Ch 1. Contessa Goes Shopping
Following Golden Morning, Contessa decides to bake the perfect loaf of bread—without using her power. Things go awry.
Inspired by a comment by /u/Colopty on reddit that imagined Contessa's unpowered attempts to find herself post-Golden Morning failing so catastrophically that she somehow resolves outstanding plot threads.
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Chapter One: Contessa Goes Shopping
Contessa stood in one of the normally deserted kitchens that studded Teacher's pocket-dimensional lair. She had placed every ingredient essential to making the bread her mother had once taught her to bake on the counter, but something was wrong.
Olive oil. Milk. Water. Salt. Flour—no. She frowned at the canister in front of her. Not flour. Sugar. Where was the flour?
Her power automatically activated and informed her that the last of their flour had gone into a batch of extra-gooey chocolate chip cookies for Ingenue.
She felt her lips tighten as irritation washed over her. Her intent was to do this without using her power at all, but it kept providing her information and help every time she had a stray thought. Even now it was telling her how she could order the missing flour through Teacher's underlings.
No. She would do this herself. She put the milk back in the refrigerator and left to find a teleportation pad.
Teacher looked up from the monitor he was observing over Saint's shoulder. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked.
"Bet," Contessa told him as she opened the control panel to the machine. She wished, not for the first time, that Doormaker had survived. "It's important."
Teacher frowned. "When will you return? I have a lead on the Simurgh's project."
"On completion of my mission," she said. Providing an exact time was within her capabilities, but she didn't want to report to him. She waited a moment, long enough for her refusal to provide a direct answer to sink in. "Likely less than four hours."
He gave her a curt nod, accepting her message on both its levels, and she stepped onto the pad.
The teleporter spat Contessa out in an American city that a mild strafing by Scion had left significantly worse for the wear but still in existence. She immediately started a path to the nearest government-run food distribution point that would let her avoid being killed, injured, subjected to master or stranger powers, or otherwise harmed, inconvenienced, or dirtied.
She passed a large, now abandoned and crumbling building that had a statue of a giant badminton birdie on its lawn. Not for the first time, she thought that people on the earth Scion had infested had somehow gotten things wrong. They'd had wealth and luxury to a degree she still couldn't fathom after thirty years of observation, and they'd used it to do things like that.
It took her half an hour to reach the supply warehouse, now closed for the day. She bypassed the unpowered guards, scaled the side of the building, climbed in through a window on the third floor, and hopped over a balcony to land lightly on the second.
Conveniently, she'd landed right next to the flour. She checked the label, picked up the largest bag there, hoisted it onto her shoulder, and placed two hundred dollar bills on the nearest table as payment.
Contessa had almost made it back to her teleportation spot when her power warned her that she'd been spotted. She continued, more slowly, and waited to be spoken to.
"I have to ask," someone said from behind her. "Do you know why your power tells you to do things, or do you just follow the steps blindly?"
She turned, still balancing her burden with her power, to stare at the metal-skinned man who had spoken. He was barefoot, wearing the white and blue pants of the Wardens' uniform. A tentacled girl was wrapped around his torso, fastened to him with iron rings. "My power is the exact opposite of blindness, Weld. Hello, Sveta."
He walked forward, closing the distance between the two of them to a few feet. She let him; even with Garrote on his shoulder, he wasn't a concern. "What I'm asking you is what plan, what scheme, what twisted plot could possibly require you to carry twenty pounds of cocaine around in broad daylight?"
She could think of several, but that was beside the point. "This is flour."
"It's cocaine," he repeated. "The supply point you raided is a front for a distribution operation."
She shifted the bag so he could see the letters spelling out FLOUR.
Weld morphed his hand into a blade, sliced her flour bag open, then changed his hand back as powder spilled to the ground.
The flare of anger she felt briefly gave her a path to killing Weld and Garrote both, but she consciously amended it to making him apologize and replace her flour. Before she could start, he extended a palm full of white powder to her. She reached out, touched a finger to the flour, and put it in her mouth to taste.
He wasn't wrong.
Well.
Contessa dropped the bag, turned on her heel, and headed directly to a bright orange Fiat parked haphazardly across the street.
"What are you doing?" Garrote called.
"Getting a refund," Contessa said, asking her power to provide a path to locating the source of the cocaine. She smashed the Fiat's window and opened the door.
Weld ran up to the passenger side window and leaned in, careful not to touch the metal. "You can't just steal a car!" he shouted.
She looked at him like he was an idiot, which he was, while her fingers hot-wired the vehicle.
"He means that if you steal a car, we'll arrest you," Garrote said.
"Won't work," she replied, as the car's engine turned over. "I don't want to be arrested. Just like I didn't want to be killed the last time we met."
Weld glared at her. Judging by the way her tentacles were loosening and regripping Weld's shoulders, Garrote was getting agitated.
"Drug-running is worse than borrowing an abandoned vehicle," she added.
"I think," Weld said, very deliberately, "that the merits of your dubious ethical reasoning are lost on us. Leave the car and let us take on the drug ring."
Contessa shifted the car into drive. "I know where they are and you don't. Come with or stay behind, I don't care."
"We'll come with you," Weld said.
Garrote's tentacles continued to contract and expand. "But--"
"I wouldn't invite you into my car if you were going to hurt me," Contessa said.
The two Wardens crammed into the passenger seat—she noticed Garrote had opened the door so he wouldn't bond with the handle. The right half of the car tilted nearly to the ground as six hundred pounds of mildly annoyed metal entered and got situated.
There was silence as she pulled out, and then the engine began to whine in protest as they started to climb uphill.
"Maybe I should get out," Weld suggested.
She swerved, missing a pothole that could have eaten their vehicle for breakfast by less than an inch. "I've taken you into account. This will work."
"You said we could ask you questions after humanity won," Weld said. "Was that another lie?"
"No."
Garrote spoke up. "Are you sorry?"
Contessa judged it was safe to throw the question back at her. "Should I be? You're only here to criticize the experiments because of the experiments. You, me, and every other human who is alive or who will come after, ever. Does your pain have more weight than total extinction?"
Garrote's tentacles began to spasm. Contessa ignored them; she hadn't provoked the girl to the point where she would lose self-control. When Weld finally spoke, his voice was low and dangerous. "Are you calling us selfish?"
"I do feel that way," said Contessa, unruffled. "I won't insist on the point, because even my power says I can't debate you on morals, Henry." She let him think that was because she accepted his arguments, but the fact was that Cauldron had brainwashed him to always do the right thing, to be the pure, upright, morally uncomplicated team player the Wards and the PRT needed. The boy he once was had wanted to be a hero, and they'd made it impossible for him not to be. No words, even ones prepared by her power, would change his mind.
Weld finally broke the shocked silence she'd caused by releasing his name. "You know who I am."
"You're unusual enough to stick out in my mind," Contessa lied. "You were fourteen, severed in half in the same car accident that killed your mother. Result: metal-focused brute/changer power. So far, so useless. But psychometry gave us some interesting ideas."
"My personality?"
"Hero all over again, only a so-called monster. Ideal for convincing the public to accept Case 53s." Contessa began the final step, steering the car up yet another hill. "The idea was to get the Protectorate on board with automatically integrating you all when we released you into Bet. Give you a group, help you get on your feet, all while making the Protectorate stronger."
"I knew the Protectorate was grooming me," he said. "That was you all along? It wasn't about me? It was just another one of your plots?"
"It was always about who you are at your core, if you'll forgive the turn of phrase. You were originally an Alexandria plot to bring the Case 53s into the Protectorate. Then you were a Simurgh plot to destroy Cauldron. Congratulations on her success." She set the parking break. "Alive or dead?"
Weld blinked. "What?"
She gestured at their destination, a two-story concrete building. "Twenty-one gang members in there. It's a regional distribution node, accounts for roughly ninety percent of the drug problem in your jurisdiction. Do you want them alive, or do you want them dead?"
"No killing," Weld said firmly. "Sveta, can you knock the fence o—"
Contessa climbed on top of the car, then jumped up to grab an overhanging branch. The two Wardens were still struggling out of the car—in his haste, Weld had gotten himself stuck—when she cleared the fence.
She landed on #1, one of two men who had come out to investigate the sound of the arriving vehicle. His fall broke her own and took him out of the fight. She rolled and came up to grab a lit cigarette from #2's mouth with her left hand and slam her right hand into his ear. He collapsed and hit his head on the pavement.
#3 was standing in front of the entrance. He reached for a radio when he noticed her, but she was too close. She twisted his arm just so, breaking it and releasing the radio, which cracked when it hit the ground. She used his access card to open the door, revealing what appeared to be a maintenance bay.
#4 and #5 were just inside, busy refueling vehicles. She wrested control of the hose from one of them, sprayed fuel all over the ground and workbench, and dropped the cigarette onto it. She ducked behind an oil drum as the gasoline caught fire. When she stood back up, the two women were stranded on one side of the bay by a wall of flame and she held a crowbar. #6 began to wiggle out from under the vehicle he was fiddling with, but she swung the crowbar into the bottlejack he was relying on, knocking it over and bringing the truck down onto his abdomen.
#7 was on the other side of the door she opened forcefully, and the edge caught him in the jaw. He stumbled back and fell, landing hard on his ass. Contessa kicked him in the diaphragm, and he curled up coughing. She turned a corner and jabbed two fingers into #8's eye—he only had the one. He screamed, and she took out his right kneecap with the crowbar as she stepped by him to relieve #9 of his semiautomatic. Two punches and he crumpled.
#10 was reaching for an intercom. She shot it, then turned the weapon on him. "On the ground, hands on the back of your head. Wait for the Wardens." He obeyed and she moved to the next room, where she discovered that #11, #12, #13, and #14 were children. They were apparently responsible for preparing the product for distribution.
She pointed at some folding chairs lined up against the wall. "Go sit over there and you'll get to see some superheroes," she said.
A glance at the table they surrounded showed that their organization was not only packing cocaine, but also methamphetamine, heroin, and a pile of neon-green pills she didn't recognize on sight but her power identified as Tinker bullshit. It was manifestly stupid to ingest substances prepared by a Tinker. That hadn't stopped anyone before the world had ended, of course, and it looked like bad habits lingered.
"Move," she shouted. She punctuated the order by dropping the crow bar. The kids ran for the chairs, and the noise brought #15 and #16, unarmed women, out of a side-room. They stopped dead when they saw Contessa.
The one in front spoke. "What's going on? Who are you?"
"It's over," Contessa said, voicing the words that would neutralize them without killing them. "The Wardens are here. Sit with the kids."
She looked at the children again as she moved to a set of stairs. The world would be better off with their parents dead. Why had she bothered to ask someone else, let alone Weld, for direction?
The answer came to her, of course. Habit. Letting someone else give her the conditions for victory was easier, more routine, than deciding them for herself.
She kicked open the door she found at the top of the stairs. Four men and a woman were sitting inside the conference room on the other side. Before they could do more than look surprised, she shot #17, a man who was standing and burly enough to be a body guard, in the foot. She then threw the now-empty pistol at #18, a younger man who was leaning back in his chair. It hit him in the face and unbalanced him; the chair collapsed and the resulting head injury ensured he didn't get back up.
The two remaining men didn't rush her, but reached into their pockets and popped brightly colored pills like the ones she'd seen downstairs. The woman ducked out through another door.
More Tinker drugs. Preternatural strength and endurance for #19, enhanced dexterity and speed for #20. Not enough to count as either a brute or a mover, but enough to end a fight with a normal human.
She had just enough time to shut her eyes cover her nose and mouth with her handkerchief before #20 sprayed her with something that looked like mace but which her power informed her was a hallucinogen. Still blind, she kicked him in the groin and he tripped over the unconscious #18. Contessa stomped on his throat and kicked the spray out of reach.
#19 charged her, but she sidestepped him and let his own strength and momentum take him through the wall, sending drywall everywhere. He fell to the ground a story below, a little shocked but mostly unhurt.
He would probably feel the punches Weld was dealing him once the drug wore off.
Contessa brushed the drywall dust off her suit jacket, drew one of her knives, and went to find #21, whom process of elimination suggested was the Tinker.
Thirty seconds later, Contessa stood in the ruins of the Tinker's lab, again holding a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. The Tinker herself was unconscious, choked out and bound to a chair with Contessa's belt and her own clothes.
She reviewed the situation. Unpowered personnel would arrive to round up the gang members. Some low-level healer would likely fix the ones she'd hurt. Weld and Garrote could direct the cleanup of the area. Nobody would die, the gang would stop using government supply centers as a front, and the Tinker's drugs would never make it to market. Not bad for three minutes of work.
Tentacles lashed into the room she stood in, wrapping around a bench. Garrote's face followed, and Contessa asked for a path to safety; she did not want to die the way the Doctor had. Or at all.
"Tinker lab," she said, once Garrote had settled on the bench. "Make sure that people who can be affected by inhaling organic substances do not come in there. You and Weld will both be fine."
"Because we're monsters," Garrote said. "Something else you think we should thank you for, I guess."
Contessa looked at Garrote, pretending to consider her situation. "You know, I can't undo the memory erasure, but my power can answer most questions you, Weld, and the others might have about your past. Where you come from, your families."
Garrote went very still, and Contessa went on. "Take some time to think about it, ask the others and make a list of the questions you want answered. Just know that none of the stories ended well. We collected dying people."
"What was my name?"
"Vesela," Contessa said, moving to the door before Garrote's body could respond to the increased emotion. "Your brothers were Boleslav and Feliks."
Garrote frowned. "I think--I think I almost remember Bolek. How do we get in touch with you?"
Contessa paused in the doorway. "I'll find you when you're ready."
The last thing she did before she left to return to her teleportation pad was drag a sack out of one of the cellars and use her power to verify that, yes, this time she had definitely found flour.
Teacher's base was in disarray when she returned. Hordes of white-clad "students" rushed around to a red-faced Teacher's shouted directions and Ingenue, Contessa thought, was laughing but trying not to show it.
"What happened?" Contessa asked.
Teacher ran a hand through the remnants of his hair. "The Wardens just destroyed one of our major bases on Bet," he explained. "They decapitated my Midwestern operations and arrested one of my biochemical tinkers. I have no idea how they found us out. Can you—?"
"Of course," she said. I want to know who was responsible for destroying Teacher's base on Earth Bet just now. One step. "One mo—"
Think: I did it.
"Contessa?" Teacher asked.
"Um. I just—"
Path: not getting caught.
Three steps.
"—don't understand how he did it." She furrowed her brow. "But my power says that Saint told them via his copy of Dragon."
"Is that so?" Teacher's eyes narrowed, and he turned on the vacant-eyed man tapping away at one of the keyboards. "No wonder he says he's not able to find anything in the Wardens' systems. Saint!"
"Sir?"
"Go outside with that man," he said.
"Yes, sir." Saint shuffled over to the bodyguard that Teacher had indicated. He didn't see Teacher mouth the words kill him at the guard, but Contessa did. She found herself trying to think whether saving Saint's life would be worth it, but the guard and Saint were gone before she could form any conclusions.
Ingenue interrupted her reverie. "Is that flour?"
"Cocaine," she said, perfectly deadpan.
Satyrical frowned. "Can I ask why you need a giant sack of cocaine?"
"Obviously you can ask," Contessa said, and left for the kitchen. There wasn't a door to Teacher's ops room, so their voices trailed after her.
"I'm from Vegas, and even I'm telling you that's ridiculous—"
"To be fair, Satyr, that was a stupid question."
"I guess you can get away with anything when you have a fucking 12 power rating."
Contessa shook her head and plotted a path to baking without being disturbed.
Inspired by a comment by /u/Colopty on reddit that imagined Contessa's unpowered attempts to find herself post-Golden Morning failing so catastrophically that she somehow resolves outstanding plot threads.
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Chapter One: Contessa Goes Shopping
Contessa stood in one of the normally deserted kitchens that studded Teacher's pocket-dimensional lair. She had placed every ingredient essential to making the bread her mother had once taught her to bake on the counter, but something was wrong.
Olive oil. Milk. Water. Salt. Flour—no. She frowned at the canister in front of her. Not flour. Sugar. Where was the flour?
Her power automatically activated and informed her that the last of their flour had gone into a batch of extra-gooey chocolate chip cookies for Ingenue.
She felt her lips tighten as irritation washed over her. Her intent was to do this without using her power at all, but it kept providing her information and help every time she had a stray thought. Even now it was telling her how she could order the missing flour through Teacher's underlings.
No. She would do this herself. She put the milk back in the refrigerator and left to find a teleportation pad.
Teacher looked up from the monitor he was observing over Saint's shoulder. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked.
"Bet," Contessa told him as she opened the control panel to the machine. She wished, not for the first time, that Doormaker had survived. "It's important."
Teacher frowned. "When will you return? I have a lead on the Simurgh's project."
"On completion of my mission," she said. Providing an exact time was within her capabilities, but she didn't want to report to him. She waited a moment, long enough for her refusal to provide a direct answer to sink in. "Likely less than four hours."
He gave her a curt nod, accepting her message on both its levels, and she stepped onto the pad.
The teleporter spat Contessa out in an American city that a mild strafing by Scion had left significantly worse for the wear but still in existence. She immediately started a path to the nearest government-run food distribution point that would let her avoid being killed, injured, subjected to master or stranger powers, or otherwise harmed, inconvenienced, or dirtied.
She passed a large, now abandoned and crumbling building that had a statue of a giant badminton birdie on its lawn. Not for the first time, she thought that people on the earth Scion had infested had somehow gotten things wrong. They'd had wealth and luxury to a degree she still couldn't fathom after thirty years of observation, and they'd used it to do things like that.
It took her half an hour to reach the supply warehouse, now closed for the day. She bypassed the unpowered guards, scaled the side of the building, climbed in through a window on the third floor, and hopped over a balcony to land lightly on the second.
Conveniently, she'd landed right next to the flour. She checked the label, picked up the largest bag there, hoisted it onto her shoulder, and placed two hundred dollar bills on the nearest table as payment.
Contessa had almost made it back to her teleportation spot when her power warned her that she'd been spotted. She continued, more slowly, and waited to be spoken to.
"I have to ask," someone said from behind her. "Do you know why your power tells you to do things, or do you just follow the steps blindly?"
She turned, still balancing her burden with her power, to stare at the metal-skinned man who had spoken. He was barefoot, wearing the white and blue pants of the Wardens' uniform. A tentacled girl was wrapped around his torso, fastened to him with iron rings. "My power is the exact opposite of blindness, Weld. Hello, Sveta."
He walked forward, closing the distance between the two of them to a few feet. She let him; even with Garrote on his shoulder, he wasn't a concern. "What I'm asking you is what plan, what scheme, what twisted plot could possibly require you to carry twenty pounds of cocaine around in broad daylight?"
She could think of several, but that was beside the point. "This is flour."
"It's cocaine," he repeated. "The supply point you raided is a front for a distribution operation."
She shifted the bag so he could see the letters spelling out FLOUR.
Weld morphed his hand into a blade, sliced her flour bag open, then changed his hand back as powder spilled to the ground.
The flare of anger she felt briefly gave her a path to killing Weld and Garrote both, but she consciously amended it to making him apologize and replace her flour. Before she could start, he extended a palm full of white powder to her. She reached out, touched a finger to the flour, and put it in her mouth to taste.
He wasn't wrong.
Well.
Contessa dropped the bag, turned on her heel, and headed directly to a bright orange Fiat parked haphazardly across the street.
"What are you doing?" Garrote called.
"Getting a refund," Contessa said, asking her power to provide a path to locating the source of the cocaine. She smashed the Fiat's window and opened the door.
Weld ran up to the passenger side window and leaned in, careful not to touch the metal. "You can't just steal a car!" he shouted.
She looked at him like he was an idiot, which he was, while her fingers hot-wired the vehicle.
"He means that if you steal a car, we'll arrest you," Garrote said.
"Won't work," she replied, as the car's engine turned over. "I don't want to be arrested. Just like I didn't want to be killed the last time we met."
Weld glared at her. Judging by the way her tentacles were loosening and regripping Weld's shoulders, Garrote was getting agitated.
"Drug-running is worse than borrowing an abandoned vehicle," she added.
"I think," Weld said, very deliberately, "that the merits of your dubious ethical reasoning are lost on us. Leave the car and let us take on the drug ring."
Contessa shifted the car into drive. "I know where they are and you don't. Come with or stay behind, I don't care."
"We'll come with you," Weld said.
Garrote's tentacles continued to contract and expand. "But--"
"I wouldn't invite you into my car if you were going to hurt me," Contessa said.
The two Wardens crammed into the passenger seat—she noticed Garrote had opened the door so he wouldn't bond with the handle. The right half of the car tilted nearly to the ground as six hundred pounds of mildly annoyed metal entered and got situated.
There was silence as she pulled out, and then the engine began to whine in protest as they started to climb uphill.
"Maybe I should get out," Weld suggested.
She swerved, missing a pothole that could have eaten their vehicle for breakfast by less than an inch. "I've taken you into account. This will work."
"You said we could ask you questions after humanity won," Weld said. "Was that another lie?"
"No."
Garrote spoke up. "Are you sorry?"
Contessa judged it was safe to throw the question back at her. "Should I be? You're only here to criticize the experiments because of the experiments. You, me, and every other human who is alive or who will come after, ever. Does your pain have more weight than total extinction?"
Garrote's tentacles began to spasm. Contessa ignored them; she hadn't provoked the girl to the point where she would lose self-control. When Weld finally spoke, his voice was low and dangerous. "Are you calling us selfish?"
"I do feel that way," said Contessa, unruffled. "I won't insist on the point, because even my power says I can't debate you on morals, Henry." She let him think that was because she accepted his arguments, but the fact was that Cauldron had brainwashed him to always do the right thing, to be the pure, upright, morally uncomplicated team player the Wards and the PRT needed. The boy he once was had wanted to be a hero, and they'd made it impossible for him not to be. No words, even ones prepared by her power, would change his mind.
Weld finally broke the shocked silence she'd caused by releasing his name. "You know who I am."
"You're unusual enough to stick out in my mind," Contessa lied. "You were fourteen, severed in half in the same car accident that killed your mother. Result: metal-focused brute/changer power. So far, so useless. But psychometry gave us some interesting ideas."
"My personality?"
"Hero all over again, only a so-called monster. Ideal for convincing the public to accept Case 53s." Contessa began the final step, steering the car up yet another hill. "The idea was to get the Protectorate on board with automatically integrating you all when we released you into Bet. Give you a group, help you get on your feet, all while making the Protectorate stronger."
"I knew the Protectorate was grooming me," he said. "That was you all along? It wasn't about me? It was just another one of your plots?"
"It was always about who you are at your core, if you'll forgive the turn of phrase. You were originally an Alexandria plot to bring the Case 53s into the Protectorate. Then you were a Simurgh plot to destroy Cauldron. Congratulations on her success." She set the parking break. "Alive or dead?"
Weld blinked. "What?"
She gestured at their destination, a two-story concrete building. "Twenty-one gang members in there. It's a regional distribution node, accounts for roughly ninety percent of the drug problem in your jurisdiction. Do you want them alive, or do you want them dead?"
"No killing," Weld said firmly. "Sveta, can you knock the fence o—"
Contessa climbed on top of the car, then jumped up to grab an overhanging branch. The two Wardens were still struggling out of the car—in his haste, Weld had gotten himself stuck—when she cleared the fence.
She landed on #1, one of two men who had come out to investigate the sound of the arriving vehicle. His fall broke her own and took him out of the fight. She rolled and came up to grab a lit cigarette from #2's mouth with her left hand and slam her right hand into his ear. He collapsed and hit his head on the pavement.
#3 was standing in front of the entrance. He reached for a radio when he noticed her, but she was too close. She twisted his arm just so, breaking it and releasing the radio, which cracked when it hit the ground. She used his access card to open the door, revealing what appeared to be a maintenance bay.
#4 and #5 were just inside, busy refueling vehicles. She wrested control of the hose from one of them, sprayed fuel all over the ground and workbench, and dropped the cigarette onto it. She ducked behind an oil drum as the gasoline caught fire. When she stood back up, the two women were stranded on one side of the bay by a wall of flame and she held a crowbar. #6 began to wiggle out from under the vehicle he was fiddling with, but she swung the crowbar into the bottlejack he was relying on, knocking it over and bringing the truck down onto his abdomen.
#7 was on the other side of the door she opened forcefully, and the edge caught him in the jaw. He stumbled back and fell, landing hard on his ass. Contessa kicked him in the diaphragm, and he curled up coughing. She turned a corner and jabbed two fingers into #8's eye—he only had the one. He screamed, and she took out his right kneecap with the crowbar as she stepped by him to relieve #9 of his semiautomatic. Two punches and he crumpled.
#10 was reaching for an intercom. She shot it, then turned the weapon on him. "On the ground, hands on the back of your head. Wait for the Wardens." He obeyed and she moved to the next room, where she discovered that #11, #12, #13, and #14 were children. They were apparently responsible for preparing the product for distribution.
She pointed at some folding chairs lined up against the wall. "Go sit over there and you'll get to see some superheroes," she said.
A glance at the table they surrounded showed that their organization was not only packing cocaine, but also methamphetamine, heroin, and a pile of neon-green pills she didn't recognize on sight but her power identified as Tinker bullshit. It was manifestly stupid to ingest substances prepared by a Tinker. That hadn't stopped anyone before the world had ended, of course, and it looked like bad habits lingered.
"Move," she shouted. She punctuated the order by dropping the crow bar. The kids ran for the chairs, and the noise brought #15 and #16, unarmed women, out of a side-room. They stopped dead when they saw Contessa.
The one in front spoke. "What's going on? Who are you?"
"It's over," Contessa said, voicing the words that would neutralize them without killing them. "The Wardens are here. Sit with the kids."
She looked at the children again as she moved to a set of stairs. The world would be better off with their parents dead. Why had she bothered to ask someone else, let alone Weld, for direction?
The answer came to her, of course. Habit. Letting someone else give her the conditions for victory was easier, more routine, than deciding them for herself.
She kicked open the door she found at the top of the stairs. Four men and a woman were sitting inside the conference room on the other side. Before they could do more than look surprised, she shot #17, a man who was standing and burly enough to be a body guard, in the foot. She then threw the now-empty pistol at #18, a younger man who was leaning back in his chair. It hit him in the face and unbalanced him; the chair collapsed and the resulting head injury ensured he didn't get back up.
The two remaining men didn't rush her, but reached into their pockets and popped brightly colored pills like the ones she'd seen downstairs. The woman ducked out through another door.
More Tinker drugs. Preternatural strength and endurance for #19, enhanced dexterity and speed for #20. Not enough to count as either a brute or a mover, but enough to end a fight with a normal human.
She had just enough time to shut her eyes cover her nose and mouth with her handkerchief before #20 sprayed her with something that looked like mace but which her power informed her was a hallucinogen. Still blind, she kicked him in the groin and he tripped over the unconscious #18. Contessa stomped on his throat and kicked the spray out of reach.
#19 charged her, but she sidestepped him and let his own strength and momentum take him through the wall, sending drywall everywhere. He fell to the ground a story below, a little shocked but mostly unhurt.
He would probably feel the punches Weld was dealing him once the drug wore off.
Contessa brushed the drywall dust off her suit jacket, drew one of her knives, and went to find #21, whom process of elimination suggested was the Tinker.
Thirty seconds later, Contessa stood in the ruins of the Tinker's lab, again holding a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. The Tinker herself was unconscious, choked out and bound to a chair with Contessa's belt and her own clothes.
She reviewed the situation. Unpowered personnel would arrive to round up the gang members. Some low-level healer would likely fix the ones she'd hurt. Weld and Garrote could direct the cleanup of the area. Nobody would die, the gang would stop using government supply centers as a front, and the Tinker's drugs would never make it to market. Not bad for three minutes of work.
Tentacles lashed into the room she stood in, wrapping around a bench. Garrote's face followed, and Contessa asked for a path to safety; she did not want to die the way the Doctor had. Or at all.
"Tinker lab," she said, once Garrote had settled on the bench. "Make sure that people who can be affected by inhaling organic substances do not come in there. You and Weld will both be fine."
"Because we're monsters," Garrote said. "Something else you think we should thank you for, I guess."
Contessa looked at Garrote, pretending to consider her situation. "You know, I can't undo the memory erasure, but my power can answer most questions you, Weld, and the others might have about your past. Where you come from, your families."
Garrote went very still, and Contessa went on. "Take some time to think about it, ask the others and make a list of the questions you want answered. Just know that none of the stories ended well. We collected dying people."
"What was my name?"
"Vesela," Contessa said, moving to the door before Garrote's body could respond to the increased emotion. "Your brothers were Boleslav and Feliks."
Garrote frowned. "I think--I think I almost remember Bolek. How do we get in touch with you?"
Contessa paused in the doorway. "I'll find you when you're ready."
The last thing she did before she left to return to her teleportation pad was drag a sack out of one of the cellars and use her power to verify that, yes, this time she had definitely found flour.
Teacher's base was in disarray when she returned. Hordes of white-clad "students" rushed around to a red-faced Teacher's shouted directions and Ingenue, Contessa thought, was laughing but trying not to show it.
"What happened?" Contessa asked.
Teacher ran a hand through the remnants of his hair. "The Wardens just destroyed one of our major bases on Bet," he explained. "They decapitated my Midwestern operations and arrested one of my biochemical tinkers. I have no idea how they found us out. Can you—?"
"Of course," she said. I want to know who was responsible for destroying Teacher's base on Earth Bet just now. One step. "One mo—"
Think: I did it.
"Contessa?" Teacher asked.
"Um. I just—"
Path: not getting caught.
Three steps.
"—don't understand how he did it." She furrowed her brow. "But my power says that Saint told them via his copy of Dragon."
"Is that so?" Teacher's eyes narrowed, and he turned on the vacant-eyed man tapping away at one of the keyboards. "No wonder he says he's not able to find anything in the Wardens' systems. Saint!"
"Sir?"
"Go outside with that man," he said.
"Yes, sir." Saint shuffled over to the bodyguard that Teacher had indicated. He didn't see Teacher mouth the words kill him at the guard, but Contessa did. She found herself trying to think whether saving Saint's life would be worth it, but the guard and Saint were gone before she could form any conclusions.
Ingenue interrupted her reverie. "Is that flour?"
"Cocaine," she said, perfectly deadpan.
Satyrical frowned. "Can I ask why you need a giant sack of cocaine?"
"Obviously you can ask," Contessa said, and left for the kitchen. There wasn't a door to Teacher's ops room, so their voices trailed after her.
"I'm from Vegas, and even I'm telling you that's ridiculous—"
"To be fair, Satyr, that was a stupid question."
"I guess you can get away with anything when you have a fucking 12 power rating."
Contessa shook her head and plotted a path to baking without being disturbed.
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