Mist of Shadows
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Endbringers Hate Paperwork Part 1 (edited)
🕑 Added 2023-02-04 01:30:08 +0000 UTCAn: This is the edited version of Monday's chapter, basically tweaked things with the Mayor's bit to make things work a bit better as he's a politician in the Bay, he's used to rolling with things so I fixed it.
Myst blinked as he went from filling out a CYOA to standing in front of a school that had obviously seen better days. "What the hell?!" he sputtered when he realized the van he was standing next to only came up to his waist.
[Primary Objective: Provide a worthy challenge for Host:High Priest]
[Target: Brockton Bay]
Myst stared when a translucent popup window appeared in front of him showing him a collection of powers. 'Power Mimic, Summoned Minions, and Telekinesis.'
"No one is coming to help, no one is going to save you Taylor," Sophia taunted as she took a step forward, forcing Taylor to take a step back.
"You should just jump-" Emma stared in disbelief when Taylor stumbled, hit the ledge with her calf and fell backwards off the roof with a look of horror on her face. "Shit!"
Myst instinctively reached out with his telekinesis and caught the falling girl before she hit the ground.
[Queen Administrator: Overwrite Primary objective. New Primary Objective:Protect Host:Queen Administrator]
"Let's go!" Sophia snapped as she grabbed Emma's arm and pulled her towards the stairs, not seeing the point in taking the fall for Taylor being clumsy.
'Great, I'm in Worm and I might be an endbringer,' Myst mused as he levitated a dark haired girl with glasses, that he was reasonably sure was Taylor Hebert, over to the parking lot.
[What the hell!] Taylor mentally exclaimed as she woke up and found herself floating towards a fifteen or sixteen foot tall man in jeans, boots and a green sweatshirt.
[Congratulations, you're a cape.] Myst smiled as he set Taylor down in front of him.
Taylor stared at the giant parahuman. "You think I'm a cape?"
[Considering you sent me a mental message? Probably,] Myst replied with a grin.
Taylor shivered when she realized the cape hadn't actually used his voice. "Great, I'm hearing voices."
"Is that why you jumped off the roof?" Myst asked, fairly sure it had something to do with the trio but not wanting to assume in case he was wrong.
"What? I didn't jump, I fell," Taylor replied as she turned and looked at the school, fairly sure Emma was going to tell people that she’d jumped.
Myst frowned when he noticed several faces in the window looking at him. "Why were you on the roof?"
"I was avoiding people, they showed up anyways," Taylor admitted, still a little shaken from nearly dying and dealing with a giant cape she'd never heard of.
"Have you considered talking to the principal about it?" Myst asked, trying to get more information.
"I've tried for over a year," Taylor grumbled. "Emma's father is a lawyer and Sophia is a track star, the administration doesn't want to deal with it."
"In that case, let's talk to the police and file a complaint," Myst suggested.
Taylor shook her head, fairly sure talking to the police would only make things worse. "What makes you think they'll believe us?"
"Because I know how to push buttons and I'm a giant parahuman," Myst said as he started walking towards the street. "Coming?"
"Might as well," Taylor said as she broke into a jog to catch up with his stride, hoping that he could actually help. 'At least the station is only a couple of blocks.'
0o0o0
"Sorry, we can send an officer to talk to the school, but we're stretched a bit thin and you don't have any proof," Officer Bradley explained to the giant cape and the teenage girl outside the station, mostly because the man couldn't fit through the doors.
"That's it?!" Taylor demanded.
"You might be able to get them on harassment with the right judge and some luck, but I doubt they'd have to pay more than a modest fine and spend some time doing community service," the officer explained.
Myst scowled at the slightly overweight officer that was standing on the steps, wondering what type of mental damage you needed to be suffering from to look at a giant parahuman like they were less than human or not worth your time. "In other words, you're not going to help."
"We have a bunch of drug dealers running around shooting people and worse, we don't have time to deal with every sob story," the officer replied a touch sarcastically.
"Fine, screw it, I'll deal with it myself," Myst replied as he stood up, less than pleased by the entire experience with the police. 'Should have known better.'
"What are you going to do?" the officer asked warily, suddenly realizing that he probably should have been more helpful.
"I'm going to talk to the mayor and possibly the school board about the principal and your lack of understanding and sympathy, best of luck finding work when you're blacklisted," Myst said cheerfully as he started walking towards the bay.
"Blacklisted?" the officer demanded. "Who do you think you are?"
Myst turned to look at the cop. "Me? I'm a cape that is really tired of dealing with stupid people."
"Watch your language," the cop snapped.
"Last I checked, this was still America, free speech and all that, Officer Stern," Myst replied as he picked up Taylor with his telekinesis. "Up up and away," he whispered as he used his telekinesis to fly up so he could see the bay.
"Now what?" Taylor asked warily, trying not to think about the fact that she was floating a dozen stories in the air thanks to a strange cape she'd just met.
"Now we get some leverage," Myst replied as he reached out with his telekinesis and grabbed the massive cargo ship blocking the bay, trusting a power that was supposed to be able to lift cities to manage one massive cargo ship.
"Leverage…" Taylor trailed off as she spotted the cargo ship in the distance rising out of the water. "No way!"
"I'm done playing nice," Myst replied as he pulled the massive ship out of the water, trying not to pretend like he wasn't ecstatic about having powers.
"What are you going to do with that?" Taylor asked wearily as she watched the massive ship rotate so the water had an easier time draining out.
"I'm going to move it over the school then I'm going to talk to the mayor about a reward for removing it, if he doesn't want to pay me or deal with the principal then I'll just put it back," Myst replied cheerfully, figuring that would at least get people's attention.
Taylor pulled her attention away from the ship and looked at the strange cape. "Pretty sure that counts as blackmail or extortion."
Myst gestured towards the massive cargo ship. "There's nothing illegal about claiming marine salvage when it's been in the water that long or at least I doubt they're going to complain. Worst case, I'll just tell the news when they show up that the mayor was probably taking kickbacks from the gangs to leave the cargo ship in the bay to ruin the economy."
"Pretty sure that's slander," Taylor pointed out.
"I'm allowed to voice an opinion," Myst replied with a grin as he floated the cargo ship towards the city, at a rather glacial five miles an hour, wanting to give the water time to drain.
"Screw it, nothing else has worked," Taylor admitted.
"That's the spirit," Myst replied as he mentally poked at his minion summoning power, trying to get a sense of what it could do. He blinked when a house sized purple slime with googly eyes appeared out of thin air in front of them and dropped towards the street. "Oops," he muttered as he reached out and caught the slime with telekinesis before it could crush or at least slime an old van.
Taylor stared at the massive house sized mass of jello or at least it looked like purple jello. "What the hell is that?!"
"No…" Myst trailed off as he realized he could sense its powers in a weird way now that he was looking. "I was going to say 'no clue' but I get the feeling that it's a giant slime. It has the ability to clean toxins out of its environment."
"Did you make it?" Taylor asked wearily, fairly sure the PRT was going to freak out about the unknown Master flying over the city that could create monsters and lift hundreds of tons with telekinesis.
"Theoretically, which is less problematic, creating temporary minions or summoning monsters from other dimensions?" Myst asked as he rotated the ship a bit to try to get more water out of it.
"No clue," Taylor admitted, tensing up when she saw an out of costume Glory Girl flying towards them. "Incoming cape."
"Hello!" Myst called out, wanting to make sure the flying cape didn't have a reason to attack him out of hand.
Victoria slowed to a stop twenty feet away from the giant and the teenage girl that looked almost as confused as she felt. "What's going on?"
"I'm cleaning up the bay!" Myst called out, relaxing a touch when he got a sense of what the cape's powers were and realized who he was dealing with.
"How are you lifting the ship?" Victoria asked, shocked that he'd actually managed to lift it out of the water.
"Magic," Myst replied with amusement.
"Funny," Victoria complained when she realized the giant cape was joking.
"If Myrddin can claim to be a wizard, I can claim my telekinesis is magic," Myst replied, not completely sure his powers weren't magic considering how strange and overpowered they were for the setting.
"What are you going to do with the ship?" Victoria asked, noticing that it was floating towards the city.
"I was thinking about parking the ship over Winslow while I have a discussion with the mayor about the principal of Winslow and the school board that hasn't fired her yet," Myst explained, hoping he didn't have to resort to drastic measures to deal with the principal and all of the teachers, but willing to break a couple of laws if it meant they'd never be near children again.
"You're going to blackmail the mayor?" Victoria asked warily, feeling a cold chill run down her spine at the idea of fighting someone that could pull the cargo ship out of the bay, something she wouldn't even be able to budge.
"Of course not," Myst lied, hoping he didn't have to but perfectly willing to make his point perfectly clear if they decided not to be reasonable. "I'm just being efficient with my time. I need to talk to the mayor about the cargo ship and I need to talk to the school board or someone that can get me in touch with them without jumping through their hoops and pointless regulations."
"Why?" Victoria asked as she glanced at Taylor.
"Why what?" Myst asked as he lowered the massive slime into the bay, causing the various people near the water a decent amount of 'concern'.
"Why do you need to talk to the school board?" Victoria asked.
"Because the principal is a sociopathic bitch that refuses to do her job and keep people safe. I could understand if the people bothering my friend were capes or even gang members but they're just a pair of spoiled bitches, I mean they're not part of the gangs, right?" Myst asked Taylor.
"Not that I know of, though Sophia is on the track team and Emma's father is a lawyer, that probably has something to do with it," Taylor complained.
"What was Emma's father's name?" Myst asked Taylor, wanting to get Alan involved in the mess if only so he could drag his name through the mud.
"Alan Barnes," Taylor replied.
"What does Mr. Barnes have to do with this?" Victoria asked, recognizing the name from some of the things her mother had mentioned.
"His daughter is a sociopath or maybe she's just fucked in the head, you'd have to ask her. Emma gets away with shit because her father is a lawyer and she likes threatening people with him or maybe the principal just likes the money they get because someone that Emma hangs out with is a ward, because I'm not sure why the principal is insane."
"Are you planning on outing a ward?" Victoria asked warily, wondering what the hell Shadow Stalker had been up to.
"Sophia is a ward?!" Taylor blurted, easily figuring out who they were talking about. “The bitch that shoves me down the stairs and assaults me on a daily basis with the staff of the school looking the other way is a WARD?!”
"Welcome to Winslow, a school that may become a bit flatter if my grip on the tanker slips. I'm planning on asking why a couple of bitches thought pushing someone off the roof was a good idea and why all of the teachers were turning a blind eye. When a principal has that much blackmail material on the teachers, there's usually something rotten going on," Myst explained as he continued floating towards Winslow with the massive tanker in tow.
Victoria glanced at where the ship was getting closer to shore. "Keep the ship over the bay, I'll make some calls."
Myst turned to look at Taylor. "What do you think?"
[I think you're going to get in a lot of trouble], Taylor mentally replied, wondering why she could talk to the cape in her head and if he might be a projection.
[I can toss cargo ships with my mind, I doubt the mayor is going to want things to escalate], Myst replied, knowing there was a decent chance of things getting worse before they got better.
"Dad says the mayor is a reasonable person, I'm sure we can work something out," Taylor lied, fairly sure someone would start shooting or screw something up, if only because of bitter experience with Winslow and her father's stories of the corruption in the city.
"It's worth a shot, schools are expensive to rebuild," Myst said cheerfully, wanting to imply that he'd obliterate the school without saying anything that could be taken as a threat, mostly because he didn't really want to complicate Taylor's life more than he had too.
Victoria quickly called her aunt, hoping she had some suggestions for avoiding a potential catastrophe.
[Do you have an actual plan?] Taylor asked as Victoria floated a bit further away, hoping the strange cape trying to 'help' wasn't actually crazy but willing to take the chance because she didn't have a lot to lose at this point.
Myst wasn't sure his vague plan to wing things counted as a plan but he was reasonably sure the mayor would see reason or at least see the benefit of making a couple of calls so the school wasn't reduced to a pile of broken rubble. [I have a couple of ideas, it just depends on how reasonable the mayor is. Moving the cargo ship should buy us fifteen minutes of fame, fame I can use to shed some light on Winslow in a way that the principal won't be able to avoid. I doubt the mayor is going to object to helping, it makes him look better if he can say he arranged everything, especially if he can claim that it didn't cost taxpayers anything.]
"We can hope," Taylor muttered, wanting the shit to stop and hoping things would improve for the bay without the cargo ship blocking the harbor.
0o0o0
Roy Christner found himself wishing he'd had a drink as he walked out of the employee only door and saw the fifteen foot tall cape standing in the middle of the employee parking lot talking to a couple of members of the security team and Lady Photon. He did his best to ignore the chill in the air as he glanced around the mostly deserted parking lot.
Richard followed his boss out and froze when he spotted the giant cape. It was one thing to hear about a giant cape, it was another to see them, especially since he was dressed like a normal person and not like a cape, it managed to make it more unnerving rather than less. "Just so you're aware, you don't pay me enough to fight a giant," he pointed out
"That's fair," Roy admitted, hoping that things didn't turn violent, mostly because he had the sense that the giant could squash them like bugs.
"Are you sure you don't want to call the PRT?" Richard asked in a whisper.
"They'd just complicate things," Roy replied as he started walking towards the cape, trying to put a brave front on things and not think about the mess Armsmaster would make of things.
'At least I have a built-in cape detector, if I remember to use it,' Myst thought as he watched the man dressed in a suit walk across the parking lot with what was obviously yet another security guard. "Thanks for agreeing to meet with me."
"Lady Photon seemed rather intent on the meeting," Roy replied, stopping about ten feet away so he didn't get a massive crick in his neck.
"I wanted to make sure someone actually heard the man out before he had to resort to drastic measures," Lady Photon replied. "He has some rather serious allegations against Winslow and the local PRT."
"Against the PRT?" Roy asked warily, not particularly surprised that he had issues with Winslow as most people even remotely involved with the place had issues.
"One of the PRT's wards is nuts," Myst replied, glad that Taylor left to grab pizza with Victoria because he didn't want to tap dance around secrets. "She likes hunting people with crossbows and she's not particularly concerned with checking to make sure her targets actually deserve it. She's also a bit of a sociopath in her civilian identity and the principal of Winslow doesn't see a problem with her assaulting students as long as she gets the money the PRT pays her or at least that's why I'm assuming Blackwell puts up with it."
"I'm not in charge of the school, you'd have to talk to the school board or take your evidence to the police, we're going to need solid evidence to have her removed and make the charges stick," Roy argued, knowing the school employees had an effective union.
"I tried to talk to the police, but they weren't interested in listening. As for the school board, they're either idiots, corrupt as hell, or someone is feeding them crap, take your pick. If I hadn't been near the school a student would have died because of Sophia's insanity, mostly because she helped her friends threaten a girl to the point where sneaking up onto the roof to avoid them sounded like a good idea. The girl stumbled off the roof, neither of the bitches warned her or tried to do anything when they corralled her towards the ledge, so it’s more on the intentional side of intentional manslaughter, I want that school dealt with."
Roy sighed. "It's not that easy, I can't just fire a principal, they have a union and despite being Mayor, I don’t have the authority to fire anyone outright."
"Really? You're telling me that you can't make a call to Emily Pigot and tell her that Sophia Hess's case worker is hiding information and that she's a sociopathic monster? I doubt it would take more than a week to find evidence that Blackwell is guilty of several felonies which would keep her from ever working for the school system again and void her contract. Or just send an attractive investigator to the school with a couple of hundred dollars for rewards for information that leads to an arrest and I'm sure someone will let you know how insane their pet ward is."
"I'd have to get the PRT to send agents from Boston, that's going to take time," Roy argued, not wanting to promise anything he couldn't deliver, knowing that the investigation wouldn't go anywhere as it would risk exposing a ward if what the cape was saying was true and give the PRT a blackeye. "It's probably not going to make the papers."
"I don't care about the papers, I just want Blackwell and Hess dealt with," Myst replied.
"It's going to take at least a couple of weeks to get the results you want," he explained, “if they’re guilty they won’t be able to hide it for long, but the procedures and legal paperwork will take some time. While they could be removed in as little as a week for ‘administrative reasons’ the actual sentencing and court case could be years down the road.”
"What would you like done with the cargo ship?" Myst asked.
"Honestly, it would be less paperwork if you tossed it into the depths of the ocean," Roy replied, not wanting to deal with the paperwork salvaging it would cause or the clean up.
"Not to mention criminal," Lady Photon piped up.
"Doesn't change the fact that it would generate less paperwork," Roy replied with a sigh then smiled as he realized he had the perfect solution. "Actually, I'll make some calls, the Dockworkers Association should have people with the right skills and certificates to cut the ship apart once you've ripped it apart and dropped everything on a lot. There should be enough steel to pay for the entire operation rather than costing the city money."
"Works for me," Myst agreed, knowing the jobs would help the city more than just tossing the cargo ship into the ocean. 'Not to mention help the union stay afloat while they're waiting for shipping to pick up.'
"Let me make some calls," Roy said as he pulled his phone out of his pocket.
0o0o0
Director Pigot did her best to ignore the urge to grab a bottle and damn the consequences as she stared at the rusty cargo ship that was hovering a couple of hundred feet over the bay. "Can someone explain how they're moving the cargo ship?"
"No," Armsmaster admitted over the com system, annoyed that none of his instruments were giving him anything useful. "I was hoping I could find some type of energy that would give me a better idea of how they were moving the ship but I haven't been able to find anything that would let the cargo ship float."
"Telekinesis?" Emily asked warily, wanting to know what they were dealing with.
Armsmaster glanced up at the flying cargo ship hovering over the bay, knowing he'd be in a world of hurt if it dropped into the bay while he was on the rocks. "I've never heard of anyone other than the Simurgh having telekinesis on this scale, it's more likely that someone used several anti gravity generators."
"Any evidence?" Emily asked.
"No, but I could have missed it," Armsmaster admitted, hoping he'd just missed it as the alternative was worse.
Emily scowled when her phone beeped twice, letting her know that she had an important call. She glanced at the number of the display. "Let me know if you find anything, I need to assure the mayor that we have things under control."
"We don't," Armsmaster replied.
"I'm aware," Emily replied then accepted the Mayor's call. "Yes?"
"Is there a reason you have a sociopathic ward in Winslow?" Roy Christner demanded, not particularly interested in being polite after what he'd learned.
"What are you talking about?" Emily asked, wondering what Sophia Fucking Too Stupid to Keep Her Mouth Shut Hess had done this time.
"I'm not sure if you're aware but the cape that pulled the cargo ship out of the bay set up a meeting to discuss certain matters, he's more than a little angry about your pet sociopath and wants the principal of Winslow brought up on charges," Roy told her.
"Revealing the identity of a ward is a crime," Emily pointed out.
"Only if you've signed an NDA," Roy pointed out. "I told him that I can't do anything about your ward and that he should probably take things up with Boston. I know how much you hate capes so I'm giving you a chance to clean house before I kick things up the chain and the entire situation blows up in your face."
"Assuming we have a cape in Winslow, does he have any evidence of illegal activity?" Emily asked, wanting to know what the mysterious cape had.
"Do you honestly think it matters? If you don't have a lunatic on the loose, you're going to need to relocate Hess because the man has the ability to lift a cargo ship and a grudge. If you have a lunatic running around, you need to get rid of her and make an announcement about her moving," Roy told her, wanting the problem out of his city one way or another.
"What makes you think it's Shadow Stalker?" Emily asked.
"Vista is adorable and she's also too young to run around Winslow," Roy replied. "Let me know if I need to worry about the man ripping the city apart."
"It's," Emily scowled when she realized the mayor had hung up on her. 'I knew putting her in the wards was a bad idea,' she grumbled as she headed for Ms. Warren's office, wanting to ask the woman a couple of questions before she unleashed the hounds of hell on Winslow, hoping she could find enough evidence to get rid of Sophia.
