it, not having seen it with my own two eyes; however, a working associate asked me to look at some very interesting documents–contracts, as Trickster said. Describing the very thing he’s talking about.” She shifted her stance, planting her hands on her hips, and canting them to one side. “The reason none of us have heard about it is because it’s extremely hush-hush. The contract says if you squeal, you get them yanked from you, or worse, like being character assassinated until you’ll never work a job other than flipping burgers again. And of course, we’re talking about millions of dollars, even for sorta mediocre stuff, so these are people who can’t risk having their name and legacy smashed to pieces.”

  Amy was frowning in her suit, glad that it didn’t reveal her facial expressions, having recently shifted from open-mouthed shock. Her mind was racing at a thousand miles per hour.

  “So you all drank vials, and Noelle got a bad batch, or unlucky with side-effects, and that’s what’s driving her mutation and issues with her power?” Amy asked after a beat.

  Trickster sighed. “No, not exactly. See, we had six vials in the briefcase, and seven people. So two of us, Noelle and Oliver, split one. We drew straws.”

  “Oh no…” Lisa said. “Did you guys not read the instructions?”

  “Sort of?” Trickster said, but he wasn’t convincing anyone.

  “It very, very specifically said to consume the entire vial, and that very bad things could happen if you only drank part of it,” Lisa said, hissing between her teeth.

  “Well. Shit.” Trickster’s shoulders slumped, and he took another puff of his smoke before dropping the butt into the water. “I guess that makes me responsible for her condition. Listen, it wasn’t like we were in a good headspace when we were doing these things. We were stranded on another Earth, a shitty one full of giant monsters. We were going to be quarantined and then locked up when it was found out we didn’t exist here. And most importantly, Noelle was dying from the injuries she had sustained during the teleportation. We discovered that taking one of the vials healed you, so I gave her one. She refused to take all of it because it would leave someone else out. So I told her to drink half.”

  Amy reached out and placed a gauntlet on Trickster’s shoulder. She didn’t like the guy; he seemed like a know-it-all, smug asshole, not to mention a villain, but she could imagine the situation they had found themselves in, and it was fucked. He was trying to save the person he loved, and she might have done something similar in his boots.

  “Oliver, what’s his power?” Tattletale asked Trickster.

  “It’s sort of… well, it’s mostly useless, to be honest. It makes his appearance change, but not to the extent that most people who do that kind of thing. It makes him handsome? And he can become good at things if he studies them for a while. Like typing, or knitting, or whatever.” Trickster explained, straightening up and giving a polite nod to Amy, who retracted her hand.

  “Hmm,” Lisa said, tapping her chin. “I have an idea, it’s sort of a long shot. Let’s say, hypothetically, one of the two had to give up their powers for the other. Who would be willing to give theirs up for the other?”

  “Ugh, they’re both insufferable about it. Noelle doesn’t want powers because she can’t control her ability, and it’s left her as she is. And Oliver doesn’t like his powers and complains about having them. If I had to pick, though, I’d say Oliver would give up his power to Noelle.” Trickster shifted his stance. “You really think something like that would work? And how would you even do it?” he asked.

  Tattletale looked at Amy. “Do you think you could extract someone’s Gemma inside their Corona Pollentia without killing them?”

  Amy thought a moment about it. “Removing a Corona Pollentia or Gemma has been tried; it doesn’t appear to successfully remove the ability in the individual, short of just giving them so much brain damage they just can’t operate as a functional person.”

  Tattletale sighed loudly. “That’s not what I asked, Amy. Can you do it?”

  “I mean, yeah, sure, it wouldn’t be too hard, I could seal it in a membrane, extract it between the lobes, re-seal the skull. Five minutes, if that. Use the patient’s body fat to regrow a new one in its place, so they don’t have an actual hole in their head,” Amy said.

  “Okay. Here’s the plan. We start with that. What I want to do is to try and take the missing material from the vial out of Oliver’s body, and put it in Noelle’s, and see if that helps. If that doesn’t work, or doesn’t seem to, or there’s another issue, then we’ll go with plan B.” Tattletale turned to Amy. “You’ll try and extract as much of her body out of the mutation as possible, and we’ll take her for medical treatment right away to replace and treat anything missing. That work?”

  Amy turned to Trickster. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful or demanding or anything, but what are we getting out of this? I don’t mind helping someone who needs it, but is there something more?”

  Trickster grinned at Amy. “I’m so glad you asked! You get your mission handed to you on a silver platter. My team is in his base, Oliver stays with her. We can subdue Coil easily, Tattletale has flipped most of the mercs, the rest is a simple cleanup op, and then treatment time.”

  Yeah. That’s a good deal. I don’t want my family or the rest of them getting shot or hit by a stray bullet.

  “That sounds good to me. Miss Militia?” Amy asked.

  Miss Militia nodded. “Yes, you do this, and you won’t have any issues with us keeping up our side of the bargain. We might be able to help you out in other areas when this has calmed down.”

  “Oh?” Trickster asked, his dark eyes gleaming in the darkness.

  “Chances are extremely high that you can’t return home. We have a treaty with Earth Aleph that is very strict in terms of the agreement. Your side is specifically concerned about disease and invasions of other biological organisms. Since you’ve been here, you’re basically contaminated in their eyes. But we could get you papers and make it so you don’t have to live in the shadows, give you jobs, and if you’re not hiding, you’d be able to do things like video calls back home, since digital traffic is allowed.”

  Trickster bobbed his head as he listened. “So Coil was just playing us for fools the entire time, telling us he could get us home and cure Noelle?” He was looking at Lisa when he asked it.

  “Yes, he’s been lying to your face all along. Welcome to the club. He fucked us just as hard. There’s no physical traffic between worlds, barring another freak incident with the Simurgh, only reversed,” Tattletale explained with a huff.

  Trickster only grinned. “Well, good, then. That makes seeing him do the perp walk even sweeter.” He stuck his hand out to Miss Militia. “Rules say that deals have to be shaken on, you know how it is.”

  Miss Militia took one last pull of her cigarette, then ground the butt out on a broken shelf and pocketed it. She shook Trickster’s hand.

  “Let’s get this show on the road. I don’t want to wait too much longer,” Miss Militia said and headed for the exit.

  “I’ll head down, you all wait up here, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll bring Tall, Dark and Backstabby up for a visit,” Trickster said, and ambled off down the street.

  Amy, Miss Militia, and Tattletale moved to the main group, gave them a brief update on the new plan, and they, too, headed in the direction of Coil’s base. It was an underground complex and was located underneath a construction site in the downtown area.

  Miss Militia commented on “The snake being right under their doorstep.”

  Amy glanced around. They were only a handful of blocks from PHQ. They waited. Five minutes turned to ten, then to fifteen. People started getting antsy.

  Amy’s stomach was up in her throat. There were a lot of ifs and maybes in this plan, and that made her extremely nervous.

  She saw something in the sky in the distance, and the group of heroes and villains glanced upwards to watch a trail of fire carve through the air over their heads at a fairly low altitude. Then they were hit with an astonishingly loud crash of thunder and the terrible shriek of large jet engines.

  “Holy shit, a little warning!?” a dark-skinned girl Amy didn’t recognize cried out in the middle of the group.

  “Shh!” Grue hushed her.

  “Dude. The sky just exploded. I think silence isn’t of high concern right now,” she shot back.

  She had no more than got that out when they heard thunder again, but not nearly as loud and more distant.

  “Is there something else going on right now?” Grue asked while looking around at the other capes.

  “There’s a sortie being fought against the Nine currently,” Miss Militia told him. “Hold up, we have incoming.”

  Everyone straightened up and focused immediately.

  Trickster returned with another guy wearing a red and black costume, one that looked like football armor, with a bulky helmet, shoulder and chest padding, and that was covered in pockets and pouches. Between them was a very tall, rail-thin, nearly emaciated-looking man wearing a black Spandeez with a white snake winding over it from head to toe in segments. Six armed soldiers walked behind the three, hands on their guns and armored up.

  “Any issues?” Tattletale asked one of the soldiers. He shook his helmeted head. “No, ma’am.” She broke into that coy grin of hers and looked over and up at the snake man.

  “He surrendered when we confronted him with his mercs on our side,” Trickster said.

  “And the girl?” Miss Militia asked.

  “Safe, unharmed. Well–yeah, nobody has hurt her, but she’s obviously not in good health. Sleeping at the moment, and we have people watching her to make sure she stays safe,” Trickster said.

  The snake man cleared his throat. “Well played, Tattletale. Seems I underestimated the lengths you’d go to, to get what you wanted. You do know they’re not going to let you keep it, right?”

  “Oh yeah. All accounted for. But I won’t be hurting for money, and I get so many more puzzles to play with,” She grinned at him. “It was a pleasure doing business, Coil, but I think it’s time we parted ways.”

  He dipped his head to her. “Agreed, and likewise. Good luck in your new ventures.”

  Miss Militia motioned to Assault and Battery, who stepped forward and started securing Coil in linked hand and ankle cuffs. Miss Milita tapped her earpiece and murmured something into it, then she stepped over to Coil. “Your surrender and compliance are appreciated, Coil. It will be reflected on your record. I am sincerely hoping there aren’t explosives or other boobytraps waiting for us downstairs.”

  “I know, which is why I did it. My futures weren’t looking so good, so I figured it was best to soften the blow as much as possible. By choosing to surrender, I’m choosing to live, which is preferable to the alternatives. There is a large amount of explosives and other weapons in my bunker, but they shouldn’t be armed, at least, not by my orders. Do be careful around my employees; not all of them appreciate the U.S. Government. As for booby traps, there is a single, quite large one, but I believe you’re well aware of them.” Coil turned his blank face to look at Trickster.

  “Glory Girl, would you mind taking him to the roof of PHQ and dropping him off? It would save us time versus getting transports over here,” Miss Militia asked Vicky.

  “Hm? Oh, sure, no problem. And you want to stay with him, or head back?”

  “Just drop him off on the roof; there’s a large squad waiting to receive him, then head back.” Miss Militia stated.

  “We’ll buzz over with you and back, Glory Girl,” Lady Photon and Laserdream stepped forward. Vicky lifted Coil into a fireman carry, and the three heroes flew off.

  Miss Militia looked over to Tattletale. “What were the terms of the surrender agreement with the mercenaries?”

  “They keep their gear, armor, the weapons that were provided to them by Coil, which include some tinkertech attachments, the cash they have from their pay, plus their ‘severance bonus,’ shall we say,” Tattletale said.

  Miss Militia made a face at the mention of tinkertech weapons. “Please tell me you don’t have heavy weapons in your collection,” she told the mercenary that Tattletale had spoken to. “And how many people are we talking about?”

  “A Company, ma’am. Hundred and twenty men. Could you define heavy weapons for me, so I could give you an accurate answer?”

  Miss Militia pulled her green and black, slightly glowing pistol from the holster, and not only defined, but literally demonstrated exactly what she meant, the weapon flipping between more than half a dozen different, and terrifying-looking things.

  Amy didn’t have the faintest clue what most of it was, outside of cheesy action and horror movies from Earth Aleph, but she knew that she didn’t like any of it.

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re light on air defense systems, but we have a solid quantity of heavy machine guns, AT launchers, grenade launchers, and a handful of infantry mortars,” the merc answered when she was done with her demonstration.

  Miss Militia tapped her cheek with her thumb while she was intermittently pressing on her earpiece with her index finger and talking quietly into it. After a moment and a few exchanges, she straightened up and turned back to the merc. “We can make special exceptions for the illegal small arms, as I’m assuming those weapons aren’t ATF-registered and licensed.”

  “Correct,” the merc responded.

  “The heavy weapons we can’t let go, along with the corresponding ammunition.”

  The soldier-for-hire looked at Tattletale. “This is not the terms of the agreement we had.”

  She held up an index finger and leaned over to whisper with Miss Militia. After they’d spoken, she asked, “How would you feel about selling them for a fair market value?”

  “Money is money, ma’am. If we’re being compensated for them, it’s all equitable. Those being provided to us were part of our negotiated compensation with our former employer.”

  Tattletale clapped her palms together and smiled. “Great! That settles that! Please separate out the stuff you’re taking from the stuff we are purchasing, and get your people ready to move out. We’ll do a quick run-through inspection of your materials and supplies, and then you’ll be paid out. I’m going to assume the vehicles are yours?”

  “Yes, ma’am, and we’ll begin at once.” He snapped off a crisp salute and headed back with his other men.

  Amy stepped closer to the two to snoop while they waited for their three other heroes to return. There were a few more explosions in the distance while they’d been talking, but it seemed to have calmed down.

  “...And how do you plan on paying for the heavy weapons you just agreed to purchase? You know those aren’t cheap, right?” Miss Milita was asking Tattletale.

  Man, having juiced-up hearing is going to be so useful.

  “Coil keeps between twenty and thirty million in his safe downstairs. I doubt all of it is going to cost more than a few million, maybe eight, tops. I’ve seen most of what they’re talking about, and I’m not going to let them swindle us on the prices,” Tattletale said.

  “And let me guess…” Miss Militia started to say, but was cut off by Lisa.

  “Yes. Please. Do you really think so little of me that I wouldn’t already know the access codes to everything in the base?” Tattletale scoffed.

  “Mm. I suppose having a Thinker on the team would be a nice change of pace,” Miss Militia mused.

  Vicky, Crystal, and Aunt Sarah all landed and gave a thumbs-up to Miss Militia.

  “Alright, this way, please! We have one last thing to deal with, then we’re basically done here,” Tattletale said.

  Some looks were shared around the group.

  “I realize that you all expected a giant firefight, explosions, and carnage, but are you really going to complain, like we haven’t had enough of that in the city recently?” Tattetale asked loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Hell no, I’m not! Are you kidding me? I might actually be able to go get a full night’s sleep after having a hot shower?” Crystal said loudly, to amused chuckles.

  Trickster walked over to Tattletale and said something to her under his breath.

  “Oh, yes. So, most of you know already, but there is a member of the Travellers who needs medical attention, and her condition is… fairly extreme. We’re going to try and treat her first thing, but she’s got serious mood swings, so we want most of you all to keep out of sight, keep quiet, and let us handle it, but be ready should anything happen. She isn’t always in control of her lower body, so if anything does happen, avoid harming her on top!”

  They moved out. A large storm drain tunnel was at the base of one of the building skeletons, with an extremely heavy-duty metal grate installed in it, with doors built into the grate. They were open, and the lights were on in the tunnel. It was large enough to be able to drive a flatbed in and out of, wide, and with tall ceilings.

  The large group worked their way down the completely dry tunnel, the sandbags around the perimeter of the construction site keeping the water out quite effectively. A marked utility access point was on one side of the wall, with the door propped open. They entered through that door, and down several flights of stairs, down another hallway, this time one with surveillance equipment mounted in it, through heavy steel doors, and into what looked like an underground vault or shelter.

  In fact, it might have been an actual Endbringer shelter, but it had a different layout than the ones Amy had seen. Far more open and spacious. Plenty of uniformed and camouflaged men were moving crates and boxes around. The place looked extensive, like it could have easily housed more than twice the number of people Coil had down here already, which was probably around a hundred and fifty people, maybe?

  They were led down a large corridor and, upon rounding a corner, what looked like bank vault doors, only… much bigger. There was an intercom and video system built into the access point on the wall next to the doors.

  Tattletale, Miss Militia, and Trickster turned around. Trickster and Tattletale conversed briefly, then Tattletale addressed the group. “Okay. Only Weld, Panacea, Trickster, and I are going in, so we don’t make her anxious. The rest of you, please just relax out here for the time being, but keep it quiet.”

  Trickster cleared his throat. “We’re going to leave the vault doors open, and Miss Militia is ready to close them, if needed. There is a very strong odor inside, so you might want to cover your noses.”

  Grue spoke up next, “I can shroud all of us out here in my darkness. It will dampen any sounds, light, and even smells. I can see and hear through it fine, so I can drop it right away if needed.”

  “Grue, that is an excellent idea. Let’s go ahead and do that, please, and then we’ll open up once everyone who is staying is in,” Lisa said.

  “Okay, no problem. I’m told this feels sort of like oily, slightly thick air, since I don’t experience it the same way others do. It helps if you hold hands; it’s a bit like a sensory deprivation chamber and can be disorienting after a few minutes otherwise. Just a suggestion.”

  The groups separated out the people coming and going. New Wave linked hands, as did the Protectorate and Wards. Grue and his sister stood next to one another, and he enveloped the group in his smoke. Trickster stepped over to the intercom and control panel. He adjusted his costume, then keyed the intercom.

  “Noelle? Oliver? How are we doing tonight?”

  The speaker crackled, and there was rustling and shuffling on the other side. “Hey, Krouse. We’re doing alright in here, same old sort of stuff. What’s up?” The voice was male, but soft-spoken.

  “Well. We’ve had a bit of a party out here without you. I hope you two weren’t disturbed, but that’s not the big news. Noelle, are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah…” There was more shuffling, louder this time. “I’m here,” the voice was louder now, but the girl who was speaking sounded exhausted. “Please tell me it’s good news, I don’t know how much more waiting I can take. I’m so hungry.”

  Trickster, Krouse, glanced over at Amy, Weld, and Tattletale briefly. Turning back to the intercom, he broke into a huge grin and pressed the button. You could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke. “Good news? How about amazing news? I’ve got a few people here to help you, Noelle. Including the best healer in the entire world. They, this little group, have a good feeling that they can get you all straightened out, fix your power, and make it so you don’t have to suffer any more.”

  The intercom was quiet, only the sound of shuffling coming through for long moments. Finally, Noelle asked, “Really? Is it finally time, and it’s not just more people poking and telling me to wait more?” She sounded slightly less exhausted as she asked, but also like she wasn’t sure what she was hearing was real or not.

  “Really, really. They’re standing right here with me. Can we come in and visit you and get started right away?” Krouse asked.

  “Um, how many? You know I get nervous around people.”

  “Me, plus three others. One who we think your power won’t work on, so no issues there, one person who’s going to stand back to watch, she’s a Thinker, to try and troubleshoot any issues if they come up. Then the healer, Panacea. She’s in this pretty cool suit that’s made out of bones and bug parts!”

  “Okay. I’ll do my best not to have any accidents. I’m ready,” Noelle said. A moment later, Oliver spoke up. “I’m ready too? Should I stay here?”

  “Yes, actually, we need you as part of the treatment, Oliver. I’m going to open the doors, one moment.”

  Trickster punched a long code into the terminal, but paused before hitting the send key. He turned to the rest of the group. “Just remember, she can’t control how she looks, and it’s pretty intense. She also sometimes loses control of her lower body, the mutated part.” He got a deathly serious look on his face. “If any accidents happen, and someone winds up getting cloned, you kill them immediately, on sight. I am not joking around. They’re not people, they’re abominations, and they’re unbelievably dangerous.”

  Weld frowned. “I don’t know if I’m comfort–”

  Trickster shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Listen to me, we’ve had this happen many times at this point. The clones are pure evil. They literally only want to hurt and murder people, and they’re as smart as you are, and they have all your powers. Don’t fuck around. You have a few seconds from the time they’re spit out to deal with them. Kill them.”

  “When you say pure evil…” Weld trailed off.

  “I saw a mother get cloned, the clone came out, and murdered all her children in cold blood before we could stop her. It was eating them. Now do you get it?” Trickster’s voice was strained.

  Weld swallowed and flexed his jaw, then he nodded. “Understood. I won’t hold back if that happens.”

  “Good, because you’re the only person here who can even risk getting close to her, other than the healer.” Trickster turned to Amy. “I hope that suit can protect you from it. Please tell me you can use your power from inside?”

  Amy cleared her throat. “Yes, I can. And the suit only has a little bit of my DNA in the gloves, so I can use my power through them, but it’s partial. The rest of the suit is from dozens of different organisms.”

  Trickster pressed the button, and yellow caution lights lit up in the hallway. A chiming sound repeated from the terminal, and the doors made several loud thunk sounds before starting to open. It was slow, and Trickster hit a button to stop the sequence when there was about a two-foot gap between the doors. The electrical buzz of the motors went silent.

  He motioned to Miss Militia and showed her a few buttons. “Open, close, emergency close. We’ll shout if any help is needed. You can turn the cameras on and watch from out here, too.” He turned back to the rest of them. Tattletale was fanning her face and looked mildly nauseous. Weld was seemingly nonplussed. Amy only caught a slight odor through her suit’s filters, but it was foul. Rotting meat, blood, disease, and feces. Krouse broke into a huge, cheery smile, and didn’t even look like he was faking it. He seemed genuinely happy.

  He led them through the narrow gap in the doors. Amy was shocked to see that the doors had to be at least a meter thick. This inner sanctum of the bunker looked like it was built to survive concentrated bombing, or something.

  The inside of the room was a big, empty vault. The ceiling was probably thirty or forty feet high, and the room was huge, the size of a sports field. Everything was bare concrete, gray and bland, and huge square pillars were spaced every twenty feet or so throughout. The room was softly lit by recessed lighting, and two-thirds of the lights were off, from what Amy could see. There was a small table and some chairs, a little bit of canned food, and a bunch of bottles of water. The table had a number of decks of cards and board games on it.

  She brought her attention to the two occupants. A shorter boy with straight blonde hair in a bowl cut below his ears. Despite the hairstyle, it seemed like it worked for him. He had a soft face, with plush lips and sparkling green eyes. He had on sneakers, sweatpants, and a loose shirt. If Amy were to pick a description, it’d be maybe cherubic or innocent. He didn’t look like he would or could harm a fly.

  Then there was Noelle. She was a slim, willowy woman with brown hair that was greasy and limp around her neck. Her lips were cracked, her light blue eyes were sunken and surrounded by deep, dark rings and bags. Looking at her face, Amy was reminded of patients she used to frequent in cancer wards. She looked deeply unhealthy and ill. She was wearing a light-colored graphic tee that was crusty-looking with sweat stains around her neck, armpits, and chest.

  From just above her butt and down, she was attached to a twisted and warped mass of all different types of animals and limbs, and there were numerous eyes and mouths all over, as well as a few complete heads, including a wolf’s head, a horse’s head, and a bull’s head. Entirely too many legs and limbs supported the massive bulk of her lower half, ending in all manner of things, from hooves to paws, tentacles, claws… You name it. Her lower half was the size of a large van or pickup truck when standing up. It was covered in different kinds of skins and furs, and it also looked incredibly unhealthy, tumorous, with cracked and split skin and scales in places, leaking pus and dark blood.

  Amy watched as tentacles would scoop up the leaking fluids and feed them into the mouths all over the thing’s form. The eyes of Noelle’s lower half looked manic, crazed, and angry, from what Amy could tell.

  This is like… if some amateur bio-tinker had tried to replicate Apex. So many recognizable different species, crammed together, but it’s all warped and wrong. She must have some kind of regeneration in effect to even keep the thing alive with the way it is.

  Trickster handled introductions and explained the thought process and what they were aiming to do. Questions cropped up when it came to the bit about Oliver.

  “So you’re telling me I have to eat part of Oliver’s brain? Doesn’t that sound… messed up?”

  “It is, but only a little bit,” Tattletale said. “Everyone here is consenting, it’s a life-saving medical treatment, not like you’re doing it for fun, or something. Nobody will ever talk about it when we leave here, and we won’t judge you for getting medical attention.”

  “I um, I’m going to use my ability to modify it for you, so it won’t be gross,” Amy explained. “It’ll be about the size of a smaller grape, just swallow it, and we’ll see if that corrects what we believe is the issue. We have other treatments in mind, if that doesn’t work, too.”

  Oliver spoke up. “They said it’s not going to hurt at all, and I want to do anything I can to try and help you, Noelle. Please let them try and help you? I really don’t mind at all. I just want to see you happy and healthy again. All of us do.” He smiled at her.

  Noelle choked back some tears and looked at Trickster. He nodded, smiled, and gave her two thumbs up, from the position they were all in, a good fifteen to twenty feet back from her.

  “Okay…” She sighed. “It’s going to hurt like it did last time, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy said. “This hasn’t been done before, so we don’t know what to expect. Try and keep your head clear and think about the positive future you’re going to have, going out, hanging with your friends, going to the beach, stuff like that. Having a positive mindset and good goals helps more than you might think!” Amy didn’t have to fake the positivity in her voice; she was really hoping this poor girl was going to have a bright future ahead of her.

  Amy walked over to Oliver, who took a seat at the table. She spotted a few styrofoam cups on the table, sitting next to a two-liter bottle of soda. She took a clean one in her hand and stood next to Oliver. “Okay, this won’t hurt at all. You might feel a weird tingle with your power, and then on your scalp, but that’ll be it. Won’t take more than a moment. Ready?”

  He nodded. Amy placed her hand on top of his head, where she’d be extracting the piece of his brain. She reached into his body with her power and started to work. Numbing his scalp and skull in the immediate location she was going to work in, she told the bone to separate and open, leaving a small flap of skin attached to act as a hinge. She flipped it open, a small opening no bigger than her thumbnail.

  Next was extracting the Gemma. She could feel particles of something in it, super finely ground minerals of some sort, inorganic. It was organized like a hub with branches spreading out inside the tiny organ. She made a little bit of breathing room in Oliver’s skull so his brain had space to shift, and she pulled the entire Gemma up, between the lobes of his brain and out through the top. The sealed meninges surrounding the brain parted to only allow the Gemma to pass through, and resealed. As carefully as possible, she picked it up with the sterilized surfaces of her leather gloves and placed it inside the cup.

  It was tiny, between the size of a marble and a small grape. It, like the rest of the brain, was mostly fat. She thought of something similar that would be tasty.

  “Hey, Noelle?” She asked loudly. “Do you like chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla ice cream?”

  “Um, chocolate?” Noelle asked, confused.

  The organ melted into a thin brown liquid that would taste just like chocolate ice cream in the cup. That done, Amy pulled some resources from elsewhere in Oliver’s body and reformed an identical Gemma where the old one had been, put the bone cork back in his skull, re-filled the small voids she’d carved out in his skull, sealed everything, and sterilized it.

  “How do you feel, Oliver?” She asked the boyish-looking fellow.

  He looked up at her faceplate and blinked. “I feel fine. When are you starting?”

  She laughed. “All done! Told you it would be easy!”

  Oliver’s face lit up with a bright smile, and it was a beautiful sight in the dim, dingy vault. “Wow, Noelle, she’s super good! I didn’t even know she did anything at all!” Amy stepped back, and he stood up, grabbing one of those extended-reach grabber arm things that seniors use off the table.

  “That cup has it? Let me take it over to her, we use these things to play games and for her to eat with, so she doesn’t have to risk accidentally making skin contact,” Oliver explained.

  “Okay, but whatever you do, be careful, and don’t spill it. We only have one, and I really don’t want to have to crawl on the floor and put it back in the cup,” Amy cautioned.

  Oliver nodded seriously, took the cup carefully in the grip of the claw arm, and shuffled over to Noelle. She looked a little anxious, but also cautiously optimistic.

  Good. Let’s pray this works; otherwise, unhooking her from that mass is going to be nerve-wracking. I don’t want to get anywhere near that thing.

  The beast Noelle was attached to knelt, then flopped onto the floor, and she still had to bend over and reach to bridge the gap. Oliver extended the cup up, and she took it, looking cautiously into the cup, and giving it an experimental sniff. That got several blinks out of her.

  “It smells just like melted ice cream,” she muttered.

  “I try my best,” Amy said with a laugh. “Oliver, please stand back from her at a safe distance before she drinks it. And Noelle, you have to drink all of it in one go, one quick gulp, okay? It’s not much, so it should be really easy.”

  “Um, sure, and I’m also starving, and it smells so good.”

  Amy noticed as she moved that the girl had a rivulet of saliva seeping out of the corner of her mouth, which caught and reflected the overhead lighting.

  She threw back the cup like she was taking a shot of liquor and gulped it down in one motion.

  Noelle licked her lips. “That… Really wasn’t so bad. How long do you think before it will–”

  She clutched at her abdomen and doubled over.