Interlude 8 - Tattletale
“but you look harmless enough-“
“..is Eidolon.”
The first words she had said to the unicorn echoed in her head as Twilight finished her sentence and casually turned the world upside down. It wasn’t the first time she had wondered just what the hell she had been thinking when she met the alien. She watched in mute horror as the Simurgh decided to crash the party Leviathan had started. Even in her shock, she drew on her power. She needed to know more like she needed air to breathe.
True. Leviathan only cares about Eidolon. Endbringers connected.
All Endbringers only care about Eidolon. Simurgh arrived to try and stop the release of this information.
Simurgh can’t see Twilight Sparkle, only repercussions from her actions. Simurgh can’t see the present.
Twilight Sparkle can counter the Simurgh’s telepathy.
Twilight Sparkle has access to an ability that is the equal to the Simurgh’s.
Twilight Sparkle has access to an ability greater than the Simurgh’s.
Twilight Sparkle is-
Tattletale winced as pain spiked in her skull and she had to stop using her power. She watched the monitor as Twilight somehow turned an entire street into feathers to catch her and the others falling from the sky ship. The view on the screen rapidly filled with feathers and tumbled violently before suddenly shutting off.
Should she tell people what her power had told her? She didn’t know if she could predict the ramifications even if she had been using her power, let alone without it. The screen clicked back on, showing the Simurgh and the city from a different angle, probably one of Dragon’s drones. Fuck it, I’ve never been good with secrets anyway. She tapped the communicator on her wrist and broadcast to everyone still in the fight.
“Tattletale here. It’s true, All the endbringers care about is Eidolon. They’re connected to him in some manner. The Simurgh appeared to try and stop us from finding out. Somehow Twilight Sparkle can counter the Simurgh’s telepathy, her precognition is hampered when something involves her. Also, I think she’s mad.” Tattle ignored the commotion this caused around her and watched as the Simurgh stopped everything and simply stared in the direction where the airship had crashed. She clamped down hard on her power before she could even be tempted to use it on the Simurgh again.
Her eyes flicked to another screen showing the ongoing fight against Leviathan. It wasn’t good. Only about a half a dozen capes had abilities that could somehow account for or withstand Leviathan’s recently revealed speed were still in the fight. They were trying their best to at least contain or herd Leviathan into already damaged areas, but he was simply too fast.
Especially since Eidolon had just headed out to sea in the middle of what looked like a major freakout. Everyone else not dead and still ambulatory had turned their efforts towards rescuing as many civilians as possible.
Too much damage, Simurgh exposure, government already calling for evacuation.
Brockton Bay will be quarantined, abandoned.
Protectorate now only hoping to prevent Leviathan from sinking large section of coast-
She shut her power down again as pain lanced through her head. Well, that's depressing. I was looking forward to seeing how Twilight’s plan for the city would turn out. The blond thought as she was shoved back into her seat, the mobile command center she was in accelerating abruptly.
Dragon’s/Armsmaster’s program has predicted likelihood of Leviathan entering this area.
Pressing a hand against her left eye, she willed the the armored vehicle faster. She looked back at the monitor showing the Simurgh while someone scrambled to buckle themselves into the seat beside her. The Simurgh had come out of her trance and had flown into the heart of downtown. Without any capes to impede her, she was disassembling it with remarkable haste.
She saw a status indicator she had been monitoring click back to green and she switched the Leviathan monitor to a new feed. Kid Win’s camera was back online. The feed shook and crackled with static and the sound of rushing wind. The Wards lay huddled on a rooftop that was illuminated in a purple glow that matched intense light emanating from the unicorn that stood in the center of the frame. Everyone she could see, including the glowing unicorn, looked like they’d been fed to Bitch’s dogs. Twilight was missing half a wing, Gallant a leg, all bleeding, several unconscious. Then she noticed a building whip by in the background and blinked.
Twilight levitating entire rooftop
Huh, well thats certainly a novel mode of transportation.
Most of party too injured to continue, some need immediate medical assistance
Twilight Sparkle bleeding out from wing
Used too much power
Used too much power attacking Simurgh
When the fuck did Twilight attack the Simurgh?
Has/hasn’t attacked the Simurgh
She groaned and laid her head down on the table, headache intensifying.
Can’t sustain this, evacuating
Evacuating to closest rally point to their crash site-
Shit, losing the only pers-pony that had ever given the Simurgh pause was not something that needed to happen today. On top of whatever other insights Twilight had gleaned when she had done whatever the hell she had done to find the connection between the endbringers and Eidolon. She clicked her armband.
“Tattletale here, Wards and Twilight Sparkle are headed towards public school 67, several in party including Twilight are seriously injured. Scrounge a trauma team and an evacuation vehicle to meet them when they land, eta 7 minutes via flying rooftop. If you’re in the area and wearing red shoes - I’d leave.”
She signed off and flicked her eyes back to the Leviathan screen as whole vehicle bounced violently down a road that had obviously been on the city works to do list for quite a while. The fight seemed to be going a little bit more in the heroes' favor now. Leviathan had a new assortment of superficial wounds and was moving slower, closer to his traditional speed.
Alexandria and Legend looked like they were successfully herding the endbringer back towards the docks with Kaiser erecting metal roadblocks to assist. Occasional missile attacks from a Dragon suit detonating at just the right time and place to throw the creature just enough off balance for a punch from Alexandria or a Laser shot from Legend to knock Leviathan to the ground.
The city is going to be abandoned, why are they herding Leviathan?
Herding towards another cape
Believe cape may be able to damage Leviathan
Believe cape may be able to damage Leviathan more than Alexandria or Legend
Dragon involved, Armsmaster involved, herding towards Armsmaster
Armsmaster has a new tinker weapon
Armsmaster has been planning this for a while
Manipulated other aspects of the fight to get to this outcome
Confident
Wrong-
Tattletale slumped in her chair feeling like her brain was melting. She’d used her power too much today, helping in the evacuation and planning the response when Leviathan had revealed just how much it had been holding back. Hardly able to form words through the pain she brought her shaky hand up to her wrist to let them know, it wasn’t going to work, what they were doing wasn’t going to- it was too late. Alexandria hurled Leviathan through a half collapsed warehouse and his head slid to a stop directly in front of Armsmaster who jabbed his halberd, which was surrounded in a grey fog, directly into the sea monster’s face.
Leviathan writhed as the grey cloud began to dissolve anything it touched. For a second Tattletale dared to hope that her power had been wrong. Then Leviathan’s tail whipped around in a graceful arc and when the blur passed Armsmaster’s armor lay scattered over the street in dozens of blood soaked pieces. A scream broke over the comm and then a dozen missiles exploded in Leviathan’s face, followed immediately after by Dragon’s mech slamming into it at a couple hundred miles an hour and detonating in an explosion that leveled what buildings still stood in the surrounding area.
Tattletale let her fingers fall away from the wrist communicator, and then almost blacked out when the command center took a corner so fast that its right side wheels briefly left the asphalt. Pained curses chorused through the vehicle as people were flung into consoles or each other and then flung back into their seats as they accelerated forward once more. With a supreme effort of will she turned her head to look at the screen displaying the other eldritch horror of the day, and stared in shock.
The Simurgh was in two pieces. It’s left arm, lower left torso, left leg, and the myriad wings that had been attached to those parts of its body were frozen in mid air along with most of the previously swirling debris cloud it had been working with. The rest of the Simurgh was floating a block away and staring at its suspended body parts. Not that the Simurgh’s expression had changed in the slightest, but Tattletale took a moment to enjoy imagining that it was wondering what in the hell had just happened. Cheers echoed around her as other people took in the scene. No one had ever inflicted so much damage on an endbringer.
As Tattletale stared at the screen she noticed that the frozen area formed a sphere and faint purple lightning sporadicly crackled on its surface. ’Twilight,’ she thought not needing her powers to deduce that the purple alien had done yet another impossible thing. The temptation to use her power to figure out exactly what that sphere had done was almost impossible to resist, but she knew from past experience that she was very close to wiping out her ability to function at all.
Several people gasped at once, and if she had not been in so much pain she might have giggled at how ridiculous it sounded. Instead she focused on what had caused the reaction in the first place.
“Something is happening in the sphere!” the woman to her left said much too loudly, as if everyone wasn’t already looking at the feed and could see for themselves. “Everything inside the area of effect seems to be drifting towards the center.” Indeed that was happening, and the speed of the drift appeared to be increasing, quickly. The purple sparks started to appear more often and traveled quicker along the surface. Tattletale glanced at another feed and noticed that the Simurgh seemed to be deliberately putting more distance between itself and whatever was happening.
Unsta-
Fuck! That fucking hurt. Screw it, she didn’t need her power to tell her that something bad was about to happen, it was just that kind of fucking day. She quickly tapped her wristband.
“Hard override - everyone needs to put as much distance between themselves and downtown, repeat get the fuck away from there!” The items inside the sphere had begun a counterclockwise spiral into its center where a bright spot of light had formed and was getting brighter by the second. She looked over her shoulder and shouted towards the drivers cab and tried not to hurl from what the motion did to her headache. “That fucking includes us!” She lurched back in her seat as the driver headed her advice and the other console operators began barking into their headsets.
Without warning, all the screens flashed white, followed less than a second later by the vehicle being lifted off the road. The armored transport came down hard on its left hand tires, several of which succumbed to the impact and blew out. The vehicle tipped and came down hard on its side. Tattletale clutched her harness tightly as the vehicle slid down the road on its side and tossed everything not locked down inside it towards the new floor.
When the unholy screech of metal on pavement finally came to an end as the vehicle slid to a stop, Tattletale took twenty seconds just to hang in her harness. She heard other people starting to move around and unbuckle themselves, checking each other for injuries. She should be doing something like that, but..fuck, she just needed a moment before recognizing that this day wasn’t over yet.
Someone abruptly grabbed her around her waist and released the five point harness she had been strapped into, her head very nearly swung into the console in front of her before whoever it was increased their grip and pulled her sideways and out of her seat. Gently she was lowered to stand on the base of the console that was now the obstacle strewn floor.
She looked behind her to see Catherine, the much taller and fitter PRT tech that had been working the next seat over from her. The tech gave her a weary smile, marred by a sizable cut in her right cheek and pointed towards the back of the vehicle where someone had just pushed open a door now above their heads letting in daylight and a steady stream of rain.
“Let’s go,” Catherine said, “Evacuation command has already dispatched a truck to pick us up. The explosion, whatever the hell that was, was apparently enough to convince Leviathan that he’d had enough for today. Alexandria just came in over the comms saying he took a quick dive back into the ocean minus a few bits and missing most of its face from what Armsmaster did.”
Tattletale nodded as she shuffled towards..Rick, that was his name, who was helping to boost people up through the door.
“What about the Simurgh?”
“Missing half of itself, and drifting nonchalantly towards the southwest. Most of the heroes still onsite have had close to the maximum allowed exposure limit already, and nobody had planned for a Simurgh fight when we started today. Plan is to pull everyone back and regroup, and wait for some reinforcements that are staging in Boston before we try and drive her off - though honestly if missing half her body hasn’t been enough to discourage her - I’m not sure what the hell is.”
Tattletale grunted in pain and agreement as Rick hoisted her up into the rain and the arms of a waiting PRT officer. She quickly got out of the way and tried to watch her step on the slick side panels of the former mobile command center. Looking out she realized that they were most of the way up captain’s hill. One of the nicer areas of the Bay, at least it had been. Now, despite the rain, it was mostly on fire.
She was a cynical supervillain with a fucked up history, was being blackmailed into working for a complete sadist, and had been helping to organize an a fight against not one but two lovecraftian horrors and still the vista in front of her staggered. From the elevated vantage point where they had crashed you could see the whole city, or what was left of it.
Downtown was simply gone, anything within about 8 blocks of where the sphere had been, just didn’t exist anymore. Past that lay block upon block of flattened buildings, and beyond that was fire. If it weren’t for the network of streets, it would have been hard to tell there had ever been a city here at all. Looking towards the fringes she could see lines of cars and what might have been crowds of people all trying to make their way from what had once been their home.
There had been worse endbringer attacks, but not many. And the Simurgh was still fucking here. Drawing her gaze towards the southwest it took her a second, but she spotted the floating white speck that had to be the creature in the distance. Just what the hell were they going to-
A pillar of rainbow colored light snapped into existence not far from where the Simurgh was floating. It pierced the cloud banks and appeared to continue all the way into space. The area around the pillar seemed to take on a glow. Tattletale felt a hum in the air and what felt like alternating waves of comforting warmth and cold despair washed over her.
Twilight Sparkle is-
Twilight Sparkle is-
Twilight Spa-
She dropped to her knees on the slick metal beneath her, cradling her head in her hands while a feeling of dread rose up from inside her oscillating in time with whatever was emanating from that rainbow pillar. Her power was useless, but something deep inside herself was telling her something bad was about to happen, something worse than an endbringer attack.
She looked out through the pain at the rainbow pillar that was somehow beautiful and awful simultaneously. The PRT troopers and staff around her were talking frantically to each other or to their wristbands. They felt it too, but there was nothing they could do against this. It was beyond. Nothing was going to stop whatever that was.
Then a jagged tear in the sky appeared, stretching a thousand feet from the ground near the base of the pillar of light into the sky. Suddenly it was night and Lightning crashed all over the city. As quickly as it appeared the rainbow pillar winked out of existence, taking the comfort and dread with it. The tear in the sky seemed to merge into the new born night and vanish like a mirage. The clouds grew, billowed and darkened as lightning danced between them. Rain that had been letting up intensified into a downpour hard enough that the fires started to go out.
A voice felt more than heard echoed through the city, but Tattletale couldn’t make out any of the words. They felt angry, commanding. She stared up at the growing storm, and a nighttime that had arrived hours before it should have. None of this made any goddam sense and she was sick of being out of the loop. She was probably going to be able to do fuck all down there, going down there was probably a one way ticket to a quick death, but at least maybe she would die knowing what the hell was happening.
She glanced around the neighborhood they were in.
No car
Evacuated with vehicle
Evacuated with vehicle
Looks vacant, owners on long term vacation, car in garage
Car in garage, spare keys in house-
Wincing and hoping that there were also some painkillers in that house Tattletale struggled back to her feet and walked towards the driver's cab, and from there towards whatever answers were to be found.