She’d had her doubts about coming to Brockton Bay.  It had been a turn off to know that areas lacked power, that still more areas lacked working plumbing.

It’s not a particularly inviting place these days, by first world standards.

But Burnscar and Bonesaw had both been excited to come, and Jack Slash had bent to Bonesaw’s wishes, pushing for the group to come this way.

We already know Burnscar had other reasons than just violence and abuse of a post-Endbringer situation to want to go to Brockton Bay. Could the same be the case with Bonesaw?

Crawler, Mannequin and Siberian had seemed fairly indifferent.

Sounds about right.

Not that Crawler or Mannequin showed much emotion.

Yeah, and I’d imagine Siberian isn’t all that interested in cities, besides the sheer amount of prey.

She’d thought she had an ally in Shatterbird, at least, but the woman hated her, and the uptight bitch had gone along with the plans to visit Brockton Bay just to ruin her day.

Hah! I kinda doubt how accurate that is, but…

Wait.

Nope, it’s probably at least mostly accurate. If there’s anyone around here who would know for sure exactly how others feel about her, it’s the girl who can listen to people’s emotions and accurately identify their targets.

So why does Shatterbird hate the Newbie? Does it have something to do with not having been the one to recruit her? Or maybe it’s just a conflict of personality, like Shatterbird not caring for Newbie’s more casual attitude.

Let’s see if we can’t find out what the Newbie actually calls herself today. At least one of her names would be nice. 😛

“Hey!”

She could sense her passenger climbing out of the jeep, hear the garbled murmurs of warning, questions.

“What are you doing, man?”

There was a burst of fear from all three, then the sound of multiple guns firing.  She smiled.

Welp, looks like the suspicion, tension and paranoia just kicked in.

The authorities would have a hell of a time figuring out what happened there.

Yeeeah, especially since it seems likely they don’t know about the Newbie being in the Slaughterhouse yet.

…so let’s read some more Worm!

He pulled the gun away, dropped it into his lap.  He crumpled over, his hands to his head, then moaned, “No.”

Is that a “no” of “no, I can’t shoot you”, or “no, please stop messing with my head”? Or maybe “no, this can’t be happening”?

She was close to her destination.  She pulled the jeep to a stop and hopped out, the other jeep pulling up just a ten or so yards away.  Two soldiers got out.

“Hey, fellas! How’d you like becoming my thralls along with your comrade? :)”

“Hey!” someone shouted at her.

She turned her back to them, slipping her ear buds in.  The music had looped back to the first track.

Looks like she doesn’t give a shit.

Also that’s a short playlist, how long have you been deleting stuff from it?

She got her phone out and skipped forward a few times, pausing to delete one song.  She sang along, “Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…”

Just like at the beginning of the chapter. This would make a fantastic bookend with that, but… this doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the end of the chapter.

Not much time to do it.  She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia.

Welp. Suddenly they’ll all be like, “You’re working with the bad guys, aren’t you?”, and “You’re not taking my glory!”, or maybe “Why do you want to catch up with them?”

Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear.

Oh wait, I misread, she was doing that to the guy in her jeep (essentially stolen, like everything else she uses), not the guys in pursuit. I suppose there’s probably a shorter range on the manipulation, otherwise it’d be quite overpowered.

“Get the gun.”

She’ll make him shoot his own comrades.

He fished for it between the seats, picked it up.

Then he pointed the gun at her.

Well, apparently he’s still present enough to know who his target should be.

“No, stop,” she said.  Too unspecific.  Fuck.  Still need to work on that.  She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her.

I suppose this is her weakness, for now – until she gets better at it, the manipulated emotions will be a little too unspecific about certain things, such as whom to be paranoid about.

Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain.  She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions.  By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely.

This is why I call the music semi-metaphorical. I don’t think it actually manifests as sound that only the Newbie can hear and mentally “wrangle”, but when faced with a sense the brain isn’t normally designed to handle, it can find ways to treat these things as if they came from the basic senses. Similarly, I don’t think Dinah actually sees the branching timelines in any real sense, but because she has overview over a large number of them at once, presenting it as a “visual” in her mind is the best way for her brain to handle that sense.