Since the advent of parahumans, Earth-Bet had changed a great deal. Intermittent contact with Earth-Aleph had allowed those curious to figure out just how much, although most didn't bother, knowing that it would only made them more depressed about the state of the world they were, as far as they knew, stuck on until the day they died.
Nowhere were those differences more obvious than in those regions which had been surrendered to the monsters which had risen with the coming of parahuman powers. Over the years, as Humanity came to terms with its new, lower place on the food chain, a series of shared protocols had come into being as nations shared information on how best to deal with beings and phenomena which could not be eliminated or stopped – could only be contained. Even as countries continued to jockey for resources, influence, and prestige, such knowledge was shared more or less freely, out of a tacit understanding that none of them could afford to have their neighbours slip in containing their own home-grown horrors.
Thus were the Quarantine Sites created. Places where the greatest evils of the age could be kept out of sight, so that Mankind could keep on pretending it hadn't lost control of its homeworld, wasn't slowly being pushed out of territory it had held since the last great predators had been driven away or wiped out completely.
And among all Quarantine Sites, none were so feared as those left in the Simurgh's wake. They were scattered across the world, the last lingering legacy of the Hopekiller. After the first time the Simurgh had descended from orbit and brought madness and ruin to Lausanne, the people of the world had adapted quickly, but no matter what they tried, no way to save her victims had been found, leading to the erection of the first Quarantine Sites.
Madison, Wisconsin was the only such Quarantine Site in the United States. Less than two years ago, the Endbringer had descended upon the state capital, and despite the best efforts of the Triumvirate and the local capes, she hadn't been pushed back soon enough to keep her from twisting the entire population into ziz-bombs.
The debate over whether it would be better to simply raze the entire city and kill everyone inside had raged ever since. Even if you put ethics aside, the concern was that the Simurgh would have planned for it somehow, and introducing a lot of powerful explosives to the vicinity of a Simurgh plot was obviously a terrible idea. All it would take was some parahuman with the power to redirect the bombs, and you could lose Washington. As for nuclear weapons, that didn't even bear mentioning – those had the potential to cause the end of the world all on their own, let alone when brought in proximity to the Hopekiller's schemes.
And Madison had a lot of strange capes inside it, far more than any other city the Simurgh had hit for some reason. So the city had endured, even as it was surrounded by high walls and the best surveillance technology Dragon could put together.
The soldiers stationed there to enforce the quarantine were regularly replaced, as were the capes. Garrisoning a Quarantine Site was often used as punishment duty by the Protectorate, but when it came to Madison, the rules were different. No one, not even the most hardened PRT veteran, was allowed to spend more than a six-months period on that duty, and even that was only for a select few people who had passed even more stringent psych-evals than the rest.
In addition to ensuring nobody got in or out, the base was also tasked with monitoring the regular deliveries of foodstuffs to the population inside, as well as protection for the work crews who made sure the water pipes were still functioning. Both food and water were laced with contraceptive drugs; they might not have been able to save the kids who had been in the city when it had fallen, but they could keep the Simurgh from breeding her thralls, at least. And the Tinker who'd worked on the chemicals swore they couldn't be used for anything else.
While stationed here, you had to ignore the pleadings from people who looked and sounded normal begging to be let out, all while watching out for signs of a cape being hidden among them, ready to strike with some new ability you couldn't anticipate. Ignore the screams from the ones being slowly tortured to death from deeper inside, outside the reach of the sniper towers. Ignore that voice in your head wondering whether you were turning into a monster simply by being here, and whether that was part of the Simurgh's plans.
Morale was always at rock-bottom, but in recent days, it had started to tentatively improve. The death of the Hopekiller hadn't freed the people inside Madison, but the knowledge that, at the very least, no more people would be turned into ziz-bombs, had granted some solace to those who stood wardens over this slice of Hell on Earth.
Vigilance, on the other hand, remained as high as ever. It was rare, but from time to time the ziz-bombs would try to break out. It never worked, and it was thought the point wasn't actually to escape, but instead to start some kind of chain reaction in accordance to the Simurgh's schemes. Now that the Hopekiller was dead, they didn't whether that would change, but they still needed to be prepared.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
So, when Lasombra suddenly appeared in the middle of the base a couple of hours after nightfall, it only took three seconds for him to be noticed by a patrol of soldiers, who immediately activated their radios (reinforced through Dragon-made Tinkertech to be immune to EMP and as many forms of jamming as possible) and called out :
"Intruder !"
The Endkiller didn't react as over a dozen firearms were pointed in his direction. To their credit, the soldiers' hands didn't tremble, even though they knew damn well how little their weapons would do if it came to a fight. He merely stood there, leaning on his cane, waiting.
Within a couple of minutes, a man whose uniform bore a colonel's rank stripes strode in. Like every man and woman in the base, he looked stressed and sleep-deprived, but he still walked with the sharpness and precision a lifetime of military service had ingrained into him.
"At ease, men," he barked to the soldiers still pointing their weapons at Lasombra. "I was warned about our friend's visit. This is all officially approved, although way above your pay grade. Get back to your patrol."
"Yes, sir !" They replied immediately, although they still cast a mix of wary and awed looks at the Endkiller as they departed.
"Follow me, please," the colonel told Lasombra, who nodded and fell behind him.
The officer and the cape went up one of the observation towers, the soldiers manning it saluting the colonel and staring at the Endkiller with wide eyes. Once they were atop it, they both looked out over the wall and toward the ruined city within.
"There it is," said the colonel. "Madison. Once the proud capital of Wisconsin, now a prison for the lost souls who were driven mad by the Simurgh."
"HOW MANY ?" the shadows asked.
"Hard to get an exact count, but upward of ten thousand. You really think you can free them all ?"
"YES."
The colonel grunted. "Huh. You sound confident at least. I hope you are right. I got word the relief crews have been mustered a few miles away; once you are done, just pop back out and let me know and I will call them in."
"UNDERSTOOD."
"Good luck in there," the colonel said. "May God be with you."
Lasombra nodded, and melted back into the shadows. The colonel suppressed a shiver at the sight, then brought up his radio :
"All units, this is Colonel Morgan speaking, M/S code omega-purple-six-three-alpha-seven-tango-nine. Lasombra has just entered the Quarantine Site. Don't panic if you start getting static on the surveillance cameras."
The drone didn't have a name. It hadn't had a name for years, because it did not need one to fulfil its function. It merely moved according to its programming, going through the motions of feeding and cleaning itself in order to continue performing its assigned function.
The drone's function was simple. It moved through the ruins of the city, gathering materials that it brought to the lair the drones had built in a large underground space close to the center of the zone in which the drone existed. There, other drones took the materials and used them to build something – the drone didn't know what, because it didn't need to. It worked from sunrise to sunset, then went to feed and maintain itself, before doing it all over again.
Once every seven days, it went to the edge of the zone, right on the line past which it would be shot, and made noises it didn't understand for a few hours, moving its face and body according to its programming while facing the watchers on the wall and in the towers. Sometimes it did so alone; other times there were other drones with it. Then it went back deeper into the zone and return to its other functions.
The drone didn't know that it was part of an engine of meat and torment, meant to cause one of the men tasked with keeping watch over the Quarantine Site to snap and Trigger with a specific Tinker power and a brand of obsessive madness that would, in time, guide him to return to Madison, breach the quarantine, and turn the parts being built by the parahuman drones in the underground into a machine which would break through the containment cordon before being obliterated by Eidolon – a process that would inevitably cause more Triggers, and put more pressure on an already crumbling society.
And it didn't know that the complex chain of cause and effect required for this to happen had been broken months ago, on the day the shade of the Lasombra Antediluvian had escaped the Abyss and the predictions of the Simurgh had begun to swing out of alignment, rendering it all pointless anyway.
It did not know this, because it knew nothing. It merely was. Right now, it was harvesting pieces of broken glass, uncaring of the cuts that opened on its hands as it put them in the basket it was carrying.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The drone didn't react to the noise. It wasn't in its programming, and so it might as well not have existed. When the shadows came alive and wrapped themselves around its body, holding it in place, it struggled, its programming forcing it to keep moving even though its frail body could not possibly break free of the darkness' gentle but unyielding embrace.
"BE FREE," a hundred voices said.
And as the Simurgh's conditioning was burned away by the undeniable will of the speaker, the drone – she remembered the day the winged monstrosity had come.
She remembered strangling her own children with a smile on her face while a cape in a silly blue and yellow costume watched, stunned in horror, until she was stabbed from behind by another of the civilians she had hoped to save.
The presence of the ziz-bombs in the shadowscape was muted, but I could still find them if I focused on it. I couldn't reach out all across Madison at once, not with my current grasp of my powers; maybe Lau-Som-Bheu could have managed it, but not me, not yet. But I could still reach out a fair distance, and get a few hundred people at the same time.
The process was made easier by the fact that the people inside the Quarantine Site only had the most basic conditioning, not the elaborate infiltrator packages the Simurgh had bestowed upon Martin Wright. I could simply hold them in place with my tentacles, burn through the conditioning, and then command them to sleep so that they could be recovered later.
I had been doing that for … two hours ? Three ? I wasn't sure. I had started with the parahumans, knowing that they would be the ones with the most adaptable conditioning, and disabled them quickly before moving on to the civilians. Strangely, they all lacked the traumatic echoes from their Triggers, something I'd only previously encountered on the Case-53 Faultline had brought for me to examine.
This group was the last, and perhaps that was why my focus slipped. Not much, but enough for me to get a glimpse of the memories of the woman closest to my projection as I cut her mind free of the Hopekiller's conditioning. Enough that I was still linked to her mind with my metaphysical guard down when she woke up.
Her shock hit me like a hammerblow. My projection stumbled, and in the time it took me to recover, my tentacles faded away, and she was free before I could command her to sleep so that she would be safe until the rescue teams could get to her.
I shook my projection's head, the gesture helping me clear my mind through mental association, and looked at her.
"Thank you," she told me with broken smile. There was no fear in her eyes, I saw, and realized she might very well be the first person to look upon my projection without any fear – for what fear could she have of me, after all she had gone through ?
Then she reached into the basket she'd been carrying, brought out a large, jagged piece of glass, and lifted it to her throat.
Time seemed to slow, in a way that had nothing to do with any of my inherited abilities. I knew what she was going to do; I could see the glass cut through skin and artery, see the blood pour out, quickly enough that she would be long dead by the time help arrived.
I could stop her. I should stop her.
But I had seen her memories. I knew the Simurgh had used her body to kill her children when it had attacked the city. I remembered the terror and incomprehension on their face as their mother was turned into a monster by the Hopekiller; I remembered how they had cried out, how they had begged for her to stop. I remembered the cape who had stood nearby, stunned by the horror of it; I remembered how that heroine had started to move to save the kids, only to be stabbed from behind while she was distracted.
And she remembered that, remembered seeing her own hands do the deed.
I couldn't imagine how she felt; the depths of horror, grief and despair that had swallowed her when I had freed her from the Simurgh's Song. Even just the echo of it through our mental link had been enough to break my concentration, and I knew it was only a shadow of what she was feeling. I could excise those memories, remove the source of that horrific trauma. But the idea, to erase her last memories of her children, no matter how awful and twisted, made me feel sick … and her children would still be dead regardless.
There was only one Power who could bring them back to life, and it was not – could never be – me. Out of all of Lau-Som-Bheu's cousins, only two had been able to undo death, and neither Saulot nor Cappadocius had been the kind to share their secrets. With my knowledge of the Abyss, perhaps I could bring forth some kind of simulacra of her lost children, but they wouldn't be the real thing anymore than Marchosias was a real wolf.
It was her choice. Who was I to take it away from her ? Who –
My hand closed around her wrist. My hand, not Lasombra's. Without realizing it, I had moved my true body across the Abyss, and my projection had shrunk around me to form a costume similar to the one Tattletale had made for me. Dad was going to worry, I knew, but I couldn't think about it now.
She looked up at me, tears running down her face.
"Please," she whimpered. "Please."
I didn't know what to do. I had acted on instinct, without thinking, and I knew that I wouldn't always be with this woman to stop her. Even in the PRT's custody, there would be opportunities for her to take her own life if she was really determined to do so. And I had known that something like that might happen; it was why I'd put every thrall I'd freed to sleep immediately after breaking their conditioning.
But … but not today. Not when the shock was still so fresh. She wasn't in her right mind, because how could she possibly be ? But with time, and proper help and counselling … maybe she still had relatives alive outside of the city. Maybe there were people who had mourned her and her family, for whom her return would still be a miracle. Maybe she could find a new reason to live, even if she would bear the scars of what had been done to her until her dying day.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
I didn't know if this was right. But I couldn't just sit back and let her kill herself in front of me.
"Do not give her this victory," I told her. "I will not lie and tell you that it will get better … but if this is truly too much to bear, then you can always die tomorrow."
"My children," she wept. "My precious, beautiful boys … Please. I can't … I can't go on like this."
My heart broke, but my grasp on her wrist didn't relent.
"You will see your children again when the time is right," I told her. "I promise you. They wait for you now, but they would not want you to hurry to their side."
I knew souls were real, after all. I knew there was something beyond death, though the details were beyond me – and had certainly been beyond Lau-Som-Bheu, whose fear of the Final Death had been so great it had been a large part of his drive for absolute power. But I had faith, if only because the alternative was unbearable.
One day, she would be reunited with her children, free of all the evils of the world.
And if she didn't – if God punished her for what the Simurgh had used her to do – then I would rise in rebellion against the One Above, though the very idea brought back the memories of the Mark of Caine, and the great terror it had imprinted on Lau-Som-Bheu. I was not so arrogant as to believe my rebellion would end any differently than Caine's, or the fallen angels which were said to reside in the Abyss' deepest layers, but that wouldn't stop me. I would break down the Pearly Gates themselves if that was what it took to force justice upon the universe.
But I didn't think it would come to that. After all, God had offered forgiveness to Caine no less than three times, and the arrogant bastard had deserved it a lot less than this poor woman.
"Really ?" she whispered.
"Yes. I promise."
The shard of glass slipped from between her fingers, drops of blood following where she had grasped it.
"Sleep," I told her, with the gentlest application of my will. She fell unconscious in my arms, and I knew she would not dream. It was only a brief respite from the living nightmare into which I had released her; but it was the best I could give her.
I wrapped myself into shadows so that my body would look like my Lasombra projection, and moved myself through the shadowscape back to the military base outside the Quarantine Site.
Colonel Morgan was waiting for me atop the same observation tower where we'd beheld Madison. He jumped at my sudden reappearance, but quickly composed himself.
"IT IS DONE," I told him.
"Alright," he replied. "We saw you moving across the city; it looks like everyone in there is unconscious right now. I'll send the signal to the recovery teams."
I nodded wordlessly, but before I could leave, he spoke again :
"Lasombra ?" he asked me, a hesitant look on his face. "Are you … are you alright ?"
I stared at him, long enough that he began to visibly sweat. Yet he never broke not-quite-eye contact with me.
"NO," I said eventually. "I AM NOT."
I expected that I wouldn't be for a long, long time.
Danny Hebert was sitting in the living room, waiting for his daughter to return, and trying not to panic.
When Taylor had told him about the PRT's approving her plan to go to Madison to free the Simurgh's victims there, he had been torn between pride and concern. Pride, because his daughter could do what nobody else could and rescue people who had been written off as worse than dead by the rest of the world; and concern, because of what this would do to her.
They had known Madison was going to be different from her previous expeditions across town and beyond. Even with the Simurgh dead, the Quarantine Sites she had created were still some of the most psychologically damaging places on Earth-Bet, to the point that even trained, veteran troopers were at risk after going inside to extract the people Taylor had healed in the Rig.
The closest thing Taylor had encountered before would be the work of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and even then, there was a great difference between Jack Slash's band of psychopaths and the Simurgh. The point was, Danny wasn't happy about his daughter going off to face such horrors, incredible powers or not. She could say whatever she wanted about having inherited the memories of a millennia-old vampire with a penchant for casual cruelty, he could tell these memories didn't affect her the same way the things she'd experienced herself did.
And now, this. Moments ago, her body had vanished, slipping into the shadows that had gathered around her. He'd almost panicked, before remembering that the same thing had apparently happened when she'd fought the Fallen. For some reason, Taylor had decided she needed to bring her actual body to Madison, and while Danny really, really didn't approve of her doing that, he had to believe she knew what she was doing. She had fought the Simurgh herself and triumphed; she deserved that much trust from him, at least.
Eventually, after what felt like an eternity but wasn't more than an hour according to the clock, Taylor came back. She emerged from a pool of shadows, and it was immediately obvious that something was wrong.
She was shaking; tears and snot were running down her face. Before Danny realized that he was moving, he had wrapped his daughter into a hug as he brought her to the couch.
"I got you," he told her, gently rubbing her back. "I got you. It's okay, kiddo. It's okay."
For a long moment, they merely sat there on the couch. Danny looked Taylor over, not seeing any injury; whatever had shaken her, it had been mental, not physical.
Tattletale had warned him about this.
'She won't be dissuaded,' the Thinker had told him over the phone, calling him at work while Taylor was at school. "She thinks she's the only one who can help the people in Madison – and the Hell of it is, she's right. But she's still a teenage girl underneath all the power … still a human being. Which is good for all of us lowly mortals, but it means that when she encounters something she can't fix and there isn't a convenient bad guy responsible nearby to vent her frustration on, she's not going to take it well. And since the Simurgh is already dead …'
It was obvious Tattletale had been right. Something had happened during Taylor's trip to Madison. He had no idea what exactly – details about the Quarantine Sites were scarce, especially those created by the Simurgh – but his imagination provided him with a wealth of options, each more disturbing than the last.
"Do you … do you want to talk about it ?" he asked hesitantly, more to reassure himself that his daughter could still talk than because he wanted to hear which of these options was correct.
"It … it was bad, Dad," she whispered. "All those people … I could free them. I did free them, all of them. And none of them were hurt in the process. It went as well as it could have, but …" She shook in his arms, and he tightened his hug, feeling her return the gesture with enough strength that he hid a grimace of pain, knowing he was going to have bruises tomorrow. "But I can't undo what that monster did to them. It destroyed their lives, and returning their minds to them won't bring that back."
"You did everything you could," he reassured her. "And that was more than anyone else. No matter what, these people are better off now than they were before."
"I know," she sniffed. "I just … it hurts, Dad."
Danny couldn't think of anything to say to that. So he stayed quiet and continued to hold her for a few minutes; then got up, wrapped her in a blanket, and went to make hot chocolate before sitting back with her, offering what comfort he could.
It had been a long time since they had sat like this, he thought. Too long. He should have done something like that when … when Annette had died. But he had been too caught up in his own grief to help his daughter process her own, just like he had been too busy throwing himself into work to notice her being bullied at school.
He was here for her now, though, and he would be as long as she needed him. He had been given a second chance to be here for his daughter, and he wasn't going to mess things up again.
Then, suddenly, there was a knock at the door, loud enough to make them both jump in surprise.
"Did you expect anyone ?" he asked Taylor. "Tattletale, maybe ?"
She shook her head and frowned. "She shouldn't be here. She said she'd come to check on me in the morning … but for what it's worth, I can't sense any ill intent from whoever is on the other side. Except, they weren't there a moment ago. They just … appeared, right at the door."
"Some kind of Mover ?" he asked.
"Stay here," he told her, and carefully got up and walked to the door. He didn't open it – even if Brockton Bay had gotten a lot safer in the last few months, some habits were just good sense – but instead looked through the peephole.
A woman in a suit wearing a fedora was standing on the other side. She wasn't carrying any visible weapon, and there was nothing about her that indicated she was a cape. And yet, something in her eyes – or rather, the absence of something he couldn't define – set him on edge.
"Good evening, Mister Hebert," she said, staring right at him, her voice loud and clear through the door. "I am Contessa, and I need to talk with your daughter."
AN : ... fuck the Simurgh, am I right ?
In the original draft of this chapter, the nameless mother in Madison actually took her own life. I intended for that scene to be a reminder to Taylor that, for all her great power, she still has things she cannot do, problems she cannot solve.
She didn't agree with the outcome of the scene, and intervened. But even so, there are limits to Taylor's power, and she cannot undo all evils.
For those who are curious, Cappadoccius being able to resurrect the dead is a reference to the Giovanni Chronicles series of adventures. In it, the player characters are given the opportunity to interfere with the Bite, when Augustus Giovanni commits Diablerie on the Antediluvian. If the PCs kill Augustus, Cappadoccius resurrects his childe and paralyzes the PCs so that the Diablerie can happen as part of his insane plan to "transcend" and commit Diablerie in turn on God.
Yeah, Cappadoccius was crazy, and that's pretty rail-roady too. Though in the writers' defense, there is a sidebar about how to go for a full alternate timeline if the PCs manage to convince Cappadoccius to give up his stupid, stupid plan.
Also, I changed some of the background of Madison from what I found on the wiki. Most of it was either from comments by Wildblow or supplementary materials, and I decided it would make a better story to change things up a little.
With this, I've reached the end of my current batch of chapters for this story, so barring the Muse's intervention, there'll probably be a longer time before the next chapter than between the last few. I also need to get back to CCWC and DC, to say nothing of finally finishing ACCWAMD ... but we will see.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Zahariel out.