Colin ran one of his hands over his short cropped brown hair, sighed.  “Right.  You have as much say as I do, in this.”

He walked back to his desk and slumped down into his seat.  He kicked a screwdriver and a pair of pliers from the corner of the desk to put his feet up, one ankle crossed over the other.  Reaching in the opposite direction, he grabbed a stack of folders and let them fall to the desk.

Hmm… maybe he’s going to talk about Taylor and the Undersiders?

“Piggot has decided to take action in reflection of recent events.  Both the Wards and the Protectorate are being restructured.”

Hannah winced, “How bad?”

Huh.

Shrugging, Colin told her, “As far as the Wards go, we’re losing Aegis.  Piggot and the PRT want to see how he does leading a different team, and the boy’s parents are amenable.  He’ll stay in the Wards for a little longer, to suggest he’s younger than he is.”

A different team? Are they starting up a sort of second youngster team?

“A shame.  Who do we get?”

“It’s a swap.  It’ll be Weld from the Boston team.”

Oh, that kind of different team. So we’re getting a new Ward and Aegis is moving to Boston. Alright.

Weld… maybe someone with the power of shooting welding flames with their hands?

“I don’t know him,” Hannah admitted.

“He’s a good kid with a good record,” Dragon chimed in from the computer, “Ferrous biology, absorbs metals through his skin.  Strong, tough, good grades across the board, high marks in the tactics simulations.  Likable, and a scan of the web shows feedback for him is higher than average, which is impressive, considering he’s one of the Case 53s.”

Ferrous biology… sounds like someone who should under no circumstances go up against Kaiser.

Now what is a Case 53? Hm… It’s impressive that he’s well liked in spite of it, so maybe it’s the sort of deal Shadow Stalker has, in which he’s a Ward to atone for his crimes?

“He’s got the tattoo?” Hannah asked.

“The mark is branded into his heel, not tattooed, but yes.”

Ahh… Upsilon. We meet again.

“We were talking shop,” Colin spoke.  He motioned to the Halberd he had in front of him.  “Procrastination through Tinker stuff.  I think tonight’s project was a success.”

“Oh?”

I suppose having something to tinker with lends itself well to procrastination.

Armsmaster stood, seizing the Halberd in one hand.  He pressed a button on the handle, and the blade blurred.  Without even swinging the weapon, he let the heavier top end fall against an empty stainless steel mannequin that might have held a spare suit of his armor.  Dust blossomed where the blade touched the mannequin, and it passed through without resistance.  Pieces of the mannequin clattered to the ground.

Niice.

“Impressive,” she told him.

He pressed a button, and the blur around the blade dissipated in a steel-colored smoke, leaving only the normal axehead top of the weapon.

Huh. Who knows what kind of tech went into that.

“Only problems are that it’s vulnerable to forcefields, fire, and other intense energy, and the apparatus takes up too much space in the upper end.  Even with my power, it likely means I’d have to do without some of the kit I’ve gotten used to.”

I take it Miss Militia knows about your real power, then?

Wait, Tattle would’ve outed him to her at the gallery anyway, wouldn’t she.

“I trust you’ll figure it out,” Hannah told him.  Then with mock sternness, she put her hands on her hips, “Now, no more distracting me.  Just what are you procrastinating on?”

Yes, enlighten us please.

“You’re up early,” Dragon commented. “And you were out late, from what I’m seeing on the web.  Trouble sleeping?”

“I don’t sleep,” Hannah confessed.  “Not really, since I got my powers.”

“Oh?  Me either.”

Interesting. I wonder what Dragon’s reason for that is.

Colin leaned back and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, “I’d give my left foot for that little perk.”

Hannah nodded.  There were others like her?  She asked the computer screen, “Do you remember?”

“Sorry?  I don’t understand,” Dragon replied.

Aw, she thought for a moment she could have someone to relate to.

“Nevermind.”  If Dragon did remember, Hannah knew the answer to that question would have been different.  Dragon was too smart to miss the connection.

Yeah.

She glanced at the clock; 6:30 in the morning.

We’re getting close to the siren – assuming it actually is the same day, Taylor is thinking about the fact that it’s about time for her morning run around now.

She draped her flag-printed scarf loosely around her neck and lower face, then left her room.  The energy became an assault rifle hanging at her side, bouncing a comforting beat against her hip as she walked. She made her way up a flight of stairs and down to the end of a hallway.

Watch out for the stairs.

She heard a male voice, a female one.  She paused at the open doorway and knocked.

Hm, are we about to meet a new (to us) Protectorate member or two? Whoever they are, they might have just sent out the alert for the Endbringer.

“Yeah?” Armsmaster called out.

“Am I interrupting?”

“No.  Come on in,” he replied.

Okay, so the male one was Armsmaster. No real surprise there. I’m more interested in the female one, though.

Dragon? I don’t know why she’d be in Brockton Bay, though.

She stepped into the room.  It fell somewhere between a workshop and an office.  Two spare suits stood at one side of the room, each with minor functional differences.  A set of Halberds were placed on a rack behind Armsmaster’s desk, one shattered in pieces.  One of the spaces on the rack was empty – Armsmaster had the Halberd in front of him.

Ah, interesting, so he has multiple. Good call.

“You worked too hard and forgot to go to sleep again, Colin?” Hannah asked, though the answer was obvious.

Colin, eh? Not the worst of names.

He frowned, reached over to his computer and hit a button.  He saw the time, muttered, “Damn it.”

Relatable. Though usually when I stay awake all the way to 6:30, it’s not because I worked too hard.

“Good morning, Miss Militia,” a woman’s voice came from the computer.

Hannah blinked in surprise, “Dragon.  Sorry, I didn’t realize you were there.  Good morning.”

Oh, it was her! Just not in the flesh.

People were judgmental, she knew, and so she would never speak of what she had seen in that moment she received her gift.

I guess it would particularly upset some religious groups. And scientists, certainly.

The Lovecraft fans, on the other hand… Well, that depends on whether my unfounded hypothesis on the Endbringers is accurate or not.

Even among other faithful, she would be met with suspicion and scorn, were she to say she’d seen God, or one of His warrior angels, such as they existed beyond the scope of human understanding.

Ah, yeah, definitely.

That He had given her this ability so she could save herself.  Others would offer different interpretations, argue that He had given such gifts to bad people, too, they would point to the science of it.

And suddenly you’ve started a religious war over the origin of parahuman powers.

Maybe some small part of her suspected these hypothetical individuals were right.  Still, she preferred her faith to uncertainty.  The notion that this thing she had seen was something other than a benign entity watching over humanity, that it might be malign, or even worse, that it existed with no conception of the effect it had on mankind?  An elephant among gnats?  It wasn’t a comfortable thought.

That last one is pretty typical of Lovecraftian horrors.

Though again, I’ve never read any actual Lovecraft literature.

She’d grown to love this country.  Truly love it, for what it stood for.  She’d had to fight to wear the flag as part of her costume.  America wasn’t perfect, but nothing touched by human hands could be.

So basically, the reason she’s so overtly patriotic is that she comes from a country where she had it a lot worse, so she can see the good sides of the U.S.

I like it.

There was greed, corruption, selfishness, pettiness, hatred.  But there were good things too.  Freedoms, ideas, choices, hope and the possibility that anyone could be anything, here, if they were willing to strive for it.

The good ol’ American Dream.

As she accepted her new country, she let herself make friends, boyfriends, let herself get close to her parents and their church.  By the time she started college, her accent had all but disappeared, and she knew enough to at least pretend to know what others were talking about when they spoke of pop culture, music and television.

Hehe. Don’t worry, Hannah, it’s like that for a lot of us. 😉

It never felt entirely real.  More than once, she had let herself begin to believe she’d died, that she’d taken that step forward and never made it out of the forest.

I suppose it’d feel like a good afterlife compared to the hell she lived it.

She had made mistakes when she let herself think that way, had put herself in too much danger, back in her earliest years as a hero.

Naturally, most mythologies without rebirth don’t let you die again in the afterlife.

Now, when she found herself slipping into that mindset, she often tried to sleep.  Her memories as she slept were perfect, unblemished, almost more real than real life, which was why she never did it too often.  Ironic, given how necessary it often was, to keep her grounded in reality.

Some sleep to escape reality. It’s the other way around for Hannah.

Wait, no, the forest was specifically implied to have been there when the war started. Either it had other trees too or the parahuman joke theory doesn’t work.

Bright lights and conveniences and wanting for nothing and televisions and sports cars and capped teeth and chocolate and the list went on…  It had taken her the better part of a decade to even start getting used to it, and everything moved so fast that any time she thought she was getting a grasp on it, there was something new, something she was supposed to know or understand.

Am I gonna have to break out that one ICP quote I did again?

She’d accepted without complaint when her adoptive parents told her to start writing her name in the more American ‘Hannah’.

I suppose it might help avoid some racists, and also make it easier to tell people how to write her name.

She’d agreed and signed the papers when they took the last name her parents had given her and replaced it with their own.

That said, I feel like things like this should be entirely the child’s choice, if they’re old enough to make a choice.

Small things, so minor, compared to what she had seen and done.  It didn’t bear complaining about.

Yeah, fair.

Everyone praised her for how dutiful she was in school and her training.  She never gave up, never quit.  Why should she?  This was nothing compared to those hours she spent in that forest.

Those hours when each step or lack of one could lead to her death, or that of another.

So hard to believe that the events from her dream had occurred just twenty six years ago.

Hm, so that puts a bit of a time frame on things. The events of the dreams would’ve happened in 1985, then, assuming present day is 2011. The war had lasted for seven years… which identifies it on the list of wars involving Turkey as the Kurdish conflict (known on the list as the Turkey-PKK Conflict), which started in 1978 and is still ongoing.

I guess Wildbow really didn’t check if there were pine trees in Kurdistan, just in Turkey. Fair enough.

Or, for a more fun explanation: There was a parahuman in Kurdistan whose power was causing pine trees to grow randomly within a large radius.