Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 75
🕑 Added 2023-02-22 02:26:52 +0000 UTC“Ask me,” Dinah’s tired, pained voice demands from the other end of the line.
Dinah Alcott’s need for perceived self-reliance—
I know. I know, but it’s still a shitty day to tackle this.
“Dinah, I—”
“Ask me!”
I close my eyes.
I close my eyes and try not to dwell on the ever-growing throbbing in my temples as I withdraw from the noise surrounding me. From noise in all the senses of the word, not just the auditory, as Colin, Dragon, and Hannah make their rushed preparations behind me, as Taylor keeps squeezing my right hand whenever she thinks I need the support, as a wireless headset gets uncomfortably warm over my left ear, as two rows of three monitors mounted on mechanical arms flash divided images and videos at me, all of them screaming that they may contain that one nugget of information that could turn the tides of the coming battle.
Maybe they do.
And… And I want to find out. I need to find out. For many reasons, some of them noble, some of them having to do with ridding the world of one of the waking nightmares that have haunted us for years, slowly dooming us all to a bitter, pathetic end.
What could be more heroic than wanting to slay a monster, after all?
But… But I am Lisa Wilbourn, yes, but I also am Tattletale.
And Sarah Livsey.
Poor, pathetic, sad Sarah. The weak girl who broke after her brother’s death, the girl who needed to know the reason for something so senseless badly enough that it shattered her, brought her to the lowest point a human being can subjectively experience.
Yes, that’s pleonasm: all experience is subjective.
Trigger events, doubly so.
Because Taylor broke after a campaign of orchestrated harassment, torture, and attempted murder. Rachel broke at the last remaining thing she loved calling for her to save it from certain, cruel death. Alec broke at… at things that shouldn’t have ever happened, that should have broken him long before they got to that point.
And I broke at somebody I loved dearly dying without me knowing why.
So, yes, Power rushes through my mind and senses, absorbing the information available only to PRT and Protectorate officials and establishing impossible connections about Behemoth’s tactics, motives, and physiology even as I try to learn about all the powers that we can bring to this fight so that we can coordinate something that is usually barely above pointing at the enemy and yelling “charge!”
Yet I know it will not be enough. That I don’t have the time nor the intelligence needed to make that one brilliant, unbeatable plan that would finally solve this once and for all.
I know that, and that knowledge brings me far closer to what Sarah was at her lowest than I ever wanted to be when I called myself Lisa.
I open my eyes, and the world rushes back in, my tight shoulders resting on Colin’s stupidly comfortable chair as Taylor’s silk-clad thumb traces soft circles on the back of my hand.
One of the quadrants on the monitor up and to my left tells me that Flechette is currently missing after a clash with March.
Fuck.
No silver bullet. Just… the overly elaborate plan.
“Dinah… One more question and you’ll break,” I tell her, remembering the state she was in when I finally (too late) got her out of Coil’s grasp.
“I can do it. You are doing it. You are pushing—”
“Not as much as you are. You burn brighter, sis, but you also burn faster—”
“Don’t call me ‘sis.’ Not now, not when I know you’re using it to manipulate me—”
“Of course I’m manipulating you! Of course I want to spare you weeks of agonic pain! Of course I want my adoptive sister to—”
Taylor grasps my cheeks and forces me to look into citrine lenses that are close enough that I can see the texture of the irises whose seafoam green is currently hidden from me.
“Let her fight, Liz. Let her,” she says, the mouth behind a thin layer of silk turned into a shifting darkness that draws me back to the moment.
“Please,” Dinah whimpers in my ear. “I… I will be hurt, yes, I know I will, but… But if not… if I don’t hurt and somebody dies, the pain will be so much worse…” my little sister begs through a headset made by Colin, one with such an accurate portrayal of the human voice going through it, enhanced through Tinker heuristics to make up for the noise in the data introduced by regular phones, that it feels like my sister is a small ball of warmth, sadness, and desperation cradled against my chest as her trembling words are whispered straight into my ear.
I remember a leather sofa on a late afternoon, sleeping under a soft bamboo blanket with a girl huddled beneath it and atop me.
Trusting me.
And I, once again, close my eyes.
But for entirely different reasons.
Just… one last question. And it could be a selfish one. I could ask her how likely it is that Colin, Hannah, and Dragon will make it back safely. How likely it is that Brian and Alec will survive. How much I will lose today.
I could. I shouldn’t, but I could.
And the temptation, one that Sarah clings to desperately, is there.
But I… also am Lisa.
And Lisa has grown up quite a bit in the past… too short a time for everything that’s happened.
So I open back my eyes and look straight at the monitor in the middle of the lower row of monitors, showing me four videos of Behemoth reacting to different injuries of varying gruesomeness, up to having its lone eye torn open by Alexandria’s bare fist as the radioactive fires melted the costume of the most powerful Brute in the world.
Of the most powerful human Brute in the world.
Power crackles in my mind, and I speak almost in synchronicity with him.
“Behemoth’s injury threshold before retreat varies. Injury threshold seemingly proportionate to the impact of a defeat at its hands. Behemoth fights harder and longer when its victory will hurt us more. Behemoth allows greater risks according to the importance of its goal—no. Behemoth’s performance impairment due to wounds inconsistent. Behemoth’s performance underaffected by loss of sensory organs. Sensory organs non-functional. Behemoth’s loss of performance feigned. Behemoth performing… Behemoth’s capabilities greater than surmised. Behemoth pretends to lose. Behemoth pretends the need for retreat. Behemoth never at risk of termination from injuries sustained so far. Behemoth… Behemoth… Likelihood of Velocity surviving until tomorrow if ordered to stay just outside Behemoth’s killing aura and under Colin Wallis’ signal shielding tech?”
“Ninety-eight point seven percent,” Dinah immediately answers.
And then, softly, slowly, she breaks into whimpering tears.
“Thank you. Thank you, Dinah. You have done good. You have done great. You are a hero, Dinah, as much as anyone who will go out today,” I try to tell her, trusting the tone of my voice will carry a meaning I’m not sure words can. Not with how much pain she feels as the kaleidoscope of her visions shatters around her.
“I… More… I could do more…” she begs to a power that isn’t as kind as mine.
“You will do more. Someday, you will do enough to change the world. To save the world. Today… you may have saved us. Now trust me to fight the rest of the battle for you,” I tell her, gently and softly, like Mom used to do when I was still small enough for her to hold me and for me to believe that would ever make a difference.
Her phone rustles, and Power is so alert I know I will hear Dinah’s father before his rough voice reaches me.
“Kill it,” he says, almost breaking down before hanging up to take care of the daughter that has been incapacitated by a monster on the other side of the world that has never seen her.
And never will, if I have anything to say about it.
I quickly browse through each of the opened windows on each of the six monitors arranged in front of me, looking for that last flash of insight that makes something click, that dislodges something as vital as what Dinah just confirmed in as roundabout a way as her blind spots forced us to.
But I don’t see anything, and an imperfect plan is better than no plan at all, so I squeeze Taylor’s hand once more, her warmth seeping into me through the softness of the unguarded palm of her silk gloves, and I turn around the swiveling chair Colin is gonna have to give me after all this is over.
In front of me, three of the most powerful heroes in the world gear up for a battle to the death.
My heart clenches, and I resist the urge to jump up and rush to them. To hug Hannah and Colin and look at Dragon’s avatar, to beg them to please, please, don’t die on me, not when I’ve finally found them, not when I’ve finally started to feel things I should never have had to discard when I fled the house that was no longer a home, and…
I almost cry. I do.
Instead, I smirk.
“Well, who’s ready to hear how to beat an Endbringer?” I say.
Dragon rolls her eyes on the monitor above Colin’s right, cobalt blue pauldron; Hannah shakes her head in fond exasperation, sending her bandana rippling patriotically as she keeps fiddling with the right vambrace of the black exoskeleton she’s wearing for the first time, and Colin…
Colin looks straight at me, a skeptical, sardonic eyebrow arched, and…
Colin Wallis’ emotional attachment to Lisa Wilbourn—
Right.
Colin looks at me and understands.
The sappy bastard.
***
“I want Clockblocker and Vista right here, understand? This is the place that will allow her to act fastest, and he will have an unobstructed view of the battlefield that will allow him to act defensively in case they need urgent extraction—and I mean urgent. Vista dying could very well be a victory condition for Behemoth—”
“Stop focusing on the details and give me an overarching view of the plan,” Colin says curtly, but not… Not irritated, just instructing me.
Poorly, yes, but intention matters.
So I hold back on the biting remark and try to order my swirling thoughts, to focus on the main threads of the multiple, overlapping plans that Power and I have come up with.
“All right,” I slowly say, drawing the words out as I still line up the next ones. “There are multiple victory conditions, and I have tried to make it so all of them can be reached through the same set of actions. We can deprive him of his objective, making him flee after a comparatively short battle. We can damage him enough that he accepts it as a loss for his arbitrary reasons and flees. We can stall him until Scion shows up. Or we can kill him.”
“Yes. We can do all those things. Ideally,” Colin says, an edge of annoyance actually coming up on his tone.
Heh. Still got it.
“Right. Vista and Clockblocker are instrumental in the first part, and I want a teleporter stationed with them at all times. As to the other objectives…”
I clasp the synthetic leather-covered armrests of the chair tight enough that my fingers hurt, and I pull myself up, standing on unsteady legs over a metallic floor that gleams in almost aquatic waves under me.
In front of me, three heroes look at me with a flash of concern that makes me bite my lip.
Behind me, Taylor clicks on the icon I asked her to for my dramatic, villain’s plot reveal, and the six monitors at my back show a single, cohesive image.
A map.
“Dinah and I have confirmed that this town will be China’s most radioactive population center come tomorrow morning. It’s called Sandouping.
“It’s famous for being the site of the Three Gorges Damn. The largest electricity-generating plant in the world.
“And, hopefully, it will soon become famous for being the place where an Endbringer was first killed.”
***
They are ready.
They are ready, and time is short.
The CUI has caved into the pressure the PRT has applied after my early warning and has confirmed where the attack will happen, and heroes all over the globe (even if some of them are villains) are being teleported there to wait for the monster to finally show up once his audience has gathered.
Theatrics. What kind of egomaniac would value them so much?
“I’ll come back,” he says, his bare hand briefly resting on my shoulder before he turns the gesture into something else as he wraps his arm around me and pulls me so hard against his stupidly non-huggable armor that it almost hurts.
Theatrics.
I return the hug, both my arms around ceramic plates coated in paint with a metallic hue, my cheek pressed against reassuring, solid cool armor that is going far, far away.
And I, leaning so hard on Tattletale’s persona that my façade almost cracks, don’t cry.
Because of theatrics.
“You better,” I mumble, almost unintelligibly. “Otherwise, I’ll have to swear deathly revenge on a hero-killing machine, and that never ends well.”
“Hey,” Hannah says with a soft smile that thrums through the almost whisper, “it’s our job, you know? To save the day—”
Her reassuring speech would’ve been cool and dramatic if not for the panicked ‘eek’ that escapes her lips as I clasp the bottom of her bandana and drag her into the hug.
“Shut up,” I tell her, not quite angrily. “Stop raising death flags and just… Just come back to make me a horde of pseudo-siblings for me to spoil rotten, all right?”
She goes ramrod straight.
But she also returns my hug without further comment, so I guess I can start coming up with names that will be perfectly innocuous at first blush.
It will be hard with a surname like ‘Wallis,’ but nothing but the best for the future second-triggers.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Dragon reassures me from the monitor I’ve seen her use the most in the lab, the one hanging from a segmented arm that starts above Colin’s bike and ends up holding her above the three of us like a moving, stained glass window.
“Just one? Don’t disappoint me; I know you’re also invested in the baby horde idea. Think of all the adorable Tinkertech plushies,” I say with a smile and a wink that would get hidden with a black bar on any public TV station, Dragon’s sudden and violent blush somehow helping me keep the mask up for just a tad longer.
Then, with a last squeeze around my arms, Colin steps back from me and mounts on his modified bike, his broad back gleaming under the diffuse, shifting, sterile light of his workshop before Hannah mounts right behind him and hides him partially from me, the dull carbon sheen of her new exoskeleton replacing bright cobalt blue.
Colin brings up his right vambrace, his fingers flying over it in what he thinks to be efficient gestures and I know to be just a power quirk that will never stop being annoying while also making me heart-achingly fond of the annoyance.
At his command, the cabinets set in the metallic wall in front of him recede before the wall splits open along a diagonal line as two perfectly symmetrical halves slide away to show a gleaming tunnel with a line painted down the middle that is just the right width for his bike’s front wheel to drive into.
His hands go back to the handlebars, and he presses a series of buttons that make something almost inaudibly thrum, the engine for his S-class grade vehicle feeding off a miniaturized nuclear reactor that is decades away from what mainstream science can manage.
Then he twists his hand forward and, without even the dramatic roar of a furious machine about to face death itself, with merely the sharp noise of still air being split apart…
Armsmaster rides.
I… I take a moment to catch my breath. To let myself just… just feel all the things I’ve desperately tried not to since I stepped in here and they convinced me to let them be who they are.
Taylor’s hands are on my shoulders, and, as the wall of Colin’s lab reforms itself, neatly ordered cabinets once more in their correct place, she pulls me toward the chair still facing the now absent heroes.
I let her guide me as I all but slump on it, boneless and drained of almost all of my energy despite the fight still needing to be fought. Despite everything I still have to do.
And Kid Win, still fiddling with whatever it is he needs to fiddle with on a coms array that will guide the fates of heroes on the other side of the world, quietly turns from the workbench protruding from the wall to my right and, quietly, solemnly, and sympathetically, tells me:
“I didn’t know he had a daughter. You must be proud of him.”
I… blink at him.
And then, for the next five minutes, I laugh until my sides hurt.
Even if he’s right.
