“Right.”

“What if you could choose both?  Choose both A and B, so your A self knows what your B self knows and vice versa.

Intriguing… go on…

When you know path B is the right choice, you can make it so.  The world where you chose to go down path A is gone, vanished, so when you comes to the next choice, you can do it again.”

This sounds a lot like how future vision works in Steven Universe.

“Sounds pretty useful.”

“Trick being that you can only have two realities running in parallel at a time, and the only differences between those realities hinge on the choices and calls you make.

Hm.

Is she describing Coil’s power here? Because this sounds a lot like Coil’s power, except with more of a bent towards knowledge.

The choices in question here wouldn’t affect the flip of a coin, though, unless you’re parahumanly good at physics.

So you delegate.  You find people who will follow orders.  Sometimes you send them out to do something in only one world, so that if things don’t go the way you want, you can default to the reality where you didn’t send them.

Okay yeah, this is absolutely sounding like Coil now.

What does he have to do with any of this, though?

Or, in simpler terms, in one world, you flip a coin.  In the other, you hold on a second, delay, say something.”

…the character I was talking about in the previous post also does a thing involving a coin flip and parallel timelines.

“Until every coin you’re flipping gives you a heads.  You’re talking about Coil,” I realized.

I see… so that’s how it works. Thank you! I’ve been really wanting to know the particulars of his power.

But again, what does this have to do with you knowing about Taylor’s secret since before you met her? Did you (or Coil) know something about the other reality’s Taylor, or something?

I nodded, not sure where this was going.

“That’s everyone’s situation, day-to-day, making choices.  Through resourcefulness, like using a cell phone to call for directions in our hypothetical situation, or talent, like me using my power, we can make it more likely we find the right paths, but we inevitably come to a choice between A or B at some time, right?”

This is making me think of Homestuck. Homestuck spoilers ahead:

There’s a character whose thing is the impact of people’s perceptions of reality and the choices they make, and predicting the consequences of those choices. Tattletale is currently reminding me of that character.

I may have mentioned previously that I thought Tattle might be a hero of Light in Homestuck terms, possibly a Thief of Light or Rogue of Light, but based on the elaboration we’ve seen in this Arc on how exactly Tattle’s power works and what we’re seeing right here, as well as her proficiency in mind games, I’m inclined to say she’s a hero of Mind instead.

I’m not quite settled on a class yet, though. Mage, perhaps? Classpect speculation is varied, but I’d define a Mage of Mind as someone who understands/knows the mind and choices, or understands/knows through the mind and choices, and (unlike a Seer of Mind) uses this understanding/knowledge herself rather than spreading it to the team.

Yeah, I think that fits Tattletale to a T.

“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.

“Since before we met.”

Wow. Since when you first found out Taylor was fighting Lung in your place?

Does that mean you were acting like you thought Taylor was a villain when you first talked to her, specifically in order to set her down that path?

That was unexpected.  “What?  How?”

She turned her head, surveying the scene, the handful of people still around the monument, “Over there?”

Hm?

I nodded.

We walked over toward the railing above the sheer drop to the base of the hill.

Ah, she was suggesting they walk over there.

I guess this puts us at a good spot to look out over the city and maybe visualize the events of 1.3-1.6?

The position gave us a view of the entire city.  There was the ocean, the coastline with crews and machinery clearing away the wreckage of buildings and the PHQ.  Blinking lights marked the barriers and trucks around the perimeter of the massive hole Leviathan had made in the upper end of Downtown.  The hole was still largely filled with water.  People were still trying to verify if it would ever empty on its own, or if it would be a permanent part of downtown.

Ah, yeah, I suppose that’s worth looking into before declaring it a new lake.

I couldn’t make out the details of the Docks, but I saw flattened and ruined buildings.  I’d scouted it early one morning, pulling on my costume and traveling the streets at an hour that even the roving mobs were asleep.   From a distance, with the help of my bugs, I’d verified it.  The loft was gone.

R.I.P.

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.

“They’re names, and this took time,” I said in answer, turning back to the memorial.  “They mean something to someone.”

Yeah… Good way of putting it without giving away that you know who these names belong to.

Or that they were dogs. I don’t think the man would take that well.

“I think you’re right,” a girl said.

The father didn’t respond, just continuing to walk around the memorial.  I waited until the father was gone before I stood, checked to see that most of the people who’d been visiting were off getting their lunches, the rest out of earshot.  I turned to face the girl, sticking my hands in my pockets.

Rachel? Lisa? Someone else we know?

Lisa’d had the sense to dress warmer than me.

Hiya!

I have a feeling Lisa’s going to treat Taylor much like she ever has, unlike the rest of the team. Maybe she’s going to explain that she knew for a while, and why she didn’t tell the others or call Taylor out on it privately.

Her hair was up in two tight buns, just behind her ears, and she wore sunglasses, an oversized sweater and a skirt with tights underneath.  She had a backpack slung over one shoulder.  She smiled lightly, almost sadly.

Sounds like a nice outfit.

It’s not lost on me that Brutus and Judas (or BROOTUS and JOODUS, as Rachel apparently spelled it – I suppose with her background it makes sense that she might not be the best at spelling) seem to have been among the dogs Leviathan killed. I guess that leaves Angelica to tug at the leash alone. 😥

How long had it taken her?  She would have had to come late at night, well after the crowd had left, sat there with a chisel, hammer and flashlight, painstakingly chipped the letters into the marble.  If she even had a chisel.

Taylor clearly figured it out a little bit quicker than I did.

And yeah, poor Rachel must’ve been really intent on putting those names there. As they should be.

The doggos should be remembered too.

She might have done it with a screwdriver or something else she had at hand.

I bent down and ran my fingers over the letters.

“Sickening.” I glanced over my shoulder to see the father holding the toddler.  He shook his head, added, “Vandalizing this?  So soon?”

I mean, it’s a fair assumption. And, well, technically what Rachel did. But he doesn’t have the full story.

Neither do the Protectorate, for that matter, though I doubt they’d put the dogs on there to begin with even if they did.

Sham /
Shielder / Eric Pelham

Oh, never mind. It’s just too long for one side.

Smackdown / Jennie Ryan
Snowflake / Charlotte Tom
Strider / Craig McNish
Uglymug /
Velocity / Robin Swoyer
Vitiator /
WCM /
Zigzag / Bennie Debold and Geoff Schearn

But they did catch themselves.

Also, interesting that Zigzag is given as two people. Were they a duo and the people in charge of this decided that since both of them died, they might as well just put the duo’s name rather than their individual ones? Or did they maybe not have individual cape names in the first place?

It was shorter than the other lists, the last list of names, so there was space at the bottom.  Someone had used the empty space to etch words into the marble.

This could go different ways, primarily along the axis of respectfulness.

Also, I only now looked back and noted Taylor walking around the monument with each portion of the list. The division makes more sense now.

It was crude work, with scuff marks around each notch where the tool had been off target.  The letters were all in capital letters, all straight lines – the ‘o’s were squares, the ‘B’s two triangles joined at one corner.

Yeah, either Wildbow’s pulling a bait-and-switch or it’s pretty clear where this falls on the respectfulness axis.

KOOROW   BULLIT

Bait-and-switch it is, whether intentional or not. 😛

MILK                   STUMPY
BROOTUS  JOODUS
AXIL         GINGIR

Curious names, these. Civilians with nicknames, I guess— wait shit

RACHEL

oh no poor sad doggo 😥