Capítulo 1280: 41
Interlude 4.b (Tattletale)
Lisa got off the bus at the Boardwalk and walked the rest of the way to the abandoned factory at the docks that was the Undersiders' lair.
On a Monday morning, the Boardwalk was unusually sparse with tourists. Still, there were enough of them around that she kept her power off to avoid triggering an endless stream of irrelevant information. She only had so much to use before getting a splitting headache for the rest of the day, after all. She had to conserve her uses, and she'd already used it quite a bit today watching the latest video posted by CRUCIBLE.
Lisa walked through the maze of barely distinguishable warehouses, garages, and factories easily. The graffiti and worn walls were enough for her to find her way, even if she hadn't gotten familiar with the area over many months of operating nearby with her team.
It wasn't long before she was just a few buildings away.
She turned on her power then and scrutinized the surrounding places for hiding spots where there could be people spying or ambushes.
There was nothing that she could detect. None of Coil's mercs, who sometimes stationed nearby.
She closed the distance and pushed through the door beside the Redmond Welding sign and headed up stairs. Brutus, the big dog, greeted her with a bark at the base of the stairs, then followed her up.
The first person she saw was Rachel, who came out on account of Brutus' barking, and just gave her nod before heading back in to the loft.
Inside, Alec was playing a video game as usual, while Brian sat beside him watching him play.
The nominal leader of the Undersiders looked over. "Hey Lisa. Glad you could make it."
"Hey Tats." Alec gave her a glance before his eyes darted back to his game.
She gave Brian a smirk. "If our fearless leader is calling, how could I miss it?"
"You're the fearless one, Lisa. I seem to remember you were the one that suggested we look for Lung after Oni Lee, instead of running away from the raging dragon."
"It isn't fearless if I knew we would have been fine," she said, tapping her head.
Brian didn't know about the timelines Coil used. But Lisa did, and she knew that if their boss ordered them to look for Lung, he probably had a backup timeline where they did run away, in case things went badly.
Although she didn't work for Coil one-hundred percent by choice, she would be lying if she said she didn't feel safer having that kind of assurance when they went up against the crazies that didn't care for the unwritten rules.
The Undersiders were in it for the fun playing cops and robbers with the dress-up heroes, and getting burned alive wouldn't be fun at all.
"Right, right," said Brian.
"So, what's up, Brian? You said the boss contacted you?" Lisa asked.
It was strange, and she didn't like it. Coil always went through her when he communicated with the team. Even though he could contact the others at any time, and did do so when dealing with their private matters—like Brian's custody suit—anything team-related he'd go through her.
While Brian was the nominal leader, she was supposed to be Coil's liaison.
And she hadn't been able to get into contact with him for an entire week. That was why she'd suggested for the team to lay low for while, in case something happened.
The last time she spoke to Coil a week ago, he'd been intent on getting the dirt on the new capes that took down Lung, and ordered her to find out about them too.
She had been half convinced that Coil finally bit off more than he could chew trying something with a precog that might have been even more powerful than himself. They managed to execute exactly the right steps to persuade someone as famous as Panacea to join willingly and leave her own family, then predicted exactly how to defeat Lung with bugs and tranquilizer, after all, what's to say they couldn't have foreseen exactly how to take down Coil in spite of his power as well?
But she was only half convinced, not one-hundred percent, because Coil's men were still out and about.
The best guess she had come up with was that Coil's civilian identity had been close to being compromised, so he was avoiding unnecessary contact. The PRT had suddenly vamped up security, and the old passcodes to their network that Coil gave her stopped working. She could find a way around that, eventually, but for now she was cut off from her best sources of intel.
"Yep. He called me on Friday to apologize for being unreachable, and gave me a solo job. I did it Saturday and got paid yesterday. I'm pretty sure it was legit."
Lisa had her power on momentarily as Brian answered. The micro-expressions on his face clued her in to the fact that it wasn't quite a solo job. He could have shared it, but he didn't. And he was now justifying it to himself as being testing out the waters to see if it was legitimate.
If he hadn't been greedy, the proper thing to do would have been to get her to analyze whether it was legit or not.
But she guessed that Coil must have offered a sweet deal for doing it alone as well as the option of doing it as a team. Brian wasn't the type to do things behind the team's back, so Coil must have wanted him to make that choice—not just to do it alone, but for him to decide to do it alone, otherwise he wouldn't have presented the choice at all. Why? To create a crack in the team?
"A solo job? Mind telling the rest of us the juicy details?"
"He just asked me to use my power to cover a block at the docks Saturday morning. I went in, did it. Left. No trouble. That's it."
Normally, she would have known about something like that through the PRT networks. Now though? She had to find out from Brian himself, and didn't know what it might have been for. She knew Coil had been fighting the E88 and backing up the ABB, and ABB territory was in the docks, so it might have been to help any of their forces escape after a battle.
"Right. So we're back in the game?" She asked.
"Well, there's no new job for the team or anything like that. Boss is supposed to contact you as usual, and he said he would be occupied for a while. We're still going to get our monthly paycheck, but I'm guessing there won't be any specific requests for a while. So I was thinking, if you guys wanted to do something, we've basically got a free hand to plan whatever we want."
"You know, Brian, normally I'd be all for some fun time with you guys, but I feel like you might not be aware of something reeeaallly important that happened last night," she said.
"Two gangs in town just bit the dust. That what you mean?" Alec piped up.
"Yeah. That."
"What? What do you mean?" Brian asked with wide eyes, looking between Lisa and Alec.
"It was all over PHO this morning, even in-game chat in the lobbies. The ABB and Coil are done," said Alec. He put down his controller then leaned back and pointed at the TV screen that was connected to his gaming machine. "Look, there's even people talking about it right now."
"Mind pulling up the vid so we can watch on the big screen, Alec?" Lisa asked.
"Anything for you, Tats."
Brian and Rachel watched and listened closely.
"Fuck. These guys aren't messing around. Those mutant bugs are scary as shit," said Brian at the end.
"Good old Panacea's work. Or Araliac now," said Lisa. "A week ago, Skitter was a newbie using spiders with lethal venom, now with Panacea's help she's upgraded to big monster spiders that can wrap whole people in their webs. And that's only the stuff they were willing to upload onto the internet."
"I think…I liked the kind healer at the hospital more," said Brian.
"We can take them," said Rachel with a growl.
"At least the crazy chick putting bombs in people's heads is gone. She might have come after us next if Lung were still around," said Alec.
"So, what does this mean for us? Are you worried about them coming after us if we do another job?" Brian asked.
"Kinda. Don't know if we're really on their radar yet, but they seem pretty serious about their mission to root out villainy. They don't seem to care about playing nice with the rules either. Right at the end here? See how they said they took Bakuda and Coil into custody? Sounds like they're not planning to hand them over to the PRT."
There was a moment of silence in the loft as the rest of her team processed that.
"They can't do that, can they? I mean, they're registered heroes," Brian said with a disbelieving look.
"There wasn't any press release from the PRT about the arrest. It's almost noon and they've been completely silent. I don't think CRUCIBLE care what the PRT thinks, and I think the PRT might be scared too, because they took Bakuda's bombs," Lisa explained.
"Including the one they're saying can wipe out the east coast," said Brian with a nod.
"And I've got a good hunch that they put that in the video to make sure the right people understood that they have nuclear level firepower now. If they kept it secretly for themselves, it'd be hard for anyone to find out, but they purposely showed just how much destruction it's supposed to be capable of."
"You're saying they're keeping it as a threat in case they get on the PRT's bad side?"
"I'm saying that with the precog on their team, they know exactly what they're doing. They know they're going to butt heads with the PRT soon, and they're not planning to back down. Illegally keeping cape prisoners is only the tip of the iceberg."
"But why?"
Lisa didn't immediately answer. Inside, she was struggling to make a decision. When she saw that video, she noticed something else, something that put all the pieces together for her.
"Guys…I have something I need to tell you," she said finally.
She looked around at her team who looked curiously back at her.
"Our secret boss was Coil," she said.
"You're shitting me…?!" Brian shouted. "The same Coil that was just captured?"
"Way to drop a bomb on us Lisa," said Alec.
"Not exactly. That Coil was a fake. A body double," said Lisa.
"Wait, so, our boss is still kicking?" Brian asked.
"No…not exactly," said Lisa.
"Alright, I'm lost. How about you just explain the whole thing to us, Lisa."
She sighed.
"It's like this. I was thinking about what happened to the boss ever since we lost contact with him. I thought he had to have been in trouble, but I wasn't sure how much until I saw this video. You see, this body double? My power told me he was acting the whole time. Everyone else in there didn't know about CRUCIBLE's ambush, not even his own men, but he did, and he was just playing along at being captured," said Lisa.
"You mean the whole thing was a setup? It was staged?"
"Bakuda thought she was the one setting the trap, but CRUCIBLE has a really powerful precog, so they turned it around on her. The thing is, why would Coil's body double be in the know too, and why wouldn't he be concerned about being captured? The only way that makes any sense is if he was actually a CRUCIBLE secret agent. But is he just a CRUCIBLE agent? Or a Coil double-agent, who warned Coil about the trap and went in his stead to the meeting? And I still haven't been able to get into contact with Coil, so I don't know if he's just in hiding now."
Alec saw something interesting on PHO as he checked out the other hot threads.
"Channel 24…?" he muttered, then he took the remote and flipped to that channel.
"If the real Coil is in hiding, then that would explain why CRUCIBLE won't give custody to the PRT. They can't, because they don't actually have him. But it could also be…"
Lisa caught a glimpse of the thread Alec was on, and her eyes widened.
"Also be…?" Brian asked.
Before Lisa could answer, the TV news channel interrupted.
"Mayor Christner seems to be in good spirits today," the voice of a female news commentator narrated.
On screen, the camera was showing Mayor Christner, a local Congressmen, and several city councillors were shaking hands with Polychromic, Araliac, and Skitter one after the other, and smiling for the camera flashes. A huge crowd of reporters was at the front, where the politicians and CRUCIBLE were on a portable stage with a podium.
"Can't say I'm surprised. This event is really hitting home with the voter base, we've got a massive turnout here even though it was just announced this morning, and it's only getting bigger," another male news commentator said.
The camera panned around to show a mass crowd of people on the field facing the portable stage, and a line of stalls/tents on the sides, then the camera switched over to a few other vantage points showing the filled parking lot, people swarming over the streets, police vehicles blocking off the road, and armed men in silver and black uniforms corralling the traffic.
These men looked awfully familiar to Lisa's eyes. They were all helmeted, but the way they stood and moved reminded her of Coil's men.
"As a quick recap for viewers that are just tuning in, we're live at the Merianton Hotel and Conference Center, where CRUCIBLE and BBPD are coordinating the release and reunion of Bakuda hostage victims with their friends and families. Last night, following the defeat of ABB and Coil's Mercenaries, CRUCIBLE made arrangements with the hotel to house all of the victims in five star accommodations," said the female voice, whose face had popped up in a box.
The camera moved inside the hotel, where more police as well as men in silver and black uniforms could be seen, some as armed guards, others seemingly employees sitting at booths, processing the friends and families who had arrived to unite with the victims.
"Our journalists on site were informed by CRUCIBLE employees—the ones in the silver and black uniforms—that there were over a hundred and fifty victims and each received an individual room. A very expensive, but well appreciated gesture, as we heard from the victims and their families."
The scene changed to a reporter interviewing a reunited family on site, who were hugging and had tears of joy in their eyes. "We are so, so, grateful to CRUCIBLE and everyone on their team that helped make this possible! We are just blown away by the amount of money, effort and care that they've put in to make my daughter comfortable! Thank you!" The mother said.
"And for everyone else, a big party to celebrate, with a large amount of free refreshments and food for the first people to arrive," said the male commentator as his own head popped up in a box.
"Free food? I'm so down. Maybe we should head over, guys," said Alec.
The camera moved around to show the food and beverage being offered in the rooms where people waited, along with huge screens playing the CRUCIBLE videos, live footage from the outside stage, or random educational videos on self defense and first aid.
Then it moved back outside to show the tented stalls lining the field, all of which were handing out hotdogs, burgers, ice scream, etc.
"They invited local bands and entertainers who will be putting on performances free for the public throughout the afternoon and evening. The Brockton Jazz Boys were on stage just before the mayor arrived to join the party."
"Don't forget Skitter's spider dance, I think that was one was the real attraction."
"Definitely. Who knew giant spiders could be cute? There are also rumors floating around that famed singers Mickie Oswald and Renee Silvers might be making appearances later at night."
"Well if Renee Silvers is coming to Brockton Bay, then it's a good thing her performance isn't happening yet, or all the kids would be skipping school," the female voice said with a chuckle, and the male voice laughed with it.
"Some of them already are, aren't they? The BBPD have had an awkward time trying to get them to go back to school. No one wants to be the party pooper in something this big. At least CRUCIBLE is playing some educational videos in the conference rooms."
"Aisha!" Brian shouted. There was his sister on the screen, grabbing food from the stalls. Beside the stalls massive corporate sponsor signs could be seen.
Alec snickered. "I'm telling you guys, we need to get there before the free food runs out."
Where did they get the money to do all this? When did they have time to organize it? This wasn't something a week old team could pull off. Or any team, for that matter.
Lisa was getting an increasingly bad feeling about it. Coil had the money and resources to do something like this…and she was pretty sure those uniformed team members that popped out of nowhere were actually Coil's men.
The problem was, Coil couldn't have been the one to orchestrate it, because she knew that Coil didn't know who CRUCIBLE were last week. She didn't believe that Coil had the means to bring CRUCIBLE under his control that quickly, which meant the other possibility that she was going to tell the team earlier seemed increasingly likely.
"And the hand shaking is over. It looks like the mayor's about to deliver some remarks."
The congressman and councillors had walked back down to their reserved seats in the front row, while the CRUCIBLE three still stood on stage at the center.
An assistant quickly ran up and gave Mayor Christner a written speech script that Lisa recognized as being hastily written in the last hour.
The Mayor took a quick glance over it standing behind the podium, then cleared his throat, looking around the crowd.
"First, I would like thank you all for being here today and showing your support. I want to thank team CRUCIBLE for the invitation because I am tremendously pleased to be here celebrating with you all."
He's a little too happy, Lisa thought. Did CRUCIBLE make a sizable donation to the city or the Mayor's campaign? Or is he just happy that he's getting free good publicity for his administration?
"But above all, I want to thank CRUCIBLE for the tremendous service they have done for Brockton Bay in the removal of two criminal gangs that have plagued this city for years, and for their truly heroic rescue of the hostage victims who were forced to fight for the ABB! Let's all give a big round of applause in recognition of these incredible heroes who call this wonderful city home!"
What followed was a thunderous round of applause led by the mayor as he turned to face the CRUCIBLE three and a wave of cheers that drowned out all other noises.
After a moment, when the applause finally died down, the mayor continued.
"I believe that years from now, we will look back on this day, and see that it is a significant turning point in the history of Brockton Bay. Every year, criminal elements and the underground economy siphon an estimated $27 billion dollars out of Brockton Bay's GDP, without paying any taxes to the city, while reducing economic growth further by the spread of drugs and property damage…"
Alec turned off the TV.
"Alec! I was watching that," Lisa complained.
"You gonna watch the mayor and his friends give boring ass political speeches? Suit yourself, I'm going to get some free food and wait for Renee Silvers to show up," Alec said with a shrug, then went straight out the door without waiting for anyone.
"Heading over doesn't seem like such a bad idea. You could keep watching in person, Lisa," said Brian, as he also got up.
He was obviously going to find Aisha, but Lisa held back her retort. "Alright, fine. Let's join the party."
O O O
Status de energia semanal
-- Ranking de
Poder 
-- Pedra de
Poder