Archive of Our Own ^beta

Taylor was losing track of time.

How long had it been since Hijack had let her see her dad?

How long had he had his figurative fingers on her nerves, even in their sleep?

How long since she’d been able to breathe without him interfering?

She couldn’t tell. Time had this odd tendency to stretch when one was being puppeted around in her own body and used as a supervillain’s plaything. If she hadn’t had the senses of her bugs to parse (which she got very good at, very quickly, thanks to having literally nothing better to do), she would have gone insane.

She hadn’t started out this way, of course- there was no way anyone sane would consent to being a Master’s plaything. No, she had wanted to be a hero, and she’d fought off Lung to do it.

Of course, when Tattletale of the Undersiders offered their gratitude and asked to meet up, she did it (reluctantly and cautiously, of course, but not nearly cautiously enough). Taylor arrived early, using her bugs to scope the place (a mid-tier café) out cautiously, and once satisfied with the kitchen and its lack of infestations, bought a coffee and sat down outside.

The next thing after that she remembered was waking up tied up in a blacked-out room without any bugs. Then, her limbs started twitching, without her permission, and she started screaming.

That didn’t last long.

In the stretch of time (that she guessed was about two weeks) since she’d been captured by Hijack, she came to despise her male teammates. Regent was the public persona of the son of a bitch controlling her and did… things… to her, Grue was willfully blind to her plight (she should know, she heard him confront Hijack and accept being brushed off), and Chariot was just… generally creepy. She didn’t really like Rachel, strictly speaking, but given that she obviously had trouble interacting with people, she didn’t hold her lack of response to what Taylor and Tattletale were going through against her.

As for what he had her do, as his “teammate” Skitter… The bank robbery wasn’t too bad, and the campaign against the ABB worked out fairly well in addition to the vindication she felt in taking down Lung again, but the fact that she had to work with the Empire and the Merchants to do it left a bad taste in her mouth, beyond what being controlled into doing it left.

Today, she was being brought along with Tattletale- Lisa out of costume, apparently- to go on a “date” at the same café that she had been captured at with Hijack, but something Hijack had registered through Tattletale’s power (or at least the weaker version he had access to) had gotten his metaphorical ears pricked up, sending a shudder down her spine.

“Hello there, miss Mexico,” he drawled, licking his lips.

This drew Taylor’s attention to the woman in question. She was tall, busty in a way that seemed almost intimidating, and well muscled, with brown skin and dark hair almost as well cared for as hers (at least, before Hijack started neglecting its care), strong facial features that made her look to be vaguely in her early twenties, but the thing that really drew her eye (her bugs’ eyes, strictly speaking, but that was just semantics) was the phone in her hand. Quite simply, it was far more advanced than it had any right to be with the exception of if it were Tinkertech- it was a single transparent piece of a glasslike substance with a small border of metal going all the way around, acting as a touch screen, except to some bugs it looked like just an ordinary flip phone- weird.

Lisa sashayed over to the woman, who looked up. “Hey, kid,” said the woman, “can I help you?”

“I think you might be able to. Would you mind too terribly coming over and talking to my boyfriend about it? I’m not exactly privy to all the details, but I think he could use some help with his work.” Lisa’s voice was chipper, and she beamed at the woman almost enough to blind her.

“What line of work is your boyfriend in, miss…”

“Lisa Wilbourne, and Alec’s an independent contractor,” she said.

“Really?” asked the woman, eyebrows rising slightly. “In that case, lead the way, kid.” She tapped at her phone, and the screen shut off just before she slipped it into the pocket of her loose-fitting jeans.

Lisa did just that, with Taylor screaming in her head for the woman to run.

The woman sat down at the table, looking directly at Hijack. “What do you want with me, Jean-Paul?”

He froze. “How do you know that name?”

“Neither a woman nor a magician ever reveals her secrets,” she said, pulling a deck of cards from her sleeve and starting to shuffle them.

Hijack’s fist clenched above the table, and after a moment, something in the woman’s neck twitched and she collapsed onto the table.

“Damn it,” said Taylor’s mouth. “She forgot to eat lunch again.” Her body moved, and she put one of the woman’s arms over her shoulders while Lisa did the same on the other side.

“Let’s get her back home,” said Hijack, slightly louder than necessary, and walked away, leaving enough money to cover their drinks (but no tip) that Taylor hadn’t had the chance to enjoy more than about a sip of.

He had just taken another slave, and she could do nothing to stop him.

The cards lay splayed across the table, revealing the Tower flipped face-up in place of a normal playing card. They would lay there until the café closed, at which point, the owner’s common sense overcame their superstition and threw them away.

It took me nine days to actually break free of Regent’s power.

Ironically enough, he was the one Master I never prepared for. My implants were the first thing I built on Earth Bet, and they were intended to protect me from precogs and Masters. Pretender, Heartbreaker, Contessa, Valefor, and Dinah Alcott, their powers would all just sort of bounce off my brain thanks to bullshit Forerunner reconciliation tech abusing causality to make it so that they technically never tried to go for my brain, as far as their power was concerned, but since Regent’s ability directly hooked into my nervous system without stopping by my brain, the implants only prevented him from reading my emotions and pain. If I had just had the chance to start breaking into neural physics-!

But I digress.

Regent was excited to have what was essentially a Free Tinker on board the Undersiders, since while Chariot was good, he was limited in his ability to give tech to others because of how unintuitive it was.

Not me.

The human tech I had that he knew how to make me build was- well, not necessarily idiotproof, but the everyday uses definitely didn’t exactly require advanced degrees, although an understanding of some of the mechanics and the construction methods definitely did. Weapons, deployable equipment, and… well, having a Free Tinker in his hip pocket, there’s one thing that Regent wanted that I could give him: power armor.

That was, funnily enough, both a lot more complicated and a lot simpler than it seemed. A lot of the really good stuff, like the Combat Skins that let the Forerunners destroy cities or even MJOLNIR armor, which could tank an orbital drop, required extensive implants to work properly, and MJOLNIR also needed a solid Brute rating on the wearer if they didn’t want the armor’s normal operation to shatter their bones, setting aside the substantial material costs of both (which I could bypass via my Striker power given time, but he didn’t know that).

But Semi-Powered Infiltration armor was easier to build. Primarily specced out for stealth with active camouflage and less of the typical (by Halo standards, at least) power armor staples such as energy shields and a tank’s worth of armor, it was still impressive as far as Earth Bet was concerned, and relatively easy to build with the right components, at least for a Tinker.

So, that’s what he had me build. He mostly left me alone to Tinker, having someone (presumably Coil’s mercenaries) deliver what I’d need to make it to the Redmond Welding building. A couple LCD TVs, to build the nanocrystal mesh underlay, plenty of raw metal and a forge to work it, electronics galore, everything I needed I got.

Coil was almost certainly going to steal it (and possibly me) once he learned I finished the armor, but that was only a problem if I couldn’t escape on my own with it.

It took me eight days, once I really got started the day after Regent made me his, to build it, which was something of a miracle enabled by the fact that my implant greatly reduced my sleeping needs. Eight days of almost nonstop Tinkering, with just enough food, water, and sleep to keep me going. Eight more days of Taylor and Lisa being under his thrall. Any normal person, any normal Tinker, wouldn’t have been able to do this nearly as fast.

I couldn’t afford to be any slower.

But I finished, and he knew right when I had because he was riding along in my body, so he was right there once the armor was assembled and ready. He made me fiddle with one of the specialized soldering irons I’d been forced to make to bring the electronics up to snuff.

“So,” he said, all theater for the three Undersiders he wasn’t Mastering and possibly Taylor, “tell us what it can do.”

“Sure thing,” replied my voice. “This suit of powered armor is roughly on par with what Armsmaster or Mannequin brings to the field, in terms of physical capabilities: strength, speed, durability, and all that. But it’s also got stealth capabilities.” He rapped it with my knuckle twice, not quite long enough for me to really activate my Striker power, but close, and it vanished, leaving behind only a shimmer that, had it not been obviously out of place in the cool environment of the factory floor, could have been mistaken for heat haze. It switched off at the snap of my fingers, revealing the gunmetal gray surface of the armor right next to me.

“Impressive,” said Brian. “How long until we can all get some?”

“Well, I have to build some for the boss,” said my voice, “so obviously that’s gonna take a while, but after that, given that the materials access gets streamlined, I could probably have us all outfitted in… a couple months, maybe? A little longer if Chariot doesn’t want to stick with his own armor.”

Alec clapped. “Excellent work, Amber. Come here.” He took my face in his hands and pressed my lips to his, my arms wrapping around him in a passionate embrace.

At that moment I realized that I wasn’t going to get a chance to use my power on the armor, not with him right here, so I went for the second best option.

My Striker power, broadly speaking, let me upgrade things. As long as they were considered “close enough” in purpose, I could use some of my internal reservoir of energy, which grew slowly, to forcibly upgrade them, skipping both the Tinkering time and, more crucially, the materials I would need to build them. The farther the technological advance I intended, and the bigger the object, the more energy I needed to use, but I hadn’t used the power beyond getting my implant up to snuff almost three weeks before. I had energy to spare.

In a flash of actinic white light, my soldering iron abruptly became a Sangheili-style energy dagger, and it flashed on for just long enough to sever Regent’s spine just below his rib cage.

He fell onto me, dead weight, and his control of all three of us weakened from the shock and pain he must have been in from the flash-cauterized wound.

Lisa and Taylor both collapsed, wheezing, but he hadn’t had the same chance to fuck up my autonomic systems, so I was mostly fine, fine enough to direct my collapse to just miss the SPI armor and land with my hand on the boot.

This lightshow was much brighter as I dumped the rest of my stored charge into the suit, jumping it right to a Forerunner combat skin that almost seemed to flow onto me in response to my desire, as transmitted through my Striker power.

As it sealed itself around me, the last of his influence vanished from my body, Forerunner tech standing up to Shard interference, and the suit immediately injected medical nanites to restore my nervous system as it temporarily shut down my ability to feel pain.

It interfaced with my implant, allowing me to bypass my damaged nerves and direct the armor directly, and I stood up, smooth gray metal responding better than flesh could dream.

“What the fuck are you doing!” snapped Grue, his smoke billowing off him.

“Escaping the Master that kidnapped me off the street,” I replied, the armor’s speakers adding a flanged effect to my voice. “Correction: me, Tattletale, and Skitter.”

“I-impossible,” wheezed Regent. “How…”

“Persistence,” I said, kneeling over him, “and ingenuity.”

One blow pulped his head against the unforgiving concrete floor.

I stood up and glared at the other three Undersiders. “Grue. Chariot. Leave or die, and I release the details of what you were complicit in using your cooling corpses to hold the message.”

They left.

I turned to Rachel. “Go to your dogs.”

“Why’d you do that?” she grunted.

“He kidnapped and enslaved us. It was the best option I had.”

She nodded. “Alright.” She left.

I sighed, then dropped to one knee between Taylor and Lisa, blocking both of their views of Regent. “This is almost certainly going to hurt.”

“H-haouuu… freeee?” asked Taylor through poorly responsive lips.

“My implant protected my brain from his power, and my upgrade ability is centralized there, so he didn’t know I could do it.” I pressed two fingers to each of their heads and triggered the nanite release, giving them their own doses of the medical tech which immediately paralyzed their voluntary nervous system.

It only took about five minutes for the tech to work its figurative magic on them, at which point the nanites returned to my suit.

During that time, my suit’s ancilla loaded, a small seven-pointed star appearing at the top right corner of my field of vision.

“Howdy,” it drawled in a low, smooth, feminine voice. “Call me Dawn Under Heaven, she/her.”

“Nice to meet you, Dawn. I’m Amber, she/they.”

“Kid’s about to get back up,” said Dawn just as the nanites finished their work and returned their nerves to their control.

“Thank you, thank you so, so much!” Taylor didn’t so much stand up as hurl herself at me, wrapping me in a hug.

“No problem, kid,” I said, patting her on the head gently. “Come on, let’s see if we can’t get you home.”

Outside, the sun rose, bringing with it the promise of a new day.

“Pet,” said Coil, “I have some questions for you.”

“Candy?” asked Dinah Alcott, looking up shakily at Coil.

“Once you answer my questions, pet,” Coil replied, not quite as kindly as he thought he was pretending.

“O-okay, but only six, it hurts already,” Dinah said.

“In that case… what are the chances that-”

The door to Dinah’s room disintegrated in a flash of blue-white light, revealing a tall figure in gray power armor. “Coil. You have two choices: surrender or die,” she said, an odd flanged quality to her voice.

Coil split the timeline. In one reality, he went for his pistol, which ended with the woman’s right arm morphing into some sort of energy weapon and neatly boring a hole through his head, at which point his power shut down the timeline.

“I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement,” said Coil, raising his hands.

“So long as that arrangement ends with either you betraying your word and then abruptly passing away or going to prison, yes,” said the woman.

“In that case, may I have the name of the hero who’s taking me in?” asked Coil, splitting the timeline once again. In one timeline, he triple clicked his phone button, setting off the base self-destruct.

In that timeline, the woman produced the same energy weapon. “No.” Then, she killed Coil again.

In the other timeline, she nodded. “You can call me Witness. Regent didn’t, but I don’t particularly care what a dead man called me.”

Coil’s blood ran cold. This must be the Tinker that Regent acquired and used to try and get his hands on power armor, and given that he’d had the materials delivered, which amounted to a tacit approval of Regent’s actions… well, Witness was likely just looking for an excuse to kill him.

“Dinah, honey? I’m going to take you back to your parents, okay? I just need to take Coil to Boston to hand him over,” said Witness, extruding some sort of solid energy bindings from her suit and clamping them around Coil’s wrists.

Damn it. There went the probability of him being sprung from PRT custody. Here in Brockton Bay, the Travelers would have been potential options, since they were staying at their secondary location today and as such shouldn’t have been captured by Witness, but in Boston… Accord wouldn’t do it without concessions he would have been unwilling to make, Blasto wasn’t willing to sell his services, the Teeth were unwilling to be bought for that, and everyone else in Boston was too small an operation to break into the PRT holding facility. He might have been able to rely on-

“Don’t bother calling on Cauldron for extraction. We’ve… come to an arrangement, and this was part of the concession they made to me.”

Shit.