“Damn,” I muttered.  What had happened?  Not knowing was almost worse than hearing we’d all been slaughtered.

No use dwelling on it now, I suppose.

“Anyways, point of this explanation is this:  Knowing we had an imminent fight with Lung coming, knowing Lung planned to pyrokinesis our general area until he rooted us out, got civilians to finger us or brought in enough capes to make life difficult for us, I called Coil.  He said he’d help, told us to wait five minutes, then take the more direct route, straight into the heart of ABB territory.

Sooo then there was another timeline where they didn’t wait and came either before or during the main part of Taylor’s fight.

Did they find out in that reality that Taylor was trying to be a hero, and report that to Coil, who then reported that to the Tattle in the reality he chose? No, that still doesn’t make it so she’d know before she met Taylor.

“We go, we take out a contingent of ABB gangbangers and scare off Oni Lee.  Then I get a call back from Coil.  The other reality?  We left earlier, went a different route.  Got in a fight with Lung before you showed.  You decided to attack both our groups while we were occupied fighting each other, worn out, only Lung was stronger at that time, too strong for you to do too much.

Ahh, I see!

By the time you realized you’d have to work with us to stop him, which wasn’t long, it was too late.  Lung was too tough.”

Sounds like Taylor died in that one. Possibly also some of the Undersiders, though someone would have to escape to report this info back to Coil.

“And the fight with Empire Eighty-Eight?”

Lisa frowned, “Apparently that was one case where he saved our hides.  Remember that call I got?  Telling me to be careful?  Same thing he did with the bank robbery.

Yikes.

Tells one version of me to push us to be careful, tells the other to go in for direct confrontation. 

Oh dang.

Yeeah, I could see the confrontational route not really working out.

Knowing how he works, I try to nudge us in one direction or the other.  The group of us that went in for the headlong attack?  We got taken down.”

“That happened?” my eyes widened.  That would have been the fight with Night and Fog, and it hadn’t been pretty as it was.

Yep. There were a lot of ways that could’ve gone bad – and, in another reality, did.

I guess I can blame Coil for the anti-climax, huh? 😛

“Did we die?”

Lisa shrugged, “Not sure.  He didn’t elaborate, often doesn’t, unless it’s key info.  But Coil decided not to go with that option, so it was clearly worse than what did happen.  Or worse in his eyes.”

Yeah, evidently.

Tattletale nodded.

“He’s been doing that from the start?”

“Some.  The bank robbery, he had our back.  But timing was sensitive, and I guess he wanted to maximize the chances that he’d get Dinah, so he didn’t have a concurrent reality where he kept us out of action.

Makes sense, although I suppose he could’ve opted for a secondary reality where he sent someone else. Another team, or maybe some of his soldiers (though that would make the crime traceable back to him).

And, according to him, we succeeded in both cases, though Bitch got hurt in a fight with Glory Girl in the other one.  Lucky for us, I suppose, that the world where she didn’t get hurt was the same one where Coil got his captive.”

Ouch, yeah.

I winced.  Even an offhand mention of the role I’d played in what happened to Dinah elicited a painful stab of guilt.

Yeeah, Taylor’s not quite over that yet.

“We didn’t have him for the fight with Bakuda, but we did have him for the fundraiser.  He had the other version of us in reserve.”

In other words, they were guaranteed to win because if they didn’t, he would’ve chosen the reality where he didn’t ask them to try.

This is a really cool concept, and can act as a very good device to explain plot armor while throwing the characters into incredibly risky scenarios.

“We’re alive.  That’s a win in my book.”

Closest thing you get to a victory with this kind of enemy. So far, at least.

I didn’t respond, and a silence stretched between us.

“Okay,” Lisa told me, “No more secrets.”

Sounds good to me. Time to answer the question, then?

“Sounds good,” I admitted.

“And I’m trusting you to use that brain of yours to know what parts of what I’m about to say should stay between us.”

I think Taylor can handle that, yeah.

“Okay.”

“Imagine this.  You walk down a street in an unfamiliar city, you’ve got an appointment to go to, but barely any directions.  You follow?”

I nodded.

Hm… alright?

“You come to a branching path.  Do you go left, do you go right?  Whatever decision you make, you’ve got to live with it,

walk down that path, and if it’s wrong, you have to figure out how to get over to the other path.  And that keeps happening, until you get where you need to be.  Maybe you got lucky, picked the right paths, got there on time.  Maybe you were unlucky, and you were late.”

Are you using this analogy to say that you were gambling on Taylor’s resolve to be a hero, and nudged her away from it whenever it seemed risky?

My dad’s house was intact, at least, if not in the best shape.  Still, even with two nights in a row with barely three hours of sleep between them, I’d held off on returning.  Too much I couldn’t explain.

Poor Danny probably thinks Taylor is dead.

There’s only so much a man can handle. I’m not sure he’s okay in any sense of the word right now.

Lisa leaned on the railing, “I didn’t think we’d win.”

Against Lung, right?

I seem to recall the Undersiders’ rationale for going out to fight him being essentially “fuck it, let’s go and do our best”.

I joined her, leaning beside her.  Maybe she could read something in the fact that I put myself far enough away that she couldn’t reach out and touch me, couldn’t push me over if she had a mind to.  Paranoid.

Oof.

I mean, considering everything it’s not unreasonable to be a little wary, but it still stings a bit.

Looking over the city, thinking of the devastation, the hundreds of thousands of hungry, dirty, homeless people still in the city, I thought aloud, “Did we?”

Oh, against Leviathan… I doubt you ever quite “win” against an Endbringer, really. There’s losing, and losing less. Brockton Bay lost less.

I’m still not entirely sure Lisa is actually talking about Leviathan, though Taylor seems to think so. The fight against Lung is a more natural follow-up to Taylor’s question.

I shrugged.  How did I respond to that?  Confess that I wasn’t sleeping?  That I had nowhere to go?  That I was angry enough in general that I’d been asked to leave one shelter, for yelling at someone who hadn’t entirely deserved it?

Sheesh.

Taylor’s most definitely not okay.

Could I even bring any of that up?

Instead, I guessed, “So.  You knew?”

“Yeah,” Lisa replied, bobbing her head in a nod.  “I’m so sorry.”

I was always bobbing back and forth on this but c o n f i r m e d 😀

“You’re apologizing?” I asked, caught by surprise, “I’m the one who planned on screwing you guys over.”

“But you didn’t.  You changed your mind.  Me?  I had an idea of what you were up to, I lied to you, misled you.  Manipulated you.  Kept it all a big secret.  And I’m sorry for that.  Really.”

…I mean, fair, I guess?

What kind of manipulation are we talking here, though? Manipulation into giving up the recon mission like she ended up doing?

“How long did you know?  When I was lying on my cot in the shelter, wondering whether you did know, thinking back to your expression and the things you’ve said in the past, I thought maybe it was when I decided to leave the group over…”  I paused, looked at the people nearby, who might or might not be in earshot.  “…you know.  But no.  You’ve known from the start.”

Yeah, or at least far longer than that. The apology just now doesn’t make sense with Lisa only figuring it out right before the Endbringer alart.

If Taylor hasn’t seen Lisa since the incident at the hospital, this makes for a good opportunity to catch up with the last two weeks on both sides of the divide, since both people have someone to tell about it. That would also explain why Taylor hasn’t narrated about any of it yet, except for her efforts to get to the monument.

“You getting by?” She asked me.

I shrugged, “I’ve got a cot in one of the shelters for people who lost their homes, and I have some of the cash I brought with me, so I have the basics of what I need.

Did you lose your home, or do you just refuse to go back home due to your falling out with Danny?

Not sure if Coil cancelled my bank account or what, but I might have that too.  I’m surviving.”

I mean, Coil doesn’t seem like the type to cut a former employee off from the salary they already received. He’s a villain with some questionable morals, but that doesn’t sound like him.

“I figured you would be.  What I want to know is if you’re okay.”

A whole other question, that.