Capítulo 134: 132 Setting up a Playdate
Columbus, Ohio, July 19th, 18:31.
"-with that we can fully confirm that yes, Dragon, with the help of a Tinker who goes by Negante, has finished development of a cure for HIV, and that mass production will be started shortly, making the cure available nationwide, with talks of going international after a brief adjustment period.
"In Dragon's own words, with help from the Tinker known as Negante, it is likely that other similar diseases could have cures within the next five to ten years. This is Aubr-"
Cutting off the news caster before they can finish introducing themselves, I switch the channel to some cartoons and turn back around to open the oven behind me.
Looks about done.
Still smells like shit though.
"Riley!! Dinner's ready!"
Following my yell, the pitter patter of footsteps can be heard as the girl in question runs down the stairs, clearing the last few with a small jump.
With a skip in her step, Riley runs up to me and jumps at me, wrapping her arms around my waist as she hangs there, causing me to gaze down on her with exasperation.
"Is it chicken nuggets!?" She exclaims, looking up at me with a smile.
Patting her head with a smile of my own, I pick her up and place her back down on her own two feet.
"Better," I say with a grin, as I walk back to the oven and pull out a tray, not bothering with oven mitts, because I can hardly feel the heat.
"It's pizza!" I exclaim, showing her her meal with a flourish, "now go sit down while I cut this up for ya."
"Yes mommy!" She exclaims before bouncing away to the dining room.
...Yeah, that's a thing now.
Apparently it's a lot harder to fix a twice broken little girl than I thought it would be.
It's not like I'm a psychologist anyway, so it's not like I really knew what I was doing, but the past couple of weeks have had a lot of cuddling and crying, with plenty of comforting words.
It wasn't exactly hard to get her to hate Jack, he did kill her family after all. The difficult part was getting her to be happy and fun again, without it also just being a mask that can be ripped off whenever, leading to another breakdown.
I've more or less succeeded.. I think?
Look, it's not an exact science, and I don't really know where the whole 'mommy' thing came from, but she started doing that a few days ago.
I think part of what made the whole thing so annoying is that I've also been trying to avoid accidentally convincing her to switch sides and be 'good' or something.
It would suck if I went through all this effort only for her to retire as a mad scientist and just be a doctor or something lame like that.
Truthfully, James has basically been my deus ex machina for this whole thing.
It's a lot easier to convince her that experimenting doesn't make her evil when I have an example of someone a lot like her. They're even similar ages too, which is a nice coincidence.
Of course, it wasn't that simple, which is why I got James to hurry up with the whole HIV cure thing, because it meant that I could tell Riley that it's fine if your experiments hurt people, because look at Negante; he definitely hurts a lot of people, but he's also helping even more by curing HIV.
Basically making her believe in karma and balancing out the scales.
It's not exactly a harmful belief in the first place, and with her power, working together with James, it probably wouldn't be too hard for the two of them to come up with some more cures or other medical advances, then it's just a case of giving the tech to Dragon for the sake of mass production, and boom, problem solved.
That's all without even mentioning the shit tonne of money involved.
People don't seem to realise just how much money there is in pharmaceuticals, and the rich assholes getting richer from it all probably would have tried to silence and or kill James for releasing his cure.
However, since it's technically Dragon that's spreading it, there isn't really anything they can do about it.
Dragon is probably the richest parahuman on the planet, and she also does a mind boggling amount of work.
Seriously, I may not particularly care about helping people, but that doesn't mean I can't respect the hell out of Dragon for all the work she does, globally too.
She's basically the head of the modern tech industry, all while making necessities affordable to anyone who needs them, but she also does food drives, and runs a couple charities, all the while helping with relief efforts literally every time there is a disaster anywhere on the planet.
In fact, the only times she isn't helping with relief efforts after a disaster, is when she's either busy helping other people elsewhere, or because she is straight up just not allowed to help.
Like China. The CUI don't like... well, anything that isn't also a part of the CUI really, so they don't let her in, even though she really does only want to help.
That's all without even considering the fact that she's been present, at least in robot form, at every Endbringer fight since she became active.
Basically, she's the most deserving of the title of hero out of everyone who wears it, and is probably the nicest woman on the planet, because I really don't see her having much free time.
A choking sound brings me out of my thoughts, and it's only when I notice Riley coughing and patting her chest that I realise I've been spacing out.
"Don't eat too fast, the food isn't going anywhere." She ducks her head embarrassedly at my amused chastisement, and goes back to stuffing her face, a lot more sedately this time, while I just watch with a glass of 'wine' instead of a meal.
I started fermenting some booze a while ago; I basically just filled a hole with bodies and ethanol and sealed it. It's pretty shit to be honest, but it's better than just coffee all the time, though it would probably kill a normal person if they drank it, with how concentrated it is.
But as I sip, turn my thoughts back to the girl before me.
At this point, she's basically just a severely toned down Bonesaw.
She's a lot less amoral, but she also won't flinch about experimenting on live humans, which is kind of important, because I eat people; so I can't really have any kind of positive relationship with someone who would find that fact displeasing.
But, she's be doing so with the mindset that it's fine to hurt a few people with her experiments, if it means that she can help an equal or greater number of people with the result, which is fair enough really.
Most importantly, is that she's basically fixed, more or less.
Ok, not really, but I've laid the groundwork, like I said I would, and frankly I'm getting bored.
I want to go out and do something, but I don't really want to leave the Chibi unattended.
Luckily for me, I have a plan.
So, once the Chibi has finished with her food, I speak up with a smile.
"So, are you ready to meet Negante?~" I ask, with a teasing tone as she looks away with a faint blush.
You see, one great thing about making James see great to her, is that I can just dump her on him and she's perfectly happy with it.
In fact, she's a bit more than happy, evidence by how she rushes up the stairs to get changed into something more appropriate.
It turns out that there was a slightly unexpected side effect of using James as an example of all things good about her, because she seems to have developed something of an 'unhealthy' obsession regarding him.
Not that I see a problem with it, if anything, I just think it's funny. Especially since James has no idea about it.
Shame no one thought to warn him ahead of time.
Ah well.
She basically sees him as the idealisation of all that she wants to be.
He's a Tinker, just liker her and his speciality compliments her own almost perfectly. But he's fully in charge of his own life, doing whatever he wants. He's become someone powerful, respected and feared, all while 'doing a lot' to help people.
That last part was why I needed him to hurry up with the HIV thing, and I don't doubt that the Chibi was watching the news as well before I called her down.
It doesn't take all that long for Riley to get back down, and I take a moment to look her over, causing her to blush as I give her a knowing look.
She's certainly dressed to impress.
Now that she's not obsessed with being a 'good girl,' she's finally dropped the whole Alice in Wonderland thing she had going on with her frilly dress from before.
Instead, she is wearing a short plaid dress with red as the primary colour and black second that stops just above her knees, showing off... well, nothing really, since she is still a child, so it's not like she has curves or long legs or anything, but I'm sure that to an equally prepubescent child it looks great.
Above that, she has a cute black dress shirt, tied with short sleaves and a long red western bowtie, the ribbons of which fall asymmetrically down to about her stomach.
It's all newly bought too, so she's looking extra nice, with a simple, if small, leather jacket over it all.
The main thing I take note of though, is that she 'just so happens' to be matching James' colour scheme.
What a coincidence.~
"Alright then Riley, let's go."
She nods her head and puts on a pair of sunglasses, despite the time, because she 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 still have a kill order on her head. I've just been wearing a different face this whole time.
Not literally. My power lets me shapeshift a little bit.
We've decided that it'd be best if Riley got some surgery done too, to change up her face, get her a new identity too.
With her power it shouldn't be hard, and we don't need the identity to be airtight anyway.
A great thing about rebranding away from the Nine, is that no one's really going to call you out on it, because everyone else also wants the Nine to be gone.
Like Murder Bear for instance. Riley hasn't had the time, or mental stability, yet to do anything more than give her her voice back, but that was enough for her to come up with her new cape name as a Clown.
The name she's chosen to represent herself?
Diversity Hire.
She fucking called herself Diversity Hire.
I must have laughed for a solid ten minutes after she said that, and it's not like it's completely wrong; she 𝘪𝘴 the first black person to join up.
Still, the point is that no one is going to call out the fact that she is very obviously the cape formally known as Murder Bear, because doing so could risk forcing her to take up the role once again, and everyone would just rather we all move past our Slaughterhouse ways.
A better example is Crawler, who is 'rebranding' as a Clown named Cerberus. Our little tussle with Behemoth is actually kind of helpful in this too, since while he might not have the three heads, he 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 look slightly different now.
Which means that if anyone tries to say anything like 'Hey! That's obviously just Crawler!' We can just be all, 'what are you talking about? Look at him! Crawler had weird bone spike things coming out the back of his neck, this guy 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 only has weird bone spike things coming out of his shoulders, they're completely different people! Crazy that they look so alike, but hey, that's a coincidence for ya!'
And if someone is going to be really insistent in calling us out on it? Well, who gives a fuck?
He's not going around murdering people anymore, so no one really wants to fight the unstoppable tank dog for basically no reason.
All said, the week after Behemoth was pretty hectic, but things are calming down now, and my Clowns are gaining notoriety by the day.
"Mommy?"
A sudden voice brings me out of my thoughts, and I turn to look at Riley, who is giving me a curious look of her own.
Glancing about, I see the Hearts and Minds club right in front of us.
Huh, looks like we made it.
I should really stop spacing out. I've just been finding myself rather easily distracted these past few days.
Ah well, it's probably nothing.
"Welp, let's go see James then," I say as I get out the car, Riley following me.
I've talked about him enough that I gave up on keeping his identity secret, but I doubt it'd matter anyway, so I'm sure he'll be fine with it.
It's been a while since I actually saw him. I wonder if he's grown taller?
=================
A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!
idk if you were expecting a chap with lusia actually fixing riley, but fuck that. it'd just be a chapter of lusia telling her that jacks bad, riley's good, she should do what she wants, ect.
boring.
Also, it was genuinely a coincidence that riley and james are the same age, but now I'm totally going to make them date when they're older.
and yeah, riley is kinda fixed, but she's still broken. it's more like she's on the way to being fixed, all that is needed now is time to adjust.
(5+)Advanced chapters with the links below!
pat/reon.com/user?u=41732867 (get rid of the first slash or check the description)
Also, join the discord with this invite code! Pj3Dttwses
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