Capítulo 2497: 80
Chapter 80: Depravation 8-5
Depravation 8.5
The studio apartment they'd arranged for Lisa in the PRT headquarters as a temporary living space had very obviously once been an empty office. The windows on the far wall were bigger than you would have expected, with mismatched curtains that had clearly been put up hastily. The kitchenette was barebones, a tiny stove, a portable fridge, and little else. The bed was nothing more than an inflatable mattress that sat directly on the carpeted floor. They had at least been kind enough to set up a tv for her, but it was small and very much bought on a budget.
They had, at least, seen fit to give her a table she could eat on, an office chair, and a couple of foldout chairs for whenever she had someone with her (me, obviously). That was where we sat the next morning, just before my meeting with Glenn.
Yesterday, since the murder had curtailed the planned patrols, I'd had another training day with the Wards and the PRT troopers Piggot had given me to buff up, and I'd finished everything tired and too wiped out to have a coherent conversation, so I hadn't had the chance to explain what was going on to my friends. With a good night's sleep under my belt, though, even if it wasn't nearly as good as my bed at home (note to self: enchant my bed in the Wards section and the other Wards' beds, too, for good measure), I was more than up to bringing them into the loop.
"You know, I don't envy you," Lisa said, a hint of a smile hiding in the corners of her lips. "I mean, you kind of brought this on yourself, but still…"
I gave her an unimpressed look. "So I should have let Leviathan mow through all the capes like a scythe through wheat?"
"Oh, fuck, no," she replied, laughing. "I'm just saying, once you did it? This was basically inevitable."
A frustrated sigh hissed out my nostrils.
"It's not like I planned for this," I muttered. "I was more focused on making sure there was still a city left to live in after the attack hit. Not how much fame it was going to net me afterwards."
"As much as I hate to agree with the most annoying, know-it-all bitch in Brockton Bay," Amy drawled.
"Aw, you say the sweetest things, Panpan!"
"— killing an Endbringer is a pretty big fucking deal," she went on, flipping Lisa the bird almost absently, like it was a reflexive response. "You already had some pretty good traction on PHO, what with Lung and Bakuda and all. Axing Leviathan was just too big a splash to avoid the national attention."
Lisa snorted, hacking out a surprised laugh. "Oh, wow, that pun. I didn't know you had it in you!"
Amy stared at her for a moment, confusion writ across her face, and then, as she caught on, her cheeks flushed and she groaned. "That wasn't what I meant!"
Lisa just kept grinning. "That's what makes it so great, that you did it entirely on accident."
"Ugh."
She turned back to me.
"Serious talk, though?" she started. "I know you're gonna hate hearing this, but Piggot is kinda right, you know. Bringing more national attention to the state of the city will definitely get Brockton more in the way of disaster relief aid, and doing it by having you go out and give interviews? That'll bring more tourism into the city, which means a boost to the economy, which means projects that have been put off or denied because of a lack of funding will suddenly find that there's more than enough to go around."
"Projects like the ferry," I concluded miserably. Dad's pet project, the one he'd been trying — fruitlessly — to get off the ground for years.
"Yep."
"Doesn't make it more fun, though," Amy interjected sourly. "Photo ops are a fucking nightmare. Twelve different layers of makeup, so many spotlights you might just melt, and two dozen different variations on the same damn pose for every shot. And the kind of people you meet at them are all vain and self-centered —"
"And have their heads shoved so far up their own asses that they fart when they talk," Lisa finished, smiling bitterly. "Yeah. I know the type. Been there, too."
Absently, I thought of Emma and wondered if she'd felt at home in that kind of environment. The little girl I grew up with, probably not, but the teenage queen bitch who had tried so hard to tear me down at every turn? It was all too easy to imagine.
"What a surprise," Amy said dryly.
"So you think she's right about the investigation, too?" I asked, cutting off the argument that was sure to follow. "That I need to stay out of it and let the adults and the professionals handle things? Even though the murderer used Excalibur as a calling card?"
Lisa glanced at Amy, as though debating with herself whether or not it was worth it to start the argument anyway, but she didn't hesitate to give me an answer.
"Oh, no, if we were the Undersiders? We'd be taking care of this ourselves, because this kind of thing is a fucking no-go. There are some things that might not be part of the Unwritten Rules, but you don't let them fly," she said. Then, she shrugged. "But, we're not, we're on the straight and narrow —"
"And you wouldn't catch me dead as an Undersider," Amy added dryly.
"— which means," Lisa continued, shooting Amy a dirty look, "we've gotta follow the rules and obey the laws. That means we don't go poking our noses into a murder investigation when we're not wanted, and we let the adults do things their way. If they screw things up, then we get to sit back and say we told them so."
I frowned.
"And you're okay with that?"
Because that wasn't the answer I expected from Lisa, Tattletale, of all people. A mystery, one that looked unsolvable from the beginning, that maybe only she with her power would be able to unravel? I figured she'd be chomping at the bit. Finding secrets and pulling skeletons out of closets was her thing.
She laughed, shaking her head.
"Oh, fuck no, I'm not okay with it. Are you kidding? I want to head right up to Director Piggot's office and beg her to let me in on the case! I might even do it, if I thought it would actually get me anywhere."
She sighed, slumping back in her chair. "But in a lot of ways, the criminal justice system hasn't caught up with capes, yet. With powers, I mean. Sure, they've got their maximum security prisons and their PRT-backed solutions to holding onto some of the more troublesome guys, and hey, if a villain gets too out of line, they've got the Birdcage, but that's just another symptom of a greater problem."
She held out one hand. "How do you deal with criminals who can phase through walls or turn into monsters, other than letting them escape without much of a struggle or throwing them in the darkest, most inescapable pit you can build?" She held out the other. "And how do you give validity to the testimony of someone who can't explain how they got their answers, just that those answers are one-hundred percent correct and factually accurate?"
She shrugged again.
"There's no system for it, yet, except to add checks and balances to make sure that inexplicable testimony can be corroborated with tangible evidence." Her lips quirked into a lopsided smile. "It's part of why I had trouble getting money legitimately, before Coil shanghaied me into his pet villain group. Hard to be a private detective or whatever when I can't provide evidence for my conclusions, besides, 'My powers told me so.' It's not just law enforcement that finds that unsatisfying as an answer."
"You say that like it's a bad thing," Amy accused. "I find it pretty damn comforting that a random Thinker can't just come up and say I've killed half a dozen people without providing anything other than 'my powers told me so' as evidence."
"Right, but Thinker powers are a part of life, now," Lisa argued. "Sooner or later, there has to be a better solution than just —"
"You say that like nobody's fucking tried. You yourself said before that powers were bullshit —"
"Guys," I cut in, "guys, we're getting off track. Can we…?"
They glanced at me, then back at each other, then back to me.
"Sorry," Amy mumbled.
"Right," said Lisa. "Your upcoming meeting with the head of the Image department."
"Glenn Chambers," I corrected.
Amy made a noise in the back of her throat. Lisa looked at her. "You've heard of him."
"My sister's dating a Ward," was her response. "They all have one horror story or another about him."
"Khepri met him, too," I added.
"Ah." Lisa winced. "And?"
"I don't know if I ever told you this, but her original power was bug control," I explained. "Anything and everything that had an exoskeleton in a range of about three blocks. Mosquitos, cockroaches, spiders, flies, gnats, bees, hornets — everything."
Lisa winced again. "Let me guess…"
"He made her use butterflies."
Amy snorted. "That sounds about right."
My lips pursed.
Maybe it was being a little unfair. Glenn had done right by Khepri in other ways, like with the Behemoth video, like giving her a voice in the Directors' meeting, and he'd sacrificed his job to do it. It wouldn't be entirely wrong to say that he'd been fairer to her and more of an ally than almost any other adult in her life — at least during her career as a cape, anyway.
But the idea of being hobbled bothered me. Being told which heroes I could and couldn't use, just because one was more photogenic or more popular than the others. Being told which ones were off limits because of how they'd been depicted in their legends or because their name had negative connotations. Being told I had to use this hero or that hero because it would promote a particular message or image or belief.
Fuck. Imagine if this had happened before Leviathan, and he'd told me I couldn't use Herakles? Or Medusa? What if I'd been a Ward from the start and he'd forbidden me from using Medea?
"You want my advice?" Lisa leaned forward. "Pick the guys you won't budge on. King Arthur's gonna be a freebie, because there's no way they'd say no after Leviathan. There might be a few more they won't make a big deal about, because they're well-known enough or have a positive enough image that they won't have a good reason to say no. The rest? Choose your favorites, the ones you absolutely refuse to give up. Then, pick the ones you don't like, the ones you can't see the PR department ever agreeing to, use them as leverage, and put up a bit of a fight about having to not Install them."
I shifted as I understood where she was going with that. "Like Jack the Ripper."
She winced. "That's… Bad example, maybe, but yeah."
"Circe."
"Isn't she the one who turned people into pigs?" asked Amy.
"Mordred and Morgan le Fay."
"Mm. Maybe?"
"Queen Medb."
Lisa blanched. "Okay, yeah, they'd never let her past."
Amy looked confused.
"Queen Medb?"
"Did several things," Lisa answered. "Most famous for her promiscuity."
Amy pulled a face. I couldn't say I blamed her. There were a lot of heroes whose legends weren't exactly clean and especially not child friendly, but Medb was…not dirty, per se, and twisted wasn't quite the right word, either, but of all the crazy stuff that happened in the Ulster cycle, her part in it was particularly fucked up.
A woman who had admired a hero so much and was so used to getting her own way that when he rejected her, she conspired to bring about his death. I suppose part of the reason I disliked her so much was that, in some ways, she reminded me of Emma.
That, and it felt kind of out of place for a woman who had made most of her legend by sleeping around with whoever caught her eye to be exalted in the way King Arthur was.
"How…?" I began.
"When I was researching geises — right, geasa," Lisa corrected herself before I could. "She came up, related to how she got Irish Hercules killed."
I snorted.
"Irish Hercules?" Amy asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Dude was a demigod," Lisa reasoned. "Was banging, like, six different women, including his wife, his teacher, his teacher's daughter, and his teacher's sister —"
"Says something for keeping it in the family, I guess," Amy muttered.
"— had tons of adventures, was the manliest man in all of Ireland, was the object of envy and admiration from all of Ireland, women swooned when he passed, blah-blah-blah, you get the point. So, Irish Hercules."
That was… Well. An oversimplification of Cúchulainn's myth, but sure.
"You're not exactly wrong," I allowed, "but that's a weird way to put it."
"Really? I think it's pretty nifty shorthand. Cu isn't that well known outside of, like, Ireland and mythology buffs, but everyone's heard of Hercules, even if they don't know the details, so calling Cu Irish Hercules gives people the cliff notes version of his legend."
I shook my head. "I'm not going to argue about that."
My eyes drifted over to the clock hanging from her wall, and I grimaced. A quick check of my phone showed me the same thing.
A sigh hissed out of my mouth as I stood from my chair.
"I've got to go," I told them reluctantly. "My meeting with Glenn is in ten minutes and it's probably going to take half that to find my way to the conference room we're supposed to be using."
"Remember what I said," Lisa replied. "And keep your cool. The most important part of a meeting like this is to stay in control."
"Right."
"Good luck," said Amy. She probably meant it to be more earnest, but it came out sounding halfhearted. I took it in the spirit it was intended.
"I'm going to need it."
I made my way to the door and opened it, but I stopped before I left and turned back to the two of them.
My lips quirked to one side, not quite a smile. "Try not to kill each other?"
Amy frowned, but Lisa grinned and chuckled.
"No promises!"
My eyes rolled skyward, but I left and closed the door behind me with a little smile on my face.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
The conference room was empty by the time I managed to find my way to it, and for a minute, I hesitated at the door, thinking I'd gotten the wrong room.
But when I checked, no, I was where I was supposed to be, so I went inside and sat down on the opposite side of the table, facing the door, which put me directly in view of the doorway and gave me a subtle leg up on Glenn in terms of power dynamics.
There were a lot of pitfalls in Khepri's memories, but some of the things she knew and had learned over the course of her career were incredibly useful.
Lastly, I checked my costume, making sure that only the mask and the undersuit remained beneath the PRT issue jacket and pants, and relaxed into my chair as though this were my office and Glenn was here to meet me, rather than the other way around. It might have been a petty, almost pointless little rebellion, but it would hopefully get the point across — that there was a limit to how far I was willing to go to play ball on this.
The next five minutes felt like an eternity as I listened to the ticking of the clock that hung on the far wall, and I sat there, waiting, trying to keep my leg from bouncing impatiently. It was an exercise in futility, because it started up again every time my thoughts wandered and I stopped paying attention to it.
Finally, the clock clicked at ten a.m., and maybe half a minute later, the door burst open and an overweight man barged inside.
Glenn Chambers was exactly as I'd expected him from Khepri's memories of her first meeting with him; not the brief impression he'd made during a meet-and-greet, but the first real meeting she'd had in the aftermath of losing Pretender. It wasn't the same outfit, exactly, but the garish, incongruent colors were there, the neatly parted hair, the thick, round glasses. He looked like a walking advertisement of what not to wear, if you wanted to dress to impress…anyone, really.
I almost got pulled into it, too, almost forgot that this guy was a master of making you think what he wanted you to think, that he was an expert at misdirecting and redirecting your impressions and biases. It was only Khepri's memories that kept me from falling for it.
"No, no, no," Glenn was saying, talking into a cell phone. "I told you, it has to be — yes, exactly. And it needs to be done for next Tuesday. We can push it back if we have to, but it'll have an impact on… Yes. Yes. And the t-shirt — yes. Yes, I want the finalized design on my desk by tomorrow morning. I don't care who pulls overtime or if someone needs to work through the night, it has to be done!"
He glanced at me for a moment, then went back to his phone.
"No, no, the prototype had defects. The sword — yes, yes, it broke far too easily, it needs to be redesigned. Weak, flimsy! The hilt needs to be sturdier. The hair seam was too noticeable, as well, tell Mason to find a way to hide it. Yes, I want a second cast of the prototype by this weekend, it's absolutely paramount that we have the figure out before the end of the month. There's an upswing now and we have to capitalize on it while it lasts!"
He went on for almost another five minutes, relaying orders through his phone about one thing or another that was approaching its deadline — this thing that needed to be done by the weekend, that project that had to be finished before the end of the month, another that needed to be ready to go by the end of the day — and I found myself getting a little impatient without any idea of how to say it that wouldn't give more power back to Glenn.
Just when I was contemplating interrupting him forcefully and doing something rash like tearing the phone out of his hand, he finally ended his call and put it away.
"Now," he said, turning to me with a smile, "let's see what we have to work with."
He fell silent and looked me over, leaning this way and that to…get a different angle, I guessed, and hummed thoughtfully as he did. I sat there, feeling like a statue on display, or maybe a slab of meat hanging in a stereotypical butcher shop's window.
At length, he straightened and said, "Mask off, please, Taylor."
My mouth twitched, and behind the lenses of my mask, my eyes narrowed.
It wasn't like I hadn't considered it, really. I was a Ward, now. I was officially in the system, and Glenn was here to coach me on what to do for that interview I was supposed to be going on in a few days (and that was still a fucking trip, wow, I hadn't wrapped my head around it, yet). I'd known from the beginning that they'd probably told him my real name, and it was entirely possible he'd heard about Khepri, too, although I had no plans to bring it up if he didn't.
But maybe because I was looking for it, I saw the power play.
I thought about arguing the point, about saying something regarding the fact that no one was going to see me outside my mask for the interview or in public, not in my identity as Apocrypha, but Glenn was a lot better at this than I was and I didn't feel like losing the argument.
So, after a moment of hesitation, I dismissed the mask, leaving only the black undersuit.
If he was surprised, he didn't show it. He just hummed and looked me over again with his squinty eyes.
"I'm told your power lets you manifest your costume, yes?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then show me the whole thing, if you would."
My lips twisted and I worked my jaw, but pushed my chair out and stood. A second of focus was all it took to bring out the entirety of my costume, and the vest, the vambraces, the boots, the pants, the mask — they all formed atop the black undersuit as the PRT jacket and pants disappeared to wherever my passenger put them while I was in my costume.
It wasn't quite the same as it had been, back when I'd first started, that night with Lung. There were traceries of gold along the vest, now, patterns lined through the purple, representing the pendants I'd constructed, the key to Castle Avalon and the amulet of arrow protection. How and why they'd been melded this way into my costume, rather than just disappearing with the rest of my regular clothes when I swapped, I had no idea.
He hummed again, stepping to the sides back and forth to get a better look, examining me again. If he asked me to fucking twirl, I was going to tell him exactly where to shove it.
"And you can't change it?" he asked at length.
"No."
Or rather, if I could, intentionally instead of accidentally, I didn't have the first clue how. For temporary changes, I could probably just learn to mimic King Arthur's manifestation of her armor and weave it together out of the…magical energy that I was beginning to suspect my power relied on.
For permanent changes, though? Not the first clue.
Glenn sighed, frowning.
"Well, it's not the worst thing I've had to work with," he mused aloud. "It's sleek, the colors work well, the purple and gold speak to importance, to authority. But," he added, "they also give the feel of affluence and wealth, which will turn off the middle and lower class, and they're darker, less vibrant than a hero's costume really should be. The pants, too, are a little too baggy, they don't show off your legs enough, and the tails are too old fashioned, too archaic, too formal."
He clicked his tongue.
"The black goes well, but black goes well with anything, and it just makes the whole thing darker, makes it look darker. Not good, not good for a hero. You're sure you can't remove it?"
I scowled at him. "Can you take off your underwear without removing your pants?"
Far from being offended, Glenn nodded like he understood.
"Ah, yes, yes," he said. "It comes in layers, yes? You can put the layers on one at a time, but they have to be put on in order, yes? Am I understanding this right?"
The lack of reaction threw me off a little. "Yes."
"Is there anything that stops you from wearing something over your costume? Any power interactions we might need to worry about?"
I considered him suspiciously.
"No."
What are you after, Glenn?
He hummed again, rather than explain.
"I'll have to mock up a few designs," he said, more to himself it seemed than to me. "We'll have to see how it looks. A cape, perhaps? A cloak. Too long, maybe. Yes, too long, I think. A mantle? Could work. Perhaps some armor on the shoulders to fill out the silhouette."
"I don't think my power would consider that part of my costume for my forcefield to protect," I interrupted him.
Glenn waved it away. "Cosmetic only, dear. Cosmetic only. This isn't about what works in a fight, this is about your image, how you present yourself."
He gestured vaguely in the direction of my upper body.
"Your shape is too slim," he said. "Too straight, not feminine enough."
I bristled, acid on the tip of my tongue.
"Your overall shape points upwards," he went on. "It draws attention to your height. That works for Narwhal, but I don't have any say over Narwhal and she's quite a bit taller and more…developed than you are. Which is a fine thing," he added before I could respond. "She's older than you. She's had time to finish growing. You…"
He gestured vaguely at me again. Somehow, I felt insulted.
"We need to fill you out," he explained. "Bulk out your silhouette a bit. You already have the association with knightliness from Leviathan. Perhaps half-plate?"
My lips twisted, but I didn't toss the idea from the word go. "What did you have in mind?"
"Lean into the knight imagery a little. A chestplate," he told me, motioning with his hands to try and give me an idea of what he was talking about. "From about here to here. Curve it and pad it in a way to give the illusion of a fuller bust. Maybe some armor on your shoulders, too, make them look broader, and your upper legs, as well, to round out the shape. Minimalistic, of course, to match the chestplate. Hm, but what color should it be?"
I didn't say anything. Mostly, because I didn't have anything to say. My costume had come as-is, and I hadn't had any hand in its design, its making, or its coloring. Honestly, I'd just been happy it didn't look like a haphazard mess, so whether or not it was the best costume I could possibly have had never been something I'd concerned myself with too deeply, even if I'd initially thought it a little weird looking.
He waved it off. "No matter, no matter. I'll have something mocked up for you to try on by Thursday. Speaking of…"
He paused to take a breath.
"Your interview."
"Yes." It might have been petty, but I dismissed everything except the black undersuit again and sat back down. "My interview."
"Let's start with the questions they'll be asking," said Glenn. "We've given them a list of safe topics to cover, and your civilian life is obviously not on it. They're well aware of the landmine they'd be stepping on if they tried, so they'll steer well clear of the subject while you're on stage. It's not worth the mess they'd be jumping into with the PRT and the Protectorate."
A short breath hissed out of my nose and I relaxed a little.
I didn't think they would have tried, but it was nice to know that it had been established beforehand that I wasn't going to talk about Taylor Hebert on national tv.
"They'll want to know about Leviathan, I'm guessing?"
"Of course." He made a motion with his wrist. "How much you divulge is entirely up to you, but in general you should avoid particular topics. You can talk about the death toll, but only in regards to how low it was, or how afraid you might have been, but only in the context of how you pushed past that to fight anyway. Your power is based on heroes, yes? Then you want to present that heroic image — someone who jumps into the fray, no matter how frightened you are, because it's the right thing to do.
"You're in a very precarious position," he went on. "You are the girl who killed Leviathan, but you're also fifteen years old, still a child, still a Ward, now. The absolute worst thing you can do in this interview is present the image of yourself as a little girl in over her head. That's why the one topic you absolutely must avoid talking about is those three times during the battle where your armband glitched out and registered you as dead —"
"Where I died, you mean," I corrected him. I took perhaps a little too much pleasure in the way his face twisted. "Those three times when Leviathan killed me —"
"Where your armband glitched out," he emphasized, "and erroneously registered you as dead. The minute the parents in the audience start to think about how dangerous life as a hero is for their children in the Wards, we start to have problems and the program will suffer for it."
My lips pulled tight. "I understand."
Whatever happened, the last thing I wanted to do was destroy the Wards program, and with it, the PRT and the Protectorate. It was hard to argue with the fact that they were all but essential to the fight against the Endbringers, and tearing them apart, or even just dealing too hard a blow, would mean increased casualties and damage whenever one of the Endbringers attacked.
Whatever my problems with their restrictions and limitations, whatever reservations I might have inherited from Khepri, ripping the organization as a whole to pieces wasn't something I wanted to do. It was part of the reason I was trying so hard to make this all work.
"What if they ask me to demonstrate my powers?" I asked, changing the subject. "For that matter, what about using my heroes in general?"
"Ah," said Glenn. "Yes, of course. Obviously, there are some…heroes isn't the word we should use, let's call them legends. There are some legends you should absolutely avoid —"
"Because they're not nice and pretty?" I cut in.
"For one, but also because they're dangerous," he said. "We're here now in part because of Leviathan. That was good. You did a lot to revitalize the image of the Protectorate. Faith in heroes as people and the Protectorate as an organization has risen dramatically in the past week and is likely to continue rising. We can lay that at your feet.
"But," he went on, "we're also here because you used a very dangerous hero, three weeks ago. A hero who had the power to Master everyone in a not insignificant range, including two-thirds of the Triumvirate and almost two whole Protectorate teams, including the Wards. The only saving grace is that this particular event didn't get out to the public, so no one knows that you can turn other people into your puppets."
My lips pursed, even though I understood the point he was making. People had made a big deal out of Canary, after all, and the Simurgh was the most feared of the three Endbringers. There was a reason people called her the Hopekiller.
"Khepri was an extraordinary situation," I told him evenly. "The circumstances that forced me to use her were extreme and virtually irreplicable."
"And that right there is the problem," he said. "Extreme. Extraordinary. No, the exact scenario that resulted in you using such a legend with that kind of power might not be feasibly possible to reproduce, but there's nothing to say that you won't find equally difficult circumstances that you might solve that way. The idea is that you should always use a legend that can solve the problem without creating one."
One corner of my mouth pulled. "You're asking for the impossible."
"Am I?" he retorted. "Perhaps somewhat unreasonable, but not impossible, I would think. By your own admission, you have a significant degree of variety. I'm told you even compared yourself to Eidolon, your first night out — not wrongly, it seems to me. There should be plenty of ways for you to act and plenty of legends for you to choose from, even with restrictions."
"Because no hero can do exactly the same thing as another," I told him. "You don't want me to use Khepri? Fine. I can avoid her and keep her in reserve for the truly fucked up situations that call for her kind of power."
"That's not what I said —"
"But my favorite caster is Medea," I bulldozed over him. "The woman who was Mastered by the goddess of love and did things like butcher her own brother or cut up a king. Everything she did in her legend was marked by betrayal — either hers of someone else, or someone else of her. She's not in the least PR friendly, but she's also the one who let me make the amulets that saved both mine and my best friend's lives several times over and the one who let me restore Vista's arm after it got blown off. Are you going to tell me I can't use her?"
Glenn's squinty eyes narrowed further. "But you haven't used her in the public eye."
"I will," I said. "Eventually, I'll have to, because she lets me handle ordinary people nonlethally — people without Brute powers or Breaker powers that let them actually put up a fight."
He waved it off. "Then it should be fine. As long as no one makes the connection between the legend herself and her myth, there won't be any trouble."
"Even if they ask me who she is?"
"Ah." He hummed. "Yes, that does present a bit of a problem, doesn't it?"
"It's not like she's the only one with a troubling background, either," I went on. "Herakles was driven mad by Hera and killed his wife and kids. There's an implication that Siegfried raped Queen Brünhilde" — even though, with access to his actual history, I could say it hadn't happened — "and Lancelot and Guinevere were committing adultery."
"But those aren't the sorts of images attached to those legends, and that makes all the difference," said Glenn. "Lancelot and Guinevere may have been adulterous, but the image attached to Lancelot is of a paragon of chivalry, a peerless knight to whom all should aspire. People think of…Herakles as the greatest hero ever, and Achilles as an invincible warrior, and Siegfried as the man who slew a dragon.
"Perception," he emphasized with a jab of his index finger, "perception is the important thing, not what their actual legends say they did. Do you think the average person is going to go out and read up on each of the legends you use? Of course not! They'll listen in, and when they hear the name of the legend you used for this fight or that battle, they'll either recognize it or not, and then move on!"
A short breath hissed out of my nostrils.
"Then what does it matter? I just have to avoid the subject, then, and use whoever I like."
"No, no, no! I already told you that there are some whose powers are too dangerous —"
"All of them are," I interrupted. "Every. Single. One. You don't think I couldn't have turned around and wiped out the city with Excalibur? There's a reason I aimed it out over the bay. Medea? She's the most versatile of them all. She'd have at least a five in every PRT rating in the book and quite a lot of eights or higher. Nimue is a Shaker to put Labyrinth to shame. She could sink the entire city faster and easier than Leviathan."
Technically not true, because it would require both her castle and a lot of setup, but once that was done, it was just a matter of having enough power.
"Siegfried would have obliterated Lung and everything in front of me for at least a mile, if I hadn't held back that first night. Gawain can literally chop the city in half. Herakles can turn anyone into chunky salsa with a flick of his wrist. Aífe's spear sprouts thorns that rip a person up from the inside out." I leaned forward and stared Glenn dead in the eyes. "Every single one of the heroes in my repertoire is capable of an absolutely horrifying level of destruction. Just because they can doesn't mean they have to."
Glenn scowled at me — actually scowled — and shook his head with a sigh, then checked his watch. His scowl got deeper.
"This doesn't look like a subject that we'll be able to cover in its entirety today, unfortunately," he said regretfully. "We'll come back to what sort of restrictions you'll have to make to your roster of legends for public use later. For the purposes of the interview, the only legend you're permitted to use is the one that dealt the final blow to Leviathan: King Arthur."
I didn't reply verbally; instead, I reached through myself and pulled up Atalanta, transforming without a word as my body shrunk and my outfit morphed. The expression that twisted his face, seeing me use my powers to their fullest for the first time in person, was interesting and complicated, like he wanted both to chastise me and swoop in to take advantage of this hero and her…unique appearance.
My new tail curled up and around my waist lazily, and I folded my arms and looked back at him, watching his eyes as they roamed from the almost lolita style dress to the tail whose end swayed absently by my hip to the twitching cat ears atop my head.
"Are you sure about that?" I asked him.
I tried very, very hard not to smile. Somehow, I managed to succeed.
He closed his eyes and let out a long breath through his nose, something like regret and longing echoed in the grimace that pulled at his mouth and brow.
"Later," he promised, and it sounded like he was making it to himself as much as he was to me. "We'll cover it later."
He took a deep, calming breath, and I knew exactly what it meant.
Victory. A temporary one, maybe, but I'd take it, for now.
"Now," he began, "let's get back to that subject, since that's what I'm here to prepare you for, and go over some of the other topics that will come up."
"Let's."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
There was some fluffy stuff and character interaction up top, but the real show was the Glenn battle. Asymmetrical warfare, Taylor! Attack from the angle he least expects!
Happy birthday to me! ...in about two and a half weeks. I was hoping Musashi would come home as an early birthday present, but that didn't happen...and now I'm out the SQ I was saving for Semiramis and Jack. FGO is a cruel mistress indeed.
Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.
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