Tag: Chapter 7.3

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In any case, these numbers had been a way to keep one’s racist feelings on the down low, around those that weren’t already affiliated, until Kaiser’s predecessor formed Empire Eighty-Eight here in Brockton Bay.

1) It really seems like these codes are common knowledge now. I guess that’s a natural result of a far from low-key group of supremacists parading them around and identifying themselves with one of them.

2) Apparently Kaiser didn’t found the E88… interesting.

The move had pushed an ultimatum on the more secretive racists in the area, forcing them to either join the aggressive, active group in the public eye or retreat further into hiding.

Both of which are bad for actually dealing with the racism.

It had also drawn crowds of the more diehard white supremacists from the surrounding regions to Brockton Bay.  When people with powers, Kaiser included, started to congregate in the group, Brockton Bay became something of a magnet for those sorts.

Welp. No wonder the E88 is so big, then.

One of the bigger collections of racists above the bible belt.  Quite possibly the biggest congregation of racist supervillains.

Not exactly the feat you’d want your city to be known for.

The day Empire Eighty-Eight had gotten its name hadn’t been a good day for our city.

Evidently not.

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Bitch had her dogs standing around her, and she stood opposite a group of seven or so people.  They ranged from thirtyish to twelve in age.  It wasn’t hard to figure out who they identified with.  Half of the guys were blond or dyed blond, and the others had shaved heads.

Well, shit. Hi, there, E88.

So are they sent by Hookwolf?

The youngest was a twelve-ish girl who’d taken a razor to her scalp, too, leaving only her bangs and the hair hanging around her ears and the back of her neck.

Ughh.

The detail that confirmed my suspicions of their affiliation was the number eighty-three that I saw etched on one of the guys’ t-shirts in permanent marker.

Eighty… three?

Did part of it rub off or something? Or is this just their way of not-so-effectively establishing deniability while still getting close enough to wearing one of the gang’s symbols that other E88ers will recognize it? “Of course I’m not a Nazi, does this look like it says 88 to you?”

The white supremacists loved codes in numbers.  If you were suspicious about whether a number was one of their codes, the number eight was a good clue, since it cropped up a lot.  The eight referred to the 8th letter of the alphabet, H; Eighty-eight stood for H.H. or ‘Heil Hitler’, while eighteen pointed to Adolf Hitler in the same way.

Some of this I knew from when I first learned about 14/88 via this block, though 18 is new to me.

By this system, 83 would be “HC”… Um… I got nothing. “Heil Christ”?

The eighty-three wasn’t one I’d seen before, but I knew it would have stood for H.C… Heil something.  Heil Christ?

…apparently Taylor and I are on the same page today.

Honestly, though, I feel like part of the number rubbing off is a more likely explanation than “Heil Christ”.

Maybe Taylor is wrong to assume the H is for Heil. Her assuming so could be a simple misdirection by Wildbow to make the reader not consider other options, in addition to explaining why she didn’t.

“Hookwolf’s Crew”?

“Hi, Colin”?

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I could have argued the details, pointed out that most people weren’t aware of the ins and outs of trigger events, I could have argued that some things could get worse if dogs could get powers.  It didn’t feel necessary.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Sometimes, you don’t need to go into the realistic results. Just appreciate the fantasy.

And the funny mental images.

Do the dogs get costumes, too? Please tell me there’s art of dog versions of some of the capes I’ve met out there!

That was the extent of that dialogue.  We enjoyed another long silence and the dogs competed with one another to fetch the ball.

The sound of a breaking bottle and very human shouts disturbed our peace.

…well, that’s not good. Are some Docks drunkards fighting outside? Or maybe they want to hassle the dogs, unaware that Rachel is present?

“These guys again,” Bitch snarled, moving Sirius’ head from her lap and hopping down from her seat on the pile of concrete blocks.

Rachel has encountered them before, at least.

The black lab turned his head to watch as she stalked towards the front of the building.  Bitch whistled for her dogs and Brutus, Judas and Angelica rushed to her side.

“What’s going on?” I called after her, moving to follow.

She seems to find it necessary to chase them off – it’s almost like she’s straight up getting ready for battle, though at least she doesn’t seem to be powering up the doggos.

“Stay inside,” she told me.

I did as she asked, but that didn’t mean I didn’t try to get closer, to get a better picture of what was going on.  I approached one of the boarded up windows at the front of the building and peeked through a gap in the plywood.

Skitter! What do your bug eyes see?

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“I think I get it,” I told her.  I looked at Bullet, who had stopped running and was sitting in the middle of the field, watching others run.  “Do they all have stories like that?”

“Most.”

“Damn,” I felt a pang of sympathy for the animals.

Yeah, this place isn’t one filled with happy stories.

The herd of dogs returned to me, and a shaggy dog dropped the ball at my feet.

The phrase “shaggy dog” honestly just makes me think of the tropes “Shaggy Dog Story” and “Shoot the Shaggy Dog”… neither of which I hope we’ll be encountering here.

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“Good dog,” I told it.  I threw the ball, aiming to get it near Bullet, and the herd of dogs rushed off again, with more than a few excited barks.

Bitch and I weren’t conversing, but neither of us were conversation people.  I was too socially clumsy to maintain small talk for any length of time, and Bitch was… well, she was Bitch.

Yeah, this is to be expected.

So we sat, minutes passed between each exchange of dialogue, and it somehow didn’t bother me.  It was letting me pick and choose what I was talking about very carefully.

Sometimes it’s nice to have this kind of friend. It might be what ultimately makes Rachel more positive towards Taylor, too.

“It’s too bad dogs can’t have trigger events,” Bitch mused aloud.  “If they did, some people might think twice.”

Well…

huh.

That would make for quite the chaos, now wouldn’t it. Imagine it – a whole bunch of abused dogs suddenly going wild with parapowers of their own! You’ve got flying dogs, dogs that can shoot lasers around corners, hyperintelligent Tinker dogs, dogs that can cause explosions without actually blowing anything up, dogs that can turn other humans into demons…

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“Ah.”

“The one you were talking to a few minutes ago is Bullet.  She’s the smartest in the group.

The white one that wanted Taylor’s food?

Her breed craves exercise, they’re meant to run around all day with hunters… except she was used as a beta to warm dogs up for one of the dogfighting rings around here and her shoulder was torn up pretty badly.

Ouch.

Even with the shoulder healed as well as it’s gonna get, it hurts too much for her to run as much as she needs.”

I spotted Bullet in the crowd.  Sure enough, she was lagging behind the rest.  I thought maybe she was favoring one leg.

Aww.

There’s a certain irony in the name. She’s got natural potential to be fast as a bullet, but she’s a bullet that was misused and damaged, and now she lags behind the others.

“If your power heals, why doesn’t it help her?  Or Angelica’s eye and ear?”

Bitch shrugged.

Really, this kind of thing goes for any healing power. How does the power determine what needs to be healed? What the state to which the target should be returned is?

I don’t think what happened with Sirius is really healing, though, so much as getting rid of internal interlopers and injuries that might get in the way of the transformation. Alternatively, the worms simply can’t survive in the environment that a hellhound’s body becomes.

“Lisa said it has something to do with me making a ‘blueprint’.  It’s babble to me.

Sounds like Rachel subconsciously decides what the true state should be.

I actually briefly talked to someone about something similar earlier today – the topic was how Steven Universe’s healing powers worked. Specifically, in a world where not every character it’s been used on is organic, how does the power determine what it should work on? My take on it is that it works on whatever Steven himself perceives as “alive” – including a teddy bear – and by extension, it returns the target to the state that Steven considers healthy and whole.

With Faultline’s theories in Gregor’s interlude, we’ve got confirmation that some of the powers in the Wormverse, and notably the Manton effect, have been theorized by researchers to work similarly to that – it would make sense for both Rachel’s and Panacea’s healing (if we’ll call this side effect of Rachel’s power that) to be among those powers.

All I know is that it doesn’t help older health problems.  It gets rid of disease and cancer, and parasites, and most damage they take when they’re big.  That’s all.”

Hm. Maybe not so much Rachel’s subconscious deciding how the dogs should be as essentially checking how they are before the power is used on them, minus disease, cancer and parasites… no, something’s not quite adding up about this formulation.

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Bitch frowned, but she didn’t refuse me.  “This is Sirius.  He was bought as a puppy for some twelve year old, then grew too big and unruly to stay in the house.  He was caged outside and ignored, his nails grew too long, and he wound up with an infection in his foot.  They decided it was easier to leave him at a shelter than pay for medical care.  Since he wasn’t trained or socialized, he came off too wild and excitable to get adopted.  I got him in the week he was due to get put down.”

Aww.

Well, at the very least, a shelter is better than just abandoning him in the wild like way too many people (that Rachel would hate) would do. Though apparently this particular shelter was a bit inept, given the whole medication issue.

“That’s fucked up,” I looked at Sirius, who was sleeping.  “How do you know the story?”

That’s… actually a really good question. Is Tattletale involved, or did Rachel just straight up track down the former owners and get it directly from them?

“I know some people that volunteer at shelters, from when I used to.  They let me know if there’s a dog that deserves a second chance.  Not that many don’t.”

Ah, okay. I guess the shelter folks would know a bit more than I figured about the dog’s backstory.

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“Here,” Bitch told me.  I turned around, and she handed me the blue stick that had been jutting out of the zipper of the backpack.  It was plastic, molded to have a handle with finger-holds on one end and a cup on the other.

Ooh! So it’s kind of like an arm extension so you can throw the ball further?

As a dog brought the ball to me, I experimentally pressed the cupped end down on it, and the ball snapped into place.

When I whipped it forward, the ball went flying, five times as far than it had when I’d used my hand.  Most of the dogs stampeded after it, racing to be the first to grab it or chasing after the ones in the lead.

Niiice.

It was nice, enjoying the sunshine, playing with the dogs, having no responsibilities or pressures for the moment.

I turned to look over my shoulder.  “Can you tell me about some of them?  The dogs?”

Yes please.

I’m aware this is probably headed into discussion of animal abuse, so not really happy fun time, but still, I do want to hear about the dogs.

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“Come on, you know me pretty well.  All the others describe me as careful and cautious, though I’m not entirely sure why.  Do you really think I’d pick something as important as a dog, a new addition to my family, without researching, first?”

That’s a really good point. Taylor gathers all the information she can before she does anything – of course she’d do her research.

She didn’t reply.  Instead, she turned her attention back to the dogs outside.

“Right,” I said.  “I wouldn’t.”

Yeah. Rachel can’t really argue with that.

I didn’t press things any further.  We finished our wraps, I dug one piece of the foil-wrapped baklava out of the bag, set it down on the paper from my wrap and bunched up the foil around the remainder to throw up to Bitch.

Since I’m not really familiar with Greek food, I just looked up both baklava and chicken souvlaki. They both look quite tasty, though I’m not sure I’d like baklava since it apparently contains nuts. Chicken souvlaki, on the other hand? I’m a big fan of chicken, and I think I’d really like to try this some day.

When I was done eating my dessert and licking my fingers clean, I hopped down from my seat on the wall, found a ball and started throwing it for the dogs.

Playtime!