Chương 15: Whittle Away

I had, for reasons that I don't think wanted to make themselves known to me, agreed to inform Samantha of the news. I wasn't entirely sure what compelled me to meet with her and tell her everything when that was more likely something Chris or maybe even Jairo would be better off doing. Probably another way to make me socialize more. Frankly, Dr. Way was the closest thing to reasonable among the team even if she was clearly out of her fucking mind.

Her kids were probably also fine, but I had no reason to interact with them, and I wasn't sure if they counted as teammates or not. I descended the stairs, glancing around to see that the lab was less crowded than the first time I came down. That plasma globe thing wasn't in sight, neither were Sam's kids. Had me wondering if the doctor was there at all. Reaching the bottom of the stairs was what confirmed to me that she was there, thanks to the acrid smell of burnt rotting wood.

I saw a hunk of one of the tree-men's limbs sitting on a large table, with Dr. Way going at it with some kind of device that was shooting out sparks. Looking closer, it seemed to be some kind of angle grinder. On my approach, she suddenly stopped, turning to face me with a surprisingly warm smile.

"Hi there, stranger," she called out with an amused look. I raised my eyebrow.

"How did you know I was here?" She waved it off, placing the grinder aside as she walked towards me, her hands in her lab coat's pockets.

"Oh, I know where everything is in my lab." She was good at coming up with unnerving phrases, I had to admit.

"Where are your kids, then?" She pointed up towards one of the walls behind her, where I saw nothing that was worth being pointed at.

"They're in their rooms next door. It's about bedtime for them." My face scrunched a little.

"Alone?" She shook her head.

"Same way I know where everything is in my lab. I've got monitoring devices in their rooms and mine that give me real-time footage. I can see that Samuel's curled up in his bed right now and Samara's quietly playing with stuffed animals. She'll tire herself out; she always sleeps about an hour later than her brother." I squinted at her.

"I... how? Are you a cyborg?" She seemed to find that quite funny with the laugh that crashed out of her.

"Oh no, no. I have a bunch of soft-light projectors that go under a specific spectrum." She pointed up towards the ceiling and floors, and I did happen to notice a bunch of black, paint-can-sized tubes sticking out.

"They're constantly outputting visual information I can read through a set of contact lenses I made." She tapped the side of her head, near her eyes.

"Means if I want to turn the information overload off, I can just take my contacts off, and if things go wrong, I'm not stuck waiting through the error or forced to resolve it immediately." I nodded. Seemed she had some measure of common sense. But that did drive my curiosity.

"So how much can you see?" She stared at me for a few moments, smile unchanging, before suddenly snapping her gaze off to the side.

"Sorry, was just pulling up all my information. I do have a couple diodes on my scalp for brainwave transmission so that I can do hands-free control. This is all a pretty recent set-up, since I got the idea from May and Jairo's powers, otherwise I'd be using a pair of glasses loaded up with hardware. Contacts mean I just have to shape lenses." Fast worker.

"Anyways, I can see into my room, my kids' rooms, and all the public areas. I also keep track of all my digitized notes this way, so I don't always need to type, but I keep some things offline like Sandy so that I'm not wasting bandwidth on what would just be figuring out which weapon to pull up." That explained the laptop.

"I can also see all the public and common areas like the cafeteria, the admin room, the hallway on the third floor, and the immediate exterior of the building."

"Why just the hallway?" She rolled her hand.

"Eliza, Perry, and Tancred's offices are considered private like your rooms, legally speaking, so I don't have any observation devices in there." Surprising to hear a mad scientist obeying the law.

"The walls outside of Tancred's office windows are public visual space and good for surveillance of the outside though, and if they just so happen to hear anything he decides to say out loud, that's not my fault. He knows I have public surveillance." Yeah, that filled in the gap.

"And he hasn't done anything about it." S he shook her head." I doubt he knows exactly where they are, but I also bet he suspects that level of distrust from me. There's not a single government-hired wackjob tinker that they're not spending tax dollars on keeping from starting the next apocalypse. They were doing it when they had ConKing make the Firmament and they ramped it up after Chicago." I tilted my head.

"What's mad science got to do with Chicago? Was it an experiment gone wrong?" Her head shook in disagreement.

"No, no. The usual casual understanding of Chicago is it got 'nuked.' In clearer terms, it was hit with a radioactive death ray that was basically an instant nuke that could strike anywhere. Professor Perdition built it and used it at the government's behest because of Wallachia." Nodding was my only physical response I could offer.

"So, what actually was Wallachia? 9/11 was a couple years before my time and I didn't watch much TV, so I've never really had it explained to me." She pursed her lips for a moment, before pulling out a phone. I wondered if they gave one to her or if she already had one. I then wondered if I would get one. Would have to ask later. She tapped away at it before turning it towards me, showing me a rather disturbing image of this lofty tower of what almost looked like burnt flesh with spikes jutting out everywhere."

On September 11th, 1993, this structure formed from the ground in the morning. There was mobilization of the Chicago PD and the National Guard, but initially it just did nothing. The tower itself was later called Wallachia because of all the spear-like barbs on its body. No one was sure what to make of it, maybe an experiment gone wrong, maybe a wizard opened a portal, maybe it was a kaiju, no one had any way of knowing. After a couple of hours, not long after the National Guard arrived..."

she trailed off, tapping away at the phone again before a video was shown of the tower from a different angle; seemed to be a news camera filming from a rooftop.

"It produced what is historically referred to as a 'sonic event.'" The video went from quiet ambience to this noise that filled me with a dread one cannot fathom. It started as this trilling reverberation before almost sounding like a man screaming in agony at the end." When it let out this scream, random individuals began displaying abnormal behaviors. Initially they seemed confused and in a fugue state, but then they began to suddenly start attacking everything around them, trying to kill people indiscriminately.

And it wasn't limited to mundane humans. Some superhumans had arrived with the intent of dealing with what aftermath could ensue, but many of them were struck with this same violent trance. For the next nine hours, Chicago was Hell on Earth.

People both mundane and superpowered were actively trying to kill and destroy everything they could get their hands on. If they couldn't find people to hurt in their immediate area, they ventured further out. Their intelligence wasn't diminished either, so they would use manipulation tactics or even exploit and damage infrastructure." Every word struck my mind's eye with a hammer blow. Awful things to imagine. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

That didn't stop her from continuing.

"This phenomenon reached to just about a half mile outside of Chicago's city limits, and there was no way of knowing who would or wouldn't be susceptible to the phenomenon, making the situation higher risk as there was resistance to sending people in. The government reached out to every superhero and villain possible in hopes someone could do something." She pulled her phone away, putting it back in her coat's pocket.

"Meanwhile, off in New England, Professor Perdition had faced humiliation after humiliation. He was a mad scientist whose devices fell apart easily, and was routinely defeated by Sparklad, a 12-year-old superhero." Never heard of him.

"He had been making a project designed purely to cause mass destruction in secret in an attempt to justify his ability to be a threat to the world. He called it his 'Death Ray,' a specialized high-pressure water cannon with enough force to send a stream of high-pressure liquids drenched in gamma radiation across the country in minutes.

The liquid stream was a carefully balanced mix of chemicals that were highly reactive, but due to being layered between immiscible liquids, ones that don't mix with others in the same way oil and water don't, they wouldn't perform a chemical reaction until impact was made." With every word, she seemed to seem like she was spacing out a little. Like she was just a robot reading off a script.

"On impact, they'd all form a chemical reaction that was akin to a bomb going off, sending super-hot and irradiated substances at high pressures flying out. On top of the added explosive force from how fast this ray was flying, he basically made the world's fastest nuclear missile. Destroying cities was the bare minimum it could do. It would remove any life where it struck." I already pieced together the next steps, but she seemed to feel that wasn't enough.

"The Department of Defense asked him to prepare a shot after a set time window where they had an improvised team of superhumans enter and evacuate as many people as possible. The Great Lake Guardians as they were composed at the time, the Wave of Hope sans Guapo Galera, and Tyr — who wasn't a member of the Wave yet — were the team." Tyr. Mundane human, uses technology from a company called YggTech. Has a robot dog.

"Tyr had provided counter-sonic devices meant to resist any effects of the scream if it was still going out, and theorizing there was a psionic influence as well there was a neurological dampener as well. Guapo Galera was not permitted to enter due to them not knowing how to integrate the devices with his unique biology on a short time frame. He focused on infrastructural protection in the meantime."

Guapo Galera was an eight foot tall humanoid shrimp whose entire rap sheet could be summarized by the fact he was the de facto hero for fighting off kaiju, and he did it by punching them back into the water. Him going insane would be apocalyptic.

"They evacuated as many as possible, but after thirty minutes it was time to fire. Professor Perdition's Death Ray turned the Chicago area into a still heavily irradiated no-man's land. We don't know how many truly died, but approximately only eight percent of Chicago's population made it out. Honestly miraculous numbers. But all of that made the entire world of super stuff — which a lot of men in power, born before its start didn't trust — lay directly under the gaze of the powers that be."

"And then came the Chicago Act, and why I'm here with you guys after getting arrested." She nodded.

"The very same. Though you probably would've still gotten hit for vigilantism without it. Frankly, I think the Chicago Act saved you." My face scrunched, worried that the one person I was agreeing with turned out to be as batshit insane as people alleged her to be.

"Look at it like this. The Chicago Act produced a nationalized superhero system that they use for recruitment with the Patriot Project." Secret agent superheroes. No one really knows who they are, just that if they're in the area something bad is happening.

"That reminded them of the fact that, just like in World War II, having superheroes work for the feds is actually really convenient. Then the Patriot Project itself has gotten so much criticism that they're interested in a public-facing, classical superhero team like when they helped form The Wave of Hope. They're picking young adults who need this structure and have the means to make a difference. Without this, with your rap sheet? You'd probably be in The Firmament." I scoffed.

"So, what, it's good that I had a choice of prisons instead of the default one?" She let out a shaky exhale, placing a hand on the tree man's limb to lean against the loose piece of dismembered tree.

"That's not what I'm saying, Leo. This isn't a prison. You're being given employment, an education, somewhere to live, and association with people you can actually trust an ally with who aren't scared you're going to hurt them." My head tilted.

"And why shouldn't they be?" I asked. She put on a particularly smug smile at this point, the warmth cooling down from it.

"Because you're not that menacing of a guy. Yeah, you're strong and that has objective risks, but that doesn't mean anyone you shake hands with is going to die. They understand that; most of that team has been dealing with similar issues right now. I don't know if Chris told you, but he was born with his power. No one else in his family like that. Two chromosomes grazed each other the wrong way and now he sees on a spectrum we can't comprehend." I clenched my jaw a little.

Maybe it wasn't the right thing to think, but that confirmed something important from me. Out of all the supers here, Christian might have the most experience with his powers. Depending on how early he realized it was something no one else could do, that could be fifteen years of real experience he always had. I barely even got to test mine across ten. Jairo in his own words hasn't even had his powers for a year.

I didn't know how long May had hers, but if I could gather that I could start really tracking and tiering threa-"You need to stop treating us like we're enemies." The words derailed my train of thought like a herd of cows on the tracks.

"I'm not." She clicked her tongue as she stood herself back up from her lean, her hands going into her pockets." You tilt your head when you're confused." Knew that was gonna get called out at some point.

"When you get what you think is the clear answer, your head straightens up slowly, you might not even notice it. You get this spacey look when it's going up, which is why I think that. You're trying to read into everything. You think I've got another layer to what I'm saying, and you probably do that with everyone. You probably think we're saying what we want you to hear and not what we're thinking. You told May you didn't even go near the other kids in fear of hurting them."

"How did you-" She just tapped her ear.

"I told you I get transcripts." My neck tightened and I stepped forward, feeling a bit of the concrete give way under me.

"You said that was for calls. Were you spying on me this whole time?" She didn't flinch. If anything, she stepped closer, reaching out and ruffling my hair. My skin felt this vibratory sensation as she did it. I think the term for this was a shudder. I might have felt something like this from Eliza's hug as well, I wasn't sure.

"I just said my lab keeps logs. I never said it was only for calls. I don't look at them when I can tell it's not a communication normally. I just spotted it when I was auditing logs for a call Tancred was taking, caught it out of the corner of my eye. I don't spy on people; I get a lot more interesting information from people who know I'm trying to learn about them." The little vibration I felt seemed to subdue the tension in my neck, and my heart slowed in turn.

"Now could you get your foot out of the floor? That's gonna be a tripping hazard." I glanced down to see one of my feet was ankle deep in the floor. In my periphery, I noticed the gauze Dr. Way put on me. It lingered in my vision. I yanked my leg out from the floor.

"Sorry," I muttered, before trying to move on.

"Then I guess you already overheard our conversation in the common room. Do they know you listen to them?" Sam shook her head.

"They know I keep logs. Like I told you, I don't look at anything that's not meant to be a communication because most of the time it's not reliable. If you're out running in a spandex suit for two minutes the logs are going to say 'Stuffing stuffing stuffing' over and over because that's how it interprets the ruffling sound when doing sound-to-text. Real-time audio isolation, constantly, is way too costly to get precise with it. If they were worried, we'd have spoken about it at this point.

I destroy any non-communication logs at the end of the day, which for me is in about three hours. I don't really gossip with the others anyway, so it's not like I plan on telling them all their personal details. Hell, telling you about Chris' power being from birth is kind of a HIPAA violation." I tilted my head, and she pointed at me with a smugness in her grin. Fuck's sake.

"Then why'd you tell me?" She shrugged, stepping back over to the tree man's limb and picking her angle grinder up.

"Because at this point I've realized repeating things to you isn't really what convinces you. You need unique examples every time. My kids aren't much better about that so I'm used to it. Go relax, you're gonna end up with a big morning tomorrow if Tancred's gonna start mobilizing you all early. I might end up getting my boots on the ground too." Curiosity struck me and I looked down. Rainboots. Huh.

"They're an old milsurp pair for electrical insulation. Don't think too much about it." I wasn't going to. Just surprised she wasn't being metaphorical. I just nodded and turned, making my way away from all of this. After about twenty feet, I heard her speak again.

"Leo. I want you to let it really sink in that I understand what it's like being by yourself since you were so young. I really do. You can talk to me if you don't think anyone else might get what you're thinking. Don't keep beating yourself up." I exhaled.

"Yeah. Thanks," I emptily blurted out, before making my way up the stairs and out of her lab. I immediately crossed over to my room, keeping my vision straight to avoid any other potential faces as I needed real sleep. Anything else was a tomorrow problem.