But Carol didn’t.  The woman turned and left the doorway, Amy meekly following.

Carol, internally: “Maybe she didn’t take it? What if I just misplaced it? If I bring it up and she didn’t know about it after all, then she will if I say something, and that opens a whole can of worms…”

They don’t understand.

…

Oh.

I might’ve been reading this situation all wrong. Carol might not be aware of the letter being gone at all.

She’s tense with Amy because she believes Amy could fix Mark’s disability.

Is it in the brain? Is that why Amy won’t do it?

Mark was in the living room, sitting on the couch.  No longer able to don his costume and be Flashbang, Mark could barely move.

Flashbang, right. Manpower was the other guy. Uncle Neil, I guess.

He had a form of brain damage.  It was technically amnesia, but it wasn’t the kind that afflicted someone in the movies and TV.

And I was right about the brain thing.

So if it’s not the kind you usually see in movies and TV, does that mean it’s anterograde amnesia – the kind where you stop properly moving memories from short term to long term memory, effectively meaning you barely remember anything after the onset of the amnesia?

Honestly, out of all the media I consume, Worm is the one where I’d be least surprised to actually see this arguably more heartbreaking, but lesser known and typically less narratively useful form of amnesia depicted.

What Mark had lost were the skills he’d learned over the course of his life.

Ohh. That’s a third form of amnesia I’m not familiar with, but the existence of which makes total sense. Retrograde and anterograde amnesia don’t usually affect the skills, and I’m aware of other contexts where memory of skills, knowledge and events are noticeably separate.

You don’t forget how to ride a bike, they say. That’s because of this, and that’s the sort of thing Mark actually has forgotten.

And so many more crucial skills. For one thing, Carol might’ve been reading the letter to him because he forgot how to read. And then there’s walking, eating with utensils, getting dressed, etc.

Yeeeah, I can see how this would prevent him from being Flashbang.

He’d lost the ability to walk, to speak full sentences, hold a pen and drive a car.  He’d lost more – almost everything that let him function.

At least it’s probably possible to relearn, unless there’s such a thing as an anterograde version of this type of amnesia, but it’s gonna take a lot of time, effort and guidance.

“There’s word about some strange howling near the Trainyard.  Glory Girl and I are going on a patrol to check on it.”

Oh, huh. Looks like we’re going non-chronologically here and this happened just before Interlude 11a.

Was it ever established that that’s where Bitch’s area was? I don’t remember, but it makes a lot of sense for it to be up there.

Amy nodded.

“Can you look after Mark?”

“Of course,” Amy said, her voice quiet.  She stood from her bed and headed to the door.  Carol didn’t move right away.  Instead, Amy’s adoptive mother stayed where she was, staring at Amy.

Yeeah, she definitely came in here with more in mind, but I guess she doesn’t want to say anything before she has confirmation. Not even a “hey, have you seen this one letter that went missing from our room anywhere”.

Amy reached the door and had to stop, waiting for Carol to speak.

If I’m right about why Carol isn’t saying anything about the paper, this is quite awkward.

It was all so fucked up.  She was so fucked up.

Aw.

Amy needs a hug.

There was a knock on her door.  She hurried to hide the paper.

Family member, or surprise Bonesaw?

…

Bones. Marquis’s power was over bones. Even if I didn’t already suspect Bonesaw of having a specialty in medical equipment or something similar, that right there is a connection between Marquis’s daughter and Bonesaw.

“Come in,” she said, trying to compose herself in the span of one or two seconds.

Carol opened the door.  She was pulling on the gloves for her costume.  “Amy?”

Oh, hi! Come to inform Amy that she may want to watch out, especially for goons from either E44 team, for unspecified reasons that would leave her with more questions than answers if she hadn’t found this letter?

“Yeah?”

Carol took a few seconds before she looked up from her gloves and met Amy’s eyes.  When she did, the look was hard, accusatory.

Ah, shit, she’s noticed that the paper was missing, hasn’t she.

Well, at least if they get the whole snooping matter out of the way now, they can have a proper talk about Marquis without Amy having to explain how she found out.

That’s right, Amy Dallon’s father is the famous Norwegian skier Petter Northug.

What else did she know about Marquis?  She vaguely recalled Uncle Neil talking about the man when he’d been talking to Laserdream about villain psychology.  There were the unpredictable ones, the villains who were hard to stop because you couldn’t guess where they’d strike next, but who were less practiced in what they did and made mistakes you could leverage against them.

Hm. I wonder if Bonesaw falls in that category, or if she’s an exception.

There were also the orderly ones.  The ones who were careful, who honed their methodology to perfection, but they repeated themselves, showed patterns that a smart hero could use to predict where they struck next, and often had rules or rituals a hero could turn against them.

That sounds more like the Marquis we know.

Which wasn’t to say that one was smarter than the other, or that one was better.  Each posed problems for the local authorities and capes.

Oh, absolutely. Just different problems.

Marquis had fit into the latter category, the perfectionists, the pattern killers.  He’d had, as Neil explained, a warped sense of honor, underneath it all.  He didn’t kill women or kids.

Huh. Well, that’s something, I guess.

I’m guessing he was arrested by a team of all-female heroes.

To all reports, the man had been heartless, callous.  Wasn’t she?  She couldn’t bring herself to care anymore when she went to the hospitals to heal the injured and sick.

Callous? Perhaps sometimes. Heartless? No, I don’t think so. Someone heartless wouldn’t care about fulfilling this duty as much as Amy seems to have.

She’s just burnt out. Not in the sense of the power leaving her, but in the psychological sense. She’s exerted herself too much. She was already stressed out about her work in Interlude 3. Add Leviathan and everything that’s happened since on top of that, and you really can’t blame her for disconnecting her emotions to deal with it all.

It was a chore, something she made herself do because people wouldn’t understand if she stopped.  There were only so many people she could heal before she became desensitized to it.

Exactly. There’s a limit to how much you can deal with this sort of thing before it stops having the same impact.

Now that door was open, and she could never shut it again.  She didn’t care so much about the possible hit on her.  No.  What shook her was that she now knew who her father was.

Yeeah, the possible hit on her is more business as usual when you’re in this business, really. As a hero, there are going to be bad guys who want you dead, that’s just a fact of the occupation.

She even suspected that, like Tattletale had told her months ago, she’d always known.  She just hadn’t dug for it, hadn’t put the pieces together.

Because she didn’t want to know.

Marquis had been an aspiring crime lord in the bad old days of Brockton Bay.

Wish I could turn back time
To the bad ol’ days
When my papa sang me to sleep
But now I’m stressed out

It had been a time when the villains had been flocking to the city to profit off the booming tech and banking sectors, to recruit mooks and henchmen from the city’s unemployed dockworkers.

…huh. I know we already had a mention of dockworkers becoming henchmen, long ago, but I never really made the connection that the situation of the dockworkers was overall good for villain business for that reason.

It had been an era when the heroes hadn’t been properly established, and the villains had been confident enough that some didn’t give a second thought to murdering any heroes who got in their way.

Nowadays, that just calls all the other heroes in town down on your head.

Marquis included.

Figures.

Hmm, if Amy is assuming that Carol would read the letter to Mark rather than have him read it himself, maybe that means his disability is that he went blind?

Or it could just be a little quirk of their relationship.