Shadow Stalker crouched at the corner of the roof, loaded her crossbow and fired a shot at Cricket.  It passed a half-foot behind the woman.

If she realizes you’re shooting at her, you’ve pretty much lost your chance to hit.

Her second shot was on target, and Cricket dropped a few seconds later, tranquilized.

Nice work!

Good – The woman’s radar might find Shadow Stalker if she wasn’t in her shadow state, and Shadow Stalker could be far more effective if the enemy didn’t see where she was attacking from.

Especially this particular enemy.

Who else?  Menja was classified as a breaker, the spatial-warping effect that surrounded her made incoming attacks smaller even as she simultaneously made herself bigger.

Called it! Menja and her sister being breakers, I mean.

So the spatial warping makes the attacks objectively smaller, not just relative to Menja? She’s even bigger relative to incoming attacks than she is relative to her surroundings?

The darts wouldn’t even be noticeable to her.  Stormtiger could deflect projectiles by sensing and adjusting air currents.

Hm, yeah, that’d be a problem.

And this leaves Hookwolf. He’s got fleshy bits sometimes, but how susceptible is his biology to tranquilizers?

With the right timing, so her shots came out of the shadow state as they arrived to make contact with him?  Maybe.

That could work. Seems like a very Flechette tactic.

But he was engaged in a fist fight with Assault, and she’d be risking tagging the hero.

Ah. Yeah, we don’t want that.

Hookwolf?  No point.  He was currently in the shape of a gigantic wolf made of whirring metal blades.  Even if the dart did penetrate something approximating flesh, which it wouldn’t, his entire biology was so different that she doubted he would be affected.

Figures.

Seems you’re out of targets, unless there’s someone hiding around here somewhere.

In this fashion, she kept pace with the trucks, which weren’t moving slowly but weren’t going full-bore either, likely because of the condition of the roads.

Oh yeah, Brockton Bay roads aren’t exactly Formula 1 tracks these days.

It was five minutes before trouble arrived.

It was Menja that made the first move, stampeding out of a nearby alleyway, standing at a height of twenty feet tall.  She drove her spear into the engine block of the lead truck, stepped in front of the vehicle and wrenched her weapon to tip the truck over and arrest its forward momentum.

Who knows whether Menja thinks this is a supply truck or a Coil vehicle. Either way, she has reason to attack it.

The truck immediately behind tried to stop, but the flooded pavement made it impossible to get enough traction.  It skidded and collided into the back of the foremost truck.

Ouch.

Miss Militia was climbing up out of the lead truck’s passenger door in an instant, hefting a grenade launcher to blast Menja three times in quick succession.

Hiya! Supply vehicles it is, unless Hannah neglected to tell us something fairly important in her Interlude. 😛

The giantess stumbled back, raised her shield – her sister’s shield – to block a fourth shot.

I guess that’s her way of preserving her sister’s memory.

Fenja did die, right? She wasn’t just “down”, she was “deceased”…? *checks* Yeah, 8.4, first person to get both “down” and “deceased”.

Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket all joined the fray, followed by their foot soldiers.  On the PRT’s side, the trucks emptied of PRT troops and one more cape, Assault.

Aaand it’s officially a brawl.

They mobilized to defend, and the noise of gunfire rang through the night air.

Here we go.

But the movement of air through her body made her feel just as alive, more alive, in a very different way.  The material and gravel of the rooftop were still warm from the day’s sunlight, even submerged beneath a thin layer of water from the rain.  This rising, heated air from this surface offered her an almost imperceptible added buoyance.

Cool!

The rest of her ascent was carried out by the momentum from her leap and the fact that she was nearly weightless.  Jumping fifteen feet in the air to a rooftop one story above her was almost effortless.

Not bad.

She turned solid long enough to land.  Changing back brought a sudden, thunderous restarting of her heart, a shudder running through her entire body as her bloodstream jerked back into motion.  It only lasted the briefest of moments as she bent her knees and threw herself forward.  The moment her feet left the ground, she entered the shadow state once again, sailing across the rooftop.

It sounds like a jarring experience, but she’s been doing it long enough that she’s completely used to it.

I wonder how she reacted the first time it happened.

She used one wispy foot to push herself out further as she reached the roof’s edge, so she could glide just above one rooftop without even touching ground.

Pretty handy for getting around rooftops, this power. No wonder she was so much faster than Flechette.

She realized she was still holding the phone, and the noise of a television or music told her Emma was still on the other line.  “Something’s going on.  Going to see if it leads to anything interesting.”

Good luck, I suppose.

“Call back when you’re done, give me the recap.”

“Right.”  She hung up.

Sounds good.

Leaping into the air, she entered her shadow state, every part of her body shifting gears in the span of a half-second.  Her lungs automatically stopped taking in air and her heart stopped beating.

Usually not a good sign, that, but this isn’t usual for anyone but Sophia.

She was suddenly hyperaware of changes in the atmosphere, movements of air as it passed through her body.  She had enough solidity for her body to seize the air molecules as they passed through her, and in this manner, each of her cells nourished itself.

Huh, neat.

It was strange, to feel so still.  She lacked even the most basic processes and routines that normally kept the body going, things people rarely gave a second thought to.  There was no near-silent roar of blood in her ears, no need to blink, no production of saliva in her mouth or movement of food and water in her gut.  She just existed.

tfw you disassociate so hard your body stops being solid

She was a ‘predator’, whether she was Shadow Stalker or Sophia.  Few would deny that, even among her own teammates.

Naturally.

A convoy of trucks on the road below caught her attention.  Each vehicle was painted dark, and two had the look of army vehicles, with gray-black mottled cloth or canvas covering the cargo or personnel at the rear.  They had their headlights off to avoid drawing attention.

Hm. Coil?

There were two good possibilities for who they might be.  The first was that it was a shipment of supplies.  Food, water, first aid and tools, which would mean there was a small contingent of capes inside one of the trucks or in the immediate area.  The second option was that it was Coil and his troops.

And the former doesn’t have quite as much reason to try to avoid drawing attention. Though there have been all those villain attacks on the supply vehicles.

Using vehicles reminiscent of those carrying supplies seems like a double-edged sword. On one hand, it might get you past the heroes, but it might also attract attacks from other villains.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”  Shadow Stalker didn’t elaborate too much further on the subject.  Leviathan had revealed the desperate, needy animal at the core of everyone in this city.  He’d made things honest.

…fair. Cynical, but fair.

Most were victims, sheep huddling together for security in numbers, or rats hiding in the shadows, avoiding attention.  Others were predators, going on the offensive, taking what they needed through violence or manipulation.

I guess she’s at least indirectly acknowledging that Taylor is a victim? Is it a good thing that she does that? I’m not so sure… it kinda sounds like she’s counting herself among the predators, and the victims as prey.

She didn’t care what category people fell into, so long as they didn’t get in her way, like Grue had a habit of doing.

How exactly does he get in your way, though?

Worse yet were those who seemed intent on irritating her by being lame and depressing, like Taylor or like Vista had been this past week.

Hey! First mention of Taylor by name in this Arc!

But yeah, if you could elaborate on what exactly your view of Taylor is and why you’re bullying her specifically, that would be appreciated.

They weren’t all bad.  The victim personality did have a habit of pissing her off, but she could let them be so long as the person or people in question stayed out of sight and out of mind, accepting their place without fight or fanfare.

Yeah right. Taylor’s been trying to do that for ages. It’s only recently she’s been getting more assertive, and that coincided with her literally getting out of your way by not going to school anymore.

There were some ‘predators’, she could admit, that were even useful.  Emma came to mind, the girl went a long way towards making life out of costume tolerable, and there was Director Piggot, who had kept her out of jail thus far, because she fit into the woman’s overarching agenda of PR and the illusion of a working system.

I mean, fair. It’s not like being a Ward seems to have improved things with Shadow Stalker the way it was supposed to.

Has it?

There was a need for that kind of person in society, someone willing to step on others to get to the top, do what was necessary, so they could keep the wheels spinning.

I guess.

Not all of them were so useful or tolerable, of course, but there were enough out there that she couldn’t say everyone with that kind of aggressive, manipulative psychology was a blight on society.

Sturgeon’s law as applied to social predators.

She could respect the Piggots and Emmas of the world, if only because they served as facilitators that allowed her to do what she did best, in costume and out, respectively.

Hmm. Emma functions as a facilitator? How? By providing you with a victim?

Silence hung on the line for a few long moments.

“I remember,” Emma spoke, a touch subdued.

Hm. It seems Emma isn’t quite as comfortable with this fact as Sophia seems to be.

Shadow Stalker chewed on her lower lip, watched a butch policewoman pull into the parking lot, then hand out coffees to the others on duty.

This seems to mirror what Sophia is talking about with the Wards – people with the duty to protect the city being concerned with more trivial things like coffee.

But yeah, Sophia should probably talk to Clockblocker more.

…on second thought, please don’t.

“If it weren’t for all the crying and the complaining, I would almost be glad Leviathan had attacked the city.  Tear away that fucking ridiculous veneer that covers everything.

…I suppose she does have a point. This city was always shitty, it’s just more physical now.

Get rid of those fucking fake smiles and social niceties and daily routines that everyone hides behind.”

That said, these things can be important in order to cope with living in a city like that.

“Two and a half more years, right?”  Emma asked, “Then you’re off probation, free to do your thing.”

How much freedom does that actually give her, though? Would she get to go solo and back to the old ways that got her on probation in the first place? …probably not the last part, I suppose.

“God, don’t remind me.  Makes me realize I’m not even halfway through it.  I can’t believe it’s already been this long, constantly hearing them bitch about dating, or clothes, or allowances, and every time I hear it it’s like, I want to scream in their face, fuck you, you little shit, shut the fuck up.  I’ve killed people, and then I washed the blood off my hands and went to school and acted normal the next day!”

Is that a thing to be proud of?

That didn’t stop her from returning to the subject, “Sure, some of them are older.  Some have more time in the field than me.  Maybe.  But they’re still children, living in their comfortable, cozy little worlds.  I dunno if you’ve seen what the city’s like now-”

Seriously, Sophia, you should read this Arc. Especially Clockblocker’s chapter.

“-I saw some on the news.” Emma interjected.

“Right.  Damaged, destroyed, fucked up.  

So Emma hasn’t been back to Brockton Bay since the Endbringer attack? I guess she was one of the early evacuees… if that’s true, that’s a pretty major development for Taylor, if she ever goes back to school.

I mean there’s still Sophia, Madison and their harplings, but while Sophia has found reasons of her own to hate Taylor, Emma really did seem to be the ringleader for the whole agenda against Taylor.

That said, it’s still possible that the whole thing stemmed from Sophia manipulating things so Emma would take a more negative view of her old bestie and thus stick to Sophia.

This is a place those kids visit, and they’re still convinced they can fix it.

Ah, I see, you’re a bit more pessimistic about all of this than the rest, and equating optimism with immaturity. Common fallacy, that.

I’ve lived with this all my life.  Waded through this shit from the beginning.  I know they’re deluding themselves.

…that’s an interesting comment. She’s definitely not talking literally about the Endbringer damage, unless she happens to be from somewhere else that got thrashed by Leviathan. So what exactly does she mean, then? What sort of childhood did she have?

So yeah, they’re immature, new to this, and I don’t know how long I can fucking put up with them.”

I’m not sure it’s what she’s talking about with “new to this”, but I wonder how long ago Sophia’s trigger event happened. Not to mention what it was.

“Which morons?  The Wards?”

“The Wards,” Shadow Stalker confirmed.  She sat down on the ledge.  “They’re children.”

Well yeah, kind of by definition. But that covers you too.

“Yeah,” Emma replied.  She didn’t prod for more information or clarification.  Shadow Stalker had gone over this before enough times, in one variation or another.

Honestly? I’m glad Sophia has Emma, in a way. I mean, of course it sucks for Taylor (because Emma’s a harpy herself, and clearly was already to some extent – I mean sure, people change, especially when prompted to by a new friend, but it takes some willingness to, even if that willingness is hidden beneath the surface), but it’s good that Sophia has someone to vent to when she needs it. We all need it from time to time.

…’course, that left Taylor without someone to vent to, but given what Emma has shown herself as willing to do with Taylor’s ventings, it might’ve been a good thing that she stopped venting to that particular person…

…though how can we know Emma wouldn’t be willing to do the same to Sophia if she were to get in with someone even cooler?

TL;DR we all need someone to vent to, fuck Emma, and I’m confused.