It was all so fucked up.  She was so fucked up.

Aw.

Amy needs a hug.

There was a knock on her door.  She hurried to hide the paper.

Family member, or surprise Bonesaw?

…

Bones. Marquis’s power was over bones. Even if I didn’t already suspect Bonesaw of having a specialty in medical equipment or something similar, that right there is a connection between Marquis’s daughter and Bonesaw.

“Come in,” she said, trying to compose herself in the span of one or two seconds.

Carol opened the door.  She was pulling on the gloves for her costume.  “Amy?”

Oh, hi! Come to inform Amy that she may want to watch out, especially for goons from either E44 team, for unspecified reasons that would leave her with more questions than answers if she hadn’t found this letter?

“Yeah?”

Carol took a few seconds before she looked up from her gloves and met Amy’s eyes.  When she did, the look was hard, accusatory.

Ah, shit, she’s noticed that the paper was missing, hasn’t she.

Well, at least if they get the whole snooping matter out of the way now, they can have a proper talk about Marquis without Amy having to explain how she found out.

That’s right, Amy Dallon’s father is the famous Norwegian skier Petter Northug.

What else did she know about Marquis?  She vaguely recalled Uncle Neil talking about the man when he’d been talking to Laserdream about villain psychology.  There were the unpredictable ones, the villains who were hard to stop because you couldn’t guess where they’d strike next, but who were less practiced in what they did and made mistakes you could leverage against them.

Hm. I wonder if Bonesaw falls in that category, or if she’s an exception.

There were also the orderly ones.  The ones who were careful, who honed their methodology to perfection, but they repeated themselves, showed patterns that a smart hero could use to predict where they struck next, and often had rules or rituals a hero could turn against them.

That sounds more like the Marquis we know.

Which wasn’t to say that one was smarter than the other, or that one was better.  Each posed problems for the local authorities and capes.

Oh, absolutely. Just different problems.

Marquis had fit into the latter category, the perfectionists, the pattern killers.  He’d had, as Neil explained, a warped sense of honor, underneath it all.  He didn’t kill women or kids.

Huh. Well, that’s something, I guess.

I’m guessing he was arrested by a team of all-female heroes.

To all reports, the man had been heartless, callous.  Wasn’t she?  She couldn’t bring herself to care anymore when she went to the hospitals to heal the injured and sick.

Callous? Perhaps sometimes. Heartless? No, I don’t think so. Someone heartless wouldn’t care about fulfilling this duty as much as Amy seems to have.

She’s just burnt out. Not in the sense of the power leaving her, but in the psychological sense. She’s exerted herself too much. She was already stressed out about her work in Interlude 3. Add Leviathan and everything that’s happened since on top of that, and you really can’t blame her for disconnecting her emotions to deal with it all.

It was a chore, something she made herself do because people wouldn’t understand if she stopped.  There were only so many people she could heal before she became desensitized to it.

Exactly. There’s a limit to how much you can deal with this sort of thing before it stops having the same impact.

Now that door was open, and she could never shut it again.  She didn’t care so much about the possible hit on her.  No.  What shook her was that she now knew who her father was.

Yeeah, the possible hit on her is more business as usual when you’re in this business, really. As a hero, there are going to be bad guys who want you dead, that’s just a fact of the occupation.

She even suspected that, like Tattletale had told her months ago, she’d always known.  She just hadn’t dug for it, hadn’t put the pieces together.

Because she didn’t want to know.

Marquis had been an aspiring crime lord in the bad old days of Brockton Bay.

Wish I could turn back time
To the bad ol’ days
When my papa sang me to sleep
But now I’m stressed out

It had been a time when the villains had been flocking to the city to profit off the booming tech and banking sectors, to recruit mooks and henchmen from the city’s unemployed dockworkers.

…huh. I know we already had a mention of dockworkers becoming henchmen, long ago, but I never really made the connection that the situation of the dockworkers was overall good for villain business for that reason.

It had been an era when the heroes hadn’t been properly established, and the villains had been confident enough that some didn’t give a second thought to murdering any heroes who got in their way.

Nowadays, that just calls all the other heroes in town down on your head.

Marquis included.

Figures.

Hmm, if Amy is assuming that Carol would read the letter to Mark rather than have him read it himself, maybe that means his disability is that he went blind?

Or it could just be a little quirk of their relationship.

She had to stop reading there.  The paper had been on Carol’s bedside table, and Amy had found it while collecting a change of clothes for Mark a week ago.

Mark? Would that be Manpower?

Carol had probably been reading it to him late the previous night, and maybe forgot to put it away due to a mixture of exhaustion and the distractions that came with waking up each morning to a disabled husband and a ten-year career in jeopardy.

Sounds like it, provided I’m remembering the family tree correctly. So what exactly happened to him in the fight against Leviathan?

Also this is a very good reason for forgetting to do something.

Amy knew she shouldn’t have read it, but the header had caught her attention.  With her family’s fate uncertain, she had found herself reading, to see if they were joining the Guild, if something else had happened that could distract them from this.

Makes sense.

Amy sat on her bed, staring at the piece of paper in her hands.

Ooooh!

I know the “scaredy cat” stuff made me waver on this, but I’m still going to count it as a win!

So does that mean Amy is the scaredy cat after all?

The header at the top was stylized, a silhouette of a superhero with a cape flowing, with a script reading ‘The Guild’ extending to the right.

Ooh, are we finally going to find out what the Guild is all about? 

I mean, we know it’s a superhero organization and that Dragon, for all her work for the Protectorate, is primarily in the Guild, but beyond that they’re pretty much a complete mystery so far. (I think I speculated at some point that they specialized in tinkers, but if this paper has to do with Panacea getting into it, then that’s probably wrong.)

So did Amy apply for, or get invited to, the Guild as a result of the New Wave disbanding, instead of going for the Wards like her sister?

Or maybe this is a completely unrelated document. Maybe it isn’t even for Panacea, and the reason she’s staring at it is that she found out something about someone close to her through it? Or about her dad.

Mrs. Carol Dallon.  Brandish,

Alright, so it’s not for her. What’s this about, then? Did she just discover that her (adoptive) mom is joining the Guild?

Let me open by stating my condolences for the loss of your brother-in-law, nephew, and your husband’s injury.  I have heard New Wave is currently considering disbanding, and you have my best wishes, whatever route you end up taking.  We have too few heroes and heroines to lose them, and even fewer of the truly good heroes and heroines who set the standard for everyone else, parahuman and human alike.  If finances ever become a concern, know that all you need to do is ask, and we will find you employment among the Guild’s uncostumed staff.

Hm… did Dragon write this? It sounds like her.

Either way, I think I like whoever did, so far.

Knowing what you have been through as of late, it is with a heavy heart that I send you this message with further bad news.  Marquis, interred in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center, confided to another inmate that he fears for his daughter’s life.

Ohhh.

Panacea didn’t know exactly who her father was, right? Wasn’t that part of the whole showdown with Tattletale in Agitation?

And now she’s found this letter to Brandish that states his name and makes it quite clear what his relation is, even if it doesn’t get more specific than this.

I have checked the facts to the best of my ability, and the details I have been able to dig up match with his story.  I must warn you that Allfather may have arranged for Amy Dallon to be murdered at some future date, in revenge for his own daughter’s death at Marquis’ hands.

And hey, finding out that a dead bigshot villain may have set you up to be murdered can be upsetting in its own right.

(Also, yes, this is definitely Dragon.)