章 2443: 26
hapter 26: Collateral 4-2
Collateral 4.2
For a long moment, I watched the door Amy had left through, hating myself for screwing things up so badly that she'd gone, hating Emma for destroying my ability to make friends — that, even when she'd never met Amy and probably never would, she'd managed to drive her off without even being there.
It wasn't devastating. It didn't hurt anywhere near as bad as seeing Lisa at the bank had. It was just a missed opportunity, a friendship that maybe I'd been hoping for a little more than I'd ever realized, and that I'd missed that chance stung.
"She'll be back," Lisa assured me. I shifted in my seat and turned back around to her. "Probably not tomorrow. Maybe not even next week. But she'll be back."
I frowned. "How are you so sure?"
Lisa smiled, a sad little thing that made her look older and almost matronly. "She's like you," she said. "Only ever had one friend in her whole life — her sister, Glory Girl — and ever since she got her powers, she's had a hard time forming a meaningful, honest relationship with anyone. Most of the people she hangs around with are Vicky's friends, and just about everyone she meets wants this pimple gone or this scar removed or a few pounds taken off."
That did sound a lot like me. Emma had been the only friend I'd ever had, the only person in my own age group I'd been anything more than acquaintances with, and ever since Emma had turned on me, ignoring how she'd sabotaged any attempts at friendship, I hadn't been able to connect with anyone else. Every girl at Winslow who wanted anything to do with me only wanted to use me to springboard into Emma's good graces.
Lisa shrugged. "Whether or not New Wave's accountability stance is right or wrong, when you can cure just about anything and you don't have a secret identity, it's hard to separate where you start and the mask ends. I'd imagine it gets to be that she's tired of having people ask her for touch-ups or quick fixes when all she wants to do is eat her lunch."
"Oh," I said.
I supposed that it did make sense, didn't it? That was the assumption Amy had made in the bank, yesterday, that I'd wanted her to, uh, enhance me. In some ways, now that I knew she was Panacea, the idea was a little tempting, to have her erase all of my flaws, but even if I asked and she actually did it, Emma and her cronies would find a way to make fun of me for it.
That was part of the reason I hadn't bothered learning something like shapeshifting. There was also the fact that if I changed so drastically overnight into a supermodel, there were only so many explanations for it, and with our financial situation the way it was, me having powers was the most likely of the bunch. There were quicker, more satisfying ways of outing myself than that.
"That does make me a little curious, though," said Lisa. She eyed me speculatively. "How did you guys hit it off?"
It was my turn to shrug. "We just…talked. I mean, she was a little prickly, at first, and I, uh, might have…told her off for being a bitch?"
Lisa snorted.
"But we just started talking," I went on. "We…didn't really get much farther than introductions, but… I guess she liked me well enough?"
Not that I really knew why. I could kind of understand — in some ways, if what Lisa had said was true, Amy and I were in kind of similar situations — but it wasn't like we'd sat down and realized we had so much in common we could have been sisters. Hell, I didn't know much more than her name.
Lisa cringed. "Ah, right, that would be my fault, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah…"
It was honestly getting a bit annoying, having her apologizing all the time. There were only so many times I could hear her say it, even if she meant it every time, before it started to sound like an empty platitude, and when it seemed like every few sentences, she had to stop and apologize for some unintended consequence of yesterday's madness, it just started to feel like… I knew she was sorry. She didn't have to say it so often.
She cleared her throat. "Anyway. She's lonely, and however you did it, you got her to consider taking a chance. She's not going to give that up so easily."
I took a sip of my tea.
"If you say so."
It would probably be nice to have another friend, though. With Emma, with Lisa, I'd never had more than one, true friend in my entire life, only vague acquaintances. I wasn't even sure I knew how to have more than one real friend at a time, but it would have been nice to try, all the same.
"So," said Lisa at length, "I know that's not why you asked me to come here, today. What did you have in mind?"
I glanced around and shook my head. "Not here," I told her quietly. "We'll talk at my…my base."
"You have a secret base?" she asked a little louder than I would have liked, grinning.
I shot her a glare and she winced.
"Oh, right. Sorry."
I took a look at my watch — a little after three-thirty — and drained the rest of my tea in several quick swallows. Across from me, Lisa did the same, and as we got up to leave, I saw her slip a five dollar tip beneath the aluminum tray. The bell jingled as we stepped out the front door.
"So," said Lisa, "where are we headed, Chief?"
"This way," I told her and started walking.
I led her through the Docks, skirting around the Boardwalk as we went until we reached the edge of the beach (for what little of one there was). From there, I took her south, the city to our right and the bay to our left, with the ultimate destination of a pier just a few blocks away from the southern ferry station.
"So," Lisa said conversationally as we went, "you read, right? Recreationally?"
"Yeah," I replied.
"Right, right, of course you do," she said. "Your mom was an…English teacher?"
"Literature professor."
"So Dracula was, like, your bedtime story."
I snorted. "Not exactly." I had no idea how Mom would have explained some of the…racier bits of it, if it had been. "But I did read it later on, yeah."
"Huh. And is he…Dracula, that is. Is he one of your…heroes?"
I thought about not answering, but there wasn't really anything to be gained or lost. Lisa couldn't betray me, and even if she could, it wasn't like I planned on making heavy use of Vlad the Impaler.
"After a fashion, I guess?" I hedged. "Not…Dracula, the character, but the story got appended to Vlad the Impaler's legend and it's an ability he can use…"
Honestly, I didn't understand how that whole thing worked, myself.
"Why do you ask?"
I glanced back in time to see her shrug.
"Well, we already covered the heavy stuff, so I figured, let's do the easier, less heavy stuff. You know, favorite books, movies we like, favorite color, that sort of thing. Me, for instance, I like mystery novels, even though my power ruins them."
"What?" I asked incredulously.
"Yeah," she said with a laugh. "My power makes it hard not to pick apart the ending before I'm halfway through, so I made a bit of a game of it. I take notes, write out the answers my powers give me, then go back and try to see how my powers got there. It's a fun little way of killing time, and you'd be surprised how good the Sherlock Holmes novels are at hiding their clues."
"Really?"
I didn't much read Sherlock. I preferred fantasy, like The Lord of the Rings, and drowning myself in wondrous, magical worlds was part of how I'd coped, the last two years. They were places where Emma and her friends couldn't touch me, where I could be someone else, for a little while, where the dreariness of my life couldn't intrude.
"A lot of them are really only obvious after the fact," she answered. "Really easy to miss. That's part of the fun of picking them apart. So what about you, then? With a literature professor for a mom, you've probably read a lot of the classics. What's your favorite?"
"Tolkien."
Lisa laughed. "Of course."
"Rowling, I guess, or the Aleph versions, at least. I really liked C.S. Lewis as a kid, but Peter and Susan were my favorite characters, so I kind of stopped after they left the cast."
"Bo-ring!" she announced. "Come on, no Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman?"
"Some," I admitted. "I never got into them that much, though, it just wasn't quite the same. I'm not sure what it was, exactly, and maybe that was part of the problem…"
We made small talk the rest of the way, idly discussing fantasy books, then a little science fiction, some romance (Lisa was secretly a fan of trashy romances, who knew?), and before I knew it, we'd arrived at an old, dilapidated pier, left to sit in disrepair.
Once, Dad had told me it used to be a fishing spot, a place men took their sons to spend the day and bond, even though it was technically illegal to fish, there. Now, after the days of Marquis and with the gangs carving out territory in the city, with the Boat Graveyard clogging the bay and the ferry shut down — permanently, it seemed, because no matter how hard Dad tried, the city hadn't budged one inch to see it reopened — it had been abandoned to rot.
And rot it had, because the first time I'd come here about a month ago, the first time in nearly ten years I'd visited, one of the wooden planks had snapped in half under my weight. Others were missing entirely or warped from constant exposure to the water. Those that remained groaned with every step and threatened to break beneath our feet, and it was a combination of a miracle and a little subtle magic I had inflicted upon them ages ago that kept them from doing just that.
"We're here," I announced, turning around to face Lisa.
"What, really?" she asked. She looked around, head spinning as though on a swivel. "Huh. I mean, it's abandoned enough, so I guess no one would bother, but this is really open and I don't see… Oh, do you have an invisible mansion or something?"
I smiled a little tightly. "Something like that. Are we alone? No one's spying on us?"
Lisa frowned and looked around again, going slower this time. She seemed to be carefully examining every old and abandoned building around us, turning a few inches at a time, but I honestly didn't expect her to find anyone watching. I'd chosen this spot for that very reason, because none of the nearby buildings were in any shape for someone to live in — not even the homeless, drug-addled wretches that made up the Merchants bothered to try.
Once Lisa had completed one whole rotation, she turned back to me. "Nope. It's just us out here, Captain."
I nodded. What I'd expected, then. "Good."
I turned back around and took a few steps until I was standing near the edge of the pier.
One of the other reasons I'd chosen this spot was because it wasn't easily visible from the Rig, where the Protectorate was based out of. The northern ferry station might have been a bit easier to get to, and even a bit safer, since it was closer to the Boardwalk, but it was also in clear view of the Rig and closer to a much more populated area. I hadn't wanted to risk anyone, not even the heroes, seeing me out here building my secret base.
"Set. Include."
In a flash, I was in my costume and already had Nimue Included. As I'd suspected they might, the pair of necklaces I'd built had carried over, and I lifted the second one up to cup in my hands.
"What's that?" Lisa asked from beside me.
I glanced over to her, then down at the pendant. It looked vaguely like a piece of opaque, blue crystal, almost like lapis lazuli, laser carved with a precision that was impossible for normal tools. The cutaway sections reminded of the jagged cliffs of a mountain or the tiers of a pyramid.
Or a key.
"It's our way in," I told her.
"Wait, really?"
I didn't answer her directly. Instead, I reached into myself and focused on the pendant in my hands. I grabbed at the well of warmth and power that rested inside of me, pushing it down through my arms and my fingers and into the key.
"Let there be a pathway through the ocean."
Light shone. On the churning sea in front of me, a steady pattern of glowing lines and arcane symbols drew themselves. Despite the undulating waves lapping at the pillars of the pier, the designs that sat atop them were clear and steady. Circles, circles within circles, triangles and stars. An ancient, flowing script that Nimue referred to as "Fairy Letters."
After a moment, the lines and symbols bled together, and what was left behind was a circular disk of light.
I turned to Lisa and gestured towards the disc. "After you."
She blinked. "Huh?"
"That pendant also has a permission function," I told her. "As long as you know where the doorway is, you just need to tell it to open and pass through it."
I'd added it after some thought, last night. If I was going to be showing Lisa this place anyway, then I might as well give her an impregnable fortress to retreat to if things ever got that bad or Coil decided to come after her. In spite of everything, I still wanted her as my friend, and I wasn't about to skimp on ways to protect her.
"Huh. You know, your powers really are bullshit."
I fought down the slightest of grins.
"Well." She stepped up to the front of the pier and looked down warily. She grimaced. "Nothing for it, I guess."
Lisa took a deep breath and visibly mustered her courage, then leapt off of the pier, curled her legs into her chest, and shouted, "Cannonball!"
I rolled my eyes, and there was no splash following her jump. I just took the last couple of steps and walked off the edge of the pier and into the portal.
I came out with a jarring landing on my feet. I hadn't found a way to make it any more comfortable, but I'd learned to deal with the disorientation of coming to so sudden a stop, and Lisa obviously hadn't. She was standing a few feet away from my own spot, rubbing gingerly at her tailbone and cursing under her breath.
"Could've warned a girl, you know," she griped.
"It's your own fault," I told her unapologetically. "That's what you get for being so childish."
"Yeah, yeah," she muttered. Then, she stopped and looked around, and I watched her, her expression of surprise and awe, the way she even forgot to stop rubbing at her bruised behind, as she took in the sight of it.
"Whoa. You actually have your own fucking castle?"
I looked out, now, too. The ramparts loomed over the courtyard, tall and solidly built. The white brick gleamed in the flickering light of the sun from above, and the glitter of the grid of golden lines that held them together made them appear to sparkle like jewels. They looked as though they could withstand even the strongest of modern missiles, as though Lung himself could hack and claw and blast fire at them without leaving a scratch. Upon their fronts were traced symbols in sapphire, arcane formulae that made the sturdy walls even stronger.
The towers stretched up towards the sky, roofed with blue tiles of lapis lazuli. Banners woven of blue and gold silk flew from their tops, waving in a nonexistent breeze. From the windows hung yet more banners, forked at the bottom and bearing a coat of arms that looked like nothing that had ever been used before.
And at the center of it all stood the monolithic keep, the tallest, largest single part of the entire thing. It was circular and rounded, built into three, staggered tiers that reached up towards the murky blue sky — which, down here, was the surface of the ocean. Atop its roofs and ledges, I knew, there were more patterns in sapphire, forming into a magic circle of truly massive scale, designed for performing thaumaturgy of the highest order.
I'd seen pictures of Windsor and Buckingham, and for sheer majesty, they couldn't even compare. This was a castle fit for a queen, already a priceless marvel on dry land, made even more incredible by its location on the bottom of the ocean. It was almost impossible to imagine that I had even had any part in making this thing.
We had landed just inside the main gate, and behind us, the ocean floor seemed to fade out into infinity. Above us, the weight of the whole sea pressed down upon an invisible barrier that protected the castle and its inhabitants.
"Yeah."
There were other options I'd explored, other castles I'd looked into to see if they would work, but I kept running into the same problem: a hero's Noble Phantasm faded once I let go of that hero's Install. Other castles that could be manifested just by activating them as a Noble Phantasm would disappear as soon as I was done with the Install.
Not this one. This one, I'd built myself using Nimue's knowledge. Brick by brick, design by design, every little bit by itself, I'd constructed it with her power, with her magic. The woman, part fairy, who was Merlin's equal in knowledge and talent, had put together this great castle in the span of only a few weekends. Less than six days, total.
When you looked at the size of it, encompassing an area roughly equivalent to the entirety of Downtown, the idea that it could be built in anything less than ten years seemed insane.
I turned back to Lisa and offered her a smile. "Welcome to Castle Avalon."
"Holy fuck," she breathed. "This place is huge! And is that…gold? That's gold. That's fucking gold. Enough for… Damn, you could make a fortune! And that's sapphire and this is…"
She stopped, turned towards me, again.
"Wait. Castle Avalon?" I nodded and watched the dots connect in her head. "Lady of the Lake?"
"Nimue," I confirmed with another nod.
"Huh." Lisa went back to looking around, taking in all of the different parts of the castle, all of the designs and complexities. "I… I don't even… I mean, I guess it makes sense? Lady of the Lake, has a castle that can go underwater… And it's made of gold and sapphire and…because why the fuck not, right? I… Just… Gimme a moment, here."
I said nothing and just waited. Lisa took what felt like several long minutes, taking several long, deep breaths and going through what looked like some kind of ritual to calm herself down.
"I really need to start upping my expectations for what you're actually capable of," she said wryly. "Anyway. I'm guessing there's more defenses than just that barrier up there protecting us from being crushed under the weight of the ocean?"
"Loads," I said without specifying.
The main defense of the castle was in its ability to be submerged and hidden from sight, true, but the characteristic attribute of it was actually in its flexibility. Unlike most of the other castles I'd come across in my comparisons, Castle Avalon's fortifications weren't too far beyond ordinary — nothing like Lancelot's Joyeuse Garde, which stripped intruders of their identities and forced them to fight a gauntlet of knights to regain the memory of their names — but it made up for it by making any fortification added part of the Noble Phantasm.
That was mostly a side effect, though, of how it had been constructed and its true ability, the thing that made it Nimue's Noble Phantasm rather than just a generic castle.
"Huh," Lisa said again, then she finally turned back towards me. "Guess I was right, wasn't I? Your wizard type heroes are much more frightening than someone as straightforward as a swordsman."
She wasn't wrong, really. Both Nimue and Medea, my main casters, were incredibly flexible, and the high class alchemists, like Nicolas Flamel and Paracelsus, while they didn't have the same versatility, could transform matter, turn lead into gold, and make philosopher's stones. Honestly, some of the things they could do were downright terrifying, and some were so weighty that I didn't really trust myself to use them responsibly.
What right did I have, really, to decide who deserved to live forever and who didn't?
"So," Lisa began, "this is a pretty incredible place and all, but I'm guessing you didn't bring me down here to give me the grand tour, right?"
"No." I gave a small shake of my head. "No, that's not why I brought you here. Hang on…"
I closed my eyes and let out a breath, focusing on myself. I tried to remember what it had felt like, yesterday, when I'd made that geis with her. How I'd pulled on that specific portion of my powers. I focused clearly on the mental image of it, on the idea in my head of what I wanted, and when I pushed Nimue away, I tried to push away part of my costume, too.
Yesterday, I'd manifested just enough of my Breaker form and my costume to seal that geis. It stood to reason I could do it again, manifesting just enough to Include rather than swapping out my whole wardrobe.
I felt the barely there weights on my body shift. The mask that covered my face, the vest that hugged me, the sturdy boots that felt like armor on my calves and feet, the vambraces that clung to my wrists and jutted up over my forearms. The feeling of being wrapped in a second skin stayed, but everything else was replaced by the weight of my hoodie and the looseness of my jeans.
When I opened my eyes again, my glasses were back and I was dressed in my normal clothes. I looked down at my hands, inspecting them — the gloves were still there, and so was the shimmer of my most basic power.
Like this, you couldn't even notice I was…
As soon as the thought began to form, I knew it was wrong. Amy had told me that I'd been moving with more grace and speed than a professional athlete while fighting Glory Girl, and I hadn't even noticed it, at the time. I hadn't been using my power, either. If I tried to fight like this, hiding the usage of my power behind my normal clothes, when my Breaker form was much more noticeably superhuman, I'd out myself within the first few seconds.
Either way, I'd proven that I could selectively manifest only parts of my costume. I had no idea how, yet, but I was sure that would come in handy later on.
I let out another breath and reached through myself, out into the vast beyond where my heroes lied.
"Set. Include."
My chosen hero's power flooded through me. It had never been as grand or as awesome, in the original sense of the word, as Installing was, but it was still a bit of a rush.
Mentoring Great Heroes
"Aite Láechrad."
The moment I'd activated her Noble Phantasm again, I checked my proficiency in the Ancient Celtic Martial Arts — the upper edges of C-Rank. I was so close to B that it'd take me only a few minutes of training to reach it.
When I looked up at her again, Lisa was staring at me curiously, head tilted slightly to one side. "Aite Láechrad…" she mumbled. "That's Irish, isn't it, so…Aife again, right?"
I nodded. "Yeah."
She was right, I hadn't just brought her here to admire the castle I'd built myself. It had occurred to me, last night, that one of the best ways to protect Lisa and help her escape Coil was to arm her with something that couldn't be taken away, the way a gun or a knife or even that protective amulet could. The best way to protect her would be to teach her to defend herself, so that she could fight free, even against another cape.
It had occurred to me, of course, that she could go and use such a skill to become a better villain. She might take them and use them against the heroes, use them to rob things or hurt people she couldn't have, before.
But that wasn't what I was going to be teaching her for, so that would be a betrayal of my trust, wouldn't it? Too, it wasn't like I was planning on teaching her the higher grades, the stuff that was really out there.
And… Well, I had to admit, at least part of me took a bit of pleasure in the idea of Lisa learning these feats the way I had learned them and found it funny to imagine her fumbling with the Apple Feat or jumping in place for hours with the Salmon Leap.
It was enough that I couldn't quite stop the smile — even if it was small and understated — from pulling at the corners of my lips.
"So," I said, "how would you like to learn to defend yourself with the most bullshit martial arts to ever be invented?"
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Taylor, relying on a mystical contract to enforce trust is generally a bad idea, you know. Like, I shouldn't even have to explain why it's a bad idea.
Anyway, here's Nimue's Noble Phantasm: Castle Avalon. Strangely, it's not quite the most bullshit NP she has. Remember how she gave Excalibur to King Arthur and received it back? Yeah, guess how that manifests as a Noble Phantasm. Even though it'll probably never be relevant.
As always, read, review, and enjoy.
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