“Almost forgot you were in there,” he murmured, barely loud enough for her to catch.  Not that it mattered.  She was as aware of the movements of her mouth as he was.

Yeeah, let’s not forget that Regent is essentially keeping Sophia prisoner in her own body.

He could mouth the words and she would probably understand.  He smirked for her benefit as much as his own.

“So.  Bet you’re wondering what’s up,” he commented.  “Funny thing about having this control over you, I can feel your emotions, your body’s reactions.

Of all the people to open up to.

Like a really, really good polygraph test.  I wasn’t even half done saying my piece back there when I caught on to the fact that you were too pissed and too angry to back down and walk away.

…of course she was.

There’s no way you’re going to leave town if I let you go, right?”

Yeah, no, probably not. She’d be terrified of being controlled again, probably, but her anger would override it and have her seeking out Regent to kill him.

Shadow Stalker wasn’t emotionally dulled.  Her emotions were rich, uninhibited.  She was  passionate in her emotions: angry, judgemental.

Oh, absolutely. If I were to define her personality in just a few words, “passionate” would probably be one of them.

Even the negative feelings were something he could savor in their own way.  He wasn’t really experiencing them – it was more of a very involved spectator role.  Her fear was thrilling in the same way a fantastic scary movie was, with the detail and the immersion cranked up to eleven.

Huh, interesting.

He leaped straight up into the air, then activated the shadow state.  When she was as high as she would get, he had her grip her cloak in her hands and use it to guide her descent so she could land atop the roof of the gas station.  He stopped, stretched her arms.

Heh. Stretching someone else’s arms isn’t something you come across often.

She was breathing hard, but not as much as his Alec-self would be after even half as much running.  He could feel the endorphins being pumped into her body from the hard exercise, and he was all the more aware of it because he had his other body to compare to.  She was an athlete.

I suppose being able to compare and contrast directly lets you be more aware of your own body, for better or worse.

He ran her hands down her chest, felt her breasts, the muscles of her stomach.

Sophia’s desire to kill Regent probably just skyrocketed way past the point it already was at.

Stretching once more, he clenched her hands, felt the muscles in her arms flex.  He felt her shudder in revulsion.

She’s being groped by her own body.

Almost.  He was surprised to realize how much he’d missed this.  It was like a high, a whole other set of emotions, of physical sensations.  Real life, just being Alec, only Alec?  It paled in comparison.  It was dull.

Ah, okay, it’s been a while since he’s done this. I suppose he hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to do it since he came to Brockton Bay, and the people he had control over while he was under Heartbreaker are too far away now, even if the sleeping thing was a lie (still uncertain).

I guess this might be part of why he seems bored so often.

He wondered sometimes if dealing with his father had messed up something inside him.

It’s certainly not the healthiest childhood.

Also, another thing that makes a bit more sense now: Tattle’s power describing Regent as a sociopath. He doesn’t exactly seem concerned about the morals of what he does, nor how Shadow Stalker feels about it.

He could remember being young, maybe eight or so, fighting with two of his sisters over the fact that he’d wanted to watch the music channel and they wanted to watch some craptastic stop motion cartoon.

I guess siblings will be siblings, even when they’re being “raised” by a fucking vile piece of shit and his emotionally manipulated harem.

That said, these are kids with the potential for powers. Had Alec already gotten his at this point? Did he end up controlling his sisters and forcing them to watch the music channel?

They’d outnumbered him two to one, and he’d known he would lose the argument.  So he’d thrown a tantrum, started screaming.

…fair enough.

The entire atmosphere in the house had changed in a second.  His sisters went from argumentative to conciliatory in an instant, changed the channel to the music, tried to give him the remote.

…wait.

Was this his trigger event?? Or was his screaming just that effective at changing people’s minds?

One of father’s ‘girls’ came in and tried to quiet him down.  When he hadn’t, she’d clamped a hand over his mouth.

Guess it’s the latter.

He was cool with that.  In fact, it suited him perfectly.

Is it that you don’t want to be close enough with them to end up hurting them? That you don’t want anyone to know the real you?

Either way, Alec is a broken kid who needs hugs.

He was cool with it because it meant that when they were all heading out to meet Coil, nobody noticed that he was distracted, or that he wasn’t joining in the conversation.

…

I didn’t think of it then, but I have noticed before that Regent has been rather silent compared to the other Undersiders… if he does still have control over other people, might those have been moments where he was busy controlling one of them instead? Has Regent been practically the core of a hivemind all along?

Similarly when he’s been “lazily” watching TV, were some of those times just excuses for his main body to not do much while he focused on one of the stolen ones?

His control got worse as the distance between himself and his puppets widened, which meant he had to devote more focus to Shadow Stalker and the act of keeping her movements fluid.

Ah, I see, so there is a sort of soft range to it.

Incidentally, I suppose I should’ve realized something was up when Regent talked about next time Shadow Stalker got “in range” as if that was something that wasn’t going to happen often, and then went and talked about how he was going to run Shadow Stalker all the way to the other side of town. Of course, that would’ve possibly been that he had a shorter range for taking control than for maintaining it, but still.

He ran into the same issues when he controlled more people, and there was the irritating side effect that his own coordination, speech and fluidity of movement all suffered to the same extent that his ‘puppets’ did.

Hah!

So Regent can control multiple people, but it reduces his ability to control both them and his main body. Nice.

Were he to open his own mouth now and speak to Brian or Taylor, he might stutter or slur his words.  It was almost more trouble than it was worth.

Brian: “Alec, are you drunk?”

I wonder if the intensity of this effect might be a product of the distance to the “average” location of all of Regent’s bodies, rather than each body’s distance to the body called Regent. That would result in Regent’s main body being treated just like his puppets, and the whole system being a hivemind where Regent’s main body is simply one of them.

That doesn’t mesh with the sleeping thing, but that’s up for debate as having maybe been a lie.

I suppose I should’ve seen the possibility of Regent’s body snatching being potentially permanent coming. Permanence is a defining trait of Heartbreaker’s power, after all.

That same philosophy of minimizing the work he had to put in, sticking to what he enjoyed and the things that interested him, it was an advantage here.  Brian, Lisa and Taylor had their own dynamic.  They were friends.

…are you saying you don’t consider them to be friends, and/or that you’re not a friend?

I suppose Alec has kept himself a bit distant.

He considered Brian a friend, but it was more along the lines of someone he could play video games with, talk about movies.  It wasn’t much different from if they were coworkers or roommates.  He smiled at the thought.  They kind of were, when it came down to it.

Yeah, thinking back, Alec and Brian’s occasional teasing of each other, and Alec’s “dork” nickname for Taylor, is the most friendlike behavior we’ve seen from him.

Also, the “roommates” part of that is about to change.

Regent knew he was a background character, for the most part.  He played along, he didn’t make waves, he didn’t stand out.  He wasn’t close to any of the others.

Getting a little meta, are we?

But yeah, up until this Arc, Regent has easily been the least relevant Undersider.

“Now let’s walk you off to the other end of the city before I release you.  I don’t think you’re quite stupid enough to try and follow us, but I think my teammates would be more comfortable if they were sure.”  He rolled his eyes.

Something that Taylor didn’t notice.

That said, he turned her around, activated her power and walked her through the door.

Hah, I like that he literally walks her through the door. I didn’t realize he did that the first time we saw this.

Regent looked at the others, shrugged.  “Good enough?”

Decent acting. I suppose that makes sense given your sort of theatrical costume design.

Using the shadow form, she could cover a lot of ground very quickly.  For long minutes, he exercised her power, the ability to be as light as a feather, enjoyed it.  He even liked the running, too, when he turned off her power and just legged it.  This girl was in good shape.  He could tell she exercised regularly, that she ran on a regular basis.  Running was almost effortless, and it felt good, even with the aches and pains of the recent brawl.

Months or years of practice had fine tuned her body.

Well… good to hear you’re having fun, I guess.

Fighting had been much the same way, but it had been even better.  Her muscle memory had been so primed for punching, kicking, takedowns and evading that he’d almost been able to let her go on autopilot, let her body handle things on its own.

Heh, nice. Going on autopilot sounds risky, though, when it comes to keeping control.

Not that he could, really.  But it had been easy.  He loved that sort of thing.  Maximum reward for minimum effort.

Yeah, that is rather nice.

“I’m letting you go,” Regent lied.

Looks like we’re getting Regent! Wildbow is generally good about establishing which character is the POV immediately, by mentioning that character first, or at least very close to first.

And yeah, I suppose that does qualify as a lie, in the sense that he’s about to go into how he’s not actually letting Sophia go. Although you could count it as a deceptive truth – he is letting her go… to the other side of town.

He made Shadow Stalker drop to all fours on the ground and forced a grunt from her mouth.

Wait, he wasn’t letting her go at all?? So is he about to make her try to attack him?

With the same ease as he moved his own body, he made her load her bolt and spin to point her crossbow at him.  There was no danger of her shooting him; he was fully in control from start to finish.

Wow.

So does that mean he doesn’t have the ability to pick the control back up later, and was just making a show for the other Undersiders?

Does he have the ability to let someone go? Without sleeping? Or was the sleeping thing a lie too? Is he still in control of the other people he’s dominated before?? But then again, we’ve seen how using this power puts him at risk of backfire…

This raises so many questions.

He could feel her striving and straining to move her finger, to pull the trigger and plant an arrow just above his collarbone.  Every iota of her willpower must have been focused on the task.

Sorry, Sophia, not gonna work.

“There’s a catch,” he spoke. “My power?  Once I’ve figured someone out?  It’s a lot easier to control them, after.  Any time you come near me, I can do this.  I can use my power and retake control in the blink of an eye.”

He had her raise her crossbow and point it at her temple.

“Next time I get control?  I’m keeping you for a full day.  Maybe two, if I feel like pulling an all-nighter.  And here’s the funny part,” there was no humor in his voice, “I’m going to do it even if I’m in civilian clothes, if my power tells me you’re in range.  You won’t even know when it’s coming.  You’re now a liability to the Wards, and you won’t ever know when or where I’m going to get control again…

“Unless you leave.  Skip town.  Join another team.”

This is all stuff we’ve seen before, so there’s not much to say. Other than that some of this seems like it might be a lie now… but why? Of course Sophia would be the only one here who could tell that he was lying, so who is he trying to fool?

I suppose the nod might’ve been Regent too.

He had her nod, stiffly, awkwardly.

Yeah.

He felt her rising heartbeat, the slight increase in her breathing, which he managed, controlled.  Her muscles clenched, an involuntary reaction just beyond the scope of his control.  She’d realized what he was doing.  Rather, she knew what he wasn’t doing.

He wasn’t letting her go.

He wasn’t letting her go, despite making a show for the Undersiders to convince them he did…

…and, assuming the sleep thing was a lie too, the whole thing about being able to retake control is a way to have the Undersiders not question it if they catch him still controlling her later.