Ablation

Lisa

It has been a very productive past week for Lisa. She’s used her newfound regeneration to train up her body to a passable athletic standard. She’s also made sure to not be in places easily accessible to Coil’s men in case he wanted to take her in for questioning in one of his timelines. That’s right. Lisa knew. She knew from the moment she got access to the Director’s office cameras. Coil was Thomas Calvert. Not only that but he’s left something very precious in the Director’s office desk. In a hidden compartment, there lies easily a hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of superpowers in a bottle. How does she know the exact price? She’s monitoring Coil’s assets already. She’s found around half of them, most held by the Number Man and therefore, kind of inaccessible by regular means. She can’t cash in her absolute jackpot of a find, but again, Coil is kinda broke now. He went from a secretly multimillionaire to just a millionaire. He even drained the assets Lisa managed to steal from him. All to get his hands on that vial. And Lisa wants it. Granted, it won’t give her a second set of powers. But! If she could find someone easy to manipulate, easy to mold to her designs, and then give them powers? With no entailing trauma that comes with naturally acquired powers? Sign her the fuck up!

But that’s for later. Coil has found out about her attempts to edit his will to include her as his illegitimate daughter, which would probably not work out anyway. Now that she’s aware of her medical situation, the MRI machine is the one thing she won’t even be in the vicinity of when it turns on. She’s not magnetic or anything, the blades being made of titanium and carbon. But still. It’s rather hard not to think about that Aleph movie about mutants. Lisa suppresses a shudder as she approaches her current target.

“Heyyyy Amyyyyy. How you doooin’?”

Target recognizes Lisa Wilbourn. Target has done experiments on Lisa Wilbourn. Yeah yeah, didn’t need a reminder, Power.

“Do you have a moment to grab a cup of coffee?” Amy tenses up, wondering if Lisa has found out. Oh did I? Hoo boy, did I? “It’s about that thing you did to me.”

“Okay.” Amy says in a thin voice, stiffly. Lisa sees her reach out with her hand and slaps it away. Her own hand in a medical latex glove for this exact reason.

“None of that. C’mon, let’s go.” Lisa drags Amy towards a coffee shop she’s already scouted out a couple days ago, and orders them both quadruple shot espressos. “Actually, I’m really liking the upgrades you made for me.” Lisa says sitting down, and looks up at Amy who froze in place, mid-motion upon hearing what she just said.

“... Come again?”

“I liked it.” Lisa repeats. “The blade thing? Cool as fuck.”

“So you’re not here to blackmail me into healing you whenever you want in exchange for keeping my secret?”

“Hm. Good idea, but no. Don’t need that now, do I?” Lisa drags a finger across her wrist, drawing a thin line that seeps tiny droplets of blood before it seals back up. 

“Oh, right. The healing factor. Sorry about that, actually.” Amy chuckles sheepishly. “I kind of used… uhh… shitty discarded isotopes from fire alarm sensors for you. That’s how you got so much energy to, you know, heal so fast. But if you let me, I can upgrade it to like… enriched uranium! And- and line your skin with insulants and a better energy retaining tissue! Right now your body is running on super increased metabolism to keep up but I could-”

“Now hold awn.” Lisa raises her hands in a time out gesture. “Are you implying that you put a nuclear reactor in me?”

“... yes?” Amy admits weakly. “I mean that’s how you got regeneration! Your body needs to take the energy from somewhere, right? Now, I can’t promise you to make it as good as the one I made for… uh, someone.” Taylor Lisa’s power supplies. And isn’t that a fun tidbit of knowledge. “But… uh. Since you know.”

“Yeah, I get it. Don’t want to leave a patch job huh?” Amy nods. “Sure. How about we meet up next week when I get all the stuff I need?”

Amy starts to nod before she suddenly frowns at her cup and looks up at Lisa. “Now wait a minute. If you weren’t a fresh trigger, that means you were an established cape! And you don’t look like Vista OR Shadow Stalker. Who the heck are you?” She reaches for her rat.

“Let’s calm down.” Lisa raises her hands in a placating motion. “I’m new around here. I got a nemesis that I came to… defeat.” Amy lowers the rat, but doesn’t put it away. “You know Coil?”

“The- the fucking clown cape? He’s a joke!”

“That’s what he wants you to believe.”

“Well, maybe THIS is what you want me to believe! Gimme your hand.” Amy does grabby motions and Lisa quickly checks with her powers to see if she’s planning to just immediately disable her on touch. No. But she could stop her heart with a thought. Oh joy. Lisa grabs Amy’s hand.

“Okay. He’s a mastermind villain with visions of grandeur, who wants to take over Brockton Bay from the shadows. He acts silly so that people don’t take him seriously and focus on other villains. He’s got another gang under his thumb that he uses for his plans where his mercenaries won’t work for one way or another. He’s also got a close working relationship with Accord from Boston, they both get their stuff from the same edgy bond villain supplier. He even got Accord to personally design his evil villain office. I want him gone. Him and Accord. They’re deranged psychos ready to do heinous shit to reach their goals. Like, did you know Coil is planning to capture like three solo Thinkers and spirit them away into his underground bond villain lair, drug them up and use them as his personal think-tank, along with whatever perverted thoughts he has running in his psycho head? Well, scratch that, he’s into one woman and one woman only. But that didn’t stop him from building a BDSM club for the elderly, did it? He’s a freak, is what I am trying to say.”

“Oh god.”

“Yeah. Oh god.”

“But wait, how do you know all that?”

“I hate him and I’m one of the Thinkers he’s targeting? I’m a Thinker with a grudge. Of course I’ll find out everything I can about him.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, I can help you.”

“Suhweet” Lisa whistles and pats Amy on the hand. “Well, see you around… next Tuesday?” She approximates the delivery for what she needs. That’s about right. She might want to commission her own team to make a quick trip to a certain uni in Ithaca. Cornell has a fun lab with fun fun stuff.

That’s what they do, then and there. The Undersiders take a quick trip to Ithaca, raid the uni of their reagents and run back to BB. Nothing notable happens on their trip there, and that’s why Lisa is eating honest to god radioactive isotopes in front of world’s favorite healer girl.

“Okay. It’s done. You got a better healing factor and… did you say you wanted mustard gas glands?”

“Yeup.”

“Why.”

“He’s got the best and worst mercenaries in the world. I would rather have a way to emit a dangerous smokescreen that also could disable them, than not.”

“Why mustard gas?”

“You got better ideas?”

“Uh. Well, no. But it’s going to dehydrate you real fast. What if you could secrete the dry powder and mix it with alcohol later on?”

“Sure. I like that.”

“Okay. Yeah. You got it. Just don’t release it in the streets?”

“I can do that.” Lisa pauses. “Also, you should probably stop with your spontaneous experiments on ‘fresh triggers’.” Amy freezes. “I found out only because I myself was your subject. But, the Protectorate has its own whole team of Thinkers. Imagine one of them, whose specialty is finding connections between events, just takes a look at the news in BB. A sudden influx of Brutes? That all at some point in their life got admitted to BB General with the most obvious hallmarks of a trigger event? Huh. How weird.”

“But we got Durasteal! She also does the Brute power-granting stuff!”

“Well, that’s true. But then they’ll see how many capes in BB have some kind of biological weapon.”

“Oh. Oh shit.”

“Yeah. Oh shit indeed.”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll stop.”

“Good. I’d hate to see you spirited away to become their personal Brute generator. Durasteal gets the scary dog privilege of not even being on their radar for recruitment, but you’re just a Striker.” Lisa processes what her Power just told her. “Scratch that. You’re a Brute Striker. But still, not quite good enough to dodge the Triumvirate. So do the smart thing and sandbag. Lay low, hold back and in general act like you’re more trouble than good.”

Amy nods tersely and lets go of Lisa’s hand. “Thanks.”

“Us girlies gotta look out for each other, right?” Lisa winks at her and turns around to leave. “Well, see you around, yeah?”

“Uh, yeah.” Says Amy in the distance.

■

She sends off a quick message to her team to lay low for a bit. Brian takes his sweet time bringing Aisha away from the city, probably hiding away in that nice cabin they got him on his last birthday, down in Berkshire. That’s probably for the best. She tells him to keep wired, but not to use any of their old burners. Those have been bugged already. And her new senses hint that some of their newer burners are bugged too. Alec and Rachel run into the woods, Alec happy to break out his Cats the Musical costume and frolic in the woods. Rachel is just happy to escape the city noises. Doesn’t hurt that they built a treehouse there last summer. Best time of their life, honestly. Some canned stuff there should still be edible.

Preparations done, Lisa approaches the Forsberg Gallery. Best use of her heightened sense of smell and knowledge of Coil’s identity was shadowing his car to his super secret base. She knows he can only be here because she’s sent the mercenaries she’s managed to turn to her side to install bombs. One in his office, set to go off if he sits in his chair. One at his home, set to a certain timer. One in his emergency bug out car’s driver seat. One near the exit of his super secret escape tunnel behind his office. All set to get armed when she makes her last call to the Undersiders. Not last-last, but as in her latest today. She isn’t planning on dying, no siree. 

She punches in the secret code on the gallery’s elevator, and instead of going up, it starts descending. She waits fifteen seconds before the elevator stops abruptly and starts speeding up the descent.

Elevator set up to explode in 2 seconds. Countermeasure by Coil against unauthorized users or infiltrators. Coil aware of Lisa Wilbourn coming.

Of course he is. With a swish and a flick, she cuts out a triangular hole on the elevator ceiling and jumps out right before the elevator gets enveloped in flames. She takes out the bottle of moonshine she bought from a homeless man for a fiver. Her power claimed that it is 300% alcohol. Which… pop off, I guess, moonshine Tinker. She chugs it all up and sticks a finger blade through the gap in the double doors. Her enhanced hearing detecting around seven heartbeats on the other side. She knows Coil dropped a timeline where there were more of them, redirecting the surplus to a more fruitful objective. While the gas is filling up the room, Lisa finds her way into the vents and proceeds to live her dream of being the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation. The Tinker who hacked, finished and leaked the game two years prior to the premiere being on top of the list of people Lisa wants to hire once she makes it big. Like bankrolling painters, sculptors and musicians. That'd be quite a nice life. Maybe she could even commission them to make a mod for the game where it's just Lisa herself instead of the alien. And the protagonist is Coil. And then they'd hardcode it into the game that you can't win while playing as him. Cause fuck him.

“Miss Livesy. There must have been some kind of misunderstanding between us? How about we calm down and talk about it like normal people?” Coil’s voice sounds from the speakers.

“Like you did when you recruited me? Or that time where you threatened to let your mercs have their way with me if I talked back to you?”

“That last thing didn't happen. I assure you of that.”

“You thought it, though. I could see it on your latex-covered face, you thought it.”

“I am a pious man, miss Livesy. No temptation can stray me from the path of god. I would never!”

“Uh huh? What about all those times you used your power to pester your ex wife? Literal sexual assault.”

“Uh… how did you know that?”

“I'm in your walls, Thomas. Literally, I'm eating through your lair’s concrete as we are speaking.” and Lisa was. Acid was a real bitch to… anything that wasn't glass, really.

“Wait, but how? When did you second trigger?!”

“Uhh, I dunno. Maybe when you left me to die after Squealer tried to turn me into roadkill?” Lisa is now in his secret office. Coil left a walkie talkie behind, strapped to the mic. That's why his voice sounded so fried, eugh.

“I arranged for you to get healed by Panacea!”

“No? Grue did. He carried my broken body to the BB General and lied that I'm a victim of the gang war between Empire and Tough Crowd.” She follows his scent to the secret tunnel, aware that Coil will probably set off the fun 50/50 explosion sensor. If not him, her passing by it will increase the odds.

“And who told Grue to do that? I am pulling all the strings in this city, Tattletale. You won't survive a week without me!”

“Really? I think… I think it's actually time for you to pass down the torch, old man. You oldies have been in charge long enough. It's the new blood’s time to shine.” she says, finally caught up to the scrawny bastard who's been the subject of Lisa’s nightmares for the past two years. Coil tries shooting her, the bullet only bouncing off her titanium skull. “Oh look at that. Can't threaten me with a gun to my head anymore, huh?”

“Sarah, you need me. My power! It's the only reason the Undersides were even half as successful as they are!”

“I think we can manage, actually. Have you heard of the new gang? I heard they're hiring.” says Lisa, her arm blade plunging into Coil’s forehead with a satisfying whistle.