Angelo
April 16th
The Docks
Early Morning
"Next."
I reclined back in my comfy leather swivel chair, propping my feet up on the magically repaired office desk that held the essentials - a cup of steaming hot coffee, black, a half-eaten deli sandwich on toasted sesame, a cheap laptop, and a bucket of ice filled with several glistening bottles of my patented Potion of Restoration; the byproduct of mixing a Potion of Healing, Potion of Cure Disease, and a few bluish-pink drops of the new Potion of Regeneration. The resulting mixture was the color of grape wine, a deep, swirling purple that sparkled with diluted magics.
It was these concoctions that I was using to restore the health of my men, because no Bucciarati dealer was going to be walking around scratching at heroin scars and cold sores. Truthfully, this should've been done two days ago.
At my short command, the muffled, excited whispers I could hear through the thin wooden door abruptly quieted, and soft footsteps approached and knocked on the door. Hesitant. Unsure.
I knew exactly who the last one was.
"Come in, Jade."
Corvo tilted its head from atop my shoulder as the metal door knob rattled, twisted, and bright, beautiful emerald eyes peered through from the dark recesses of the second floor corridor. Jade hesitated for only a moment longer before stepping through and carefully shutting the door behind her, the signal for the remaining unhealed men to start whispering to each other once again.
Silence reigned.
She stood in the middle of the moderately sized room that I'd claimed as my 'office', hands shoved into the very same dingy, stained hoodie she'd been wearing since I recruited her. Her hair was a frizzy, tangled mess of bright crimson locks, dimmed and sullied by oil and grime but no less fiery because of it, and her freckled face was thin. Pinched. Aged by hardship, not time. She was no longer hungry after all of the groceries I'd stocked up on yesterday, but that hollowness wasn't something so easily removed.
In a way, she was pretty. The past few years had clearly been hard on her, but no one could deny the jewel that rested beneath the corrosion. Fortunately she went unharassed, or else our numbers would end up dwindling even more. The men knew how I felt about in-fighting after the last joker who harassed Hector.
Though, I did find myself curious…
"Sir-"
"What was your lot in life before you became a hooker?" I asked, the quiet baritone of my voice instantly forcing a flinch from her overtly lanky body. She was scared of me, that much I could see without my dojutsu, but there was also a fierce respect there, as well.
She swallowed whatever she was going to say before.
"I-…" Jade's voice, throaty and hoarse, cracked when she went to speak. She winced, swallowed saliva, and continued, "Sorry. I- I was a college student. BBU - that is, Brockton Bay University. And I was a barista, I guess…?"
The poor woman was horribly confused, and wary. Lidded scarlet eyes traced a bead of sweat leaking down the side of her neck.
She refused to look me in the eyes. Most did when I had my Sharingan activated, I've noticed.
"Major?"
Jade blinked, visibly taken aback. "I'm sorry?"
My Unseen Servant slid around the side of my desk, gently handing me a glass bottle of Regenerative potion, still dripping cold water from the ice. Jade followed the, in her point of view, floating bottle with wide eyes.
I rolled it around my palm. "Your area of study in college - what was it? And do not say something like, 'General Studies', or 'Political Science'. Please."
The smirk on my face, and the dry humor in my voice, seemed to melt down some of the fragile, transparent glass she hid her soul behind. Something like a smile pulled at Jade's thin, cracked lips, and she shifted slightly in her ratty hoodie. There was a measure of pride in the upturning of her lips, as flimsy and brittle as it was. "Of course not, sir. Um, I was studying Economics, going for my Master's, but…"
That made me raise my brow. "You have a Bachelor of Economics?"
"Yes sir." At the sound of my open surprise, Jade's pride congealed, her quiet, hoarse voice becoming slightly louder as she grew more comfortable standing before me. "The only reason I had to… take a break is because my scholarship fell through. But I was a really good student b-before- before all that. 4.75 GPA, honors, I just-"
She abruptly cut herself off, inhaling a sharp, shaky breath. I observed the fiery-haired woman coolly, my face a stoic mask that refused to allow a single thought to pierce through. It was abundantly clear that, whatever happened that made her lose her scholarship, drop out of school, and become a fucking prostitute was something big and absolutely swamped in trauma. It was a minefield, and one that I had no intentions of trying to tiptoe through.
Not today, at least. Already, the poor woman looked like she was on the verge of collapsing. Sweat matted her face, smudging the dirt and grime that came from days, potentially weeks of living on the streets without a shower. There was no central air cooling in the warehouse, and all of the industrial fans were stationed downstairs. My Statue was currently out doing what it could to repair the electrical wiring in order to restore power to more areas of the factory, but ideally we'd hire some sort of electrician.
I was a Quick Learner, yes, but my electrical system knowledge was virtually zilch. I had no time to power level that skill.
Fortunately, I had a good feeling that I could kill two birds in one stone here.
I set the potion down on the table, and my Unseen Servant slowly slid it across the smooth wooden surface until it rested, glistening, right in front of the woman. "… Do you know what my brother and I plan to do here, in Brockton Bay, Jade?"
She hesitated to answer, eyes flickering between me and the potion, searchingly. I couldn't help but chuckle. "Drink it, and then answer my question. The potion takes time to fully come into effect."
"Oh. Of course."
Her hands shook when she picked up the bottle, and I doubted that it was completely because of nervousness. Every single one of the men I'd recruited that night was an addict of something; even Hector, the kid with arguably the most common sense out of the lot, had started suffering tremors and mood swings after only a few short days of going cold turkey. It was part of the reason why I was purging them all today.
Junkies hesitated buying from other junkies. It was like looking in a fucking mirror; and when you were ugly, you hardly wanted to see that reflected back on you. For more reasons than one, I needed them clean and of sound mind. For Jade, this was particularly important.
"Cheers," I smirked, raising my mug of coffee.
Her lips twitched upwards, and the rest of her hesitation faded away. "Cheers."
"CHEERS." Corvo trilled.
She unplugged the cork, sniffed it, and knocked the glass back with practiced ease.
That scourging burn hit her before the taste of cherries and wine did.
I was ready. My Unseen Servant smoothly caught the bottle as it slipped from her shaking hands. I stood at the same time, sipping from my dark coffee as I walked around the wide berth of my desk and leaned against its bulk.
Jade was reacting in much the same way as the other men did; arms and legs locking up, fingers twitching, stuck between pain and pleasure. The potion hadn't had nearly as drastic of an effect on me when I'd taken it as a test, but neither was I a drugged out hobo with an undisclosed number of diseases. Golden-silver light writhed around her limbs like snakes, cracked and marred skin flaking off and burning into nothingness before my very eyes.
Bones cracked, and regrew. Muscles tore and reknitted. Strands of hair fell out in clumps, replaced by silky, luscious new locks. And this was only the beginning.
The larger, more immediate changes only lasted a few more minutes. I counted it down on my wristwatch.
At exactly the three minute mark, her body practically collapsed in on itself - only, I was there to catch it. I'll freely admit that I was more gentle with her than I had been with her larger, more morally dubious counterparts; her body was as light as a feather in my grasp, and I easily handled her in the crook of my arm like a baby, her long legs spilling out over the side of my thighs and down towards the floor.
A beat passed. Jade's eyelids fluttered blearily, viridian gaze slowly opening to regard me with a dazed confusion. Up close, I could already see the changes - her skin, previously pock-marked and rugged, wiped clean of scars and blemishes. Her cheeks were less gaunt, full of color and life. The wrinkles had disappeared from her forehead. Now, she only looked like a very dirty, very pretty twenty two year old college student.
A touch of my finger, a murmured word, and the grime disappeared. Jade flinched in surprise at the flash of magic. "W-what…-"
"Congratulations, signora," I chuckled warmly, exposing a flash of pearly white teeth, "You are reborn. Now, answer my previous question quickly. Your future depends on it."
Her eyes widened, and very real panic entered their depths. I noticed her pupils dilate as she looked over my significantly closer face, sliding from my nose, down my jawline, to my lips - but other than the heat flushing her cheeks and the depth of her breathing becoming heavier, she didn't react. That was good.
Good bosses did not fuck the help. No matter how pretty their eyes were.
"Um- shit. You said, 'Do you know what my brother and I are doing in the city', right? You wanted me to describe your goals as a criminal organization…?"
I tilted my head. "Close enough. One minute."
She blanched. "N-not fair."
"Fifty seven seconds."
I had to admit; the pout was kind of cute.
I could see the moment she switched into 'businesswoman mode', though. Her eyebrows furrowed, wandering eyes cooling off and glaring somewhere between my nose and my smirk. "Yes sir. Judging by your aggressive take-over and subsumption of Shitma… Skidmark's men, the amount of drugs and weapons you've gathered, and your, um, premeditated murder of the ABB's leader, I'm going to say that you and your brother plan to conquer this city as the lead criminal organization in Brockton Bay."
Her legs had stopped twitching. I gently nudged the woman back down to her feet, and she didn't even stumble. "Go on."
My approval seemed to invigorate her. She took a step back, putting a respectful few feet of distance before us, and continued in a more confident tone, "No offense, but you are aggressively Italian. And you're a stickler for professionalism. You've thrown around the name 'Bucciarati' with pride, I've only seen you out of a suit when cleaning the factory or working out, and you hold your men to a standard that you'd never see in a run-of-the-mill street gang in the ghetto. And I've seen a few over the past couple years."
"Insightful," I commented, my Unseen Servant tearing off a sticky note and pulling a pen from a drawer. "Twenty two seconds."
But Jade was on a roll now. She hardly seemed to hear the time, eyes roaming left and right as she spoke, "I'm not sure if you two are actually the Marquis' sons, I won't lie. But you were a part of some sort of mafia organization. High ranking, maybe. The Cosa Nostra, maybe, but they've mostly disbanded since Sicily was almost sunk back in '92. Regardless, you plan to turn those assholes out there," she jerked a thumb behind her shoulder, towards the door, "Into mobsters. You want to rule this city through organized crime, and not just for the money. You want control. Change. Real change. That's why you're creating all of those crazy Tinkertech drugs and potions, right?"
Jade's nervousness had all but disappeared during her tangent, replaced by a wary, almost fearful admiration and a heavy, burning curiosity. I stared at her, eyebrows raised, actually impressed by how close to the truth her entire think piece was.
This girl was actually very intelligent.
"That why you offered yourself that day? Because you wanted a piece of the pie?"
She nodded her head shamelessly. "You took on over a dozen men armed with guns and knives, after killing Skidmark and Trainwreck, and you made it look pretty. I would've been stupid not to take a chance."
I smiled, and took the proffered sticky note from my Servant. "You went over the allotted time."
Her flushed skin, proud of her accomplishment, abruptly turned pale. "But-!"
"Luckily, I was just being an asshole. Here."
Jade stared at the folded up slip of pink paper like I was handing off the fucking Death Note. Slowly, she padded forward, taking the note with clean hands that no longer trembled from withdrawal, opening it up to reveal-
"Codes?"
"Top one's the password for the laptop. It's yours now." I tilted my head towards said laptop, sitting innocently on the desk. "The number below that is Faultline's personal contact. I've bought you a phone, prepaid - it's in the second drawer to the left. Save her number, call her, introduce yourself as La Cosa Nostra's head secretary. You'll be handling our economical and interpersonal business affairs from now on, legal and illegal. Congratulations."
Silence. Jade's eyes glazed over, her soft lips falling open in naked shock. What exactly had she been expecting from my aggressive inquiries?
My smile widened. "It comes with a raise. And an office."
That seemed to yank her out of it.
"Wait, are you sure this is okay?!" Jade went to reach forward, possibly to grab hold of my arms, but reality swiftly reminded her that that was not something she could just freely do. Instead, she gripped the edges of her hoodie and bit her lips hard enough to bruise, staring longingly at my sweet leather chair and desk. "I'm not- I won't spit on your generosity, don't get me wrong. I accept, sir, one hundred percent. But…"
"But what? You're a whore?" I scoffed, rolling my eyes. "You're an intelligent woman, Jade. Highly educated. Clever. You have a pretty smile. As far as I'm aware, the system failed you. You are not a failure. The Bucciarati Family doesn't abide failures. Now sit your ass down and-"
The onyx pinwheels in my crimson gaze rotated. I had all of the time to move, but…
I let the woman hug me.
It was a tight hug. One filled with desperation, and gratefulness, and maybe a little attraction - but that was inevitable when you looked the way I do. More importantly, the hug was needed. At first I wasn't sure where to put my arms, but after I heard the wet, broken 'thank you's' dampening the midsection of my suit, I sighed and just wrapped my arms around the redhead's waist, melding her to my taller, more muscular form. After Prestidigitation, her natural scent had taken over the previous stench of unwashed body.
It wasn't unpleasant.
Almost a full minute passed before she pulled away, her cheeks splotchy and wet, expression horrified. "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't-"
"It's fine."
We both paused there a moment, my hands still gripping her waist. She bit her lip demurely. "Um…"
I quickly released her. "You should've been the last one in line to be healed, yes?"
She hid a small smile, opting instead to simply incline her head. "Yes sir. Though Hector was saying earlier that he knew a few guys his age wanting to join up. Jack too, actually - older men from the Dockworker's Association. But that may also be because of your alluded ties to the Marquis, which… is it true?"
I feigned confusion. "What?"
"Your father. Was he really…?"
"No comment."
Jade frowned. "But it can help our-"
"No comment."
"Sir-"
"Mi no speak ingles."
She huffed, but there was a wider, significantly more happy smile on her freckled face. "Alright then, keep your secrets."
I blinked. "… Was that a Lord of the Rings reference?"
She blushed. "… Why does someone like you know Lord of the Rings?"
"Who do you think I am, signora? A boring old man who pays his taxes?"
"A murderous mafia boss who with glowing red eyes and a talking raven. I apologize if fantasy novels aren't a hobby I'd thought you partook in whilst conquering the world, sir."
"… Touché, Jade. Touché."
The banter came surprisingly easy, though Jade never crossed the line from 'intelligent, dry-witted, and respectful secretary' to something more disrespectful and vulgar. There was always professional distance between us after that hug, though I would have had to have been blind to not notice the glances she gave me when she thought I wasn't looking, as I leaned over her head to show her an excel sheet I'd made for our growing finances, or a product spreadsheet meant to be optimized for our increasingly more frequent drug runs.
Fortunately, decorum prevailed.
The room was technically big enough for two desks, but we had an entire factory to mess around with, and I'd already cleaned up and repaired most of the damages with the help of my Divine Statue. I set her up in a much smaller, yet infinitely more 'cozy' office space directly across from mine, right beside a large area that I had mentally marked down as the 'canteen', judging by the large industrial freezers and stoves placed in its kitchen.
That was work for another day.
Most of the boys were knocked out in the atrium, their new and improved health having taken a lot of energy during the healing process, but Tommy - now a big, dumb brick shithouse of both muscle and fat - helped me move some of the repaired office furniture up and into Jade's new space.
By the end of it all, everyone was tired, yet victorious. When I left Jade, she'd been on the phone with a legally-dubious electrician that she'd somehow wriggled the contact info out of from Faultline, securing a full electrical power plan for the factory, and high-speed internet, because dirty money fucking talked. All the better, because my Statue hadn't managed to accomplish all that much by himself, and we desperately needed access to power.
She was also getting on top of our current funds, looking into acquiring forged identities for us - yet another contact gained from Faultline, in exchange for a free Health Potion vial. The windfall from that initial Faultline deal was delicious, seeing as I'd sold the original vials at roughly half of what I'd planned on making the 'market price' of our potions - 5k for the basic Potions of Healing and Stamina, and 7k for the Potions of Fire Resistance. Discounted for the vials, that was 2.5k and 3.5k each.
She'd even paid for the one I drank. A blatant shot at accruing favor, no doubt. And that 'contract' she mentioned? Nothing more than a mutually respectful business agreement. I concoct any new potions with previously unused effects, I let her crew get first pick at the freshest batch, but only for the next half year, and at a decently marked up price to adjust for the special treatment. She knew how busy we'd get over the coming months, and didn't want to risk missing out on the good shit if we got bought out in bulk by other parties.
Smart women were sexy. And unless I was reading the vibes wrong, she wasn't completely against talking more with me privately.
Still, that initial deal was a little over twenty five grand, given to us in a secure briefcase the previous night. With the passive income from drug sales, Skidmark's loot, and our previous funds? We were sitting on roughly fifty grand, in straight up physical bills and coins. Too much fucking money to have sitting in a safe in a dilapidated factory. I was starting to trust Jade, and to a lesser extent Hector and Tommy, but the others?
Not yet.
So what did I do for the rest of the day, as Jade click-clacked on her new laptop upstairs, and my newly healed henchmen slept off their healing exhaustion?
I put on a wifebeater, some denim jeans, slapped on a baseball cap, and began applying Glyphs of Warding throughout the factory.
Password? Gabagool.
It was a hot, sweaty, repetitive job - mainly because each casting took a fucking hour - but I was a paranoid perfectionist. No password? Congrats - eat a Lightning Bolt to the fucking skull, puttana.
No one could ever say Angelo Bucciarati didn't take home security seriously.
Though, one nagging, slightly annoyed question kept popping into my head as I slaved over my glyphs-
Just where the fuck is my brother?
Sal
April 16th
The Docks
Late Afternoon
Angelo was the big picture guy when it came to plans and whatnot. For all of my foreknowledge on the world of Worm, it was scattershot, relegated to half-remembered, eldritch recollections between half a dozen fanfics and actual snippets of the original story. I'd be more than happy to back him up as an enforcer, go on patrols around territory, be there to scare the shit out of people…
But I really didn't have much patience for the running of an organization. He'd complain, and he might say he didn't like it, but I knew the truth. Angelo liked being the man behind the desk, the big man upstairs that everyone answered to.
It wasn't like I was even upset about that, mind you. Leading any group more prominent than a pack of goons was a headache by my reckoning.
Sherrel and I would have been diving deep into more tinkering already, but material requirements were an unfortunate reality of being a Tinker. Especially with my brand of magical item creation, where I'd need weeks to create anything puissant enough to be worth the effort. So, that left me with free time on my hands, and a question of what to do with it.
My brother would have liked me to do something productive with it. You know, cajoling the underlings, some shit like that. I, however, had an even better idea of how to spend that time.
"You think you're going to beat me with moves like that?"
"California girls, we're unforgettable!"
"Shut up! You've got longer legs, it's not fair!" Dinah shot back, as she hastily tried to correct her footing on the dance pad.
When you had a surplus of income, a complete disregard for doing anything official, and a twelve-year-old girl to keep entertained…you got creative. For me, that meant trying to find something that kept the both of us thoroughly amused, and distracting her from being technically kidnapped for her own good from her family.
The solution to those problems? Dance Dance Revolution.
Well, technically it was the Earth Bet version, but the game was practically the same overall. Picking up two dance pads, a console, and a copy of the game loaded up with about as many versions of classic songs on this world as humanly possible, I originally got it to entertain myself, but…
The allure of Katy Perry simply could not be beaten. One of the benefits of time-traveling back to 2011 meant so many classic bops were still perfectly acceptable to listen to. I didn't have to pretend like I didn't fuck with late 00's pop.
Did it matter that I was destroying a short brunette girl, given that I was physically stronger and faster than her in a dancing game? Someone who was a bigger man than me might have let her win a game or two. I…just told her to get good.
If that only made her dance harder in response, or try to, I was doing something right. Though eventually even Dinah had begun to spin down. There were only so many times you could dance like you were dying to the absolute bangers of the time period.
"Worth it, right?" I grinned, wiggling my brows at the girl. "DDR is the pinnacle of athletic gaming. The Nintendo Wii don't got shit on jamming out."
"What's a Wii?"
Ugh. And there went my good mood. "Don't worry about it," I waved off her concern, my grin twitching briefly, as she slumped against the cheap couch we'd shoved into our apartment. "Anything else you're jonesing to do? I feel kinda bad about leaving you here all day."
She hummed, shrugging softly. The joy that was in her eyes dimmed a little, as she glanced away from me. "...Is there any way we can…call my parents, or something?"
Ah. I was wondering when she'd get around to those questions.
It wasn't as if I was against it on principle. What I was more concerned about was giving Coil even more opportunities to track down his wayward Thinker slave, or the Protectorate to rescue her misguidedly. Because one was awful, and the second would undoubtedly segue pretty shortly into the former before long.
Over the last few days, I had no doubt she was doing her own tests with her power on Angelo and I. If anything, that was the only thing that'd explain how relaxed she seemed around the two of us. What was, well, more unfortunate was how depressed she tended to get at random.
It was a wild guess, but I suspected that was when she was asking some rather pointed questions about her safety outside of our company. And more importantly, whether or not she was still in danger from Coil.
I hadn't asked her to use her powers for our purposes, if only to assure her that we didn't want to protect her because of them. It was the principle of the thing, really. What kind of mafiosos would we be if we let her get strung out on drugs in Coil's base?
We weren't saints, yet even we had lines we wouldn't cross. And in time, the rest of the criminals in the city would learn not to cross those lines either.
Unfortunately, that meant that she was free to get homesick and stuck in her own head. I couldn't even begin to understand what it was like to implicitly understand that you were safer away from home, away from your family.
"I miss my mom," Dinah sighed, inadvertently stabbing me in the heart as she spoke. "I miss my dad. Is there any way we can communicate with them, to make sure they know I'm safe?"
That only made me grimace, as I reached up and rubbed my jaw. "That might be tricky. I mean, there's probably a way to do it sneakily, like leaving a letter or something, but actually talking to them over a phone call is…"
Well, I wanted to make it happen, but it was easier said than done. She was unknowingly related to a member of the Protectorate, and I had no doubt that Triumph was breathing down their necks to make her return a priority for the local branch. If I ran into the guy, I had no doubt it'd on sight between the two of us.
Not that I'd expect anything less. If I'd thought someone had kidnapped my younger cousin for god knew what reason, I'd do far worse to them.
"For right now, I'm going to hold to us getting a letter out to them," I promised, settling on that compromise at the very least. Angelo could have his creepy as fuck familiar deliver it, and have no one else be any wiser. "Anything more complex is going to need to be discussed between me and my brother."
Then again, he was just as much of a softy when it came to these edge cases. He might pretend like he wasn't, yet at his heart, Angelo was truly the most chuuni of tsundere mob bosses.
Note to self. When you're rich and famous, look into revitalizing the anime industry on Bet and pitching an anime with that premise.
Biting her bottom lip, she looked up at me searchingly, before some tension released in her shoulders. Dinah nodded, sighing out, and sounding defeated in a way no kid her age ought to.
I'd always wanted a little sister, just to make me and Angelo's duo a good trio. Maybe it was for the best that Ma had decided two was enough, if I was this much of a sap for a girl that wasn't even related to me. Or, more cuttingly, maybe I just didn't have the heart for this kind of work.
"Is there anything else I can get you while we're here? Stuffed animals? A dog? Dye your hair?"
"...What's that last one? You know how to dye hair?" She asked, looking a little befuddled at the prospect. "Just…why? You're a boy!"
I nodded, smiling her way. "Yes, I am a boy, from an Italian household, and one quite close to his mother. I know more about hairdressing and hair maintenance than most girls."
It wouldn't even be the first time I helped someone dye their hair. When I was a kid, my mom found a single gray hair and immediately rushed to touch up her hair, with all of the paranoia of a vain woman could muster. Angelo was conspicuously absent when she was looking for helpers, and I learned firsthand the process of dying your hair.
Not quite how I expected that information to come in handy. However, my time on Earth Bet was proving that most of my expectations were going to be shattered eventually. "If you dye your hair blonde, I can induct you into the ancient rites of the Gyaru, most blessed of the Japanese people."
"I'm more interested in just the blonde hair," she admitted. "I have a friend with such pretty blonde hair, but my parents never let me dye my hair to match her."
"You're in luck, because I'm not a responsible parental figure. You wanna dye your hair? Fuck it, I'll dye mine too." I wasn't specc'd for the NTR protagonist build like Angelo, though a little multiclassing never hurt anyone, right?
I will also shamelessly admit, her not looking anything like herself would throw off any possible pursuers, too.
Her expression flickered between a couple of different feelings, before in the end she gave me a low nod. "I'd…like to dye my hair. If we can do that, yeah."
"Just give me a bit to run to the store, and get some hair dye."
One brief stop to the store later, and the two of us were in the bathroom of the tiny apartment, as I ran her through the instructions on the box.
"Now, do you want your roots to be showing their real color, or not?"
"Why would I want that? I thought the point was to come off as a blonde."
"It's a stylistic choice," I carefully informed my young protege. "I've legally obligated to do that, if I want to earn a Gyaru status."
"...I'll pass."
"Tch," I clicked my tongue, as I carefully worked at her roots with the application brush. "You don't know what you're missing, brat."
A little snort escaped her, entirely incongruous with her small appearance. "I'd like to think I can imagine, Sal."
I almost was thrown for a loop when she said my first name, nearly dropping the brush in shock. It wasn't that she was afraid to address me and Angelo, but she'd always called us Hexlord, or Cavalier. Never by our first names, which was what made me so taken aback when she did it out of the blue.
It wasn't a bad change, though, so much as it meant that she was getting more comfortable here. For the best, seeing as it might take us a few more weeks to properly deal with Coil.
Dealing with his precognition, or killing his guards, wasn't the hard part. No, that'd be actually tracking the slippery bastard down. Until we managed to pin down where he was located, we'd be reactive rather than as on the offensive as I'd prefer to be.
By the time we were done, Dinah's straight, dark hair had been transformed to luscious, long golden locks. I was admiring my handiwork with a critical eye, even if I couldn't help but squint at it. "I wished I'd bought a hair iron, too," I sighed. "I could have given you curls while I was at it."
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she was beaming, smiling broadly. "Oh my god! I look just like my friend, Missy! Well, she's got shorter hair, but still!"
"It looks good," I confirmed. "We'll need to make sure there's nothing too egregious about this brand when it fully dries, but it looks good." When I'd went to the store, I hadn't cheaped out on the brand. That being said, I wasn't familiar with the quality of hair care products on Bet. Who knew what they'd do to an unprepared girl's hair?
She rolled her eyes at my antics though, swatting me gently on the stomach. "Whatever. You said you wanted to get your hair dyed too?"
I nodded. "For sure. It's for the best, the PRT is likely trying to match Cavalier's appearance by now, to other brunettes. Time to switch things up a little."
We didn't have any official identities in this world, but that didn't mean I was going to make it easy for them to figure it out. "Now, follow my instructions…"
Angelo was going to be so jealous.
Sal
April 17th
The Docks
Evening
Angelo was not, in fact, jealous. If anything, he thought my blonde hair made me look silly. I agreed to disagree, and that was that.
What was less fun was the fact that he asked me to go around the territory we'd claimed, patrol it, make sure no Merchants or ABB goons slipped through the cracks, and fly the flag a little for our organization. It wasn't even a bad idea, really, given that we'd killed Lung, kidnapped Dinah, and evaporated into the void. Making sure that everyone knew we were still around and a force to be reckoned with in the territory that we were taking made sense.
Parahumans tended to patrol for very different reasons, depending on what spectrum of morality and legality they tended to fall on. This was one of the more interesting things I'd discovered after doomscrolling on my new phone. It was one of those emergent cultural phenomena that made no sense from our perspective but tons of sense to your average native.
Back in our world, the mafia didn't patrol the areas they held sway over. I'm not sure if any gangs actively did, besides the most street-level gangbangers. Instead, the situation was that you usually would have a front or two, and some connected contacts that people would reach out to if they wanted to speak to the family.
Whereas here, that sort of active, overbearing presence of a Cape in an area had a direct effect.
Some studies showed that heroes patrolling a neighborhood regularly could lower crime rates. Now, it wouldn't entirely eradicate crime, let alone parahuman crime, because even some madmen were crazy enough to start shit in territories where you had Eidolon, Legend, or Alexandria. It just meant that the perception of safety and control of law and order was higher than normal, and that was a boon all of its own.
The reasoning was somewhat similar for villains. When you claimed territory, for good or ill, people needed to know that you were there. That it was your word, that would keep the other, scary Capes from fucking around in the area and doing insane Cape things to them. We had an obligation to lurk around the land we'd inherited from the Merchants, what little they could claim, and to make a defacto attempt for ABB dock territory as well.
Now, was I personally a big fan of being the guy in charge of doing it? Not really. But my brother had been doing responsible, adult-like things, running the gang, and leaving him to his lonesome was kind of a shit move as a big brother. I had to take up some of the slack, and handle my fair share.
It didn't make it any less dumb in my eyes. Sometimes though, people weren't always going to do the logical thing. For example, my brother refused my offer of us truly becoming the NTR-brothers, and dying his hair blonde in concert with mine.
He'd come around eventually.
While I would preferred to be outright invisible, the visibility was sort of the point. So, I patrolled, kept my head on a swivel, and tried to look as daunting as possible. A few regular people lingered around to film and take photos, but most people tended to take off at the faint sight of someone with a big, fuck-off sword on their back.
At my speed, I was moving at a brisk enough jog to make it difficult for anyone like the Protectorate to respond to my actions. So really, that just left the ABB. They had to answer, somehow, given I was actually in their territory.
I just didn't expect the form that retaliation would take.
Minding my own goddamn business on the sidewalk, when I began to hear music coming my way. That wasn't that out of the ordinary, really. Sometimes a car would drive past with the windows down, and I got a little taste of whatever they were playing on the radio.
But this was different. It was a sound blaring my way, getting closer with each passing second. The shrill noise of an engine roaring, albeit a small one, as the music came into clarity. And oddly enough, I even recognized it.
"...Is that the Rainbow Road them-"
Whatever I was about to say was drowned out by my reflexes screaming at me, as two figures on go-karts came drifting around the corner. Both were in blue overalls, but they were differentiated by the green and red shirts and hats they wore. That might not have been enough to make me twitch to draw my sword, but the red shell that the green figure threw my way was definitely enough.
It was dangerous.
Which felt like an insane, silly thing to think, as I drew my sword. Even so, I moved to block the red shell, feeling it impact my sword with a blooming, fragmentary impact, knocking me back a few feet from the sheer force of the small explosion.
"Did you get that on camera?" The green figure, with the 'L' on his cap, asked the red one.
A scoff escaped him, as he shook his head at his companion. "Did I get that on camera…? Bro has a goddamn Buster Sword, I've been trained on him since the moment we started the stream."
"Sick," the Luigi-dressed Cape grinned, glancing back my way, as if I was an afterthought. "Yo, you're Cavalier, right? I couldn't tell for sure with the hair and all."
Was I in real life? Was I being punked? I was almost tempted to think Angelo drugged me at some point, to test out the efficacy of some hallucinogen. That was until I remembered that there were in fact two video game obsessed Capes in the Bay, that had actually dressed up just like this when they'd ambushed the Undersiders on behalf of Bakuda.
Undersiders they could no longer reach, whereas I was a much easier target to find.
I told Angelo this was an awful idea.
Though to be fair, it could be worse. Uber and Leet were not ideal, yet compared to any two Capes I could expect to fight, it could have been dicier. If I was fighting Purity, or Hookwolf by myself, I would have been more nervous.
"Yeah, that's me!" I called out. "Who the hell are you two clowns?"
"We're the Super Mario Brothers, motherfucker!" 'Mario' yelled. "And sincerely, on behalf of the ABB, you're on your last life!"
"Slick line, bro," 'Luigi' commented, not even looking away from me as he high-fived Mario beside him.
A little scoff escaped me, as I hefted up my blade, preparing to advance on the two of them. "How the hell are you chumps supposed to beat me?"
"Beat you?" Mario laughed at the concept, grinning as he lifted up a red shell of his own. "We're the distraction."
…Excuse me?
Between blinks, one moment the street was empty besides the three of us. The next, there was an oni-masked figure in front of me. I barely had any time to react, time feeling like it was moving in slow motion as I moved to bisect the figure in half. It was a good plan, even, as I blinked again and there was another Oni Lee, standing some distance away.
I managed to cut through that clone easily. What I didn't manage to do was stop it before the top-half of the rapidly dissolving clone managed to pull the pins of the bandolier of grenades on its chest. There were a few breathless moments as my eyes widened behind my mask, as a flash lit up the night, and then-
Pain.
[NEW QUEST: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST]
[SURVIVE.]
[REWARD: 1x Moderate Might Perk]