“Call me an optimist,” Alec said. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad.”

Ooooptiiiimiiiist
I know it’ll work out in the end
As long as I’m living here
I’ll be an optimist
I am an optimist

“Taylor just reminded me of what I said about the bank robbery, and what wound up happening.”  This from Brian.

What did Brian say about it, again? That it was high risk, low reward, right?

“We’ve been successful because we, by and large, pick our battles, go on the offensive, and catch our enemies off guard.  In situations where we haven’t done that, and I’m thinking specifically about our fight with Bakuda, we really struggled.  That’s when we came closest to getting killed.

Hm, yeah, this is a fairly good point.

Consider that we’ll be the ones on the defensive, if we’re holding this territory and taking on all comers.”

And it got even better when I actually finished reading it.

“We can work around that,” Lisa replied, “Plans, information gathering, pre-emptive attacks. I’ve got the inside info, and there’s nothing stopping Taylor from using her bugs to keep an eye on the neighborhood.

There we go again: Knowledge is power.

She also seems to be suggesting a “good offense is the best defense” strategy. Which, if you’re better at the offensive to begin with, can be true.

Besides, Coil didn’t say we couldn’t hire other parahumans, just that anyone who wanted to work in Brockton Bay had to bend the knee to him.  So we could theoretically recruit other parahumans, if we needed to, bulk our forces.”

Start with establishing good relations with the Travelers. They’re also hired by Coil, and they’re heavy hitters that can help with that good offense we just discussed.

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.  “I’m less than thrilled you didn’t mention this, I have my concerns about the possibility that a guy like him might come after you, after us, but there’s nothing we can do about it for the time being.  Let’s focus on more pressing matters.”

Yeah.

Lisa pulled her feet up beside her on the couch, “Thoughts on the deal?  Before we vote?”

“Makes sense to me,” Alec replied.  “It’s something I figured I’d end up doing eventually, controlling a territory, being boss of an area, letting the green roll in without any major effort.”

Hehe. Classic Regent, really. It’s pretty much exactly what his name would imply, even.

“Could be a lot of effort,” I spoke, “Depending on how secret he manages to keep this, and how successful he is.

Yeah, that’s fair. This isn’t guaranteed to wo- wait, yes it is, at least if Coil’s power is strong enough.

If this goes bad, it means us against however many capes the Protectorate decides to throw at us.

It might mean that if it goes well, too. I mean, you’ll be a group of villains who have taken over an entire city.

We could wind up with the teams from Boston and New York coming to deal with the problem, if word gets out about what we’re doing.”

Yeah, very likely.

“You said he goes after his kids if they leave,” Brian spoke, “Will that happen here?  If he realizes you’re one of his?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.

That could become a problem some Arc, then.

I’d bet he’d send one of my brothers or sisters to talk to me, ask me to come back before he did anything else.  If that happened, I’d probably leave before he came in person.”

Ahh, maybe not. Unless things didn’t go as Alec expected, I don’t see this actually happening.

“Or we could back you up,” Brian pointed out.

“Or that,” Alec agreed, apparently oblivious to the show of camaraderie.

“Yes, that makes sense.”

“Anything else?  Any more questions for yours truly?”

“Dozens more,” I said, “But I think we need to get to the other big topic of the day.”

Yeah, let’s do that. It was fun learning more about Alec, but that’s not what they actually came here for.

Just another way of pushing my limits.  I had convinced myself I didn’t care about the people I was hurting or about this guy I’d just killed, and maybe I didn’t.  Maybe I don’t, still.  Dunno.  But it was so pointless.”

If Alec’s detached attitude isn’t entirely the result of Heartbreaker’s power, this kind of thing would likely contribute to it. He’d start detaching himself from the things Heartbreaker made him do, and it’d snowball into a detachment from pretty much everything.

He shrugged, “I didn’t see a real reason to stay.  Walked away.  Changed my name, got fresh ID, changed my villain name too.”

Why did you stay a villain? Why do you still want to impress your father (as discussed in 3.8)? Was that what he did with his power, make you permanently want to impress him? It would make sense to do that when he’s trying to raise children to be his parahuman servants.

He’d killed someone on his father’s orders, which made him the second killer in the group. Armsmaster must have dug up that detail & drawn the right conclusions after connecting Alec to his prior alter ego.

(The ampersand seems out of place here.)

Yeah, we know from Coil that the Protectorate is aware of Alec’s past, so Armsy almost certainly knew about that.

“When did this happen, this killing?” I asked, quiet, “How old were you when you killed that guy?”

“Hmm.  I’d been gone for about two years before the boss got in touch with me, which was about this time last year, so three years ago.  I would’ve been twelve or thirteen.”

Sheesh.

Was that forgivable?  He’d been made to do it, he’d been in fucked up circumstances with no real moral compass to go by, still a kid.  The way he described it, though, it didn’t sit well with me.  Cold blooded murder.

Ahh, a good old philosophical question right there. Are you still accountable for morally bad actions if someone forced you to do them?

Immanuel Kant would say that yes, if you have the option to refuse to do something bad (which you almost always have, just at varying costs to yourself), it’s your responsibility to refuse – though Kant was also the guy who’d rather have you giving up your children’s location to a murderer than tell a lie. He did have a point, though – is it selfish to put more weight on the bad things that may happen to yourself if you don’t than on the bad things that definitely happen to others if you do?

Worth noting in this particular scenario is that Heartbreaker would probably kill the victims anyway, and I think Alec knew that. Realistically, Alec and the world didn’t actually stand anything to gain, other than a clearer conscience for Alec, from him not murdering.

The cold-blooded part was a defense mechanism. A way for Alec to handle being forced to do this without breaking apart and becoming another tool for Heartbreaker to spread more violence.

Was it wrong to murder this guy? Yes. Did Alec have a choice? Yes. Do I blame Alec for doing it? Not one bit.

Alec shrugged, “So yeah.  I worked for him for three or four years.  We did jobs, I learned the family trade.  Called myself Hijack at first.

That’s a pretty fitting name.

It also makes me think or Paranatural, where Hijack is some kind of being with the power of possession.

He started to get on my case.  I think maybe he was having trouble affecting me the same way he did before my powers kicked in, so he compensated for that by riding me.

Confirmed that Heartbreaker used his power on his kids, including Alec.

Also, “riding”? I hope you mean in the sense of making Alec work hard. I really do.

Pushed my limits, made me do stuff that was dangerous, stuff that was hard on my conscience.  Wanted me to break, beg him to stop, so he’d have leverage to get me to do what he wanted.”

“And?”

Ugh.

…I have a feeling Alec only got more and more bitter and resolved not to break. Question is whether he managed to keep that resolve.

“And he ordered me to kill this foot soldier for a group trying to push us out of their territory.  After I was done, he told me I did it wrong, that I had to do it again with a captive we’d taken, and I knew no matter what I did, he’d make me keep doing it.

So that’s at the very least two lives he had Alec take for the sake of abusing him. There’s a chance he was going to murder these two anyway, but still. Rude.

…ohhh. I think we just found out what Armsmaster was talking about in Agitation.

“How old were you?  When your powers showed?” I asked, quiet, feeling intense pity not only for Heartbreaker’s victims, but for the kids in that situation.

Honestly, you might as well count them under his victims too. They’re not victims of the same thing, but they’re definitely also victims.

That said, it’s useful to keep them separate, just for clarity’s sake.

Whatever my feelings, Alec managed to look bored with the topic.

Honestly, Heartbreaker’s power has me worried. Is there a reason, beyond Alec’s personality and what he had to teach himself in order to make it in the Heartbreaker household, for his nearly perpetual bored or detached attitude?

I hope not, for Alec’s sake. Especially considering that boredom is one of the most awful and self-destructive feelings we have – many if not most people literally prefer pain over boredom.

“Hard to tell.  Since I didn’t go to school, and nobody really kept records, I lost track of the years.  Ten or eleven, maybe.

That must be such a strange feeling. I mean, it’s one thing just biologically having a limited sense of time’s passage and no idea if certain things happened two weeks or two months ago, like I do, but something very different to have been neglected so much you lost track of how old you were back then.

I was his fourth kid to show powers, and there were eighteen or so of us when I left.  Most of ’em were babies, though.”

Damn.

Which made him, not Grue, the one of us with the most experience and seniority.

…I suppose that’s true.