/* Runs once at story start. Sets up the identity, the tracked numbers, the story flags and the
achievement list. Start includes reset-all on top of this, so a brand-new character always
begins from reset-all; StoryInit only guarantees that every variable exists. */\
<<footer all>>\
<<set $title to "Gestation">>
/* --- Identity: filled in by the cc-* creation passages --- */\
<<set $name to "">>
<<set $capeName to "">>
<<set $capeDefault to "">>
<<set $phoName to "Transfer_Student">>
<<set $power to "">>
<<set $powerName to "">>
<<set $trigger to "">>
<<set $guardian to "">>
<<set $guardianName to "">>
<<set $gender to "girl">>
<<set $build to "average">>
<<set $hair to "dark brown, shoulder-length">>
<<set $eyes to "brown">>
<<set $mark to "nothing anyone remembers">>
<<set $heritage to "white">>
<<include "set-pronouns">>
<<include "set-heritage">>
/* --- Tracked numbers. Health and stamina against their ceilings; the three reputations, Taylor's
trust and notoriety 0-100; power control 1-5; money in dollars. snap* are the values at the
last stats-page visit, used by the framework to show deltas. --- */\
<<set $health to 100>>
<<set $maxHealth to 100>>
<<set $heroRep to 10>>
<<set $streetRep to 5>>
<<set $notoriety to 0>>
<<set $taylorTrust to 10>>
<<set $control to 2>>
<<set $money to 0>>
<<set $stamina to 100>>
<<set $maxStamina to 100>>
<<set $trainPts to 0>>
<<set $trainReturn to "Start">>
<<set $job to "">>
<<set $snapHeroRep to 10>>
<<set $snapStreetRep to 5>>
<<set $snapNotoriety to 0>>
<<set $snapTaylorTrust to 10>>
<<set $snapControl to 2>>
/* --- Creation sheet and story flags (shared with the reset passages) --- */\
<<include "init-character">>\
<<include "init-flags">>\
/* --- Baselines captured at the end of character creation (cc-summary) so a fresh-Friday replay
can restore the numbers without redoing creation --- */\
<<set $baseHeroRep to 10>>
<<set $baseStreetRep to 5>>
<<set $baseTaylorTrust to 10>>
<<set $baseControl to 2>>
<<set $achievementData = [
{
name: "New Kid",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "Start your first day in Brockton Bay.",
unlockedDesc: "You transferred into Winslow High. Could be worse. Could be Arcadia's waiting list."
},
{
name: "Cape in Waiting",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Finish making your character.",
unlockedDesc: "Name, power, costume in progress. All that's left is the hard part."
},
{
name: "Someone Noticed",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Help Taylor after the bathroom.",
unlockedDesc: "You didn't walk past. That already puts you ahead of everyone at Winslow."
},
{
name: "Before the Second Bottle",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You stopped the bathroom before it finished. Canon never saw that coming."
},
{
name: "Bystander",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You heard the laughing and kept walking. It's what everyone else did, too."
},
{
name: "Night One",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Go out in costume for the first time.",
unlockedDesc: "Unfinished costume, no phone, no spare change. Off you go."
},
{
name: "Dragon, Grounded",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "Be there when Lung goes down.",
unlockedDesc: "Bugs, dogs, pepper spray, and you. Lung is not having a good night."
},
{
name: "Burn Ward",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You stood toe to toe with Lung. The hospital has your name and your face now."
},
{
name: "Ash",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "Find out what Lung does to people who don't run.",
unlockedDesc: "One line near the bottom of a PRT statement. Try the night again."
},
{
name: "Unsung",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Let someone else take the credit for Lung.",
unlockedDesc: "Head down, radar clear. Armsmaster owes you one, whether he says so or not."
},
{
name: "Headline",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Take the credit for Lung yourself.",
unlockedDesc: "Your cape name is on the morning news. So is a target."
},
{
name: "Credit Where It's Due",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You told Armsmaster the bug girl earned it. He did not enjoy hearing that."
},
{
name: "Bad Company",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You took the ride. The dogs smell worse up close."
},
{
name: "Stuck the Landing",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 1 with full trust from both Taylor and your guardian.",
unlockedDesc: "You went out, came home, and nobody you care about is worse off for it. Enjoy it while it lasts."
},
{
name: "Bottle Service",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You skipped the worst day of your life and went straight to the powers. Somebody is going to want that favor back."
},
{
name: "Group Project",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Keep Taylor's homework out of Madison's hands.",
unlockedDesc: "You sat in the leftover group on purpose. The vending machine never knew what hit it."
},
{
name: "Nine to Two",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Stand with Taylor at the window.",
unlockedDesc: "Eight girls and Emma Barnes, and you walked into the middle of it. Nobody has done that before."
},
{
name: "Other Side of the Mask",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You told Taylor who was on the other roof. She didn't run. That counts."
},
{
name: "Dog Person",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Get between Taylor and Rachel's dogs.",
unlockedDesc: "Brutus, Judas and Angelica. You'll remember the names. So will they."
},
{
name: "Late Bloomer",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Use your power in front of people for the first time, a week late.",
unlockedDesc: "You stayed home the night Lung went down. Your first night out was a Monday afternoon, in a loft, with dogs."
},
{
name: "Night Two",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Go out on your own, after.",
unlockedDesc: "Nobody made you. Nobody was watching. You went out anyway."
},
{
name: "Audited",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Be assessed by the man with the pen.",
unlockedDesc: "Ledger watched you once and wrote down what you cost. Somebody is going to read that."
},
{
name: "Wingman",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Fight beside the kid on the roofs.",
unlockedDesc: "Kestrel dropped out of the dark eating a sandwich and put a mercenary on the ground. Thursdays, she says."
},
{
name: "Our People",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Show the Empire what you can do.",
unlockedDesc: "Behind a shed at the Kessler yard, Victor smiled. Kaiser wants to meet you."
},
{
name: "Stood",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Stand with the ABB the night Lung goes down.",
unlockedDesc: "In a street full of bugs, in front of thirty of Lung's people. Oni Lee said tomorrow."
},
{
name: "The Nod",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Put the Merchants' new cape to sleep.",
unlockedDesc: "Forty people woke up on the Boardwalk and a man in a bathrobe didn't."
},
{
name: "Inside Job",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Rob a bank with the Undersiders.",
unlockedDesc: "In, out, twelve minutes, on a dog. Lisa went grey afterward, and it wasn't the money."
},
{
name: "Console Jockey",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Work the Wards' console on a bad day.",
unlockedDesc: "Six screens, a headset, Vista, and a call that closed at two-fifty-eight."
},
{
name: "Wrong Side of the Glass",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Fight the Undersiders as a Ward.",
unlockedDesc: "Tattletale called you rookie across a bank. She wasn't wrong."
},
{
name: "Caught One",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "Put an Undersider in a PRT cell.",
unlockedDesc: "Regent asked for a lawyer and a sandwich, in that order. Tattletale said they'd be back for him."
},
{
name: "Forty-One Percent",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "Change the numbers.",
unlockedDesc: "Dinah Alcott went home. She said you weren't in the numbers. Somebody is going to want to know why."
},
{
name: "Seen Helping",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Hold Lord Street in the Empire's colors.",
unlockedDesc: "The city saw who was there when the Wards weren't. That was the point. That's the problem."
},
{
name: "Dye Pack",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Pass Bakuda's test.",
unlockedDesc: "A box under a bench, a walk north, and a bus shelter turned green. She knows what you'll do now."
},
{
name: "Insurance",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Let Bakuda place her device.",
unlockedDesc: "A bee sting, then nothing. It will continue to be nothing for as long as you are useful."
},
{
name: "Processed",
points: 5,
lockedDesc: "Get caught.",
unlockedDesc: "PRT holding has no corners. Your guardian's face was in the door window."
},
{
name: "Men in Grey",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Two men in grey armor loading crates into a Docks warehouse at night, and neither of them was worried about you."
},
{
name: "Nightlight",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A tired woman in a pharmacy aisle, and for one second the lights went the wrong way."
},
{
name: "Back Door",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Tea from a thermos behind Palanquin, poured by a man you could see through."
},
{
name: "Dud",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "One of Bakuda's tests didn't go. You were standing next to it when it didn't."
},
{
name: "Out of Towners",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A man in a top hat traded places with a parking meter and told you not to make it a thing."
},
{
name: "Off the Leash",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Shadow Stalker, past the line, with a real bolt. She told you to go home."
},
{
name: "First Night",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A girl on a laundromat floor with the room going around her. You'd been her once."
},
{
name: "Came In With The Tide",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A man from Halifax standing in the surf who didn't know his name. The fog was warm, he said."
},
{
name: "Bus Fare",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Rafe at the Greyhound station with Skidmark's money and his sister's number."
},
{
name: "Union Hall",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Danny Hebert sweeping glass at ten at night, with a brick on the step."
},
{
name: "Broadcast",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Greg Veder said \"Stop\" with his nose bleeding, and two Merchants stopped the way a tape stops."
},
{
name: "Always Been Here",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Mrs. Avery in 2B, who brought the pie, who has been there since before you moved in, who wasn't there last week."
},
{
name: "Halvorsen Marine",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A chandler's shop that closed in 1998, open tonight, and a compass that points at the fog."
},
{
name: "No Shadow",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A boy on the breakwater in a Halifax life jacket, dry, humming, with nothing on the stones behind him."
},
{
name: "Green Light",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Greenlight landed on a purse snatcher in front of three phones and called you the other one."
},
{
name: "Content",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Greg Veder, two blocks back, with his phone held like a tray."
},
{
name: "Off By One",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "The streetlights went out toward the water and your reflection was late. A woman in a bathrobe said your name."
},
{
name: "Paper",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Royce Hollis said your real name through a car window and asked you to sit in. You didn't."
},
{
name: "Shell Complete",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 4.",
unlockedDesc: "A bomb Tinker, an on-ramp, a Sunday. Eight places in the city are the color of old photographs, or four, and you know which."
},
{
name: "Lung Walks",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Lung went north over the water as something with wings, and said your cape name on the way out of the box. Canon is on fire."
},
{
name: "Drive",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You drove Bakuda's best work through a guardrail and into the harbor at sixty, and got out at the last second, mostly."
},
{
name: "The Remote",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Third position, glass. Eighth, nothing. You held the only thing in the city that mattered and turned it to nothing."
},
{
name: "Held Breath",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You found the seam in the glass and got someone out of it. One. It counted."
},
{
name: "Relay",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "A box with an antenna in a dry cleaner's basement, and three miles away a button that went nowhere."
},
{
name: "Defector",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You walked into the PRT building at midnight with the route, the time and the dial, and a Tinker from Boston said so out loud."
},
{
name: "Dragon Slayer",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You killed Lung while he was a man, in a box that took six Tinkers to build. Brockton Bay will never be the same, and neither will your file."
},
{
name: "The Chair Is Empty",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Bakuda, on an overpass, with Oni Lee watching. The timers kept their appointments anyway."
},
{
name: "A Block of Your Own",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Fourth and Lord, or the north end of the Boardwalk, or six blocks of the east side. A coffee you didn't ask for. Holding is a verb."
},
{
name: "Red and Green",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You told Fourth and Lord the ABB had a head, and Oni Lee said tomorrow, and forty people tied their bandanas on."
},
{
name: "Full Measure",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Four dots in the stat your power lives in, four in control, and one moment where everything you are happened at once."
},
{
name: "Extra Life",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You joined Uber and Leet. There is a costume with a theme. You will be asked about the theme."
},
{
name: "Co-op",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You didn't join them and you didn't arrest them. Leet gave you a controller. It doesn't work, but he gave it to you."
},
{
name: "Ragequit",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You took their stream apart on Lord Street in front of nine hundred viewers. Leet will remember the chat."
},
{
name: "Continue?",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You got Uber and Leet out of the cannery before Bakuda's Sunday. Leet's teleporter worked once, the right way."
},
{
name: "Game Over",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Leet's teleporter worked once, the wrong way. Uber carried what came out of it."
},
{
name: "Hive Complete",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 5.",
unlockedDesc: "A truce in a bar, a war in the Docks, and whatever was left of the ABB at one in the morning."
},
{
name: "Eleven",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Eleven people who pack fish walked out of a war with their hands on each other's shoulders. Nobody on the threads knows the number."
},
{
name: "Tomorrow, Never",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Oni Lee went into a bag without a sound, and Armsmaster told the kindest lie he's got."
},
{
name: "Ash",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You killed Oni Lee on a roof. He let you. Ash is for the copies."
},
{
name: "Woodchipper",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You and Hookwolf on the ground in Lord Street, and Cricket dragging him, and him letting her."
},
{
name: "Remembered",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Forty kids walked up the pharmacy stairs into daylight, and Bakuda asked for the ones with the restraints."
},
{
name: "Ninety Seconds",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You held Lung as a man for ninety seconds, and ninety was enough, barely."
},
{
name: "The Steps",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Lung stood in Lord Street for a count of ten looking at a kid who wouldn't move, and turned around."
},
{
name: "Thirty-One",
points: 30,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You walked into Somer's Rock alone and told every villain in the city that a bomb in a neck is not a membership card. Thirty-one kids came off the map."
},
{
name: "Cocktail",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Two powers at once, out of a glass of something that tasted like pennies and lightning. Nobody has a classification for what came out."
},
{
name: "Beat Cop",
points: 10,
lockedDesc: "Go out on three patrols.",
unlockedDesc: "Three nights walking the city for no reason anyone gave you. You know it a little now."
},
{
name: "Agitation Complete",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 3.",
unlockedDesc: "A bank, a van, a Thursday. The city has a hole in it shaped like whatever you did."
},
{
name: "Walked Out",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Taylor Hebert left the Undersiders' loft with you instead of staying. Canon is officially off the rails."
},
{
name: "On the Payroll",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "Two thousand a month, a room with a spray-painted door, and a boss nobody will name."
},
{
name: "Probationary",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "Sign with the Wards.",
unlockedDesc: "Schedules, oversight, a stipend, and a teammate who already knows your face from school."
},
{
name: "The Swap",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You stayed in the loft. Taylor went to the PHQ. Somewhere, a plot outline is on fire."
},
{
name: "Two Badges",
points: 25,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "You and Taylor signed with the Wards on the same afternoon, in the same room as Shadow Stalker."
},
{
name: "Independents",
points: 15,
lockedDesc: "hidden",
unlockedDesc: "No team, no boss, no Director. Two capes, one lunchbox, and a city that's about to get loud."
},
{
name: "Insinuation Complete",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 2.",
unlockedDesc: "Tuesday morning. Next: Agitation."
},
{
name: "Gestation Complete",
points: 20,
lockedDesc: "Finish Arc 1.",
unlockedDesc: "Monday morning is coming. Next: Insinuation."
}
]>>/* Stats page (noreturn: the Back button ignores it). Display only, except that visiting it lets the framework refresh the snap* deltas. $return is where "Return to the game" goes. */\
<<if ($name isnot "")>>\
''$name''<<if ($capeName isnot "")>> / ''$capeName''<</if>>
<<if ($powerName isnot "")>>Power: $powerName
<</if>>\
<<if ($trigger isnot "")>>Trigger: $trigger
<</if>>\
<<if ($background is "athlete")>>Before: ran track
<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>Before: honor roll
<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>Before: fixed things
<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>Before: talked your way out of it
<</if>>\
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<div class="stat-note">$health of $maxHealth. Hits and the costlier power moves take it. At zero you don't get up. Costume work raises the ceiling.</div>
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<div class="stat-note">$stamina of $maxStamina. Every power move in a fight costs 20, and 10 at school. Refills each morning. Conditioning and Nerve raise the ceiling.</div>
''Core.''
<div class="cast-list">
<div>Body <<skill $body 5>> · Agility <<skill $agility 5>> · Mind <<skill $mind 5>></div>
<div>Charm <<skill $charm 5>> · Nerve <<skill $nerve 5>> · Power control <<skill $control 5>></div>
</div>
<div class="stat-note"><<if ($vial is true)>>Vial: every manifestation at once. Each move draws on the stat of the power you reach for. From three dots of control the lanes start crossing: look for the [Vial] options in fights, two powers at once, thirty stamina, and nobody's classification. <<elseif ($power isnot "")>>Your power draws on <<print setup.pairName($power)>> (<<print setup.pstat($power)>> of 5). Power moves cost <<print setup.powerCost($power)>> stamina right now: twenty below three dots, ten at three, nothing at five. At four dots your power does more in the big fights, and at four dots with four control it does the most. <</if>>Body raises the health ceiling, Nerve the stamina ceiling. Charm at three opens the dating options. Power control is how well you know your own power: $control of 5, raised by training, by holding back when it counts, and by using the power with precision.</div>
''Skills.''
<div class="cast-list">
<div>Brawling <<skill $brawling 5>> · Athletics <<skill $athletics 5>> · Stealth <<skill $stealth 5>></div>
<div>Streetwise <<skill $streetwise 5>> · Academics <<skill $academics 5>> · Tech <<skill $tech 5>></div>
<div>Cape Lore <<skill $capeLore 5>> · Persuasion <<skill $persuasion 5>> · Perception <<skill $perception 5>></div>
</div>
<div class="stat-note">Options in the story that need a skill are marked, like [Tech]. Two dots gets you most of them, three the rest. Training raises skills one dot per session, up to four.</div>
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<div class="stat-note">$heroRep of 100. How the Protectorate, the PRT and the news see your mask. Grows when you protect people, call things in, and tell Armsmaster the truth. Opens the Wards' door and closes the Undersiders'.</div>
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<div class="stat-note">$streetRep of 100. How the gangs and the Undersiders rate you. Grows when you hit hard, take what's offered, and keep quiet. Opens their door and raises the PRT's eyebrows.</div>
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<div class="stat-note">$notoriety of 100. How many people know your mask exists at all, friend or enemy. Loud powers and public stunts raise it. High notoriety brings the ABB looking and makes a secret identity harder to keep.</div>
<div>Looks: $looks of 10, <<if ($looks is 10)>>could be a model<<elseif ($looks is 7)>>striking<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>a bit ugly<<else>>boringly average<</if>>.</div>
<div class="stat-note"><<if ($looks is 10)>>Hero Standing and Notoriety gains run a quarter higher: the PRT's image people love a face, and so does everyone who saw it. Street Cred gains run a tenth lower, because the gangs don't take a pretty face seriously until it hurts them. Taylor trusts you a quarter slower until she knows your mask, because you look like the people who did this to her.<<elseif ($looks is 7)>>Hero Standing and Notoriety gains run a tenth higher. People remember you, for better and worse.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>Hero Standing gains run a tenth lower, Street Cred a tenth higher, and Taylor trusts you a quarter faster until she knows your mask, because the school treats you the way it treats her.<<else>>No modifiers. Nobody describes you, and in this city that is a kind of armor.<</if>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>><<if ($job isnot "")>> (weekend shifts at $job, $60 each)<</if>></div>
<div class="stat-note">Spent on gear, the phone, lunch for people who need it, costume work. Earned from a job, the pockets of people you put down, and envelopes you probably shouldn't take.</div>
<<if ($territory isnot "")>><div>Territory: <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>the ABB, and six blocks of the east side<<elseif ($territory is "eastside")>>six blocks of the east side<<elseif ($territory is "boardwalk")>>the north end of the Boardwalk<<else>>Fourth and Lord<</if>>.<<if ($tribute gt 0)>> Envelopes offered: $tribute.<</if>></div>
<div class="stat-note">Held ground. Shops bring you their problems and sometimes envelopes. Holding is a verb. Patrol it or lose it. This is the first step toward being one of the powers in this city after the water comes.</div><</if>>
<<if ($indebted is true)>><div>Debt: <<print "$" + $debt>> owed to Royce Hollis, due the first of May.<<if ($debtPaid gt 0)>> <<print "$" + $debtPaid>> paid so far.<</if>></div>
<div class="stat-note">Pay it down through Training, a little at a time, or find five thousand dollars some other way. If it isn't paid by May he takes the lease, and the story will treat that as the fact it is.</div><</if>>
<<if (($indebted is true) or ($deaf is true) or ($injured is true) or ($marked is true) or ($record is true) or ($rival is true) or ($fan is true) or ($dissonance is true) or ($nightmares is true))>><div>Problems: <<if ($indebted is true)>>Indebted. <</if>><<if ($deaf is true)>>Hard of hearing. <</if>><<if ($injured is true)>>Injured. <</if>><<if ($marked is true)>>Marked. <</if>><<if ($record is true)>>Record. <</if>><<if ($rival is true)>>Rival. <</if>><<if ($fan is true)>>Fan. <</if>><<if ($dissonance is true)>>Dissonance. <</if>><<if ($nightmares is true)>>Nightmares. <</if>></div><</if>>
<<if (($willful is true) or ($trained is true) or ($readUp is true) or ($connected is true) or ($smart is true) or ($powerful is true) or ($tough is true) or ($pockets is true) or ($gamer is true))>><div>Perks: <<if ($willful is true)>>Willful. <</if>><<if ($trained is true)>>Trained. <</if>><<if ($readUp is true)>>Read up. <</if>><<if ($connected is true)>>Connected. <</if>><<if ($smart is true)>>Smart. <</if>><<if ($powerful is true)>>Powerful. <</if>><<if ($tough is true)>>Tough. <</if>><<if ($pockets is true)>>Pockets. <</if>><<if ($gamer is true)>>Gamer. <</if>></div><</if>>
<div>Phone: <<if ($hasPhone is true)>>prepaid, one number in it (the PHQ line).<<else>>none. Thirty dollars at the corner store, through Training.<</if>></div>
<<if ($trainPts gt 0)>><div>Training sessions banked today: $trainPts</div>
<</if>>\
<<if (($lungHurt gte 1) and ($lungDown is false))>><div>Lung: hurt $lungHurt time<<if ($lungHurt gt 1)>>s<</if>> tonight. Twice is enough to slow him down.</div>
<</if>>\
<<else>>\
No character yet. Start the game to fill this in.
<</if>>\
<<choose "menu-stats">>
#Relationships. Where you stand with the people who matter. -> "menu-relationships"
#Cast. Who you've met, and what you've done to them. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>/* Relationships page (noreturn). Display only: Taylor's trust bar, team standings, the romance bars and the dating flags. Who appears depends on the met* flags. */\
''Relationships''
<<if ($metTaylor is true)>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor Hebert" $taylorTrust>>\
<div class="stat-note">$taylorTrust of 100. Below 30 she keeps you at arm's length. Above 30 she'll talk. Above 50 she'll tell you things she hasn't told anyone, and some of the Arc 2 routes (walking out of the loft together, the swap, two Wards badges) need her to.</div>
<<if (($looks is 10) and ($taylorKnows is false))>><div class="stat-note">Slower than it should be. You look like Emma's friends, and she can't help what that does to her.</div>
<<elseif (($looks is 3) and ($taylorKnows is false))>><div class="stat-note">Faster than it should be. The school treats you the way it treats her, and she's noticed.</div>
<</if>>\
<<else>>\
''Taylor Hebert.'' You haven't spoken yet. The number here starts moving the first time you do.
<</if>>\
''The Undersiders.'' <<if ($joinedUndersiders is true)>>You said yes. Whatever that means in the morning.<<elseif ($withUndersiders is true)>>You took the ride. Tattletale has your measure, and a number for you.<<elseif ($tattletaleNumber is true)>>You have a way to reach them and they have a way to reach you. Neither side has used it carelessly yet.<<elseif ($metUndersiders is true)>>You've met them once, on a roof. They were friendlier than the files suggest.<<else>>Four names on a mostly blank page.<</if>> Street Cred is the number they care about.
''The Protectorate and the PRT.'' <<if ($joinedWards is true)>>You're a Ward, probationary. Hero Standing is your performance review now.<<elseif ($wardsInterest is true)>>You asked Armsmaster about the Wards. He wrote it down.<<elseif ($tookCredit is true)>>You took the credit for Lung in front of Armsmaster. He noted that too.<<elseif ($armsmasterCredit is true)>>You let Armsmaster have the Lung arrest. He owes you, in the way men like that owe people.<<elseif ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>You pointed Armsmaster at the bug girl. He wrote it down.<<elseif ($metArmsmaster is true)>>You've met Armsmaster. He measured you.<<elseif ($calledPHQ is true)>>Dispatch has a call from an unknown number logged against your night.<<else>>You're not in their files. Yet.<</if>> Hero Standing is the number they care about.
<<if ($guardianName isnot "")>>''$guardianName.'' <<if ($toldGuardian is true)>>Knows everything. That was your call.<<elseif ($toldPartial is true)>>Knows you were in the Docks that night. Doesn't know the rest, and knows there's a rest.<<elseif ($guardianKnows is true)>>Suspects. Hasn't asked.<<elseif ($hospital is true)>>Found out from a PRT officer in a hospital corridor. There's no number for that.<<else>>Doesn't know. The costume lives in a gym bag at the back of the closet.<</if>>
<</if>>\
''The ABB.'' <<if ($abbMember is true)>>You stood with them under Lung and Oni Lee said tomorrow to you. You're in, as far as they're concerned.<<elseif ($abbDeclined is true)>>You told Mai Vo you don't wear colors. They heard. They're patient about it.<<elseif ($abbApproach is true)>>Mai Vo has a seat saved for you and has said so twice. They assume you'll take it.<<elseif ($abbFit is true)>>They read you as one of theirs on sight. Nobody has said it out loud yet.<<elseif ($tookCredit is true)>>You put your name on Lung's arrest. They have it.<<else>>Red and green on the east side. You stay off Fourth.<</if>>
''The Empire Eighty-Eight.'' <<if ($empireRecruited is true)>>Victor has seen your power and smiled. Kaiser wants to meet you. You're in, as far as they're concerned.<<elseif ($empireCourting is true)>>Travis Hull gave you a flyer and you kept it. They think that means something.<<elseif ($empireDeclined is true)>>You told them no. They've moved you from one list to another.<<elseif ($empireTarget is true)>>They made up their minds about your face in your first week. There's an eighty-eight on your locker.<<elseif ($empireStance is "poster")>>Their recruiters noticed you before anyone else at Winslow did. They're waiting.<<elseif ($empireStance is "white")>>They assume you're fine. That's its own kind of pressure.<<else>>They can't decide what you are, and they keep trying.<</if>>
<<if (($metTaylor is true) or ($metSchool is true) or ($metUndersiders is true) or ($metKestrel is true) or ($rivalSeen is true))>>''Romance.'' Who could be more than a name on the Cast page, and how far along that is. Most of these are for later arcs; the numbers move now.
<<if ($metTaylor is true)>><<standard-bar "Taylor" $rom_taylor>>\
<</if>><<if ($metSchool is true)>><<standard-bar "Sophia" $rom_sophia>>\
<div class="stat-note">Moves every time you stand up to her. That's the kind of thing she likes, and the only kind.</div>
<<standard-bar "Madison" $rom_madison>>\
<</if>><<if (($metUndersiders is true) or ($metLisaUnmasked is true))>><<standard-bar "Lisa" $rom_lisa>>\
<div class="stat-note">She said no, and meant it, and the bar still moves. Lisa likes being asked straight questions more than she likes anything else.</div>
<<standard-bar "Rachel" $rom_rachel>>\
<div class="stat-note">Moves when you handle her dogs like they're hers. Drops hard if you use a power on them.</div>
<</if>><<if ($metKestrel is true)>><<standard-bar "Kestrel" $rom_kestrel>>\
<</if>><<if ($rivalSeen is true)>><<standard-bar "Greenlight" $rom_greenlight>>\
<div class="stat-note">Rivals first. Whatever this turns into, it goes through that.</div>
<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if (($kestrelFlirt is true) or ($travisFlirt is true) or ($maiFlirt is true) or ($taylorCrush is true) or ($alecFlirt is true) or ($lisaAsked is true))>>''Dating, or the start of it.'' <<if ($taylorCrush is true)>>Taylor walked into a parking meter and didn't move away at the crossing. <</if>><<if ($kestrelFlirt is true)>>Kestrel said she doesn't date people she hasn't seen fight, and told you Thursdays. <</if>><<if ($travisFlirt is true)>>Travis Hull's number is on the back of an Empire flyer, and he'll be at the grill. <</if>><<if ($maiFlirt is true)>>Mai Vo said a noodle place on Fourth, Thursday, and don't bring anyone. <</if>><<if ($alecFlirt is true)>>Alec said Friday, and Lisa said it would be the best bad thing. <</if>><<if ($lisaAsked is true)>>Lisa said no, nicely, and that she'd remember you asked. <</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>''Kestrel.'' <<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>>You fought beside her once and she told you Thursdays. From her that's a standing offer.<<else>>She told you to stay off Fourth and called you rookie. From her that's warmth.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($metSchool is true)>>''Sophia Hess.'' <<if ($calledSophia is true)>>You told her you know. She told you nothing, and you expected nothing.<<elseif ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>She's watching you. She noticed something on Friday and hasn't stopped looking.<<elseif ($sophiaTested is true)>>She tested you once, in art class. You passed, or failed, and with her it's hard to tell which is which.<<else>>Looks through you like a window. For now, that's the safest place to be.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<choose "menu-stats">>
#Back to Stats. -> "menu-stats"
#Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>/* Cast page (noreturn). Each entry is gated on the flag that means the character has been met. Add a show-if line here when a new cast-* passage is written. */\
''Cast.'' Everyone you've met so far. Pick one to see who they are and what you've done that they'll remember.
<<choose "menu-stats">>
#You. -> "cast-you"
#show-if ($guardianName isnot "") Home. The person you live with. -> "cast-guardian"
#show-if ($metSchool is true) Taylor Hebert. -> "cast-taylor"
#show-if ($metSchool is true) Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and Madison Clements. -> "cast-trio"
#show-if ($metSchool is true) Mr. Gladly. -> "cast-gladly"
#show-if ($sawGloryGirl is true) Glory Girl. -> "cast-gloryGirl"
#show-if ($sawLung is true) Lung. -> "cast-lung"
#show-if ($metUndersiders is true) Tattletale. -> "cast-tattletale"
#show-if ($metUndersiders is true) Grue, Regent and Bitch. -> "cast-undersiders"
#show-if ($metArmsmaster is true) Armsmaster. -> "cast-armsmaster"
#show-if ($metWards is true) The Wards and Deputy Director Renick. -> "cast-wards"
#show-if (($empireApproach is true) or ($empireTarget is true) or ($empireRecruited is true)) The Empire at Winslow: Travis, Dillon, Victor, Rune. -> "cast-empire"
#show-if (($abbApproach is true) or ($abbMember is true)) The ABB at Winslow: Mai Vo, Danny Trang, Oni Lee. -> "cast-abb"
#show-if ($metDinah is true) Dinah Alcott. -> "cast-dinah"
#show-if ($kaiserMet is true) Kaiser. -> "cast-kaiser"
#show-if (($bakudaBomb is true) or ($abbHunted is true)) Bakuda. -> "cast-bakuda"
#show-if ($nodderBeaten is true) Nodder and the Merchants. -> "cast-nodder"
#show-if ($metPanacea is true) Panacea. -> "cast-panacea"
#show-if ($ulMet is true) Uber and Leet. -> "cast-uberleet"
#show-if (($sawRock is true) or ($coilNoticed is true) or ($sundayPlan is "coil")) Coil. -> "cast-coil"
#show-if (($sawRock is true) or ($metGregor is true)) Faultline's crew. -> "cast-faultline"
#show-if (($empireWar is true) or ($hookwolfFought is true)) Hookwolf. -> "cast-hookwolf"
#show-if ($metKestrel is true) Kestrel. -> "cast-kestrel"
#show-if ($foughtLedger is true) Ledger. -> "cast-ledger"
#show-if ($heardPall is true) The thing in the Halifax fog. -> "cast-pall"
#show-if ($patrolCount gte 1) The city at night. People from your patrols. -> "cast-city"
#Back to Stats. -> "menu-stats"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''You.'' $name<<if ($capeName isnot "")>>, or $capeName with the mask on<</if>>.
A $girlGuy, fifteen. Brockton Bay reads you as $heritage. <<if ($build is "small")>>Small for your age and quick with it.<<elseif ($build is "tall")>>Tall, and still growing into it.<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>Solid, built like someone who carries things.<<else>>Average build, the kind nobody describes.<</if>> Hair $hair. Eyes $eyes. <<if ($mark isnot "nothing anyone remembers")>>The first thing people notice is $mark.<<elseif ($looks is 10)>>Everything about your face stays in people's memory, and you stopped fighting that a long time ago.<<else>>Nothing about your face stays in anyone's memory. You've worked at that.<</if>> Looks: $looks of 10.
<<if ($trigger isnot "")>>''Worst day:'' $trigger. <</if>><<if ($powerName isnot "")>>''Power:'' $powerName. <</if>><<if ($background is "athlete")>>''Before:'' ran track.<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>''Before:'' honor roll.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>''Before:'' fixed things.<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>''Before:'' talked your way out of it.<</if>>
<<if ($territory isnot "")>>''Territory:'' <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>the ABB and the east side.<<elseif ($territory is "eastside")>>six blocks of the east side.<<elseif ($territory is "boardwalk")>>the north end of the Boardwalk.<<else>>Fourth and Lord.<</if>>
<</if>>''Who knows the face under the mask.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($toldGuardian is true)>><div>• $guardianName.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorKnows is true)>><div>• Taylor.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($metLisaUnmasked is true)>><div>• Lisa, and so the Undersiders.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedWards is true)>><div>• The PRT, on file, by choice.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hospital is true)>><div>• The PRT, from a hospital bed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>><div>• Nobody has the face yet, but the ABB has the name $capeName.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($toldGuardian is false) and ($taylorKnows is false) and ($metLisaUnmasked is false) and ($joinedWards is false) and ($hospital is false) and ($tookCredit is false))>><div>• Nobody.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The Empire Eighty-Eight, as it looks from Winslow.''
''Travis Hull'' is the recruiter: a senior with red laces, a jacket with nothing on it, and a plate of food for anyone new who looks right. He never says the word. He says "our people." ''Dillon Kessler'' is what Travis means: shop two, a shaved head, a cousin with a salvage yard, and a mouth. ''Victor'' is the adult in the good jacket who runs the yard on Saturdays, who has had lessons in everything and remembers every answer you give him. ''Rune'' is a girl your age on the hood of a dead Buick who stops paper plates in the air without looking up. Her uncle is Kaiser.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($empireApproach is true)>><div>• Travis offered you a flyer at the bus stop.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireCourting is true)>><div>• You kept the flyer.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireDeclined is true)>><div>• You told them no, or walked out of the yard.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireTarget is true)>><div>• Dillon Kessler made it clear on the stairs what they think your face is for.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireRecruited is true)>><div>• You showed Victor your power behind the shed. Kaiser wants to meet you.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireCalled is true)>><div>• You texted Victor Lung's intersection before the fight.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' The Empire is the largest cape gang in the city and the one with the money. Being wanted by them is a door; being hated by them is a schedule.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The ABB, as it looks from Winslow.''
''Mai Vo'' is a junior with red and green on her backpack straps who doesn't recruit so much as inform you of the weather. She saves seats. She shows up at corners that aren't hers. ''Danny Trang'' is a kid from the second-floor stairwell who was holding a pistol on Sunday night like it might go off on its own. ''Oni Lee'' is Lung's lieutenant: a man in black with a white demon mask who is beside you between one blink and the next and leaves ash where he was. He doesn't say tomorrow to people.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($abbApproach is true)>><div>• Mai Vo told you where they sit.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($abbDeclined is true)>><div>• You told her you don't wear colors, or you ran.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($abbInvite is true)>><div>• She told you Fourth and Lord, midnight.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($abbMember is true)>><div>• You stood with them in the street the night Lung went down.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($oniLeeKnows is true)>><div>• Oni Lee knows your cape name and said tomorrow.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' With Lung in a cell the ABB is a body looking for a head, and Bakuda is the kind of head that uses the bodies.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Dinah Alcott.''
Twelve. The mayor's niece. A school uniform, zip ties, and a calm that is something held still so it doesn't break. She asks a question every morning: what are the chances something bad happens today. The answer comes back as a number, and the numbers have been getting worse, and asking too many gives her a headache that puts her on the floor. She knew about the van before the van. She didn't know about you. "You weren't in the numbers," she said, and you don't know yet whether that's the best or the worst thing anyone's told you.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($dinahFree is true)>><div>• You took her out of the back of a grey van on Pearl Street.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($dinahLost is true)>><div>• You saw her face in the rear window, and the van kept going.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Whoever wanted her wanted her for the numbers, and had a bank robbed to cover it. If she's home, he is short one Thinker and knows your mask. If she isn't, she's in a basement counting, and the man with the snake on his chest is counting with her.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Kaiser.''
The Empire Eighty-Eight's leader. Armor made of the same grey metal he grows out of walls and floors in slow fans of blades, a crown of it, a voice that's cultured and unhurried and comes through the armor because he's chosen that. He talks about "our people" and "the ABB's animals" in the same tone, and the room eases when you give him the answer he wants, and the easing is the dangerous part. Krieg stands behind him in a greatcoat. Victor keeps his folder. Rune is his niece, and the boredom she performs at all of it is a performance.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($kaiserMet is true)>><div>• You sat across a table from him in a warehouse while the walls grew.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireName is "given")>><div>• You took the name they offered.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireName is "own")>><div>• You kept your own name. Rune noticed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireSeen is true)>><div>• You stood on Lord Street in his colors where the cameras could see.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' The largest gang in the city has decided you're worth something. That's a door with a very specific room on the other side of it.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Bakuda.''
Goggles, a gas-mask filter, a braid of wire over one shoulder, a lab coat over body armor, and the voice of a teacher who has already decided you're stupid. A Tinker who builds bombs, who held Cornell University hostage for a weekend last month, who Lung brought in personally and who is now, with Lung in a cage, the closest thing the ABB has to a head. She calls the device she puts at the base of her people's skulls "insurance." She tests people with timers.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>><div>• You let her place the device. It did nothing. It continues to do nothing.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($abbHunted is true)>><div>• You refused her in front of six kids who didn't. There's a bandana on your fence.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($bakudaObeyed is true)>><div>• You put her box under a bench and walked north. It was a dye pack. She knows what you'll do.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($bakudaDefied is true)>><div>• You threw her test in the harbor in front of Danny Trang.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Everything in Arc 4. She is what happens to a city when the man who kept the monsters leashed is taken away and the monsters have a Tinker.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Nodder, and the Merchants.''
Skidmark's new cape: a skinny man in a bathrobe over armor and sandals, who sits on a bench and nods, and everything inside forty feet of him nods too, down onto the planks, and stays there. Three weeks in the city. Nobody had a good look at him before you, because nobody could stay awake long enough. The Merchants are the bottom of Brockton Bay's ladder, a drug crew with a van, and they'd like very much to stop being the bottom.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($nodderBeaten is true)>><div>• You put him in the harbor, or on the planks, or to sleep, on the north end of the Boardwalk.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($rafeKnown is true)>><div>• The kid holding the money was Kestrel's brother, Rafe. She said "Don't." You didn't.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($merchantOffer is true)>><div>• A man on a stoop offered you lookout work. You remember the stoop.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Skidmark takes things personally in a disorganized way. Kestrel takes one thing personally in a very organized one.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The city at night.'' $patrolCount patrol<<if ($patrolCount isnot 1)>>s<</if>> so far. The people and things you've found out there that nobody sent you to find.
<div class="cast-list">
<<if ($gregTriggered is true)>><div>• ''Greg Veder, who is Broadcast now.'' Two Merchants, a cracked phone, and a word that made a whole block stop. <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>He looked for you first. He says he'll tell you before anyone.<<else>>He looked at the two blocks between you first. "You weren't there."<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($metTenant is true)>><div>• ''Mrs. Avery, 2B.'' Housecoat, cigarette, the pie you remember like something you read. $guardianName says she's always been there.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($compass is true)>><div>• ''The compass from Halvorsen Marine.'' Brass, cracked crystal, points at the fog through walls. The old man said you'd want it in May.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($metTideBoy is true)>><div>• ''The boy on the breakwater.'' Halifax life jacket, dry, no shadow, a name that started with M. He said it's going to ask you.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($rivalSeen is true)>><div>• ''Greenlight.'' Green and black, a visor shaped like a smile, Arcadia money, and three phones out before the thief hits the ground. Needs a run-up. Looks at the cameras first. Favors the left.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($fanSeen is true)>><div>• ''Greg, two blocks back.'' He found the costume. He has a phone and a handle and no sense of when to stop.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($dissonanceSeen is true)>><div>• ''The lights going out toward the water.'' A woman in a bathrobe with her shoes in her hand, who said it was warm, and said your name.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hollisMet is true)>><div>• ''Royce Hollis.'' Sixty, a cardigan, your real name through a car window. <<print "$" + $debt>> to go by the first of May.<<if ($hollisJob is true)>> He gave you a card. Five hundred a time, against the balance.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($sawCoilMen is true)>><div>• ''Men in grey.'' Two of them, a box truck, a Docks warehouse with new locks, and a rifle that wasn't pointed at you. They work for someone who pays on time<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>, and they knew Ledger's name<</if>>.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sawPurity is true)>><div>• ''The woman in the pharmacy.'' A stroller, a can of formula, and light coming out from under her eyelids. <<if ($stance is "empire")>>Victor's folder calls her Purity, with a line through it.<<else>>You don't have a name for her yet.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($metGregor is true)>><div>• ''Gregor and Newter.'' Faultline's crew, behind Palanquin. Mercenaries, polite, marked with a brand neither of them remembers getting. Gregor thinks about Halifax more than most.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($foundBakudaCache is true)>><div>• ''The dud in the Trainyard.'' One of Bakuda's tests that didn't go.<<if ($bakudaPart is true)>> You've got the heart of it wrapped in a jacket, and nobody else alive has that.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($sawTravelers is true)>><div>• ''The Travelers.'' A top hat who swaps places with things, a big man who's tired of him, and two girls in a van, one asleep. Passing through, they said.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sawSophiaCross is true)>><div>• ''Shadow Stalker, past the line.'' A dealer, a real bolt, and no Protectorate shadow. She told you to go home.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($metTessa is true)>><div>• ''Tessa.'' Sixteen, a laundromat floor, and everything loose in the room going around her. <<if ($tessaPRT is true)>>The PRT took her in. You never got her name from her.<<else>>She has the PHQ number in her shoe and hasn't decided.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($pallSign is true)>><div>• ''The man from Halifax.'' Standing in the surf in his shoes, with a lanyard and no memory. The fog was warm, he said. There were more shoes in the tideline than there should have been.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($rafeGone is true) or ($rafeStayed is true))>><div>• ''Rafe.'' Kestrel's brother, at the Greyhound station. <<if ($rafeGone is true)>>He got on the bus.<<else>>He called her first, and walked back toward the Boardwalk.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($metDanny is true)>><div>• ''Danny Hebert.'' Sweeping glass at the union hall at ten at night, with the third brick on the step. The Empire wants the hiring hall.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to the Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Kestrel.''
Seventeen, maybe. Grey costume like a wetsuit with wings sewn between the arms and the ribs, a small hawk stenciled on the chest, peeling. Rides air the way other people ride bikes: not true flight, but anything with height or wind under it is hers, and she can throw a fist of compressed air hard enough to fold a grown man. Eight months out, no team, no PRT file worth the name, one newspaper photo in which she is a smudge. Works the fish market days and the Boardwalk nights, pays for her own tape, and eats constantly, usually mid-air. Her brother is a Merchant. She hasn't said so. You've worked it out from what she doesn't say about Fourth Street.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>><div>• Saturday: she landed on an awning next to you and told you to stay off Fourth.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>><div>• Tuesday night: you whistled, and she dropped a mercenary face-first onto the asphalt for you.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($metKestrel is true) and ($foughtLedger is true) and ($kestrelAssist is false))>><div>• Tuesday night: she watched you handle Ledger from a roof, and left you half a sandwich and an invitation.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' She's a third door: not the Wards, not the Undersiders, not New Wave. Thursdays, Boardwalk, nine to one, bring food.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Ledger.''
A man in a good suit over armor, with a white mask ruled like paper and a ballpoint pen he clicks before he speaks. He works for someone who pays on time, and he does not say the name. His job is new capes: he watches them use their power once, and after that he knows its limits, its costs, and its next move. A touch from him turns a power down for a few seconds, long enough to make a point. He never threatens. He states prices. He has, you noticed, a second pen.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($ledgerWon is true)>><div>• You gave him something he couldn't finish writing down. He'll be back for it, or someone will.</div><<else>><div>• He watched you once, wrote it down, and left with everything he came for.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>><div>• Kestrel put him on the ground. He added her to a list.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($coilNoticed is true)>><div>• His employer has a file on you now.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Whoever pays him knows what you cost. In this city that is either a job offer or a problem, and sometimes both.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The thing in the Halifax fog.''
Two weeks ago a fog bank came in off the water onto Halifax harbor on a clear afternoon and sat there for six days. The people inside it walked out on their own when it lifted, except for two hundred and twelve who didn't, and the ones who came out have holes where parts of their lives were. A Guild cape who was there says it was tall, and slow, and pale, and that the fog came off it like breath. The PRT says "atmospheric event." Parahumans Online has locked every thread that uses the word that everyone is thinking.
There are three Endbringers. Everyone knows that. Behemoth, Leviathan, the Simurgh. They come every few months, they level a city, and the heroes who can't fly die trying.
You live in a port city.
''What it changes.'' Nothing yet. You keep looking at the water.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Home.'' You live with $guardian.
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>Dana works nights in the ER at Brockton General, which means she sees what the city does to people before the news does. She has not asked about the gym bag. She has noticed it.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Marcus")>>Marcus is twenty-three and working doubles at the Boardwalk cafés to keep a lease in a neighborhood with fresh ABB tags across the street. He got custody because nobody else stepped up. He keeps a list of corners for you not to walk past.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>Walt worked the Docks for forty years and still knows every foreman by first name, and in this city that counts as power. He drinks his coffee black, listens to the radio on the porch, and hasn't asked you a single question you didn't want to answer. He mentioned a Danny Hebert once. You haven't worked out why the name stuck.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>Ray drives a delivery route out of Brockton Bay because it paid better and because he thought a smaller city would be safer for you. He's gone before five and home at six and leaves notes under the salt shaker. He'd say yes to anything you asked him, so you've stopped asking.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>Nana had a stroke on a kitchen floor while you begged strangers to listen. She's home all day now with a cane and a word-finding problem, and the same eyes she always had. She knows something. She's waiting for you to say it.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>Ruth took you in after January without being asked twice. She does the crossword in pen, lets you have "fine" as an answer, and has a long memory for being the family's second choice. She doesn't push. You've started to wonder whether that's kindness or distance.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>Tomas runs a scrapyard off the Docks and took you and your sister in for the winter when the blackout made the old apartment unlivable and your mother's hours made it impossible. He pays you in parts, talks to machines more than people, and listens to the police scanner the way other men watch sports. He has not asked what you build. He keeps bringing you things.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>Rosa runs the laundromat two capes fought through in January, and reopened it two weeks later because the rent didn't care. She works until nine every night and knows every grandmother on the block by name. She has one rule, the east side after dark, and she believes you keep it.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>Gerald is a corporate lawyer who moved the two of you here for a partnership. He paid for something, once, and has never asked what it does. He works until nine, golfs on Sundays, and talks about your future the way he talks about his portfolio. There's a woman's voice on the answering machine, sometimes, that isn't a client.
<</if>>
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($wentOut is true)>><div>• You went out Sunday night without telling them. They think you were asleep.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($toldGuardian is true)>><div>• You came home and told them everything: the mask, the Docks, Lung.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($toldPartial is true)>><div>• You told them you were in the Docks that night and left out the costume. They noticed the gap.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($guardianKnows is true)>><div>• You said nothing. They've started looking at you differently anyway.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hospital is true)>><div>• They found out from a PRT officer in a hospital corridor.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($wentOut is false) and ($toldGuardian is false) and ($toldPartial is false) and ($guardianKnows is false) and ($hospital is false))>><div>• Nothing yet that they'd notice.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Whether they know decides how much freedom you have at night, what the PRT needs from them if you ever go near the Wards, and who sits in the hall at the hospital if it comes to that.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Taylor Hebert.''
Tall, thin, dark curly hair she hides behind, glasses, a brown hoodie worn like armor. Sits alone in every class you share. Used to be Emma Barnes's best friend, and at Winslow that history gets you a locker full of something in January. Her mother died two and a half years ago. Her father runs what's left of the Dockworkers' Association hiring office.
<<if ($suspectTaylor is true)>>You're fairly sure she was the girl on the other roof. The one with the bugs.
<</if>>\
<<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>She knows you're $capeName. You told her yourself.
<</if>>\
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($noticedTaylor is true)>><div>• Friday: you watched her leave class, and saw what followed her out.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($stoppedJuice is true)>><div>• Friday: you got into the bathroom before the second bottle. She didn't ask you to. She remembers it anyway.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($helpedTaylor is true) and ($stoppedJuice is false))>><div>• Friday: you went into the bathroom after it was over, and stayed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($ignoredTaylor is true)>><div>• Friday: you walked past the bathroom. She saw you do it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($gaveHoodie is true)>><div>• You gave her your hoodie. She still has it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($rodeBus is true)>><div>• You rode the bus home with her instead of letting her walk.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($pulledHerOut is true)>><div>• Sunday: you got her off the roof before Lung reached it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($drewLung is true)>><div>• Sunday: you made Lung come after you instead of her.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($silencedHer is true)>><div>• Sunday: you took her sound away while Lung hunted by ear.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>><div>• You told Armsmaster the Lung arrest was hers.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($bugContact is true)>><div>• You gave the bug girl a way to reach you.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($wipedSeat is true)>><div>• Monday: you wiped the juice off her chair before she sat in it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($inTaylorGroup is true)>><div>• Monday: you sat at the leftovers' table on purpose.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($groupWon is true)>><div>• Monday: her work got presented with her name on it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($calledOutMadison is true)>><div>• Monday: you said Madison's name out loud in front of a teacher.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($stoodWithTaylor is true)>><div>• Monday: you stood next to her in the hall when it counted.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookBagBack is true)>><div>• Monday: you took her bag back off Sophia's foot.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($followedTaylor is true)>><div>• Monday: you went after her when she ran.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($boughtLunch is true)>><div>• You bought her lunch when she didn't have any.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sharedTrigger is true)>><div>• You told her the real version of your worst day.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorKnows is true)>><div>• You told her who you are under the mask.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($savedFromDogs is true)>><div>• The loft: you got between her and the dogs.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorHurt is true)>><div>• The loft: you stayed back. She has the bite to show for it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($leftWithTaylor is true)>><div>• You walked out of the Undersiders' loft with her.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($swap is true)>><div>• You sent her to the PRT and stayed behind in her place.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($joinedWards is true) and ($taylorWards is true))>><div>• You signed the Wards papers together.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($independents is true)>><div>• You talked each other out of signing anything.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($metTaylor is false) and ($noticedTaylor is false))>><div>• Nothing yet. She's the girl two rows up and one over.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Her trust (see Relationships) decides whether she talks to you at all, whether she tells you what she's planning, and which of the Arc 2 endings are even on the table.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Relationships. -> "menu-relationships"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, Madison Clements.''
The three girls who run the sophomore class, and who have made Taylor Hebert their project since September.
''Emma'' is the redhead: catalog model, lawyer's daughter, and until a year and a half ago Taylor's best friend in the world. Whatever happened between them, she talks about it like a joke she's told before.
''Sophia'' is the track star. Fast, quiet, and the only one of the three who seems to be enjoying herself. She looks through people. When she looks //at// you instead, it's worth noticing.<<if ($calledSophia is true)>> You've told her you know what she is. She didn't deny it.<</if>>
''Madison'' is small and cute and wears blue pins in her hair, and she is never alone when she's being cruel. Of the three, she's the one who'd stop if the other two did.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($madisonFriendly is true)>><div>• Friday: you made nice with Madison. She remembers, and so does Taylor.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($stoppedJuice is true)>><div>• Friday: you broke up the bathroom before the second bottle. Sophia looked at you one beat too long.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>><div>• Sophia has noticed something about you. She hasn't decided what.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sophiaTested is true)>><div>• Art class: Sophia tested you. You gave her an answer.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($calledOutMadison is true)>><div>• Monday: you said Madison's name out loud in front of a teacher.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookBagBack is true)>><div>• Monday: you took Taylor's bag back off Sophia's foot in front of everyone.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($witnessOffer is true)>><div>• You told Mr. Gladly you saw the bathroom. Your name is on it now.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($calledSophia is true)>><div>• You told Sophia that you know what she does at night.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($madisonFriendly is false) and ($stoppedJuice is false) and ($sophiaSuspicious is false) and ($sophiaTested is false) and ($calledOutMadison is false) and ($tookBagBack is false) and ($witnessOffer is false))>><div>• Nothing yet. You're furniture to them, the way you planned it.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Whether Sophia is curious about you decides how safe your secret is at school, and how Arc 2 goes if you end up anywhere near the Wards.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Mr. Gladly.''
World Issues, second period. "Mr. G." Young, enthusiastic, ends class early to chat, runs mock trials instead of tests, hands out group work so friends can sit together. Thinks everyone likes him. Most people do, in a way that doesn't cost them anything. He has watched Taylor Hebert get skipped during handouts for a year and has never once seen it.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($spokeInClass is true)>><div>• Friday: you answered his question about capes. He's decided you're one of his.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($gladlyLikesYou is true)>><div>• He likes you. That's a currency at Winslow, worth as much as he is.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($witnessOffer is true)>><div>• You told him you saw the bathroom on Friday. He said he'd look into it and meant it at the time, and he hasn't done it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($stayedForGladly is true)>><div>• You stayed after class when he kept Taylor back.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($calledOutMadison is true)>><div>• You named Madison in front of him. He heard it. Whether he does anything is another matter.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($spokeInClass is false) and ($gladlyLikesYou is false) and ($witnessOffer is false) and ($stayedForGladly is false) and ($calledOutMadison is false))>><div>• Nothing yet. You're a name on his seating chart.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Not much, on his own. But he's the only adult at Winslow who has asked you a question, and a teacher who's on record matters if Taylor's situation ever becomes a situation.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Glory Girl.''
Victoria Dallon, sixteen, a junior at Arcadia. New Wave's golden girl: flight, strength, a forcefield, and an aura that makes you want to admire her whether you'd planned to or not. The whole family goes unmasked, which is the point of New Wave. She works a crowd like she was born in one.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($metGloryGirl is true)>><div>• Saturday: you got close. She spoke to you, specifically, out of nowhere, and then was gone.</div><<else>><div>• Saturday: you watched from a distance. She didn't see you. That was the idea.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Nothing yet. New Wave is the third door in this city, after the Protectorate and the gangs, and it's one nobody has opened for you.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Lung.''
Leader of the ABB. Six-two before he starts, shirtless in April, tattooed neck to waist in dragons, a steel mask with no expression. The longer a fight goes, the bigger, hotter and more armored he gets, until he's less a man than a thing with wings. He has walked away from whole teams of heroes. His lieutenants are Oni Lee, who teleports and leaves a copy of himself behind, and a new Tinker called Bakuda, who builds bombs.<<if ($lungDown is true)>> He is, as of Sunday night, in PRT custody, with the Birdcage on the table.<</if>>
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($calledPHQ is true)>><div>• You called it in before anything started. Dispatch logged it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedFight is true)>><div>• You joined the fight.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hitGang is true)>><div>• You went after his men instead of him.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($lungHurt gte 1)>><div>• You hurt him, $lungHurt time<<if ($lungHurt gt 1)>>s<</if>>. He noticed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($drewLung is true)>><div>• You made him come after you.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($leftDocks is true)>><div>• You left.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hospital is true)>><div>• He put you in the burn ward.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>><div>• You took public credit for his arrest. The ABB knows a name now.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($abbTarget is true)>><div>• The ABB has you on a list.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookEnvelope is true)>><div>• You walked off with an ABB shakedown envelope. Somebody will want it back.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($joinedFight is false) and ($leftDocks is false) and ($calledPHQ is false) and ($lungHurt is 0))>><div>• Nothing yet. You've only watched.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Notoriety and whose name goes on the arrest decide whether Oni Lee and Bakuda come looking in Arc 2, and for whom.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Tattletale.''<<if ($metLisaUnmasked is true)>> Lisa, out of costume.<</if>>
Blond, black and lavender, a domino mask and a grin like a fox that has found the henhouse unlocked. Talks constantly and says less than it sounds like. The PRT has nothing on her. Everyone who's met her assumes she's a Thinker of some kind, and she's happy to let them wonder what kind. She's the one who recruits for the Undersiders, and she's good at it: she never says the thing that would scare you off, even when you can see her thinking it.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($tattletaleNumber is true)>><div>• You asked for a way to reach them. She gave you one without blinking.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($withUndersiders is true)>><div>• You took the ride. She watched you the whole way.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($pingedTt is true)>><div>• You answered the "Bug" thread anonymously, so she'd know the other roof was paying attention.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($atMeet is true)>><div>• You met her out of costume, at the library, in daylight.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($challengedLisa is true)>><div>• You told her to read you, out loud. She did some of it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($askedBoss is true)>><div>• You asked who the boss is. She didn't answer. She also didn't pretend there wasn't one.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedUndersiders is true)>><div>• You said yes.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($swap is true)>><div>• You stayed in the loft when Taylor went to the PRT. Lisa made that call with you.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($leftWithTaylor is true)>><div>• You walked out on her offer, with Taylor.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($tattletaleNumber is false) and ($withUndersiders is false) and ($pingedTt is false) and ($atMeet is false) and ($joinedUndersiders is false))>><div>• One conversation on a roof. She got more out of it than you did.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Street Cred decides how seriously she takes you. Your choices here decide whether the Undersiders are a door, a threat, or a crew.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Grue, Regent and Bitch. -> "cast-undersiders"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The Undersiders.''
Four teenage villains who hit soft targets, get away clean, and have embarrassed the Protectorate four times this year. Small crew, no territory, no colors. They answer to someone with money whom they don't name.<<if ($askedBoss is true)>> You asked who. Nobody told you.<</if>>
''Grue.'' The leader. Tall, motorcycle leathers, a skull-visor helmet, a voice that comes out muffled and deep. Makes darkness: thick, rolling, swallows light and sound. The one who does the introductions and worries about the plan.
''Regent.'' Half-mask, silver circlet, a ruffled shirt and a bored drawl. Makes people's bodies twitch and stumble at the wrong moment. Finds everything slightly funny, including you.
''Bitch.'' Plaid skirt, army boots, a dollar-store dog mask. The PRT calls her Hellhound. Her dogs grow into van-sized monsters when she needs them to and shrink back after. She doesn't talk much, and doesn't like being touched, looked at, or lied to, in roughly that order.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($metUndersiders is true)>><div>• Sunday: they landed on your roof, or next to it, and found Lung already half beaten.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($withUndersiders is true)>><div>• You took the ride out of the Docks on one of Bitch's dogs.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($atLoft is true)>><div>• You've been to the loft.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($savedFromDogs is true)>><div>• You got between Taylor and the dogs. Bitch took that personally. So did Grue, the other way.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorHurt is true)>><div>• You let Brian handle the dogs. Taylor got bitten.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedUndersiders is true)>><div>• You're on the crew, as of Monday night.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sawGun is true)>><div>• You know about the gun in the loft, and which rule it breaks.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($withUndersiders is false) and ($atLoft is false) and ($joinedUndersiders is false))>><div>• One roof, one conversation.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Street Cred opens their door. Hero Standing above a certain point closes it, because Tattletale can tell.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Tattletale. -> "cast-tattletale"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Armsmaster.''
Leader of the Protectorate East-North-East. Blue and silver power armor, a V-shaped visor, a beard trimmed to a tolerance, and a halberd that has been on more magazine covers than most actors. A Tinker whose specialty is making small things do more. Precise, stiff, quietly ambitious, and honest in the way of a man who has had a lie detector built into his helmet for years. He wants the Lung arrest on his record. He's not wrong that it would do more good there than on yours.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($calledPHQ is true)>><div>• You called it in before the fight. He said it was the first thing anyone did right that night.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>><div>• You took the credit for Lung. He let you. He also wrote down that you did.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>><div>• You gave the credit to the bug girl.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($armsmasterCredit is true)>><div>• You let him have the arrest. He owes you, and he knows what that word means.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($wardsInterest is true)>><div>• You asked about the Wards. He treated the question like a yes.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($owedFavor is true)>><div>• He owes you a favor. You haven't called it in.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedWards is true)>><div>• You're a Ward now. He's your boss's boss.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($hospital is true)>><div>• His people found you in the burn ward.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($calledPHQ is false) and ($tookCredit is false) and ($gaveCreditToBug is false) and ($armsmasterCredit is false) and ($wardsInterest is false) and ($joinedWards is false))>><div>• One conversation on a roof, with a halberd pointed politely at the gravel.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Hero Standing is his opinion of you, more or less. It decides what the PRT offers in Arc 2 and how hard they push.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''The Wards, and Deputy Director Renick.''
The PRT's junior program: teenage heroes with handlers, schedules, tutors, a paycheck, and a probation officer's worth of rules. Brockton Bay's roster is Aegis, Clockblocker, Vista, Kid Win, Gallant, Browbeat and Shadow Stalker. Renick is the deputy director, the man who does the interviews when Director Piggot doesn't want to be in the room. Polite, tired, and better at listening than he lets on.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($toldRenickTrigger is true)>><div>• You told Renick the real version of your trigger.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedWards is true)>><div>• You signed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorWards is true)>><div>• Taylor signed.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($independents is true)>><div>• You both walked out without signing.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($taylorAtPRT is true)>><div>• You went to the PHQ with her.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($calledSophia is true)>><div>• You told Sophia Hess that you know which Ward she is.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($joinedWards is false) and ($taylorWards is false) and ($independents is false) and ($toldRenickTrigger is false))>><div>• An interview, and a folder you haven't opened.</div><</if>>\
</div>
''What it changes.'' Signing changes everything after this arc: school, nights, who you answer to, and what Sophia Hess is to you.
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>/* Creation sheet. Set during character creation and kept across a fresh-Friday replay; only reset-all clears them. */\
/* -- The vial start: every power at once. */\
<<set $vial to false>>\
/* -- Looks, 3 / 5 / 7 / 10 (see setup.looksMult). */\
<<set $looks to 5>>\
/* -- Core stats, 1-5. Each power draws on one of them (setup.powerPair). */\
<<set $body to 1>>\
<<set $agility to 1>>\
<<set $mind to 1>>\
<<set $charm to 1>>\
<<set $nerve to 1>>\
<<set $statPts to 3>>\
/* -- Skills, 0-5. Options marked [Skill] in the story check these; training raises them to four. */\
<<set $brawling to 0>>\
<<set $athletics to 0>>\
<<set $stealth to 0>>\
<<set $streetwise to 0>>\
<<set $academics to 0>>\
<<set $tech to 0>>\
<<set $capeLore to 0>>\
<<set $persuasion to 0>>\
<<set $perception to 0>>\
<<set $skillPts to 6>>\
/* -- Creation bookkeeping: background bonuses applied once, ceilings derived once. */\
<<set $sheetInit to false>>\
<<set $sheetApplied to false>>\
/* -- Problems. */\
<<set $indebted to false>>\
<<set $debt to 0>>\
<<set $debtPaid to 0>>\
<<set $deaf to false>>\
<<set $injured to false>>\
<<set $marked to false>>\
<<set $record to false>>\
<<set $rival to false>>\
<<set $fan to false>>\
<<set $dissonance to false>>\
<<set $nightmares to false>>\
<<set $problemCount to 0>>\
<<set $problemsApplied to false>>\
/* -- Greenlight's gender and pronouns (Rival). */\
<<set $glGender to "guy">>\
<<set $glHe to "he">>\
<<set $glHim to "him">>\
<<set $glHis to "his">>\
/* -- Perks. */\
<<set $willful to false>>\
<<set $trained to false>>\
<<set $readUp to false>>\
<<set $connected to false>>\
<<set $smart to false>>\
<<set $powerful to false>>\
<<set $tough to false>>\
<<set $pockets to false>>\
<<set $gamer to false>>\
<<set $perkPts to 0>>\
<<set $perkCount to 0>>\/* Story flags. Everything here is cleared by reset-day (a fresh Friday) and by reset-all (a new character). Grouped by the part of the story that sets them; most are read by later arcs, the Cast page and the Relationships page. A flag that is set but not yet read is a seed for a later arc. */\
/* -- Arc, team and territory. */\
<<set $arc to 0>>\
<<set $stance to "">>\
<<set $territory to "">>\
<<set $tribute to 0>>\
<<set $warlordSeed to false>>\
/* -- Looks scaling checkpoints (setup.looksAdjust). */\
<<set $looksBase_taylorTrust to null>>\
<<set $looksBase_heroRep to null>>\
<<set $looksBase_streetRep to null>>\
<<set $looksBase_notoriety to null>>\
/* -- Inventory. */\
<<set $hasPhone to false>>\
/* -- Patrol loop. */\
<<set $patrolSeen to []>>\
<<set $patrolCount to 0>>\
<<set $patrolStep to 0>>\
<<set $patrolLen to 2>>\
<<set $patrolZone to "">>\
<<set $patrolReturn to "">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "">>\
<<set $enc to "">>\
<<set $encTurn to -1>>\
<<set $patrolForce to "">>\
/* -- Patrol specials seen (each fires once per run). */\
<<set $sawCoilMen to false>>\
<<set $sawPurity to false>>\
<<set $metGregor to false>>\
<<set $foundBakudaCache to false>>\
<<set $bakudaPart to false>>\
<<set $sawTravelers to false>>\
<<set $sawSophiaCross to false>>\
<<set $metTessa to false>>\
<<set $tessaPRT to false>>\
<<set $pallSign to false>>\
<<set $rafeGone to false>>\
<<set $rafeStayed to false>>\
<<set $metDanny to false>>\
<<set $metTenant to false>>\
<<set $compass to false>>\
<<set $metTideBoy to false>>\
/* -- Problem-driven events: Hollis, Greg, Greenlight, the wrong things. */\
<<set $hollisMet to false>>\
<<set $hollisJob to false>>\
<<set $fanTreatment to "">>\
<<set $fanSeen to false>>\
<<set $gregTriggered to false>>\
<<set $gregAlly to false>>\
<<set $gregRival to false>>\
<<set $rivalSeen to false>>\
<<set $dissonanceSeen to false>>\
/* -- Romance bars (0-100) and dating flags. */\
<<set $rom_taylor to 0>>\
<<set $rom_sophia to 0>>\
<<set $rom_madison to 0>>\
<<set $rom_lisa to 0>>\
<<set $rom_rachel to 0>>\
<<set $rom_greenlight to 0>>\
<<set $rom_kestrel to 0>>\
<<set $kestrelFlirt to false>>\
<<set $travisFlirt to false>>\
<<set $maiFlirt to false>>\
<<set $taylorCrush to false>>\
<<set $alecFlirt to false>>\
<<set $lisaAsked to false>>\
/* -- Winslow: the trio, Gladly, the class. */\
<<set $metSchool to false>>\
<<set $sophiaSuspicious to false>>\
<<set $sophiaTested to false>>\
<<set $sophiaHunting to false>>\
<<set $calledSophia to false>>\
<<set $madisonFriendly to false>>\
<<set $gladlyLikesYou to false>>\
<<set $wipedSeat to false>>\
<<set $inTaylorGroup to false>>\
<<set $groupWon to false>>\
<<set $calledOutMadison to false>>\
<<set $stayedForGladly to false>>\
<<set $witnessOffer to false>>\
<<set $stoodWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $tookBagBack to false>>\
<<set $skippedSchool to false>>\
<<set $spokeInClass to false>>\
<<set $stayedHome to false>>\
<<set $swap to false>>\
/* -- Taylor. */\
<<set $metTaylor to false>>\
<<set $noticedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $helpedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $ignoredTaylor to false>>\
<<set $stoppedJuice to false>>\
<<set $gaveHoodie to false>>\
<<set $rodeBus to false>>\
<<set $followedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $tailedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $taylorKnows to false>>\
<<set $suspectTaylor to false>>\
<<set $bugContact to false>>\
<<set $sharedTrigger to false>>\
<<set $boughtLunch to false>>\
<<set $leftWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $atMeet to false>>\
<<set $atLoft to false>>\
<<set $taylorJoined to false>>\
<<set $taylorWards to false>>\
<<set $taylorAtPRT to false>>\
<<set $independents to false>>\
<<set $taylorHurt to false>>\
/* -- Home. */\
<<set $guardianKnows to false>>\
<<set $toldGuardian to false>>\
<<set $toldPartial to false>>\
<<set $hospital to false>>\
/* -- Arc 1, the Docks: Lung and the night after. */\
<<set $wentOut to false>>\
<<set $leftDocks to false>>\
<<set $joinedFight to false>>\
<<set $hitGang to false>>\
<<set $drewLung to false>>\
<<set $lungHurt to 0>>\
<<set $echoClock to 0>>\
<<set $lungDown to false>>\
<<set $sawLung to false>>\
<<set $lootDone to false>>\
<<set $tookEnvelope to false>>\
<<set $savedShopkeeper to false>>\
<<set $sawGloryGirl to false>>\
<<set $metGloryGirl to false>>\
<<set $calledPHQ to false>>\
<<set $pulledHerOut to false>>\
<<set $silencedHer to false>>\
/* -- The Undersiders. */\
<<set $metUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $withUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $tattletaleNumber to false>>\
<<set $metLisaUnmasked to false>>\
<<set $pingedTt to false>>\
<<set $sawGun to false>>\
<<set $askedBoss to false>>\
<<set $challengedLisa to false>>\
<<set $savedFromDogs to false>>\
<<set $joinedUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $owedFavor to false>>\
<<set $undersidersRefuse to false>>\
<<set $undersidersPlan to false>>\
/* -- The Protectorate, the PRT and the Wards. */\
<<set $metArmsmaster to false>>\
<<set $tookCredit to false>>\
<<set $gaveCreditToBug to false>>\
<<set $armsmasterCredit to false>>\
<<set $wardsInterest to false>>\
<<set $metWards to false>>\
<<set $joinedWards to false>>\
<<set $toldRenickTrigger to false>>\
<<set $renickLikes to false>>\
<<set $wardsConsole to false>>\
<<set $wardsConsole4 to false>>\
<<set $wardsBriefed to false>>\
<<set $wardsStalker to false>>\
<<set $wardsConvoyAsk to false>>\
<<set $stalkerHunt to false>>\
<<set $wardCrashed to false>>\
<<set $rockRecord to false>>\
/* -- The Empire Eighty-Eight. */\
<<set $empireApproach to false>>\
<<set $empireCourting to false>>\
<<set $empireDeclined to false>>\
<<set $empireTarget to false>>\
<<set $empireRecruited to false>>\
<<set $empireEyes to false>>\
<<set $empireCalled to false>>\
<<set $empireAsked to false>>\
<<set $kaiserMet to false>>\
<<set $empireName to "">>\
<<set $empireSeen to false>>\
<<set $empireWar to false>>\
<<set $empireHeldLine to false>>\
<<set $rodeWithHookwolf to false>>\
<<set $empireAtArcade to false>>\
<<set $warnedKaiser to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfFought to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfRespect to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfChallenged to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfKilledLung to false>>\
<<set $kaiserSawYou to false>>\
<<set $empireBlocks to false>>\
<<set $empireSplit to false>>\
/* -- The ABB: joining, Bakuda's bombs, the workshop, the coup. */\
<<set $abbApproach to false>>\
<<set $abbDeclined to false>>\
<<set $abbInvite to false>>\
<<set $abbMember to false>>\
<<set $abbTarget to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeKnows to false>>\
<<set $abbHunted to false>>\
<<set $bakudaBomb to false>>\
<<set $bakudaObeyed to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDefied to false>>\
<<set $bakudaRespect to false>>\
<<set $sawGlassRoom to false>>\
<<set $askedGlass to false>>\
<<set $abbWar to false>>\
<<set $abbRefused to false>>\
<<set $abbBetrayed to false>>\
<<set $abbDefected to false>>\
<<set $abbDoubt to false>>\
<<set $abbRoster to false>>\
<<set $abbAmnesty to false>>\
<<set $abbSurrendered to false>>\
<<set $abbCoup to false>>\
<<set $abbCrown to false>>\
<<set $maiBoss to false>>\
<<set $sawOniLee to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeUltimatum to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeHurt to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeCaught to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeDead to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeSpared to false>>\
<<set $bakudaFreq to false>>\
<<set $abbRouteKnown to false>>\
<<set $sawWorkshop to false>>\
<<set $workshopRaided to false>>\
<<set $remoteLost to false>>\
<<set $truckSunk to false>>\
<<set $relayDown to false>>\
<<set $relayTurned to false>>\
/* -- The Merchants. */\
<<set $merchantOffer to false>>\
<<set $nodderBeaten to false>>\
<<set $rafeKnown to false>>\
/* -- Coil and Dinah. */\
<<set $coilNoticed to false>>\
<<set $dinahSeen to false>>\
<<set $dinahFree to false>>\
<<set $dinahLost to false>>\
<<set $wentForDinah to false>>\
<<set $metDinah to false>>\
<<set $coilDebt to false>>\
<<set $coilCrossed to false>>\
<<set $coilExposed to false>>\
<<set $coilAbbDeal to false>>\
/* -- Arc 3, the bank. */\
<<set $bankRole to "">>\
<<set $bankEscape to true>>\
<<set $bankCaught to false>>\
<<set $arrested to false>>\
<<set $panaceaHostage to false>>\
<<set $caughtRegent to false>>\
<<set $ledgerSeen to false>>\
<<set $metPanacea to false>>\
<<set $sawBank to false>>\
/* -- Original capes: Kestrel, Ledger, the thing in the Halifax fog. */\
<<set $metKestrel to false>>\
<<set $kestrelAssist to false>>\
<<set $kestrelHurt to false>>\
<<set $foughtLedger to false>>\
<<set $ledgerWon to false>>\
<<set $heardPall to false>>\
/* -- Arc 4, the bomb weekend. */\
<<set $sundayPlan to "">>\
<<set $convoyAct to "">>\
<<set $wentToBus to false>>\
<<set $bombSeam to false>>\
<<set $indConvoyGuess to false>>\
<<set $hospitalNight to false>>\
<<set $panaceaFavor to false>>\
<<set $panaceaApology to false>>\
<<set $atOnramp to false>>\
<<set $sundayDone to false>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to false>>\
<<set $lungFree to false>>\
<<set $lungDead to false>>\
<<set $bakudaCaught to false>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDead to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDeal to false>>\
<<set $sawBakuda to false>>\
/* -- Arc 5, Somer's Rock and the week after. */\
<<set $sawRock to false>>\
<<set $truce to "">>\
<<set $raidAct to "">>\
<<set $holdAct to "">>\
<<set $bakudaAct to "">>\
<<set $lungAct to "">>\
<<set $raided to false>>\
<<set $raidDone to false>>\
<<set $heldFourth to false>>\
<<set $holdDone to false>>\
<<set $bakudaFinal to false>>\
<<set $bakudaAlly to false>>\
<<set $lungFinal to false>>\
<<set $lungRecaptured to false>>\
<<set $lungGone to false>>\
/* -- Uber and Leet. */\
<<set $ulMet to false>>\
<<set $ulFriend to false>>\
<<set $ulEnemy to false>>\
<<set $ulMember to false>>\
<<set $ulStream to false>>\
<<set $ulBakuda to false>>\
<<set $leetInsured to false>>\
<<set $ulBetrayed to false>>\
<<set $ulSaved to false>>\
<<set $leetDead to false>>\
<<set $uberHurt to false>>\
<<set $ulLastBuild to false>>\
<<set $uberHunting to false>>\
<<set $ulSchool to false>>\
<<set $rescueAct to "">>\
<<set $ulBakudaDone to false>>\/* Same character, fresh Friday. Clears every story flag (init-flags) and restores the tracked
numbers to the post-creation baselines. The creation sheet, looks, problems and perks are NOT
touched (they live in init-character), so the two perk effects that init-flags would otherwise
undo are re-applied at the end. */\
<<include "init-flags">>\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<if ($nightmares is true)>><<set $stamina to $maxStamina - 20>><</if>>\
<<set $heroRep to $baseHeroRep>>\
<<set $streetRep to $baseStreetRep>>\
<<set $notoriety to 0>>\
<<set $taylorTrust to $baseTaylorTrust>>\
<<set $control to $baseControl>>\
<<if ($pockets is true)>><<set $hasPhone to true>><</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>><<set $heardPall to true>><</if>>\/* Start of a new day or a new outing: stamina refills (twenty short with Nightmares) and the
four looks-scaled numbers hit a checkpoint and are clamped to 0-100. Health is left to the
calling passage, because some mornings heal and some don't. */\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<if ($nightmares is true)>><<set $stamina to $maxStamina - 20>><</if>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\/* Which team the character belongs to from Arc 3 on. Recomputed from the join flags at the end
of Arc 2 and again on Wednesday morning. Later arcs branch on $stance; the ABB crown and
territory are tracked separately ($abbCrown, $territory). */\
<<set $stance to "independent">>\
<<if ($joinedWards is true)>><<set $stance to "ward">><</if>>\
<<if ($joinedUndersiders is true)>><<set $stance to "undersider">><</if>>\
<<if ($abbMember is true)>><<set $stance to "abb">><</if>>\
<<if ($empireRecruited is true)>><<set $stance to "empire">><</if>>\/* Brand new character: identity back to defaults, creation sheet cleared, then a fresh day. */\
<<set $name to "">>\
<<set $capeName to "">>\
<<set $capeDefault to "">>\
<<set $phoName to "Transfer_Student">>\
<<set $power to "">>\
<<set $powerName to "">>\
<<set $trigger to "">>\
<<set $guardian to "">>\
<<set $guardianName to "">>\
<<set $gender to "girl">>\
<<set $build to "average">>\
<<set $hair to "dark brown, shoulder-length">>\
<<set $eyes to "brown">>\
<<set $mark to "nothing anyone remembers">>\
<<set $heritage to "white">>\
<<include "set-pronouns">>\
<<include "set-heritage">>\
<<set $background to "">>\
<<set $maxHealth to 100>>\
<<set $money to 0>>\
<<set $maxStamina to 100>>\
<<set $stamina to 100>>\
<<set $job to "">>\
<<set $baseHeroRep to 10>>\
<<set $baseStreetRep to 5>>\
<<set $baseTaylorTrust to 10>>\
<<set $baseControl to 2>>\
<<include "init-character">>\
<<include "reset-day">>\/* "Replay from Friday" on the Arc 1 end page: same character, every flag cleared. */\
<<include "reset-day">>\
Same you. Same power. A different Friday.
<<page "Friday" "ch1-morning">><<include "refresh">>\
''Arc 2: Insinuation''
Monday.
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>\
$guardianName's morning is the ordinary one: coffee, keys, the door. You did your homework this weekend. Nothing in the house is being carefully not said.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Mom is asleep when you leave; her shift ended at six. There's a note on the counter that just says //We're not done talking// with a heart under it. You'd have preferred shouting.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Aunt Ruth has made eggs, something she never does, and she watches you eat them. "I'm not going to ask again today," she says. "Today."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt has the radio on the news and the scanner on low, and he turns both off when you come in. "Eat," he says. Then, after a while: "Danny Hebert's girl goes to your school. Tall. Glasses." You keep eating.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad left at a quarter to five like always, and there's a new lock on the inside of the kitchen door that wasn't there Friday, with the key sitting next to it and no note.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana is up before you for the first time since the stroke. She has the newspaper open to the Lung story and one finger on the paragraph. She taps it twice and looks at you, and then goes back to reading, and that is the whole conversation you're going to get.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Your father left for work at six. There's a business card on the counter that wasn't there last night, cream stock, no name, just a phone number, and under it in his handwriting: //She said to give you this when you were ready. I don't know what that means. I'd like to.//
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas left for the yard at six, but the box on the table has a new thing in it: a police scanner with a cracked case. There's no note, because he doesn't do notes. He does scanners.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma is already downstairs opening the machines, and she's left the newspaper folded to the Lung story on your chair, because that is how Ma asks.
<<else>>\
Marcus is already gone to open the café. He's left you a twenty and a sticky note that says //text me when you get to school// with the word //text// underlined three times.
<</if>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>>\
The news has your name. //$capeName//, in a chyron under footage of a steel cage welded to the asphalt. The anchor pronounces it wrong. By the time you get to the bus stop two kids are saying it to each other and getting it wrong the same way.
<<elseif ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>\
The news says an "unidentified insect-controlling parahuman" put Lung in a cell. They have no footage of her. They have a lot of footage of dead bugs. You watch the bus stop and wonder whether she's seen it yet.
<<else>>\
The news says Armsmaster took Lung down in the Docks, single-handed, after an "altercation with unidentified parahumans." There's footage of the cage. <<if ($stayedHome is true)>>There's no footage of anyone else, and no names, and you weren't there. You keep coming back to that.<<elseif ($abbMember is true)>>There's no footage of the street, because the street ran, and you ran with it, and some of the street will remember that you didn't run first.<<else>>There's no footage of you, as agreed.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($gaveHoodie is true)>>\
Taylor is at the bus stop with your hoodie folded over her arm, washed, and hands it to you without a word. It smells like a different detergent. "Thanks," she says, finally, when the bus is pulling in. "For Friday." There are shadows under her eyes to match yours.
<<elseif ($taylorTrust gte 30)>>\
Taylor is at the bus stop. She nods at you. From her, that's a conversation. She looks like she hasn't slept, and you know the feeling.
<<else>>\
Taylor Hebert gets on the same bus two stops after you and sits at the back with her hood up, with the same shadows under her eyes you saw in the mirror.
<</if>>\
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>\
Before the bus, there was breakfast, and breakfast was just breakfast. $guardianName asked if you'd finished the World Issues thing. You said yes, and for once that was true.
<<page "Homeroom" "ch2-homeroom">>\
<<else>>\
Before the bus, there was breakfast, and breakfast had a conversation in it.
<<if ($toldGuardian is true)>>\
$guardianName knows now. That changes the shape of a kitchen. "So what happens today," $guardianName asked, not quite a question, standing at the counter with coffee.
<<elseif ($toldPartial is true)>>\
$guardianName has decided to believe the version with no mask in it, and is working at it where you can see. "Straight home after school," $guardianName said. "I mean it this time."
<<else>>\
You and $guardianName haven't talked since you walked past each other at three in the morning. The kitchen was very polite. "There's lunch money on the counter," $guardianName said, to the coffee maker.
<</if>>\
<<choose "ch2-homeroom">>
#Tell the truth about today: school, home, nothing else. Mean it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"School and home, and that's it." <<if ($toldGuardian is true)>>$guardianName looked at you and decided to believe you. They have to do that a lot lately. "Text me at lunch."<<else>>$guardianName nodded without turning around. You both heard how it sounded.<</if>>
#Ask about the news. Casually. Like anyone would.
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"They got Lung," you said, like it was weather. <<if ($tookCredit is true)>>$guardianName turned around then. "They're saying a new cape did it. A kid." A long pause. "Eat your breakfast."<<elseif ($toldGuardian is true)>>$guardianName put the coffee down. "Don't. Not at the table. I can't do it at the table yet."<<else>>"I heard," $guardianName said. "Half the Docks heard. Eat your breakfast."<</if>>
#Say nothing. Eat. Go.
You ate standing up and left four minutes early. Behind you, $guardianName didn't say goodbye, and you didn't either, and the door sounded very loud.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\Homeroom is computer class. Mrs. Knott hands the advanced stream a spreadsheet exercise that takes fifteen minutes, and then you have an hour and an ancient desktop and a question you haven't let yourself ask until now.
Parahumans Online. The front page is Lung, Lung, Lung. The wiki entry for the ABB has a new paragraph under "Defeats and Captures" that reads like a press release, because it is one.
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>>\
The Brockton Bay board has a thread with your name in the title. Four hundred replies since midnight. Most of them are arguing about your power. One of them, from an account created this morning, says only: //we know what school you go to.// It has been reported and removed by the time you refresh. You saw it.
<<var $abbTarget true>>\
<</if>>\
The Brockton Bay board is a wall of the same thread.
<<pho $phoName>>\
<<pho-topic "LUNG DOWN. Confirmed." "Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay">>\
<<pho-post "Bagrat" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Posted On Apr 11th 2011:">>PHQ press release, 6:40 this morning. Armsmaster, "with assistance," took Lung into custody at Docks and Fourth around one a.m. Steel containment cage welded to the road; photos below. ABB presence in the area dispersed. No PRT casualties.
Question for the board: who was the assistance?<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "(Showing page 1 of 7)">>\
<<pho-post "► XxVoid_CowboyxX" "" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>calling it now. Dauntless. he's been quiet for weeks.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Not Dauntless. Not anyone on the roster. Two unregistered, per the scanner traffic last night. One of them had bugs.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► White Fairy" "" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>bugs?? like a Master? in BB?? we do NOT need another one of those<</pho-post>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>UPDATE. PRT just named the second one. "$capeName." New. No wiki page. No prior sightings. Anyone?<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Laserdream" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Heard the name from someone who'd know. Real. Young. Be nice to them, people.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► RedandGreen88" "(Account created today)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>we know what school you go to<div class="pho-removed">[This post has been removed by a moderator. User banned.]</div><</pho-post>>\
<<elseif ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>UPDATE. PRT statement credits "an unidentified insect-controlling parahuman" with the bulk of it. Armsmaster "secured the scene." Read that twice.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Laserdream" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Armsmaster giving credit away. Screenshot this for history.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Second unregistered cape is still unnamed. They were on the other roof. Nobody's saying anything about them, so somebody asked nobody to.<</pho-post>>\
<<else>>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>UPDATE. PRT won't name the assistance. "Unidentified parahumans." Plural.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">><<if ($stayedHome is true)>>One kid, is what I heard. Bugs. Armsmaster let her walk. Make of that what you will.<<else>>Two kids, is what I heard. One with bugs, one with something else. Armsmaster let them walk. Make of that what you will.<</if>><</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Tt" "(Unverified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Make of it that some people are smarter than this board. ;)<</pho-post>>\
<</if>>\
<<pho-post "► Cuff" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>ABB's going to come apart without him. Lee's not a leader. The new one, the tinker, nobody knows. Everybody in the Docks: lock your doors this week.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7">>\
<<pho-topic "Bug" "Boards ► Connections ► Brockton Bay">>\
<<pho-post "Tt" "(Original Poster) (Unverified Cape)" "Posted On Apr 11th 2011:">>I owe you for Sunday. I pay my debts. Coffee?
Message me.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "(Showing page 1 of 2)">>\
<<pho-post "► Brocktonite03" "(Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Tinfoil hat says this is the bug cape from last night. Tinfoil hat is usually wrong.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► GstringGirl" "" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Or it's someone's lost beetle. Connections board, people. Standards.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "End of Page. 1, 2">>\
<<if ($bugContact is true)>>\
<<pho-topic "Private message conversation with 2031845" "Private Messages">>\
<<pho-post "2031845" "" "Sent On Apr 11th 2011:">>Still thinking. Don't do anything stupid today. B.<</pho-post>>\
<</if>>\
<</pho>>\
You close it. <<if ($stayedHome is true)>>You look up the Undersiders, because one reply mentions dogs the size of vans, and there's only one crew in the city with those.<<else>>You look up the four on the dogs.<</if>> Tattletale is a stub with a blurry photo. Grue has three years of small-time history and one word under "Power": darkness. Hellhound has a full page, a public name, Rachel Lindt, and a red warning box. Regent doesn't exist.
The thread in Connections is two lines long and signed with two letters, and a dozen people in the replies are calling it a hoax. <<if ($stayedHome is true)>>You have a guess.<<else>>You know better.<</if>>
<<if ($tattletaleNumber is true)>>\
Your phone buzzes against your leg. A number you memorized on a rooftop. //Morning, sunshine. You're reading PHO right now, aren't you. Don't answer that. 3pm, same roof as Sunday, no costumes. Bring the bug if you can find her. Tt.//
<</if>>\
<<if ($withUndersiders is true)>>\
<<if ($tattletaleNumber is false)>>Your phone buzzes against your leg. The number isn't saved; you know it anyway. //3pm, same roof as Sunday, no costumes. We're making the bug the same offer we made you. Come be a friendly face. Tt.//
<</if>>\
<</if>>\
<<choose "ch2-class">>
#show-if ($stayedHome is false) Reply to the "Bug" thread. Anonymously. Just so Tattletale knows the other roof is paying attention.
<<var $pingedTt true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You post from a guest account. //The one on the other roof says hi.// Nothing else. Within ninety seconds it has a reply from Tt: a single winking face. You log out and feel watched for the rest of the period.
#Leave it alone. That message is for her, not you.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You close the tab. Whatever is between Tattletale and the bug girl, it isn't your business until one of them makes it your business.
#show-if ($suspectTaylor is true) Look at the timestamp on the reply, and then look across the room at the back row.
<<var $control + 1>>\
The thread's first serious reply is two minutes old. Two rows back and one over, Taylor Hebert closes a browser window a half second after you look up. Her ears go red. You look away first, because it's the kind thing to do.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($empireRecruited is true)>>\
Travis Hull passes behind you on his way to shop and says, "Victor says you did good," without stopping, and then, lower: "Sunday. Rune's picking you up. Wear something you can meet people in." He's gone before you can answer.
<<elseif ($empireCourting is true)>>\
Travis Hull passes behind you on his way to shop and says, "Saturday. Missed you," without stopping, and then, lower: "ABB's done. We're going to need people." He's gone before you can answer. The flyer is still in your bag.
<<elseif ($empireDeclined is true)>>\
Travis Hull passes behind you on his way to shop and says nothing, where last week he'd have said hey, so you've been moved from one list to another.
<<elseif ($empireTarget is true)>>\
Somebody wrote an eighty-eight on your locker over the weekend, in marker. The custodian tried to clean it and gave up. Dillon Kessler passes you in the hall and says, "Nice locker," and his friends laugh, and one of them says, <<if ($abbFit is true)>>"Dragon's in a cage. Who's going to look after you now, huh?"<<elseif ($heritage is "Black")>>"Go on. Smile for us,"<<else>>"Eighty-eight,"<</if>> like it's a greeting. Lung went down last night, and the Empire kids walked in this morning like they'd done it themselves.
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbMember is true)>>\
Mai Vo finds you before the bell. "Noon," she says. "Fourth. Lee doesn't wait." Danny Trang, two lockers down, looks at you like you're something that happened to him.
<<elseif (($abbApproach is true) and ($abbDeclined is false))>>\
Mai Vo finds you before the bell. She doesn't say hello. "They got him," she says. "Everybody's scared. You should be with people who aren't." She looks at you a second longer. "There's a seat. There are going to be a lot of seats."
<<elseif ($abbDeclined is true)>>\
Mai Vo passes you in the hall and nods the way you'd nod at someone who's made a mistake you expect them to notice on their own.
<</if>>\
World Issues. Mr. Gladly gives it ten minutes before the groups, because he can't help himself: Lung's capture on the projector, the photo of the cage, the room louder than it's been all year. Half the class has cousins or neighbors or someone in the ABB's shadow, and the other half is pretending it isn't afraid. "What does this //mean//," Gladly asks, "for the city? For the Docks?" and a boy whose brother is in red and green says, under his breath, "It means a war," and Gladly, who wanted a different answer, says, "Okay! Interesting," and moves on.<<if ($spokeInClass is true)>> He looks at you when he says it, hopeful. You don't give him anything to work with.<</if>>
Madison is in her seat early with two friends crouched beside her desk, and all three go quiet and then loud when Taylor comes in.
Taylor's usual seat, front row by the door, has a puddle of orange juice on it. The empty bottle is under the chair, label out, so there's no mistaking the reference.
<<choose "ch2-groups">>
#Wipe it off with your sleeve before she gets there. Sit in it yourself if you have to.
<<var $wipedSeat true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
You get there first. Your sleeve takes most of it. Taylor stops in the doorway and watches you do it, and so does Madison, and the two of them have very different expressions.
#Say nothing. Watch what she does.
Taylor sees the puddle, doesn't break stride, and takes a seat three rows back without looking at Madison once. It's a kind of discipline, and you're not sure it's the good kind.
#Say, loud enough for the room: "Madison, you dropped your juice."
<<var $calledOutMadison true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
The room laughs, and a room laughing isn't a room on your side. Madison's smile doesn't move. "Weird thing to notice," she says. From Madison that is a threat.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Mr. Gladly bounces in and announces groups of four. Share your homework, pick the best of it, present. Vending machine stakes.
<<if ($background is "scholar")>>You did the homework. You did it with headings, and it's in your bag, and nobody at Winslow has ever once asked to see your work.<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>Groups are where you used to live. You could run any table in this room inside of five minutes. The only question is which one.<<elseif ($background is "athlete")>>Group work means sitting still for forty minutes, and sitting still was never your event.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>Your list is six items long and four of them are about Tinkers, because that's the part of capes that ever made sense to you.<</if>>
The room sorts itself into friends with friends, and then the leftovers. The leftovers are Greg, who talks like his thoughts have no brakes, and Sparky, who may or may not be awake. Taylor walks to their table without hesitating.
<<choose "ch2-groups-2">>
#Sit with Taylor, Greg and Sparky. Make it four.
<<var $inTaylorGroup true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
You pull out the fourth chair. Greg lights up like you've joined his band. Taylor looks at you sideways, suspicious of the kindness, and then just nods and gets out a folder two inches thick.
#show-if ($madisonFriendly is true) Madison is waving you over. It would be stupid to turn that down in week twelve.
<<var $rom_madison + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 10>>\
You sit with Madison's group. It's easy. They're funny, in the way of people who've decided who the jokes are about. One of them is Julia, who arrives late and gets sent to the leftover table with a disgusted noise.
#Find a seat anywhere else and keep your head down.
You end up with three sophomores from the lacrosse team who did the homework in the hall five minutes ago. Across the room, Julia arrives late and gets sent to Taylor's table with a disgusted noise.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<if ($inTaylorGroup is true)>>\
Taylor's homework is absurd. Three pages, typed, with newspaper clippings taped in as evidence: fashion, the Tinker tech boom, how the movies changed, how police training changed once capes took the big crises. She did this over a weekend when she was also, you happen to know, fighting a dragon.
"This is really good," Greg says, with total sincerity, and for once that's the right thing.
With four at the table, Julia gets sent to Madison's group instead. Madison's group has nothing to present but what they came in with.
<<choose "ch2-gladly">>
#Volunteer to present, and present Taylor's work, with her name on it.
<<var $groupWon true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Group Project">>\
You stand up and read it the way she wrote it, and you say "Taylor's point about law enforcement" out loud, twice. Mr. Gladly names you the winners. Madison claps with the rest of the room, slowly, looking straight at you.
#Let Taylor present it. It's hers.
<<var $groupWon true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<achieve "Group Project">>\
She doesn't want to. She does it anyway, flat and fast, eyes on the page, and it's still the best thing anyone says all period. Mr. Gladly names you the winners and looks faintly surprised about it.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Across the room, you watch the leftover table come apart. Julia asks to see Taylor's homework, Greg hands it over before Taylor can stop him, and Julia tosses it onto Madison's desk like she's returning a tray. Taylor asks for it back. Madison turns around and says, to the air, that nobody is talking to her.
When presentations come, Madison reads Taylor's list to the room. Fashion, economics, Tinkers, the movies. She gets the law enforcement point wrong. She gets the credit anyway, almost.
<<choose "ch2-gladly">>
#Say it. "Mr. G, that's Taylor's homework. Julia took it off her desk."
<<var $calledOutMadison true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The room goes very quiet. Mr. Gladly visibly decides whether this is a problem. "Madison?" Madison hands the pages back with a smile that promises you a long semester. Taylor doesn't look at you. Her ears are red.
#Keep quiet. You've already got Emma's attention this week.
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
You keep quiet. Greg tries to apologize to Taylor four separate times and makes it worse each time. Sparky sleeps through all of it. Mr. Gladly gives the prize to another group on volume alone.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The bell goes. As the room empties, Mr. Gladly stops by Taylor's desk and asks her, quietly, to stay a minute. She stops moving.
<<choose "ch2-hall">>
#Stay too. Tell him you saw the bathroom on Friday.
<<var $stayedForGladly true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You don't leave. Mr. Gladly looks at you, and at Taylor, and decides to let it ride. He tells her he isn't stupid, that he knows people are giving her a hard time, that he's seen the juice and the glue and the thing in January. He asks her to come to the office with him and name names.
"What happens then?" she asks. He explains: a talk, maybe a suspension if there's proof. She laughs, not nicely, and says that isn't a start, it's shooting herself in the foot.
"I was there Friday," you say. "In the bathroom. I'll go to the office. I'll say who it was."
Both of them look at you. Mr. Gladly looks relieved. Taylor looks at you like you've offered to carry something she'd given up on lifting. "You'd do that," she says. She doesn't say yes or no.
<<var $witnessOffer true>>\
#Wait in the hall. Give her the room.
You wait outside the door with your back to the lockers. Through the glass you watch Mr. Gladly talk earnestly and Taylor look at her shoes, and you watch her say something short that makes him stop talking. It takes two minutes, and she comes out with her jaw set.
#Go. This is between them.
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
You go to your locker. You're halfway down the hall when you hear the voices start up behind you.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
They're waiting for her in the hall.
Nine of them, not three. Emma, Madison, Sophia and six girls whose names you half know, arranged around the window at the end of the corridor so there's one place left for Taylor to stand, and she's standing in it with her back to the glass.
They talk about her without talking to her. One starts before the last one finishes. Ugly, loser, doesn't try, why does she even come. None of it is clever, but it has a rhythm, and the rhythm is the point, and Emma stands at the back of it with her arms folded and the smallest smile you've ever seen on a human face.
Mr. Gladly comes out of his room with a stack of folders, locks his door, looks at Taylor over Emma's shoulder, and walks away.
<<choose "ch2-hall-2">>
#Walk into the middle of it. Stand next to her.
<<var $stoodWithTaylor true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Nine to Two">>\
You push through two girls who don't expect to be pushed and put your shoulder against the window next to Taylor's. The rhythm breaks. For a second nobody has a line. Taylor doesn't look at you. Her hand, down by her side, is shaking, and then it isn't.
#Go after Mr. Gladly. Make him turn around.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You catch him at the stairwell. "You saw that," you say. He looks at the folders. "I've asked her to come to the office," he says. "Twice. I can't make her." "You can make //them//," you say. He takes the stairs. You've learned something about which adults in this building are load-bearing.
#Stay back and watch for the moment it turns.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stay at the lockers. You watch Emma. Everyone else is throwing things, and she's waiting. You've seen that stance before, on a rooftop, on something much bigger.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The girls run out of steam. Emma steps forward, and they make room.
She asks Taylor if she's upset. Then she asks it again, in a voice like syrup, and adds the part that lands, whether Taylor is going to cry herself to sleep over it for a week, like last time.
You don't know what it means. Taylor does. Her face comes apart, all at once, and there's a tear on her cheek before she's decided to have one. Madison says, delighted, that she's actually crying. Somebody says it's like Emma has a superpower.
Sophia hooks a foot through the strap of Taylor's backpack and drags it away from her feet, and stands on it.
<<choose "ch2-run">>
#Take the bag back. Right now, off Sophia's foot.
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
<<var $tookBagBack true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You take the strap and pull, and Sophia lets it go a half second later than she has to, so you both know she let it go. "Careful," she says, for you only. "You're quick. People notice quick." You hand Taylor her bag. She's already moving.
#Say something to Emma. Anything. Break the moment before it finishes landing.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Was that it?" you say to Emma. "That's the big one? You've been saving that since September?" It's a weak line, but it's loud and it's aimed, and Emma's smile flickers. Behind you, Taylor shoves through the crowd and runs.
#show-if ($stoodWithTaylor is true) Put a hand on Taylor's arm. Just so she knows she isn't alone at the window.
<<var $rom_taylor + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
She flinches, then doesn't. Then she pulls free, pushes through the crowd hard enough to knock a boy sideways, and runs for the stairwell with her bag left behind on the floor under Sophia's boot.
#Let it happen. You can't fix this one.
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
Taylor leaves her bag. She shoves through the crowd hard enough to knock a boy sideways and runs for the stairwell, and the girls laugh at her back, and you're one of the people standing in the hall when she goes.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The stairwell door bangs. Through the window at the end of the hall you can see her hit the ground floor doors and keep going, across the parking lot, off school grounds, not running anymore, just walking, and not coming back today.
<<if ($tookBagBack is false)>>\
Her backpack is still on the floor. Sophia steps off it. Nobody picks it up.
<</if>>\
The crowd thins. Emma gives you one long look on her way past, the look of someone adding a line to a list.
<<choose "ch2-downtown">>
#Go after her.
<<var $followedTaylor true>>\
<<var $skippedSchool true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<if ($tookBagBack is false)>>You pick up the bag. It's heavier than it looks.<</if>>\
You go down the stairs two at a time and out the ground floor doors and nobody stops you, because nobody ever does.
#Stay. You have afternoon classes, and so does your guardian's patience. -> "ch2-school-pm"
You go to art. Sophia is in art. She looks at you once, and takes her time about it.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
You catch her four blocks from school, on the long slope down toward downtown. She hears you coming and doesn't turn around until you're beside her.
"Go back," she says. "You'll get marked absent. I'm used to it."
"So am I, as of today."
<<if ($tookBagBack is false)>>\
You hold out the backpack. She takes it like she's not sure it's real, and checks inside it. Something in a box, a repaired art project maybe, is still in one piece. Her shoulders come down an inch.
<</if>>\
She walks, and you walk with her. Downtown is wide sidewalks and blue sky and people on lunch breaks, and her stomach makes a noise loud enough to hear over traffic. <<if ($tookBagBack is true)>>"I spent my lunch money on costume parts," she says, when she catches you noticing. "Saturday. Don't."<<else>>Her lunch was in the bag she left, or the money for it was.<</if>>
<<choose "ch2-downtown-2">>
#use-if ($money gte 12) Buy her a hot dog. Buy two. [$12]
<<var $boughtLunch true>>\
<<var $money - 12>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<if ($guardianName is "Father")>>You've got your father's card. The vendor doesn't take cards. You've also got forty dollars in cash you'd forgotten about, because it has been that kind of week.<<else>>It's most of what you've got on you. She tries to refuse. You eat yours in front of her until she gives up.<</if>> "Thanks," she says, with her mouth full. "This is the second time you've fed me in three days, if the hoodie counts."
#Ask her what Emma meant. Carefully, this time.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<if ($marked is true)>>Before anything else she says, not looking at you, "Emma used to say the thing about you. The word. Before she said it about me." She says it like an apology for something she didn't do. <</if>>She's quiet for most of a block. "My mom died," she says. "Two and a half years ago, in a car accident. I told Emma something, after, about how I was handling it. She was my best friend." She lets that sit. "She kept it. She's been keeping it. She picked today."
You don't say sorry. You say, "She's going to run out of things like that eventually," and Taylor laughs, not happily. "She's got years of them."
#Don't ask. Just walk with her.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You don't ask. After six blocks she says, without looking at you, "Thanks for not asking." It was the right call. She'll tell you anyway, some other day.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Three blocks on, out of nowhere, she says, "Why'd you move here?"
It's the first question she's asked you. You can hear her deciding to ask it.
"Nobody moves //to// Brockton Bay," she says. "People move away. My dad's whole job is telling people there's no work. So either your family's got money, or something happened."
<<choose "ch2-library">>
#show-if (($charm gte 3) and ($taylorTrust gte 40)) [Charm] Tell her the real version, and then tell her you'd have followed her out of that cafeteria even if she weren't the only interesting person at Winslow.
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<set $taylorCrush to true>>\
<<var $rom_taylor + 15>>\
You tell her all of it, and then the other thing, and Taylor Hebert, who has not been told anything like that by anyone since the eighth grade, walks into a parking meter. She doesn't say anything for half a block. Then she says, "Okay," to the sidewalk, and her ears are red, and she doesn't move away when your shoulders touch at the crossing.
#Tell her. The real version.
<<var $sharedTrigger true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<if ($trigger is "The fall")>>You tell her about the Boardwalk rail, and the two seniors, and the rocks, and the forty minutes. You leave out the humming. She looks at you sideways. "That's why you came here. Not for a better school. For a worse one, where nobody knew." "Yeah." "Huh," she says, and you think she's putting it next to something of her own.<<elseif ($trigger is "The chase")>>You tell her about the bus and the nine blocks and the dead end, and the bat. You leave out the fence. "Merchants," she says. "They did that to a kid in my grade last year. He didn't come back to school." A pause. "You came back."<<elseif ($trigger is "The crossfire")>>You tell her about the corner store, the quart of milk, the kid under the next car. You leave out the wall. "First week," she says. "Jesus." Then, "That corner's four blocks from my house."<<elseif ($trigger is "The fever")>>You tell her about the week in February, the phone that rang through eleven times, the walls. You leave out the door. She's quiet for most of a block. "Nobody came," she says. "Not for four days." "Mine was a locker," she says, and then nothing else, and you don't ask what that means yet.<<elseif ($trigger is "The table")>>You tell her about Priya, and the three months, and the table set for nine. You leave out what you said at the door. She stops walking. "She was your best friend." "Since we were six." Taylor looks at the sidewalk for a while. "Mine was Emma," she says. "Since we were five." That's all either of you says about it for six blocks, and it's the most anyone at Winslow has given you.<<elseif ($trigger is "The blackout")>>You tell her about the cold snap, and the furnace, and the two nights with the flashlight, and Dani's breathing. You leave out what happened at three in the morning on the second night. "You fixed it," she says. "A boiler. At fifteen." "Sort of." She looks at you sideways. "My dad can't fix a boiler," she says, and leaves it there.<<elseif ($trigger is "The window")>>You tell her about Lord Street, and the grey sedan, and Keisha's scarf. You leave out the stone. "I read about that," she says, very quietly. "They said it was random." "He looked at me first. He picked." She doesn't say anything to that. There isn't anything.<<elseif ($trigger is "The phone call")>>You tell her about the kitchen floor and the dispatcher and the three doors. You leave out the word. She stops walking. "Nobody came." "Not for nine minutes." "That's," she starts, and doesn't finish, and walks a few steps looking at nothing.<<elseif ($trigger is "The kitchen")>>You tell her about Dale, and the knife, and Theo at the table. You leave out what happened to the handle. She looks at your hand, the one with the scar through the palm, and you let her. "Where is he?" "County. Trial's in May." "Good," she says, in a voice you haven't heard from her, and she has a list of her own.<<elseif ($trigger is "The photo")>>You tell her about the curb, and the rain, and Carter Reyes's phone, and the name. You leave out the mirror. "They made you into something," she says. It isn't a question. "And then you had to be it." "Yeah." She nods like she's been handed a sentence she already knew by heart.<<elseif ($trigger is "The brawl")>>You tell her about the laundromat, and the window coming in, and the hour under the table while one of them got sharper and the other one got bigger. You leave out what climbed into you. She stops walking. "That was yours? The one on Kessler Street?" "My mom's." "I walked past it. After. There was still glass in the gutter in March." A pause. "She reopened it." "The rent didn't care." Taylor nods like she knows what that means, because she does.<<elseif ($trigger is "The followers")>>You tell her about the man at the bus stop, and the photos in the mailbox, and the door coming in, and the closet. You leave out the part where he looked at you and didn't see you. "Empire," she says, like a swear. "They're in the stairwell by the shop classes. The ones with the eights." "I know." "Of course you know."<<else>>You tell her the truth: your father signed something and you drank something and there was no worst day, and you watch her try to fit that into a world where there's always a worst day. "That's not how it works," she says. "I know." "That's //really// not how it works." "I know," you say, and you don't tell her about the phone calls, yet.<</if>>
#Tell her the version you tell everyone. Family stuff. A fresh start.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
"Family stuff," you say. "Fresh start." She nods like she expected that, and lets it go. She has answers like it herself. Later, maybe, you'll trade the real ones.
#Turn it around. "Why'd you stay?"
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
She actually laughs. "Where would I go? Arcadia's got a waiting list two hundred long. My dad tried." She kicks a bottle cap into the gutter. "I'm going to be a hero," she says, to the gutter. "That's how I stay. I keep telling myself that's what the point is." She doesn't look at you when she says it. You don't tell her you know.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<set $skippedSchool to true>>\
The Central Library was built to make people feel small and well-read. Taylor heads for the second floor like she's done it before. There are twenty computers and a line that thins out at one o'clock.
She gets a station with its back to the wall and angles the screen. You take the one beside her and pretend to read about the Dockworkers' strike of 1991.
She types something short. She sits with her hand over the mouse for most of a minute before she sends it. The reply comes in under three minutes, and whatever it says makes her go pale, and look over her shoulder at the room like someone in it might be watching.
<<if ($suspectTaylor is true)>>\
You know what it is. You know who it's from. You know, because you were on the other roof, what "the same spot we crossed paths" means, and what three o'clock means.
<</if>>\
"I have to be somewhere at three," she says. "You should go back to school."
<<choose "ch2-meet">>
#show-if ($suspectTaylor is true) Tell her. "I was on the other roof. Sunday. I'm $capeName."
<<var $taylorKnows true>>\
<<var $atMeet true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 20>>\
<<achieve "Other Side of the Mask">>\
You say it to the screen, not to her. She doesn't move for five full seconds. Then she says, "The whole time." "Since the roof. Not before." "You //sat in my group.//" "I'd have done that anyway." She looks at you then, and she's not crying, and she's not running. "She wants to meet at three. No costumes. I was going to go alone." "Don't," you say. "Go with me."
#show-if ($suspectTaylor is false) Ask her, straight out: "Is this about Sunday night? The Docks?" -> "ch2-evening"
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
<<var $atMeet false>>\
Her face closes. "I don't know what you're talking about," she says, and she logs out and picks up her bag. "Thanks for lunch. Go to school." You watch her go down the wide marble stairs and don't follow.
#Let her go. Then follow her, from a distance.
<<var $tailedTaylor true>>\
<<var $atMeet true>>\
You tell her you'll see her tomorrow. You give her a four-minute head start. <<if ($power is "stranger")>>Nobody has ever once noticed you following them.<<else>>You've never tailed anyone before. You're fairly sure you're bad at it.<</if>> She takes a bus toward home, and an hour later another one toward the Docks, and you're on both of them.
#Let her go. Whatever this is, she's chosen to do it alone. -> "ch2-evening"
<<var $atMeet false>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Tomorrow," you say. She nods. You watch her go down the wide marble stairs, and you go back to school for sixth period and get marked absent anyway.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The afternoon is long.
<<if ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>\
Sophia Hess finds you at your locker between periods. She doesn't crowd you. She leans on the next locker over and looks at the hallway, not at you.
"New kid," she says. "I've been thinking about Friday." She looks down the hall. "You move like somebody who's been in a fight. Not a school fight. A fight." She pushes off the locker. "Hebert's a lost cause. You're not, yet. Think about who you stand next to."
She goes. You stand there with your combination half entered and understand that you've been evaluated by something that was not entirely a sophomore.
<<var $sophiaHunting true>>\
<<else>>\
Madison finds you between periods and is sweet to you for ninety seconds. You've been moved to a list.
<</if>>\
<<if (($tattletaleNumber is true) or ($withUndersiders is true))>>\
At two-fifteen your phone buzzes. //Running late? Roof. 3. She's coming alone; she thinks. Tt.//
<<choose "ch2-meet">>
#Go. Three o'clock, the Sunday roof, no costume.
<<var $atMeet true>>\
<<var $skippedSchool true>>\
You walk out of sixth period and nobody stops you.
#Don't go. You're not Tattletale's friendly face. -> "ch2-evening"
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
You turn the phone face down and sit through sixth period. It buzzes once more at 2:58 and you don't look.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($wardsInterest is true)>>\
At two-fifteen your phone rings from a number with a Protectorate exchange. A woman's voice, Deputy Director Renick's assistant, polite and fast: would you be available tomorrow after school for an informal conversation at the PRT building downtown, parent or guardian welcome but not required.
You say yes before you've decided to.
<<page "After school" "ch2-evening">>\
<<else>>\
The last bell goes. Taylor Hebert doesn't come back.
<<page "After school" "ch2-evening">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $atLoft to true>>\
<<set $metLisaUnmasked to true>>\
Three o'clock. The Sunday roof, in daylight, looks like gravel and cigarette butts and a scorch mark the size of a car where a dragon stood.
<<if ($tailedTaylor is true)>>\
You're on the next roof over, flat behind an air-conditioning unit, when she comes up the fire escape. She's wearing her costume under street clothes; you can see it in the way she moves. Three people are waiting for her, and none of them are wearing masks.
<<else>>\
Three people are waiting, and none of them are wearing masks.
<</if>>\
A blond girl in a graffiti t-shirt and a denim skirt, freckles, green eyes, the grin. A pretty boy with black curls on the roof lip with a bottle of cola. A tall guy with cornrows and a lantern jaw and arms like he lifts things for a living.
<<if ($tailedTaylor is true)>>\
The blond girl looks straight at your air-conditioning unit, grins wider, and crooks a finger. "You might as well come over," she calls. "You're terrible at this, no offense. Also, pay up." The boy on the roof lip swears and hands her money.
<<set $tailedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $taylorKnows to true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
Taylor turns around. Her mask is in her hand, not on her face, and her expression when she sees you climb over the gap between roofs goes through about four things before it settles on //of course.//
<<elseif ($taylorKnows is true)>>\
"Two of them," the blond girl says, delighted. "Pay up." The boy on the roof lip swears and hands her money. "I said she'd bring you," she tells you, "and he said you'd come separately. He never learns."
<<else>>\
"And there's our friendly face," the blond girl says, when you come up the fire escape. "Pay up." The boy on the roof lip swears and hands her money. A minute later Taylor comes up the same fire escape in a loose sweatshirt with her mask in her hand, and sees you, and stops dead.
"You," she says.
"Me," you say. <<if ($stayedHome is true)>>"I followed you from the library. I shouldn't have." It is not how you'd have chosen to meet anyone.<<else>>"Sunday. The other roof." It is not how you'd have chosen to tell her.<</if>>
<<set $taylorKnows to true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<</if>>\
"Lisa," the blond girl says. "Brian. That's Alec. Rachel's sitting this one out; she voted no." Brian shakes Taylor's hand, and then yours, firmly. <<if ($looks is 10)>>Alec raises the cola bottle an inch, and then actually looks at you, and says, "Huh," to Lisa, who says, "Down, boy."<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>Alec raises the cola bottle an inch and goes back to not looking at anyone.<<else>>Alec raises the cola bottle an inch.<</if>><<if ($stayedHome is true)>> "And before anyone asks," Lisa says, pointing at you without looking, "yes, that one's a cape too. Don't give me that face. You stand like one, and nobody who isn't follows a girl into the Docks on a Monday. Sit down, stray. You'll get the pitch too."<</if>>
Lisa bends down and comes up with a child's lunchbox, Alexandria on the lid, and hands it to Taylor. Inside it is two thousand dollars in banded stacks. "We owed you," Lisa says. "No strings. Or," and she lets it hang, "first month's retainer. Your call."<<if ($indebted is true)>> She glances at you. "And before you ask, yes, I know about Hollis, and no, I'm not going to say how, and yes, one month of this covers two-fifths of it. I can do fractions. It's a curse."<</if>>
<<if ($withUndersiders is true)>>\
She hands you an envelope without looking. It's thinner. "You got your pitch on a dog. This is just so you don't feel left out." Five hundred, when you count it later.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $money + 500>>\
<</if>>\
Brian lays it out plainly. He's rehearsed it: two thousand a month from a boss he won't name, just to stay on the team and stay active. Jobs pay ten to thirty-five on top, split evenly. With Lung gone, the Docks are going to be a fight, and they'd rather have more people on their side of it than fewer.
Taylor asks the right question: why her. Lisa says she took Lung apart with bugs and pepper spray and that's good enough for anyone. Taylor says they're the ones who kept her alive. Lisa tells her, in some detail, where she had her spiders bite him and what the PRT's doctors found when they finally looked. Taylor puts both hands over her mouth. Alec says something about what he'd do to anyone who did that to him. Brian tells them both to stop.
You've got questions too. Brian doesn't have the helmet to hide behind here. It's a man's face, and it's waiting.
<<choose "ch2-meet-2">>
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] Ask Alec whether "Regent" comes with a crown, and whether he's free Friday.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $alecFlirt to true>>\
Alec looks at you over the cola bottle for long enough that Brian says his name. "Friday," Alec says, like he's testing the word. "Sure. I don't do anything else." Lisa puts her face in her hands. "Oh, this is going to be so bad," she says, delighted. "This is going to be the best bad thing."
#show-if ($mind gte 4) [Mind] Tell Lisa what her power is before she tells you.
<<var $rom_lisa + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"You fill in gaps," you say. "You see a little and your power gives you the rest, and it compounds, and it gives you a headache, and you can't turn it off, and you're doing it to me right now and hating that I noticed." The roof is quiet. Lisa's grin stays where it is and stops meaning anything. "Okay," she says, after a second. "Okay. That's new." Brian looks at her. She doesn't look at him.
#"Who's the boss?"
<<var $askedBoss true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Brian's jaw tightens. Lisa says, lightly, "Someone with money, a very calm phone voice, and strong opinions about punctuality. That's the free version." "The paid version?" "Comes with the job." Alec says, "He's never met him either," and Brian says, "Alec," in a voice that ends the topic.
#"Who else have you tried this on?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
Brian rubs the back of his neck. "A girl called Spitfire. We brought Rachel, and she left before we got to the money." "And Circus," Alec says. "Who told us, in detail, where to put the money." "She works alone," Brian says. "Very alone." Lisa grins. "So you're our third try, lucky number."
#Ask Lisa, straight out, what she does.
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
<<var $challengedLisa true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
"I know things," Lisa says. "That's it, that's the whole pitch." "That's what people say when they don't want to answer." Brian laughs, surprised. Lisa points at you. "Okay, blunt. I like blunt, I'm keeping you." She doesn't answer the question. You notice that she's very good at not answering questions while seeming to.
#Ask Alec why "Regent."
Alec looks at you over the cola bottle for a while. "Long story," he says. "Boring family thing." Lisa's grin flickers, just slightly, and Brian looks at his shoes. You've touched something, and nobody on this roof is going to tell you what.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Then Taylor says yes.
You know her well enough by now to see what it is. It isn't a yes, it's a plan. She's going in to find out what they are, and she's going to tell someone.
<<choose "ch2-loft">>
#Say yes too. Whatever she's doing, she shouldn't do it alone.
<<var $joinedUndersiders true>>\
<<var $money + 2000>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<achieve "On the Payroll">>\
"Count me in," you say, and Lisa's grin gets a dimension it didn't have before, and Brian looks genuinely pleased, and Taylor looks at you the way you'd look at someone who had just followed you off a roof.
#Say you'll think about it. Walk with them anyway.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Not today," you say. "But I'll walk with you." Brian nods like that's fair. Lisa says, "Everyone says not today," in a tone that suggests she's keeping score.
#Say no, clearly. Then stay, because Taylor's staying.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"I'm not joining," you say. "I'm here because she is." Lisa looks between the two of you and puts that somewhere. "Fair enough. You can still see the place. Nobody's going to make you sign anything in blood."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
They walk you deeper into the Docks than you've been in daylight. Weeds through the sidewalk, potholes you could lose a cat in, graffiti bright against everything faded. A girl on a sidewalk with paintings propped around her waves at Lisa, and Lisa waves back.
The building says REDMOND WELDING in letters that used to be white. Brian lets you in a side door. The ground floor is dead machines under sheets. The second floor is a loft the size of a basketball court: two couches, a television bigger than your bed, a wall of game consoles, six doors with spray-painted art on three of them, a kitchen at the far end, pizza boxes, no adults anywhere. Taylor says, "I'm jealous," before she can stop herself, and Alec calls her a dork, and Lisa says it's her space now too.
They're explaining the rooms when the barking starts downstairs.
<<page "Turn around" "ch2-dogs">>/* Arc 2, Rachel's dogs at the loft. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Three dogs come up the spiral stairs like something poured, and they go for Taylor.
Not you. Her. A Rottweiler, or most of one, takes her wrist in its jaws and wrenches, and she goes down, and a German Shepherd and a one-eyed, one-eared, hairless thing are on her before she hits the floor. Brian is shouting at someone to call them off. At the top of the stairs, a square-faced girl with a broken nose and an army jacket stands with her arms folded and watches.
Rachel. Bitch. Hellhound. The one who voted no.
<<choose "ch2-dogs-after">>
#Grab the nearest one by the collar and haul.
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You get both hands in the shepherd's collar and pull. It turns on you instead, and gets your forearm. You'd planned the first part, and Taylor has one dog on her instead of three.
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go heavy and put yourself between her and the dogs. Let them chew on something that doesn't give.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You go dense and step in. The big one, the Rottweiler, hits your forearm with everything it has and its teeth skate off like it's bitten a tire. It looks personally offended.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The dogs chew on something that has been chewed on before and doesn't mind, and you don't fall.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Three seconds ahead, you can see every lunge before it happens. Get her out from under them.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You see the Rottweiler's jaw open a half second early and your hand is already there, closing it. The terrier's lunge, the shepherd's feint. You pull her backward along a path that doesn't exist yet.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and you have her out before the second dog has decided to be a second dog.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane between her and the dogs. Then another.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
Blue glass, floor to girder, between Taylor and three sets of teeth. The Rottweiler hits it full speed and sits down, blinking. You put the second one behind her for good measure.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go up between every tooth and her, and hold, and she stops screaming because there's nothing to scream at.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) A charged coin off the floor in front of them. Don't hit the dogs. Hit the floorboards.
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You flick a quarter at the boards a foot in front of the Rottweiler and it goes off like a shotgun, splinters everywhere. All three dogs reverse so hard they slide.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The coin hits the floorboard between the dogs with the exact charge that makes a noise and nothing else, because you've practiced the exact charge.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Hand on the floor. The boards under the dogs are old.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You slap a palm on the floorboards and they go, a six-foot section dropping an inch with a crack like a gunshot. Three dogs scramble back from a floor that just moved under them.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The boards under the dogs come apart in a shape you chose, and the dogs go down, and she doesn't.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip. Grab her. Skip again.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You're beside her, you have her collar, and you're across the room, in the time it takes the Rottweiler to close its mouth on air. Your stomach arrives shortly after you do.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Grab her, skip, and your stomach doesn't argue, and you've got a second skip left to put her on the stairs.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Down." You've never tried it on dogs.
<<var $rom_rachel - 10>>\
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
"Down." All three hit the floor like their strings were cut. So does Alec, who was half off the couch. Nobody in the room looks at you the same way afterward.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Down," and three dogs go down like they've heard it from someone they love.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Walk up unnoticed, and take the big one by the collar.
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
Nobody looks at you, and that includes the dogs. You take the Rottweiler by its collar from behind and haul, and it's so surprised to be held by nothing that it lets go of her.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You take the big one by the collar and it doesn't know it's been taken until it's across the room.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The baton. Not on the dogs. On the floor lamp beside them, and let it arc. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You put the baton to the lamp's cord and the lamp goes off like a flashbulb, and three dogs who have never been afraid of anything flinch from the light long enough for you to get an arm around Taylor and haul. The baton is slag. So is the lamp. Alec says, "Hey."
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The lamp's cord is live because you rewired it on the way in, and you did it without deciding to.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Touch Rachel. Start the clock on whatever her dogs are.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You get a hand on Rachel's wrist on the way past, and then you know what she knows, thinly, a first-minute copy: three dogs, and the thing that makes them bigger, and the thread from her to each of them. You can't pull the thread yet. You can tug it. The Rottweiler hesitates for one second with Taylor's wrist in its mouth, which is enough to get your arm in instead, and Rachel looks at you like you've put your hand in her chest. By the time the dogs are called off you can feel what she feels, all of it, and you'd rather not.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> Rachel's power comes into you hot, and by the second minute you know what the dogs are, and they know you know.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out, take her out of the world with you, and let the dogs bite air.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
You get a hand on her wrist and go, and the Rottweiler's jaws close on nothing. You're both a second behind the loft, and it's quiet, and she looks at you with her mouth open. You come back when Rachel whistles. Taylor sits down on the floor.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You take her a second behind the world and she comes back with all of her, because you've learned how to carry someone through.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed halfway. Put the grey arm in the big one's mouth instead of hers.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<achieve "Dog Person">>\
The Rottweiler bites the grey arm and finds it isn't meat, and lets go with a confused noise, and the other two back off from the thing that's half you. Brian stares. Alec says, "Okay, that's new."
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey arm takes the bite and the dog's jaw finds something it can't close on, and lets go, surprised.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Stay back. Brian's handling it. You've known Taylor for three days.
<<var $taylorTrust - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $taylorHurt true>>\
You stay where you are. Later, you'll go over the two seconds you spent deciding that, more times than you'd like.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. The big one, by the scruff, with both hands.
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
You get both hands into the shepherd's scruff and lift, and it comes off her with its feet going, and you throw it, and it lands and looks at you.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. In under the dog. Her first.
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
You go in low under the first lunge and come up with Taylor's wrist in one hand and the second dog's collar in the other, and you're on the stairs before the third has decided.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The whistle on the wall. Rachel's whistle.
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
Rachel's whistle is on a nail by the door and you blow it the way you've heard her blow it, twice, short, and three dogs stop and look at the door.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Rachel. Say her name like a friend would.
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
"Rachel," you say, not loud, the way nobody in this loft says it, and she looks at you, and whistles, and the dogs come off.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk into the dogs and don't flinch.
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
You walk into three dogs without raising your hands and don't flinch when the first one hits you, and the first one stops, confused, because prey flinches.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go heavy between her and three dogs and the dogs hit you like a wall, and stop being a problem.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body picks up two dogs by the collar at once, and the third decides to be elsewhere.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Grab her, skip, and the second skip puts her on the stairs with the dogs still in the air where you were.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You take all three collars, one at a time, and the dogs don't know what has them.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The floorboards under all three dogs go at once, in a shape that drops them and not her.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The lamp, the cord, the baton, and a sound that three dogs have never heard and never want to again.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and she's out before the first dog lands.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>Three coins, three floorboards, three exact charges, and three dogs sit down.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Down," and three dogs go down and stay down and Rachel looks at you like you've stolen something.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>Rachel's power in you by the first minute, and you tell the dogs what she tells them, and they listen.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You take her a second behind the world and walk her up the stairs through a room full of dogs biting nothing.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane in every mouth, and the room goes quiet.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Null and the Word. Take Rachel's command, and say it in her voice.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You touch Rachel and the clock starts, and by the second minute you have what she has with dogs, and you say "Off" the way she'd say it and the way the Word says it at the same time, and three dogs come off Taylor like they've been called by God.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Pane and Skip. Skip to her, and box the two of you in blue before the dogs land.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $savedFromDogs true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $rom_taylor + 5>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You're next to her in one skip and the panes go up around you both in the same breath, and three dogs hit a blue box from three sides and sit down, confused, and inside the box Taylor says, "Oh," very quietly, and holds your sleeve.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<if (($stayedHome is true) and ($savedFromDogs is true))>><<achieve "Late Bloomer">><</if>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $health to 5>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($savedFromDogs is true)>>\
Brian hits Rachel. Not hard by his standards, you think, but hard enough that she sits down with blood coming out of her nose and whistles, and the dogs fall back into a neat line like nothing happened.
Taylor is on her feet already. There's blood on her sleeve where the Rottweiler had her, but she's standing, and she's looking at you, and then she's looking at Rachel.
<<else>>\
It goes on for a long time, by the standards of a thing like that. Brian hits Rachel. She sits down with blood coming out of her nose and whistles, and the dogs fall back into a neat line like nothing happened.
Lisa and Alec get Taylor up. She's shaking. Her wrist is bleeding through her sleeve and there are scrapes on her stomach where the terrier got under her shirt, and a cut on her ear, and she's holding her forearm with her other hand like it might come off.
<<set $taylorHurt to true>>\
<</if>>\
Rachel licks blood off her lip and smiles at her. It's a smug, mean little smile from a girl on the floor with a broken nose, and it's the wrong thing to do, because Taylor crosses the room.
You've never seen her move like that. She kicks at Rachel's head, and Rachel gets her arms up in time; then at the ear when the arms come down, then the ribs, and bugs are coming in through every window and crack in the loft, and the dogs are backing away from them. Brian's darkness comes down between Taylor and the dogs like a curtain and then he's standing there, saying //enough//, in a voice that fills the room.
Then Taylor says what you'd say. That this is enough. That they said Rachel wasn't on board, not that she'd set dogs on a guest. That they can count this as another failed recruitment. She goes for the stairs, and Brian's darkness swallows the stairwell, and she walks into it anyway.
<<choose "ch2-outside">>
#Go after her. Through the dark.
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
You walk into it. It's oil and silence and no up or down, and you find the railing by touch and go down it fast, and come out into the dead machine room in time to see the side door swing shut.
#Stay. Someone should hear what Rachel has to say for herself.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You stay. Rachel says, to the floor, that if she'd told them to kill her they'd have done it, that she gave the hurt command. Lisa says, "Rache," in a voice you haven't heard her use. Alec says, "Honestly? Kind of impressed," and Lisa throws a coaster at him. Then you go down the stairs.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Brian is already outside, alone, on the cracked pavement by the side door, talking fast and low. Taylor has her arms wrapped around herself and her back to the wall, and she's listening, more than he's earned.
He's apologizing for the darkness and for Rachel. He says if it were up to him, he'd keep Taylor and lose Rachel, but it isn't up to him; the boss pays, the boss supplies, the boss decides who the heavy hitters are. He tells her she's bleeding, that he's trained in first aid, that her bag with the money is upstairs, that he'll quit the team himself before Rachel pulls that again. Please come back inside.
Taylor looks at you.
She actually looks at you, over Brian's shoulder, and whatever she decides next, she's going to decide partly on what your face does.
<<choose "ch2-loft-evening">>
#Tell her to go back in. She wanted inside their walls. She's inside.
<<var $taylorJoined true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"You came here for a reason," you say, carefully, because Brian is standing right there. "You're hurt and your stuff's upstairs, so go get patched up. I'm not leaving." She holds your eyes for a second longer. "Fine," she tells Brian. "But I'm only coming back because she doesn't want me to." "I'll take it," Brian says, and opens the door.
#Tell her to leave. With you. Now. -> "ch2-leave"
<<var $rom_taylor + 10>>\
<<var $leftWithTaylor true>>\
<<var $taylorJoined false>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Walked Out">>\
"Come on," you say, to her and not to Brian. "You don't owe them anything, and you don't owe her a second round." Brian starts to say something and you say, "She's //bleeding//, Brian," and he stops. Taylor pushes off the wall. "My bag," she says. "I'll get it," you say, and you go up the stairs past Lisa, who for once isn't smiling, and come back down with a backpack and a lunchbox full of money that Lisa does not try to take back.
#show-if ($joinedUndersiders is true) Tell her to go. Not home: to the PHQ. You'll stay. -> "ch2-swap"
<<var $swap true>>\
<<var $taylorJoined false>>\
<<var $taylorWards true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "The Swap">>\
"You wanted someone inside," you say, low, with Brian three feet away pretending not to hear. "Someone's inside, so go do the other half. The man with the halberd said the switchboard knows his name." She stares at you. Brian says, "Hey," and you say, "She's bleeding, Brian, and she's done," and he lets it go, because he's decent.
#Say nothing. Let her choose. It's her life and her plan.
<<var $taylorJoined true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You keep your face still, and it takes everything you have left, and she reads it anyway. "Fine," she tells Brian. "But I'm only coming back because she doesn't want me to." "I'll take it," Brian says, and opens the door.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
You walk out of the Docks the way you came, faster. Taylor doesn't say anything for ten blocks. Her wrist has stopped bleeding, and the sleeve is stiff with it.
"I had a plan," she says finally. "I was going to find out what they are. Who pays them. Take it to Armsmaster."
"I know."
"That was a good plan."
"It was. You'd have been in that building every day with those dogs. With a boy who can turn the lights off whenever he wants. With her, and she knows things. Alone, waiting to get caught." You hear yourself and stop. "I'm not saying it was wrong. I'm saying I didn't want to watch it."
She stops walking. "And now what. I'm nothing. I've got a costume and a lunchbox of villain money and no team."
"You've got the lunchbox," you say. "And you've got whoever I am. That's two." It's a stupid thing to say. It's also the first time today she's laughed like she means it.
You walk her to within two blocks of her house. She won't let you closer, because her dad might be home. At the corner she says, "Tomorrow. School. Don't sit in my group, it's weird," and you say, "Noted," and she makes a face at the word.
<<page "Home" "ch2-home-late">><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $taylorJoined to true>>\
Brian stitches Taylor's arm on the arm of the couch with a first aid kit that's better stocked than your school nurse's office, and tapes Rachel's ear while he's at it, and the two of them sit six feet apart and don't speak. "We all did a first aid course," Alec says, from the other couch. "He made us do it the first week. You'll get the same treatment." "I already did," Taylor says, and Brian smiles, and looks his age for once.
<<if ($taylorHurt is true)>>\
Taylor flinches every time anyone moves fast. You note it. You think Lisa notes you noting it.
<</if>>\
Alec shows you his power by making Brian fall over on his way back from the bathroom. It turns out he can reach into a nervous system and flick it: a stumble, a dropped glass, a finger on a trigger. "It's a dumb power," he says. "Then it isn't." Brian puts him in a headlock. Rachel, from her chair, says the dogs aren't freakish, to nobody, and nobody argues.
Then Lisa, with her feet under her, explains what she does.
"I know things. My power fills in gaps. Give me a little and it gives me more, and it compounds." She tips her head at Taylor. "Like how I knew you were at the library. Like how I knew the cape was coming Sunday. Like how I know what the PRT's doctors found when they looked at Lung." She shrugs. "I cheat, too. Passwords are easy. I watch their cameras when I'm bored."
Taylor hasn't moved, and you can see her doing the math on an undercover job opposite a girl who knows things.
<<choose "ch2-loft-night">>
#"Then read me, right now, out loud."
<<var $challengedLisa true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Lisa's grin goes sharp. "You sure?" "Yes." She looks at you for three seconds. "You didn't sleep Sunday. You've got a notebook with a code in it. You've been scared since about one this afternoon and you're not scared of us.<<if ($hair is "dyed, a blue streak through it")>> You did the streak yourself, over a sink, and you'll redo it before it fades. It's the one thing about you that isn't careful.<<elseif ($hair is "buzzed down to nothing")>> You buzz your own hair so nobody can grab it.<<elseif ($mark is "a scar through one eyebrow")>> The scar's older than the power. You let people assume it's from the worst day. It isn't.<</if>>" She stops. "That's all you get for free. The rest I'd be a bitch to say in front of people." Brian exhales. Taylor is looking at you like you've just stuck your hand in a fire to see.
#Say nothing. Let her see you deciding not to ask.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You hold her eyes and don't ask, and she watches you not ask, and something passes between you that Brian doesn't catch and Taylor does. "Smart," Lisa says. "The ones who ask always regret it."
#Ask the rule. "No real names in costume, no cape names out. Right?"
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Right," Lisa says, pleased. "Get the habit now and you don't slip later. Rachel's Rachel. Brian's Brian. In the field, Bitch and Grue." "And him?" "Alec," Alec says. "Regent only when I'm being paid."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
The afternoon goes somewhere. There's a television the size of a wall and Alec plays something loud on it, and a pizza debate that ends with Chinese food, and a room with a crown on the door and a room with a face on it and a storage closet Lisa says they'll clear out for Taylor, and Taylor says she has a place, and Lisa says can we just do it anyway.
Rachel sits on a table at the edge of all of it with a bloody pad taped to her ear and watches Taylor the way a dog watches a door.
Around five, Taylor goes to the kitchen to call her dad. You follow because nobody's told you not to. She's on the phone saying //Annette Rose Hebert// and //really, dad, it's fine// when you both see the table.
There's banded money on it, and beside the money, flat on the wood like someone put down their keys, a handgun.
<<set $sawGun to true>>\
Taylor says, into the phone, that they seem like good people.
<<choose "ch2-home-late">>
#show-if ($joinedUndersiders is true) Pick a room. You're in this now.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Lisa says the storage closet is yours and Taylor's to split until they clear out another; she says it like someone who already knows you'll be back. Alec spray-paints a question mark on the door before you leave. "Until you pick a name," he says. "For the door. Not for you. Nobody picks a name for you."
#Ask Lisa, quietly, whose gun that is.
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Brian's," she says. "Legally, nobody's. He doesn't carry it. He likes knowing it's there." She looks at you with the green eyes. "You're going to tell her that, aren't you." "She saw it before I did." "Yeah," Lisa says. "She did."
#Say goodnight. Walk out while you still can.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You tell Taylor you'll see her at school. You tell Brian thanks for the stitches, and Lisa nothing, because she already knows. The spiral stairs are very long on the way down.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
You go home at the normal time, on the normal bus.
<<if ($bugContact is true)>>\
At nine your account gets a message.
<<pho $phoName>>\
<<pho-topic "Private message conversation with 2031845" "Private Messages">>\
<<pho-post "2031845" "" "Sent On Apr 11th 2011:">>Met them. Took the job. Don't ask me about it at school. B.<</pho-post>>\
<</pho>>\
You read it four times and put the phone face down.
<<set $taylorJoined to true>>\
<<elseif ($suspectTaylor is true)>>\
At nine, on a hunch, you check Parahumans Online. The "Bug" thread has been deleted by its author. You know what that probably means.
<<set $taylorJoined to true>>\
<<else>>\
You do homework. It takes an hour and you don't remember any of it.
<<set $taylorJoined to true>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($wardsInterest is true)>>\
Tomorrow, after school, you have a meeting at the PRT building. You lay out clothes for it like it's a job interview, and then realize it is one.
<</if>>\
<<page "Go out. An hour, no more." "patrol-mon">>
<<page "Night" "ch2-home-late">><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $sawGun to true>>\
Taylor goes, not fast. She looks back once at the corner, at you standing beside Brian in the doorway of a villain's warehouse, and you can't tell what her face is doing from here, and then she's gone.
"She's not coming back," Brian says.
"No."
"You are."
"Apparently."
Upstairs, Lisa is on the couch with her feet under her and a look you're starting to recognize, the one that means her power has already told her and she's deciding how much to say. "The boss," she says, "is going to ask why we ended up with you instead of the bug girl."
"What are you going to tell him?"
"That we got the one who stayed." She tips her head. "She'll go to the Protectorate. You know that."
"Yes."
"Good," Lisa says, and you can tell she means it. "Someone should. It'd be a boring city if everyone was on the same side." Then, in a different voice, "You just did the thing I'd have done. I'm not sure how I feel about that."
Brian stitches Rachel's ear. Rachel says nothing to you, and watches you the whole time, and you've been categorized as a problem that bites back. Alec shows you his power by making Brian trip on the way back from the bathroom. Lisa shows you the room with the question mark on the door, and the storage closet beside it that was going to be Taylor's, and leaves the closet unexplained.
In the kitchen, when you go to call home, there's banded money on the table and a handgun lying beside it like someone put down their keys.
<<choose "ch2-home-late">>
#Ask Lisa whose gun it is.
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Brian's, and legally nobody's. He doesn't carry it, he just likes knowing it's there." She watches you look at it. "You're not going to tell her about it." "She's not here to tell." "That's not what I asked."
#Say nothing about it. Make your call.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You make your call with your back to the table. You tell the truth about nothing in particular and nobody on the other end believes you, and that's going to have to be fine.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Tuesday. Taylor is at the bus stop before you, for the first time since you've known her. Her wrist is wrapped under her sleeve and she's standing very straight, the way she stood before she walked into Brian's darkness.
"I'm going to call the number," she says, before you've said good morning. "Armsmaster's, the PHQ switchboard. I had a plan and the plan's gone, and I'm not going to sit in my basement with two thousand dollars of villain money feeling sorry for myself." She breathes out. "They'll want to meet after school, today probably, because they move fast when there's a new one."
She doesn't ask, and she waits for you to say it.
<<choose "ch2-tuesday-school">>
#Go with her. Both of you, or neither.
<<var $taylorAtPRT true>>\
<<var $wardsInterest true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
"Both of us," you say. Her shoulders come down the inch they've been holding since Friday. "Okay," she says. "Okay. After school, then, and bring the costume, because they'll want to see it."
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] Tell her you'll come, and make her say why she wants you there.
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $rom_taylor + 5>>\
<<var $taylorAtPRT true>>\
<<var $wardsInterest true>>\
She goes red to the ears and looks at the bus schedule. "Because you're the only person who's seen me do it and didn't run," she says, to the schedule. "Because I don't want to walk into that building alone. Because." She stops. "Both of us," she says, and it's an answer to a question you didn't ask.
#Let her go alone. You're not ready to sign anything.
<<var $taylorWards true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Go," you say. "I'm not there yet." She nods like she expected it. At six that evening your account gets a message: //Met them. Meeting Thursday. They asked about you. I said you were a friend. Don't make me a liar. B.//
#Talk her out of it. Two independents are better than two probationers.
<<var $independents true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Independents">>\
"They'll put a tracker in your boot and a shrink on your Thursdays," you say. "You'd hate it by May. Give it two weeks, just us, and if it doesn't work the number's still there." She thinks about it the whole bus ride. At school, between periods, she says, "Two weeks," like she's signing something.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $metWards to true>>\
The PRT building downtown has a bank's lobby and a museum's gift shop. <<if ($taylorAtPRT is true)>>Deputy Director Renick is a tired man with a kind face who asks you both the same five questions three different ways and writes down every answer, and who stops writing when Taylor says, flatly, what she did to Lung. Armsmaster comes in and stays. He looks at the mask in her hands a while. "You picked a name?" he asks. "Not yet." "Pick one before Thursday. The press office will pick one for you otherwise, and you won't like it."<<else>>Deputy Director Renick is a tired man with a kind face who asks you the same five questions three different ways and writes down every answer. Armsmaster comes in for ten minutes, says "Good," about something, and leaves.<</if>>
<<if ($record is true)>>Renick's folder has your school file in it, and he's read it. "Two suspensions," he says, not unkindly, and writes something next to the number. <</if>>Renick's fifth question is the one every PRT interview gets to. "Can you tell me about the circumstances in which you acquired your abilities?" He reads it off the form in a kinder voice than the form deserves.
<<choose "ch2-wards-2">>
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] Make Renick like you first. Ask about the photo on his desk.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $renickLikes to true>>\
Two kids, a dog, a lake. He tells you about the lake for a minute and a half before he remembers the form, and when he gets back to it his pen is slower and his questions are kinder, and you've learned that the Deputy Director is a man who can be reached, and that you can reach him.
#Tell him. The real version.
<<var $toldRenickTrigger true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You tell him. <<if ($vial is true)>>He stops writing halfway through, and looks at Armsmaster, and Armsmaster's face does nothing at all. From him, that's a reaction. "Thank you," Renick says, carefully. "That's... helpful. We'll want to follow up." Somewhere, a different file has just been opened.<<else>>He writes it down without looking up, and you're grateful for that. When you're done he says, "Thank you. I know that isn't easy," and you believe he knows.<</if>>
#Give him the shape of it. No details.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Something bad happened. I'd rather not." He nods and writes a single word, and you'd give a lot to know which one. "That's your right. The Wards psychologist will ask again. You can say the same thing to her."
#Decline. Politely. Watch what he does.
<<var $control + 1>>\
"No." He doesn't push. He makes a mark on the form and moves to question six, and you learn that the PRT is an organization that has met people who say no before and has a box for them.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
Then they take you upstairs to meet the Wards, in costume, because you aren't one yet.
Aegis, square and polite, who shakes your hand like he's been told to be the adult in the room and has decided to be good at it. <<if ($looks is 10)>>Clockblocker, who had a joke about your costume ready and loses it when the mask comes off in the briefing room: "Okay. Nobody said the new one was going to be distracting. Aegis, I need a ruling." Vista says, "Dennis," before Aegis can. <<else>>Clockblocker, who has a joke about your costume ready before he's seen it and uses it anyway: "<<if ($build is "tall")>>Did it come in your size, or did you grow after?<<elseif ($build is "small")>>Is that a costume or a very serious tracksuit?<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>Gray. Bold. Says 'filing cabinet with a secret.'<<else>>Gray. Really committed to the gray.<</if>>" <</if>>Vista, who is twelve, and looks at you like she's measuring you for something<<if ($marked is true)>>, and who says, when Clockblocker starts a sentence about your file, "It's a stupid thing to have a problem with," in a tone that ends the sentence<</if>>. Gallant, in silver and grey, who looks at you a half second too long and then says, low, "You're angrier than you look. That's fine. Most of us are." Kid Win, adjusting a visor, who asks what you can do and then asks three follow-up questions about the physics of it before Aegis stops him.
<<if ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>Clockblocker leans in. "You're the other one. From Sunday. The one who told Armsmaster to put somebody else's name on it." He grins under the mask. "That is the //funniest// thing anyone has done in this building in a year. Don't tell him I said that."<<elseif ($tookCredit is true)>>Clockblocker leans in. "You're the one on the news. Took the credit." He whistles. "Brave. Dumb, but brave. Lee's going to come looking. We'll be around when he does; that's sort of the pitch."<</if>>
And a girl in black with a cloak and a crossbow, standing at the back with her arms folded, who doesn't come forward and doesn't say her name. "Shadow Stalker," Aegis says. "She's... adjusting."
<<if ($taylorAtPRT is true)>>\
Taylor says hello to the room. Four words. The girl in the cloak doesn't move at all when she says them, and the stillness is deliberate. Taylor doesn't notice. She's looking at Vista, who is twelve and in the Wards, and doing math about her own life.
<<set $sophiaHunting to true>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($sophiaHunting is true)>>\
She's standing the way she stood against the lockers this afternoon, her weight on the same foot, not moving.
<<elseif ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>\
She's standing the way she stood at the end of the third-floor hall on Monday with a foot on someone else's bag, her weight on the same foot, not moving. You feel the floor shift a half inch under you, and you keep your face where it is, and you know, with total certainty, that she is doing the same thing about you.
<<set $sophiaHunting to true>>\
<</if>>\
Renick walks you out with a folder. Stipend, schedule, oversight, a trust account you can't touch until eighteen. "Take it home," he says. "Talk to your family. But I'll be honest: after Sunday, the Director would like an answer this week."
<<if ($taylorAtPRT is true)>>\
Two folders. Renick holds them both flat on the hood of a PRT van in the parking garage and waits with the patience of a man who has done this before.
<<choose "ch2-evening-train">>
#Sign. Both of you. Together.
<<var $joinedWards true>>\
<<var $taylorWards true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<achieve "Probationary">>\
<<achieve "Two Badges">>\
She signs first, in handwriting that's smaller than you expected. You sign under her. Renick shakes both your hands and says welcome to the Wards, and you think about the girl with the crossbow who didn't flinch and wonder what the two of you have just been welcomed into.
#Let her sign. Take yours home.
<<var $taylorWards true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
She signs. You don't. In the garage afterward she looks at the folder under your arm and says, "You said both of us." "I said both of us or neither. You picked." It isn't fair and you both know it, and she gets on a different bus.
#Neither. Walk out with the folders unsigned and her beside you.
<<var $independents true>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<achieve "Independents">>\
"We'll think about it," you tell Renick, and Taylor, after a long second, nods. On the sidewalk outside she says, "That girl at the back. The one who didn't talk." "Yeah." "Nothing. Never mind." She knows something is wrong with that room. She doesn't know what yet.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
<<choose "ch2-evening-train">>
#Sign it. Tonight.
<<var $joinedWards true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Probationary">>\
You sign it on the hood of a PRT van in the parking garage with Renick holding the folder flat. He shakes your hand. "Welcome to the Wards," he says, and you think about the girl with the crossbow and wonder what you've just been welcomed to.
#Take it home. You said you'd think, and you meant it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The folder goes in your bag next to your math homework. It weighs about the same, and about a thousand times more.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Mom is awake when you get home, in street clothes, so she called in sick to be here. She doesn't ask where you were. She asks if you ate. Then she asks if you were alone. You tell her the truth. No.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Aunt Ruth has the crossword and hasn't filled in a square. "The school called," she says. "You were marked absent this afternoon." She fills in a square. "I told them you were with me." You don't know what to do with that, so you say thank you, and she says, "Don't make me a liar twice."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt has the scanner on. "Quiet night," he says, and turns it off, and asks nothing, and you can tell he won't do that twice.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad is home early again. He's cooked, and he never cooks. The new lock is on the table between you. "I'm not going to put a bell on the door," he says. "But I thought about it."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana has waited up again. She doesn't say //sit// this time. She holds out her hand, palm up, and after a second you put yours in it, and she squeezes once, hard, with the hand the stroke didn't take, and lets go.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Your father is home before nine for the first time since you moved. The cream card is on the counter. "She called again," he says. "She asked how your Monday went. By name. Your //school// name." He has poured a drink and not touched it. "Who did I sign with?" "I don't know yet," you say, and it's the truest thing you've told him in four months.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas has the scanner on and a cold plate on the table for you. "Quiet night," he says. "Eat." He goes back to the stereo he's gutting, and that is all the asking he does.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma is still downstairs, folding the lost-and-found the way she does when she can't sleep. She looks up when you come in. "School called," she says. "You weren't there this afternoon." She folds a towel. "Mrs. Pham says you were with the Hebert girl, so I didn't worry much."
<<else>>\
Marcus is on the couch with his phone face up, and he's asleep, and it buzzes once while you're taking your shoes off and the screen says //New Kid// and that's what he has you saved as, and he texted himself to remember to ask where you were.
<</if>>\
You don't sleep until the window starts going grey.
<<page "Interlude" "ch2-interlude-ss">>''Interlude: Shadow Stalker''
Sophia Hess ran rooftops the way other people paced.
Three hours into a patrol she wasn't supposed to be on alone, with the tracker in her boot telling the console she was doing laps of the Boardwalk, she stopped on the roof of a shuttered bank six blocks from Winslow and let herself go to smoke, and then back, just to feel it.
Probation. That was the word the PRT liked. Six months in the Wards for one Merchant with two broken legs who'd had it coming, and a shrink every Thursday, and a tracker. They thought it was a leash. It was a long leash, and she'd learned to run on it.
She was thinking about the new kid.
<<if ($stoppedJuice is true)>>\
Friday. The bathroom. She'd had the second bottle in her hand, and then she hadn't, and whatever had happened in between had happened faster than she could follow, and Sophia Hess could follow a crossbow bolt. Nobody normal moved like that.
<<elseif ($helpedTaylor is true)>>\
Friday. The bathroom. The new kid had walked in on a thing that nobody walked in on, and had stood there like the room belonged to $herHim, and had looked at her, specifically, like $sheHe was adding her up. Prey didn't look at Sophia like that.
<<else>>\
Friday. The new kid had kept walking. Smart. Prey that knew it was prey. Except that wasn't quite right either, because she'd watched the transfer in the hall that afternoon and the transfer hadn't walked like prey. The transfer had walked like something that had decided not to be involved. Different animal.
<</if>>\
<<if ($tookBagBack is true)>>\
And today. The bag. Sophia had let go a half second late on purpose, to see what the face did. The face had done nothing. That was the tell. Normal people's faces did something.
<</if>>\
<<if ($stoodWithTaylor is true)>>\
Nine to one at the window, and the transfer had walked into the middle of it like the numbers didn't apply. Emma had been furious afterward, in her quiet way. Sophia had been interested.
<</if>>\
She didn't like Hebert. That wasn't news. Hebert was the kind of weak that invited things, the kind that curled up and took it and called that strength. The world was predators and prey and Hebert had picked a side the day she stopped fighting back, and everything since was just gravity.
The new kid hadn't picked yet.
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>\
And there was Sunday. A new cape in the Docks, the console said, the night Lung went down. Bugs. One kid, alone, and then the dogs. It had nothing to do with the transfer, and she put it next to the transfer anyway.
<<elseif ($tookCredit is true)>>\
And there was Sunday. A new cape in the Docks, the console said, two of them, the night Lung went down. One of them had a name on the news now. Sophia had read the description twice. Build. Height. The way the PRT's witness had said $sheHe moved.
She was not stupid. Everyone thought she was, because she hit things. She could count to two.
<<elseif ($sophiaHunting is true)>>\
And there was Sunday. Two new capes in the Docks, the console said, the night Lung went down. No names. One description: young, <<buildword>>, moved fast, didn't talk much. Sophia had read it twice and thought about a transfer student who'd shown up in January with new shoes and a flinch, and who had stopped flinching.
She was not stupid. Everyone thought she was, because she hit things. She could count to two.
<<else>>\
And there was Sunday. Two new capes in the Docks, the console said, the night Lung went down. No names. One description: young, <<buildword>>, moved like $sheHe'd been in a real fight. Sophia had put it next to the new kid without deciding why.
<</if>>\
She went to smoke, dropped through the roof of the bank, came out on the ground floor, and walked to the bus stop as a sophomore with a gym bag. Tomorrow she'd watch the transfer in the hall. She'd stand too close and see which way $sheHe leaned.
Predator or prey. Everybody was one or the other. The only question was how long it took them to find out.
<<set $sophiaHunting to true>>\
<<if ($leftWithTaylor is true)>>\
<<page "Tuesday morning" "ch2-tuesday-taylor">>\
<<else>>\
<<page "Tuesday morning" "ch2-tuesday-school">>\
<</if>>\<<include "refresh">>\
Tuesday at Winslow.
<<if ($swap is true)>>\
Taylor passes you on the stairs between first and second and doesn't look at you, and a folded square of paper is in your jacket pocket when you get to the top, and it says //Thursday. Don't know me.// in handwriting smaller than you expected. You don't know her, and it takes work.
<<elseif (($joinedUndersiders is true) and ($taylorJoined is true))>>\
Taylor nods at you once in the hall, the smallest possible nod, and keeps walking. The two of you have a loft with a question mark on the door and a boss nobody will name, and at Winslow you're a transfer student and a girl nobody talks to, and you both understand that this is going to take practice.
<<elseif ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
Taylor is at school. She looks like she slept even less than you did, and there's a bandage under her sleeve that she keeps her hand over. <<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>She doesn't come near you. She asked you not to bring it up, and the not-bringing-up has a shape in the hallway you can both see.<<else>>She doesn't look at anyone. Something happened to her yesterday afternoon, and you can't ask.<</if>>
<<elseif ($leftWithTaylor is true)>>\
Taylor sits with you at lunch. In the cafeteria, at a table, with people watching. Neither of you mentions it, and Greg Veder sits down with you both uninvited and talks about Space Opera for nine minutes, and it is the most normal thing that has happened to either of you in a week.
<<else>>\
Taylor is at school with her hood up and doesn't look at you.
<</if>>\
<<if ($sophiaHunting is true)>>\
Sophia Hess finds you between second and third, and she stands too close. She isn't touching you, but she's close enough that you can smell the gym on her, close enough that anyone watching would think you were friends or about to fight.
"New kid," she says. She's looking at the hallway, not at you. "Sleep okay Sunday?"
It's the question of someone who knows the answer. You can feel her waiting to see which way you lean.
<<choose "ch2-tuesday-school-2">>
#Lean in. "Fine. You?"
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You don't step back, and you don't step forward either. You just don't move, and you say it to the hallway the way she did. Her mouth tightens. "Fine," she says. "Busy." She walks off. You've passed something or failed it, and you won't know which for a while.
#Step back. Give her the space she's trying to take.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You step back. Her eyes come to you then, finally, and there's something in them that's almost disappointment. "Yeah," she says. "That's what I thought." She goes. That was the wrong answer and the safe one. With Sophia they're usually the same.
#show-if (($metWards is true) and ($sophiaSuspicious is true)) Say it, low. "You stood at the back of the room."
<<var $rom_sophia + 10>>\
<<var $calledSophia true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
She goes absolutely still. For a count of three, Sophia Hess, who is never still, is a statue in a Winslow hallway. Then, "Careful," she says, barely voiced. "You have no idea what careful means yet." She walks away without hurrying. You've just changed the rules of something. She's going to decide the new ones.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Emma Barnes passes you twice in the halls and looks at you both times, the long look, the one that's making a list. Madison is sweet to you for thirty seconds by the vending machines. Mr. Gladly avoids your eyes in the hall with the skill of long practice.
<<page "After school" "ch2-tuesday-school-2">>\
<</if>>\
<<if (($savedShopkeeper is true) and ($job is ""))>>\
There's a message for you at the front office, and nobody gets messages at the front office. A man's voice, careful English, no name: the noodle place on Fourth needs someone to wash dishes and carry boxes, three evenings a week, cash. He doesn't say how he got the school's number. He doesn't say how he knows which kid to ask for. You think about a mask and a counter and a twenty-dollar bill. He worked it out, and he's telling you he worked it out, and that this is what he's doing about it.
<<set $job to "the noodle shop">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<if (($taylorAtPRT is true) or (($wardsInterest is true) and ($atLoft is false) and ($metWards is false)))>>\
The last bell goes. You have somewhere to be downtown.
<<page "The PRT building" "ch2-wards">>\
<<elseif (($joinedUndersiders is true) or ($swap is true) or ($taylorJoined is true))>>\
The last bell goes. Somewhere across the city, a phone is ringing.
<<page "Interlude" "ch2-interlude-tt2">>\
<<else>>\
The last bell goes. You go home the normal way, on the normal bus, and nothing follows you, and you check twice.
<<page "Evening" "ch2-evening-train">>\
<</if>>\''Interlude: Tattletale''
The phone the boss gave her only ever rang from one number, and it rang at 4:12, which meant he'd waited until school let out, which meant he knew which of them were still in school, which Lisa had always known he knew and still didn't like.
"Report," the voice said, calm the way it was always calm, like a hand resting on the back of your neck.
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>\
"There's a second one," Lisa said first, because he'd hear it in her voice otherwise. "Winslow kid. Followed the bug girl to the meet, and nobody should be able to do that to the bug girl. Has a power and has never used it where anyone could see. I'd call it a find." "Noted," the voice said. She heard the file open.
<</if>>\
<<if ($swap is true)>>\
"We got one of the two, and not the one you wanted." She said it before he could ask. "The bug girl walked. She'll go to the Protectorate; I'd put money on it. The other one stayed." A pause on the line that her power filled in for her: //recalculating.// "Describe the other one." She did, carefully, leaving out everything her power had given her for free. He listened. "Acceptable," he said. "Keep the bug girl's file open." He hadn't said //drop it//. He'd said //open//.
<<elseif (($joinedUndersiders is true) and ($taylorJoined is true))>>\
"Both," Lisa said. "The bug girl and the other one, signed, housed and fed. Brian's thrilled, and Rachel bit one of them, figuratively." "Both," the voice repeated, and she heard the thing under it that she was never supposed to hear: pleasure. "That's ahead of schedule." "I'm good at my job." "You are," he said, the way he'd confirm a line on an inventory.
<<elseif ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
"The bug girl's in," Lisa said. "She's got a wrist full of stitches and a grudge against Rachel, which, honestly, same. The other one <<if ($tattletaleNumber is true)>>has my number and hasn't used it.<<else>>walked. Politely. $SheHe'll be back; $sheHe's got the look.<</if>>" "Keep the other one warm," the voice said. "Capes who hesitate are capes who can be moved." She said yes. She thought about a transfer student in a homemade costume who hadn't hesitated once on Sunday, and said nothing about that.
<<elseif ($leftWithTaylor is true)>>\
"We lost her." Lisa didn't dress it up, because dressing it up was for people whose boss couldn't tell. "Rachel did the dog thing, and the other one walked her out. Both gone." Silence. Her power offered her //displeasure, controlled// and she waved it off; she didn't need a power for that. "The other one," the voice said. "The one who walked her out. Tell me about $herHim." She did. All of it, this time, because he'd know if she didn't. When she finished he said, "Then we get her back, or we get the other one. You have two weeks." He hung up. Lisa sat with the phone in her lap and thought about a kid who'd looked at Brian in a doorway and said //she's bleeding// like it settled something, and felt, under the headache, something she didn't have a word for and didn't want one.
<<else>>\
"The bug girl's in," Lisa said. "The other one isn't, yet." "Yet," the voice said, and let it sit, and she heard him write it down.
<</if>>\
"One more thing," the voice said. "Thursday. The bank. We're moving it up." And he told her which one, and she didn't need to write it down.
<<page "Tuesday evening" "ch2-evening-train">><<set $trainReturn to "ch2-end">>\
<<set $trainPts to 1>>\
Tuesday evening. Whatever the day was, there's an hour of it left that belongs to you, and a basement, and <<print "$" + $money>>.
Or there's the bag in the closet, and a city that's awake, and nobody who's told you not to twice.
<<page "Train" "training">>
<<page "Go out. The rail yard fence, where it's empty." "ch2-patrol">>
<<page "Go out. Walk the city." "patrol-tue">>
<<page "Go out. Lord Street. Someone's streaming." "ch2-uberleet">>
<<page "Sleep" "ch2-end">>/* Arc 2, the Tuesday night patrol fight. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<achieve "Night Two">>\
<<set $foughtLedger to true>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Nine o'clock, the edge of the Docks, where the rail yard runs out and the warehouses start. You picked it because it's empty. You've been walking the fence line for twenty minutes with your mask on and your hands in your pockets, learning what a night sounds like when nobody is on fire in it.
A car has been idling at the end of the block for most of that time<<if ($deaf is true)>>, and you didn't hear it arrive, because you don't hear things on that side<</if>>. Grey and clean, and cars like that don't park in the Docks. When you turn to look at it directly, the driver's door opens and a man gets out and walks toward you at the pace of someone crossing a lobby.
He's wearing a suit. Over armor, you think, by the way the jacket sits. His mask is white and smooth, with thin horizontal lines across it like ruled paper, and he has a ballpoint pen in his breast pocket, and no visible weapon at all.
"Good evening," he says, from thirty feet, in the voice of a man who has already decided how long this will take. "<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>You're new. Nobody has a file on you yet, and that is the only reason I'm here instead of someone louder.<<else>>You're the one from Sunday. The second roof.<</if>> My employer would like to know what you cost. I'm the one who finds out. You can call me Ledger.<<if ($indebted is true)>> I should mention that I've seen your paper. Five thousand, Mr. Hollis, the first of May. My employer could make that go away in an afternoon, if the afternoon were worth it to him.<</if>>"
He stops at twenty feet. He takes the pen out and clicks it.
"You're going to do something now," he says. "Everyone does. I'd suggest you make it the thing you're best at, because I only need to see it once."
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
On the roof of the warehouse behind him, against the sky, there's a shape with wings sitting on the parapet, eating something.
<</if>>\
<<choose "ch2-patrol-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and walk at him. Let him write that down.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You let the weight come and walk. He doesn't back up. He waits until you're close and steps inside your reach and taps you on the sternum with two fingers, and the density stutters. Three seconds of being fifteen and soft with a man's hand on your chest. "A breath and a half to shift," he says, writing. "Dense is slow. Noted." You come back heavy and he's already out of reach.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> You shift in a breath, not a breath and a half, and he writes the correction without looking up.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip. Behind him, then above him, then gone and back. Make him write fast.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Behind him. He's already turning. Above him, on the fence post, and he's looking up before you land. Twenty feet left and he says, "Line of sight. You look at the spot first. Every time." He hasn't moved his feet. "Nausea on the fourth. Noted." You're sick on the fifth, and he watches you be sick, and writes.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> You're not looking at the spot first anymore, and for the first time his pen stops.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane between you and him. Then another. Box him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Blue, blue, blue, blue, and he's standing in a box of your making with the pen still in his hand. He puts a palm on the nearest pane, flat, polite, and it goes soft under his hand like warm wax, and he steps through the gap. "Four," he says. "Each one faces one way. The back of this one was toward you." He writes. "Nicely done, though. You'd hold a hallway."
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The box goes up in three panes, not four, and the fourth wall is him realizing it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Let him try to audit something that isn't there.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You go a second behind the world, and he walks to where you were and puts his hand through you, and for the first time his pen stops. He doesn't move. "That," he says, to the air, "is a problem for me." He writes one line, and you watch him decide the rest isn't worth finding out tonight.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You stay out for the whole minute he waits, and come back behind him, and he hears you breathe.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop." Then, "Put the pen down."
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>><<var $ledgerWon true>><<var $heroRep + 5>><</if>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>He stops. The pen hits the asphalt. He stands there with his hands open and his breathing very even, and when the minute runs out he picks the pen up and does not come closer. "Nobody told me that," he says. "That's a cost. For somebody else." He writes it down from twenty feet.<<else>>He stops, for about a second, and then he reaches up and takes a plug out of one ear, and smiles under the mask. "I read Sunday's report," he says. "Everyone's heard you can do that. You should assume everyone has, from now on." He writes.<</if>>
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Stop," and the pen stops, and the hand holding it, and he has to use the other one to write that down.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The baton's charged. Close the distance before he can price it. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
You get the baton out and he says, "Camera flash capacitor. One charge, maybe two," before you've swung it, and steps around the first one, and lets the second one hit his forearm, and the armor under the jacket eats it. "You're spending parts you can't afford on people who can," he says. "Noted. Also: that's a good baton."
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The baton's charge holds through two swings because you rewound the coil on Sunday, and he prices the second swing differently.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge a stone. Put it through the car behind him, so he knows.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Five seconds in your fist and the stone goes through the grey car's rear door, both sides, and out across the rail yard. He doesn't look at the car. "You looked at the target first," he says. "Three seconds of charge for that. You could have looked at me." He writes. "I'll bill the door to someone."
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The stone goes through the car's engine block and out the far door, because you charged it for the whole walk over.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch him three seconds ahead. See what an auditor does when he's read.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
You see him step left before he does, and you're already not there, and you see him reach for your wrist, and your wrist is behind your back. The third time, he stops trying. "Short-range precognition," he says, and for the first time there's something under the courtesy. "I don't like those. They make me look slow." He writes a shorter line than usual.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and you watch him decide to leave before he decides it, and say so.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Let him reach for you. Then take his hand.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
He reaches for your wrist, because that's what he does, and you take his hand instead, and his glove comes apart along every seam at once, and the pen in his other hand goes in three pieces. He looks at his bare hand. "That," he says, "was expensive." He takes a second pen from the inside pocket. Of course he has a second pen.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> His hand, his watch, the pen: three seams, and you only take the pen.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. He's seen a kid in a mask. Let him see the other thing.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The breath, the weight, and the thing that isn't you is standing over him, grey, hunched, faceless. He takes one step back, and then he makes himself take it forward again. "Changer," he says. "Nobody mentioned a Changer." He writes without looking at the page. "I'll need to come back for the rest of this. Not tonight."
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is bigger than the one in his notes, because his notes are from Sunday, and you've been practicing.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Let him touch you. Then touch him back, and see what he is.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He taps your sternum and you let him, and then you take his wrist. A first-minute copy of what he has is almost nothing: a sense that he favors his left knee. By the third minute you know it was a bad landing in '08. He sees you knowing it, and he stays anyway, because he's a professional and he wants the file, and staying is a mistake. By the seventh minute you can read him the way he reads you: the thing he's afraid of, and it isn't you, and the number he's going to write. "Don't," he says, quietly, and it's the first thing he's said that wasn't a sentence from a form. He leaves at minute eight. He knows about the clock too.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> The clock runs faster in you than it did on Sunday, and you have what he is by the second minute, and it's less than he thinks.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Go still. He can't audit what he can't look at.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stop wanting to be seen, and his eyes go over you and past you, and he turns in a slow circle with the pen raised and nothing to write about. "Stranger," he says, to the street. "Attention-based. I'm going to put down that you left." He waits another minute, listening, and then he does leave, and you're six feet from him the whole time.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You go still and stay still through his whole count, and he writes "lost subject" and underlines it, and you watch him do it from four feet.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($metKestrel is true) The shape on the roof. Whistle, and get out of the way.
<<var $rom_kestrel + 5>>\
<<var $kestrelAssist true>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Wingman">>\
You whistle, and the shape on the parapet puts down its sandwich. Ledger hears the wings a half second before they reach him, and half a second isn't enough. Kestrel comes down out of the dark like a thrown coat, and a fist of compressed air hits him in the back of the knees and puts him face down on the asphalt with his pen under him. She lands on his back, lightly. "Rookie," she says, to you. "You've had a car on you for two blocks. Eyes up."
#"Who sent you?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Someone who pays on time," he says. "Which in this city is rarer than powers." He clicks the pen. "You can ask again. The second answer costs more than the first, and you don't have it yet."
#Put your hands up and hit him. No power. Just you.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You go at him with your hands and he is much, much better at this than you are, and he does it without hurrying, and you end up on one knee with your ear ringing and the pen tapping once against your shoulder. "Brave," he says. "Not a line item."
#Turn around and walk away. You don't owe him a show.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You walk. He doesn't follow. "Walking is free," he calls after you, pleasantly. "Tonight." You hear the pen click, once, behind you.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Close the distance and put him on the ground before he's priced you.
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You cover twenty feet before his pen is up and put him on the asphalt with his own weight, and he says "Noted" from under you, and means it differently.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Take the pen.
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You're inside his reach before the click finishes and the pen is in your hand and his folder is on the ground, and for the first time his face does something.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. Tell him what his employer is. Watch him check his notes.
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
"Mercenaries, a grey van, a man who pays on time and doesn't want to be named," you say, "and you're the receipt," and he looks at his folder like it's leaked.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Ask him what he's afraid of. Pleasantly.
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You ask it like a receptionist asks for a name, and he answers before he's decided to, and what he's afraid of isn't you, and you both know what it is now.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand there and let him audit nothing.
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You stand with your hands in your pockets for four minutes while a man with a pen waits for you to do something, and you don't, and he writes "disciplined" and underlines it, and leaves.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense in a breath and walk through the car he's parked behind, and he's writing with his back to the water.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body comes out all at once and stands over him, and his pen stops, and stays stopped.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You're behind him, above him, in the car, back, and he hasn't finished the first letter.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You go still and he writes "lost subject" and then you take the pen out of his hand while he's underlining it.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The pen, the folder, the car's door, and he's standing in the Docks with nothing to write on.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The baton, charged, into the car's electrics, and his file is on a laptop that's dead.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you tell him what he's going to write before he writes it, twice, and he closes the folder.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A stone through the car's engine block, then one through the folder in his hand, and the pages go up like birds.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Put the pen down," and he does, and "Tell me who sent you," and he almost does, and that almost is worth the file.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>You have what he is by the first minute, and it's a Thinker's trick for reading powers, and you read his back at him.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You stay out until he gives up and gets in the car, and come back in the passenger seat.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>Four panes and he's in a box with his pen, and you tap on the glass.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Null and Overlay. Take his read, and read him five seconds ahead while he gets nothing.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You touch his sleeve and take the thing he does, and now you're the one reading, five seconds ahead, and he's the one standing in the Docks with a pen and no file, and you tell him what he's going to write before he doesn't write it.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Shed and Pane. Shed inside a box of panes, and walk the box at him.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $ledgerWon true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The grey body stands up inside four walls of blue and the whole thing walks at him, a box with something in it that has no face, and Ledger backs up for the first time in his professional life and writes one word, and the word is //no//.
<</choose>><<set $coilNoticed to true>>\
<<achieve "Audited">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>>\
Ledger lies flat under her. "Kestrel," he says, into the asphalt. "Mover, Blaster secondary. Eight months. Fish market. You weren't on tonight's list."
"Put me on it," she says, and gets off him, and he stands up and brushes the knees of his suit and picks up the pen.
<<elseif ($ledgerWon is true)>>\
He puts the pen away first, and that is how he tells you he's done.
<<else>>\
He finishes writing. It takes a while. You stand there and let him, because the alternatives are worse.
<</if>>\
"Here's what you've bought tonight," he says. "<<if ($ledgerWon is true)>>An incomplete file. My employer dislikes those; he'll want it finished, so someone will come back, and what you've bought tonight is attention. I'd have preferred to give you the cheaper thing.<<else>>A complete file. Nothing in it that I'd call expensive, and nothing in it that I'd call safe. You'll be left alone for a while, and then you'll be offered something, and the offer will be fair, and you should think very hard before you say no to it.<</if>>" He opens the grey car's door. "You never saw me. That isn't a threat, it's a professional courtesy, and it runs both ways."
The car pulls away at the speed limit.
<<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>>\
Kestrel picks her sandwich up off the roof, somehow, and eats the rest of it standing next to you, watching the taillights.
"Coil," she says, with her mouth full. "That's who pays on time. Everybody who's been out longer than a year knows that and nobody says it, because the ones who said it stopped being out." She swallows. "You just got priced. It's not the worst thing. It means somebody thinks you're worth money."
"What did he mean, a list?"
"New capes. He checks them. Some get offered things." She looks at you sideways, the pool-check look. "You'd say no, right?" You say you'd say no. She nods like she's heard that before and hopes it's true this time. "Thursdays I do the Boardwalk. Nine to one. Come if you want. Bring food." She's up the drainpipe before you can answer, and the gulls go up with her.
<<set $heroRep to $heroRep + 5>>\
<<elseif ($metKestrel is true)>>\
The shape on the roof is gone. You never saw it move. On the parapet where it was, when you climb up to check, there's half a sandwich in wax paper and, written on the paper in marker, //EYES UP. THURS. BOARDWALK. 9.//
<</if>>\
You walk home the long way, assessed, and not sure yet what that's going to cost.
<<page "Home" "ch2-end">>/* Arc 2 wrap-up: weekend pay, looks checkpoint, achievement, and the team is fixed here by set-stance for the rest of the game. */\
<<if ($job isnot "")>><<set $money to $money + 60>><</if>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<achieve "Insinuation Complete">>\
<<include "set-stance">>\
''End of Arc 2: Insinuation''
Tuesday. Forty-eight hours since Lung, and the city is already rearranging itself around the hole he left. Somewhere downtown a girl in a white dress is throwing a skinhead down an alley to find out who's moving into the Docks, and the answer is everyone.
Here's where things stand.
<<if ($stayedHome is true)>>\
''You stayed home that Sunday.'' Lung went down without you. Whatever you are now, you became it on a Monday, in daylight, by following a girl you barely knew into the Docks. Your first night out hasn't happened yet. The city doesn't know your name, and neither, in a way, do you.
<</if>>\
<<if ($swap is true)>>\
''The swap.'' You're an Undersider with a question mark on your door. Taylor Hebert went to the PHQ with a stitched wrist and two thousand dollars of the Undersiders' money in a lunchbox, and by Thursday she'll have a Wards folder and a name the press office didn't pick. The two of you know each other at school and nowhere else. Lisa knows. Lisa thinks it's funny. Lisa is the only one.
<<elseif (($joinedWards is true) and ($taylorWards is true))>>\
''You and Taylor are both Wards.'' Probationary paperwork, a trust account, a schedule starting Thursday, and a teammate with a crossbow who went completely still when Taylor said hello. Sophia Hess knows. Taylor doesn't. That room is going to go off, and soon.
<<elseif ($taylorWards is true)>>\
''Taylor is a Ward. You aren't.'' She signed on the hood of a van downtown. She's going to find out who stands at the back of that briefing room, and you won't be in the building when she does.
<<elseif ($independents is true)>>\
''Two independents.'' No team, no boss, no Director. Taylor has a costume and two weeks before she calls the number anyway. You have each other's real names. In this city that's rare.
<<elseif ($leftWithTaylor is true)>>\
''Taylor Hebert walked out of the Undersiders' loft with you.'' She has a costume, two thousand dollars in a lunchbox, a stitched-up wrist, and no team. She also has you, and she knows what you are. The Undersiders have a storage closet with a question mark on the door and nobody to put in it. Lisa will not take that lying down.
<<elseif (($joinedUndersiders is true) and ($taylorJoined is true))>>\
''You and Taylor are both Undersiders now.'' She's undercover and you know it. You're not sure what you are. There's a room with a question mark on the door, a boss nobody names, and a handgun on the kitchen table that she saw before you did.
<<elseif ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
''Taylor is an Undersider.'' <<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>She's undercover, and you're the only person alive who knows that. She asked you not to bring it up at school.<<else>>You're fairly sure she's playing a longer game than they think. You're also fairly sure Lisa knows it.<</if>> The Undersiders have five members for the first time, and the Docks are about to become a war.
<<else>>\
''Taylor Hebert didn't go to the roof.'' Whatever Tattletale offered her, she said no, or didn't answer. She was in school this afternoon with her hood up. The Undersiders are still four.
<</if>>\
<<if (($joinedWards is true) and ($taylorWards is false))>>\
''You're a Ward.'' Probationary paperwork, a trust account, a schedule starting Thursday, and a teammate with a crossbow who already knows your face from the third-floor hallway. Sophia Hess knows what you are. You know what she is. Neither of you has said so.
<<elseif ($metWards is true)>>\
''The Wards folder is in your bag.'' Renick wants an answer this week. Shadow Stalker stood at the back of the room and didn't say her name, and didn't have to.
<</if>>\
<<if ($joinedUndersiders is true)>>\
''You took the Undersiders' money.'' Two thousand dollars and a question mark on a door. Lisa is already planning something, and she'll tell you about it as late as she can.
<</if>>\
<<if ($empireRecruited is true)>>\
''You're the Empire's, or close enough.'' Victor has your power on file and Kaiser wants to meet you Sunday. Of everything you did this week, that is the one that will matter in May.
<<elseif ($empireCourting is true)>>\
''The Empire has your name, and you let them have it.'' Travis Hull's flyer is still in your bag. Kaiser's people recruit patiently, with food, and with a very long memory for who said yes.
<<elseif ($empireDeclined is true)>>\
''You told the Empire no.'' Out loud, so they heard it. They'll ask again, differently, and the next person who asks won't be friendly about it.
<<elseif ($empireTarget is true)>>\
''The Empire has marked you.'' A word on the stairs, an eighty-eight on your locker. With Lung in a cell they're going to feel brave, and brave is when people get hurt.
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbMember is true)>>\
''You're ABB.'' You stood in the street with them and Oni Lee said tomorrow. With Lung in a cell and Bakuda building, your name is going to be asked for, and the asking won't be polite.
<<elseif (($abbApproach is true) and ($abbDeclined is false))>>\
''The ABB is counting you.'' Mai Vo saved you a seat. With Lung gone and Bakuda coming, that seat is going to turn into a question with a short deadline.
<<elseif ($abbDeclined is true)>>\
''You told the ABB you don't wear colors.'' Mai Vo told you everybody says that. Oni Lee doesn't ask.
<</if>>\
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>\
''You've been priced.'' A man in a ruled mask who works for someone who pays on time watched you once and wrote down what you cost. <<if ($ledgerWon is true)>>He left with an incomplete file, so he'll be back, or someone worse will.<<else>>He left with a complete one, so an offer will follow eventually, and it will be fair.<</if>><<if ($kestrelAssist is true)>> Kestrel put him on the ground and told you Thursdays, Boardwalk, nine. You believe her about the first part.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($calledSophia is true)>>\
''You told Sophia Hess you know what she is.'' In a hallway, in four words. She told you to be careful. Shadow Stalker is on probation, and you are now the only person at Winslow who could end it, and she knows where you sit.
<<elseif ($sophiaHunting is true)>>\
''Sophia Hess is hunting you.'' Not Taylor. You. She stood too close in a hallway today and watched which way you leaned.
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbTarget is true)>>\
''The ABB knows your school.'' Someone posted it and deleted it. Oni Lee doesn't need it to stay posted.
<</if>>\
<<if ($witnessOffer is true)>>\
''You offered to go to the office as a witness.'' Taylor hasn't answered. Mr. Gladly has answered in his way, by avoiding your eyes twice since.
<</if>>\
<<if ($groupWon is true)>>\
''Taylor's homework won the vending machine.'' It's a small thing. It is the only thing that went right for her on Monday that she didn't have to bleed for.
<</if>>\
<<if ($job isnot "")>>\
''Payday.'' Sixty dollars, cash, from $job. It's the only money you've made this week that nobody is going to ask about.
<</if>>\
<<if ($vial is true)>>\
''The woman on the phone knows your school name now.'' Your father asked who he signed with. You didn't have an answer, and you want one.
<</if>>\
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> still owed to Royce Hollis, due the first of May. <<if ($hollisMet is true)>>He's found you once in costume already.<<else>>He hasn't come looking yet. He will.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>You've met. Green, loud, and faster than you'd like, and on Parahumans Online for the thing you did.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' Greg posted a sighting thread this week with a photo that's mostly thumb. Notoriety up five, whether you earned it or not.
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' <<if ($dissonanceSeen is true)>>The streetlights went out toward the water, one at a time, and your reflection was late. You've stopped explaining it to yourself.<<else>>The kitchen clock lost another minute. The fog came in against the wind again. Nobody else has noticed.<</if>>
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor's Trust" $taylorTrust>>\
<div>Power control: <<skill $control 5>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 3, Agitation.'' A bank on a Thursday afternoon. A girl in white who can bench-press a cement mixer, and her sister, who can do worse. The Undersiders' first job with a new roster, and whichever side of the glass you're standing on.
<<page "Continue to Arc 3" "ch3-wednesday">>
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay Monday" "ch2-replay">>/* Rewind to Monday morning with Arc 1's outcome intact: clears only the flags Arc 2 can set. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $wipedSeat to false>>\
<<set $inTaylorGroup to false>>\
<<set $groupWon to false>>\
<<set $calledOutMadison to false>>\
<<set $stayedForGladly to false>>\
<<set $witnessOffer to false>>\
<<set $stoodWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $tookBagBack to false>>\
<<set $followedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $skippedSchool to false>>\
<<set $taylorKnows to false>>\
<<set $tailedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $atMeet to false>>\
<<set $atLoft to false>>\
<<set $savedFromDogs to false>>\
<<set $taylorJoined to false>>\
<<set $joinedUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $joinedWards to false>>\
<<set $metWards to false>>\
<<set $sophiaHunting to false>>\
<<set $pingedTt to false>>\
<<set $boughtLunch to false>>\
<<set $sawGun to false>>\
<<set $leftWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $metLisaUnmasked to false>>\
<<set $hasPhone to false>>\
<<set $calledPHQ to false>>\
<<set $lootDone to false>>\
<<set $tookEnvelope to false>>\
<<set $sharedTrigger to false>>\
<<set $calledSophia to false>>\
<<set $askedBoss to false>>\
<<set $challengedLisa to false>>\
<<set $toldRenickTrigger to false>>\
<<set $toldPartial to false>>\
<<set $savedShopkeeper to false>>\
<<set $metGloryGirl to false>>\
<<set $spokeInClass to false>>\
<<set $sophiaTested to false>>\
<<set $swap to false>>\
<<set $taylorWards to false>>\
<<set $taylorAtPRT to false>>\
<<set $independents to false>>\
<<set $taylorHurt to false>>\
Same you. Same Sunday. A different Monday.
<<page "Monday" "ch2-morning">>/* Parahumans Online forum widgets. <<pho "user">>...<</pho>> wraps a thread, <<pho-topic "title" "board">>, <<pho-page "text">>, and <<pho-post "user" "(tag)" "when">>body<</pho-post>> for each post. Styled by PHO Styles. */\
<<widget "pho" container>>\
<div class="pho"><div class="pho-sep">■</div>\
<div class="pho-welcome">Parahumans Online · Message Boards</div>\
<div>Signed in as <u>_args[0]</u></div>\
<div>Showing:</div>\
<div class="pho-filters">• threads you have posted in<br>• threads with unread replies<br>• private conversations with new messages<br>• first post shown, then ten per page, oldest first</div>\
<div class="pho-sep">■</div>\
_contents\
<div class="pho-sep">■</div></div>\
<</widget>>\
<<widget "pho-topic">>\
<div class="pho-topic">♦ Topic: _args[0]</div><div class="pho-board">In: _args[1]</div>\
<</widget>>\
<<widget "pho-page">>\
<div class="pho-page">_args[0]</div>\
<</widget>>\
<<widget "pho-post" container>>\
<div class="pho-post"><span class="pho-user">_args[0]</span> <span class="pho-tag">_args[1]</span><div class="pho-when">_args[2]</div><div class="pho-body">_contents</div></div>\
<</widget>>\/* Derives the pronoun variables from $gender. Used in prose as $sheHe, $herHim, $herHis (possessive), $hersHis, $herselfHimself, $girlBoy, $girlGuy, $daughterSon, $sisterBrother; capitalised forms $SheHe and $HerHis. */\
<<if ($gender is "guy")>>\
<<set $sheHe to "he">><<set $SheHe to "He">><<set $herHim to "him">><<set $herHis to "his">><<set $HerHis to "His">><<set $hersHis to "his">><<set $herselfHimself to "himself">><<set $girlBoy to "boy">><<set $girlGuy to "guy">><<set $daughterSon to "son">><<set $sisterBrother to "brother">>\
<<else>>\
<<set $sheHe to "she">><<set $SheHe to "She">><<set $herHim to "her">><<set $herHis to "her">><<set $HerHis to "Her">><<set $hersHis to "hers">><<set $herselfHimself to "herself">><<set $girlBoy to "girl">><<set $girlGuy to "girl">><<set $daughterSon to "daughter">><<set $sisterBrother to "sister">>\
<</if>>\/* Derives how the gangs read the character from heritage, hair and eyes. $abbFit: the ABB reads you as one of theirs. $empireStance: "poster" (the recruiters' dream), "white", "mixed", or "hostile". */\
<<set $abbFit to (($heritage is "East Asian") or ($heritage is "Southeast Asian"))>>\
<<if (($heritage is "white") and ($hair is "blond, always in your eyes") and ($eyes is "blue"))>><<set $empireStance to "poster">>\
<<elseif ($heritage is "white")>><<set $empireStance to "white">>\
<<elseif ($heritage is "mixed")>><<set $empireStance to "mixed">>\
<<else>><<set $empireStance to "hostile">>\
<</if>>\/* Small widgets used throughout. buildword: the build as a word. floor0 "name": keep that variable at or above 0. capstam: keep stamina within 0 and its ceiling. cap100 "name": run the looks checkpoint on that variable and clamp it to 0-100; this is the only place looks scaling happens. */\
<<widget "buildword">><<if ($build is "small")>>small<<elseif ($build is "tall")>>tall<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>stocky<<else>>medium build<</if>><</widget>>
<<widget "floor0">>\
<<set State.variables[_args[0]] to Math.max(State.variables[_args[0]], 0)>>\
<</widget>>\
<<widget "capstam">>\
<<set $stamina to Math.max(0, Math.min($stamina, $maxStamina))>>\
<</widget>>\
<<widget "cap100">>\
<<run setup.looksAdjust(_args[0])>>\
<<set State.variables[_args[0]] to Math.clamp(State.variables[_args[0]], 0, 100)>>\
<</widget>>\/* Game start. reset-all gives a clean character, then the creation chain runs: cc-name, cc-look, cc-background, cc-trigger, cc-vignette, cc-power, cc-capename, cc-stats, cc-skills, cc-problems, cc-perks, cc-summary, ch1-morning. */\
<<include "reset-all">>\
<<achieve "New Kid">>\
''Brockton Bay. April, 2011.''
Every city has a story it tells about itself. Brockton Bay's goes like this: the ships stopped coming, the money moved uptown, and the people who used to unload cargo found other ways to get by. Some of those ways wear colors.
Red and green is the ABB, the Azn Bad Boys, who hold the east side and most of the Docks and answer to a man named Lung. The news calls him a dragon and doesn't mean it as a figure of speech. Red, white and black is the Empire Eighty-Eight: neo-Nazis with money, a dozen capes, and a leader called Kaiser who wears a suit to press conferences. The Merchants are the bottom of the ladder, a drug crew with three capes and a van, dangerous mostly to the people who buy from them. And then there's Coil, who has no colors at all. Mercenaries, ex-military, body armor, a name in the paper maybe twice a year. The people who pay attention say he's bigger than he looks, and that the Empire has lost blocks to him and never gotten them back.
Against all that: the Protectorate, the government's own team of adult heroes, who live on a floating rig out past the Boardwalk, bristling with forcefields and missile pods. Their junior branch, the Wards, where the city's hero kids wear masks, do homework, and draw a paycheck. And New Wave, one extended family of heroes who took their masks off in public years ago and never put them back on. Behind all of them sits the PRT, the Parahuman Response Team: the agency that owns the rig, writes the rules, and decides what to call you.
Because there are rules, written and unwritten. A cape in a mask is the mask, and you don't go after the face underneath. Heroes don't kill, and villains mostly don't either, because the ones who do end up in a prison nobody comes back from. Everyone, hero or villain, gets a label and a number from the PRT: Brute 4, Mover 2, Thinker 7. The label says what you do. The number says how scared to be.
You moved here in January. You didn't choose it. You also didn't choose what happened to you this winter, the thing you've never said out loud. Nobody chooses that part.
Since then you've been practicing in secret, keeping a coded notebook, and telling yourself that soon, when you're ready, you'll put on a mask and go do something with it.
You keep saying soon.
//An unofficial, non-commercial fan work set in the world of Worm, by Wildbow. The characters and city are his; the prose and your protagonist are not.//
//This is a demo: Arc 1 of a work in progress.//
<<page "Begin" "cc-name">>First things first.
What do people call you? Your first name is fine. Nobody at Winslow has bothered to learn the rest of it anyway.
<<textbox "$name" "Alex">>
<<page "That's me" "cc-look">>/* Creation 2: gender, build, hair, eyes, heritage, looks (3/5/7/10) and a distinguishing mark. Pronoun and heritage variables are derived from these by set-pronouns and set-heritage. */\
Second thing. The mirror.
You are <<listbox "$gender" autoselect>><<option "a girl" "girl">><<option "a guy" "guy">><</listbox>>, fifteen, and <<listbox "$build" autoselect>><<option "small for your age, and quick with it" "small">><<option "tall, and still growing into it" "tall">><<option "solid, built like someone who carries things" "solid">><<option "average, the kind of build nobody describes" "average">><</listbox>>.
Your hair is <<listbox "$hair" autoselect>><<option "black, cut short" "black, cut short">><<option "dark brown, shoulder-length" "dark brown, shoulder-length">><<option "blond, always in your eyes" "blond, always in your eyes">><<option "red, tied back" "red, tied back">><<option "dyed, a blue streak through it" "dyed, a blue streak through it">><<option "buzzed down to nothing" "buzzed down to nothing">><</listbox>>. Your eyes are <<listbox "$eyes" autoselect>><<option "brown" "brown">><<option "dark" "dark">><<option "green" "green">><<option "blue" "blue">><<option "grey" "grey">><</listbox>>.
Brockton Bay sorts strangers by face before anything else, and this is what it decides when it looks at yours: <<listbox "$heritage" autoselect>><<option "white" "white">><<option "Black" "Black">><<option "East Asian" "East Asian">><<option "Southeast Asian" "Southeast Asian">><<option "South Asian" "South Asian">><<option "Latino" "Latino">><<option "Middle Eastern" "Middle Eastern">><<option "mixed, and people guess wrong" "mixed">><</listbox>>. It shouldn't matter. In this city it decides which stairwell you use.
The honest part. On the scale nobody admits to using, you're <<listbox "$looks" autoselect>><<option "a 3 out of 10: a bit ugly, and you know which features" 3>><<option "a 5 out of 10: boringly average, invisible in a crowd" 5>><<option "a 7 out of 10: striking, the word people use when they're being careful" 7>><<option "a 10 out of 10: you could be a model, and people tell you so" 10>><</listbox>>. Brockton Bay uses the scale too. It changes who talks to you, what they want, and how fast anyone trusts you.
The thing people notice first, if they notice anything: <<listbox "$mark" autoselect>><<option "a scar through one eyebrow" "a scar through one eyebrow">><<option "freckles" "freckles">><<option "glasses" "glasses">><<option "braces" "braces">><<option "a nose that's been broken once" "a nose that's been broken once">><<option "nothing anyone remembers" "nothing anyone remembers">><</listbox>>.
<<page "That's what the mirror says" "cc-background">><<include "set-pronouns">>\
<<include "set-heritage">>\
Before the worst day, you were somebody. People at your old school could have summed you up in a word. Which word?
<<choose "cc-trigger">>
#''The athlete.'' Track, three seasons, and a box of medals you haven't unpacked. You know what your body can do and how long it can keep doing it.
<<var $background "athlete">>\
<<var $maxStamina + 20>>\
<<var $stamina + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You still run most mornings. It's the only part of the old you that made the move.
#''The honor student.'' Straight A's, two grades ahead in math, the kid teachers pointed at. Winslow's classes are a year behind you and you've stopped raising your hand.
<<var $background "scholar">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You read everything. You read the PRT's public classification guide the week you got your power, twice, and took notes in the margins.
#''The fixer.'' You grew up in a garage, or a bike shop, or at the end of a kitchen table covered in somebody's broken radio. Things come apart in your hands and go back together better.
<<var $background "fixer">>\
<<var $money + 20>>\
<<var $maxHealth + 10>>\
<<var $health + 10>>\
Your costume is the best-built thing you own. You did every seam yourself and you know which one will go first.
#''The talker.'' You were the one who got the whole group out of detention. You read a room before you walk into it, and you've never once started a fight you couldn't end with a sentence.
<<var $background "talker">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You've been quiet at Winslow for twelve weeks. It's the longest you've ever managed, and it itches.
<</choose>>Parahumans don't get powers by accident. They get them on the worst day of their life: the moment when you need something more than you have ever needed anything, and something answers. The PRT calls it a trigger event, and you've looked the phrase up more times than you'd admit.
The day shapes the power. Everyone who has studied it agrees on that much, and nothing else. A person who needed to get away becomes something that moves. A person who was hurt becomes something that can't be. A person nobody would listen to becomes something that has to be heard. Some days wouldn't have broken you at all, given who you were before; those are greyed out.
What was yours?
<<choose "cc-vignette">>
#use-if ($background isnot "athlete") ''The fall.'' Two seniors held you over the Boardwalk rail by your ankles, laughing, and let go. Eleven feet onto the rocks. You lay there with a broken pelvis for forty minutes while people walked by above you and nobody looked down. //(Not the athlete: you'd have had a hand on the rail before they had your ankles.)//
<<var $trigger "The fall">>\
<<var $money + 35>>\
<<var $guardian "your grandfather Walt, a retired Dockworker who still knows everyone on the waterfront">>\
<<var $guardianName "Grandpa">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Your parents sent you to Grandpa Walt's after the fall, partly for the hospital and partly so the seniors' families would stop calling. He drinks his coffee black, knows every foreman in the Docks by first name, and hasn't asked you a single question you didn't want to answer.
#use-if ($background isnot "athlete") ''The chase.'' Three Merchants followed you off the bus in your second week and ran you nine blocks into a dead end. The woman's bat broke your forearm when you put it up. You got halfway up the fence one-handed, and the tall one got your ankle. //(Not the athlete: nine blocks is a warm-up for you. They'd never have caught you.)//
<<var $trigger "The chase">>\
<<var $money + 45>>\
<<var $guardian "your dad, Ray, who drives a delivery route and is gone before five every morning">>\
<<var $guardianName "Dad">>\
Your dad took the Brockton Bay route because it paid better, and because he thought a smaller city would be safer for you. He leaves at a quarter to five and gets home at six. He bought a second deadbolt the week after, and didn't say why.
#''The crossfire.'' Your first week in the Docks, a red-and-green crew and a white-and-black crew decided the same corner belonged to them. You spent twenty minutes under a parked car with a dying kid under the next one, looking at you.
<<var $trigger "The crossfire">>\
<<var $money + 20>>\
<<var $guardian "your brother Marcus, 23, who works the Boardwalk cafés">>\
<<var $guardianName "Marcus">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
Marcus got custody when your parents' situation fell apart. He's doing his best on café wages and a lease in the bad part of town. He knows which corners to avoid now, and he's taught you.
#use-if ($background isnot "scholar") ''The fever.'' Meningitis, the week in February your mother worked doubles. Four days alone at a hundred and four, calling a phone that couldn't ring inside the ER, watching the walls move and your hands stop being yours. //(Not the honor student: you'd have known what it was by the second day, and called an ambulance instead of your mother.)//
<<var $trigger "The fever">>\
<<var $money + 40>>\
<<var $guardian "your mom, Dana, an ER nurse at Brockton General">>\
<<var $guardianName "Mom">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You live with your mom. She works nights in the ER, which is where she was for all of it. She has not forgiven herself and you have not asked her to. Neither of you talks about the week in February.
#use-if ($background isnot "talker") ''The table.'' You told your best friend one thing about your parents' divorce, and for three months she used it to take everyone. It ended on your birthday, at a table set for nine, watching the photos go up from her house. //(Not the talker: nobody drops the talker. You'd have been at the party.)//
<<var $trigger "The table">>\
<<var $money + 40>>\
<<var $guardian "your dad, Ray, who drives a delivery route and is gone before five every morning">>\
<<var $guardianName "Dad">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
Dad took the Brockton Bay route the week after. He said it paid better. He didn't say the rest, and you've never made him. He leaves at a quarter to five and gets home at six.
#use-if ($background isnot "talker") ''The blackout.'' January, the old apartment, three days with no power in a cold snap. Your little sister ran a fever and the furnace was dead and the super didn't answer. You spent two nights with a flashlight in your teeth, taking apart a machine you didn't understand, until you did. //(Not the talker: you'd have had the super there in an hour. You'd have found him.)//
<<var $trigger "The blackout">>\
<<var $money + 35>>\
<<var $guardian "your uncle Tomas, who runs a scrapyard off the Docks and pays you in parts">>\
<<var $guardianName "Tomas">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Your mother's hours and the dead building made the decision for everyone. You and your sister Dani went to Uncle Tomas's place behind the yard for the winter, and the winter hasn't ended. He keeps a box on the kitchen table for things he thinks you might want. He has never once asked what you do with them.
#''The window.'' A car slowed at your bus stop on Lord Street and a barrel came out the back window. He held it on you for a second you can still count. Then he moved it to the girl behind you, because her scarf was the wrong color, and fired, and the car kept going.
<<var $trigger "The window">>\
<<var $money + 30>>\
<<var $guardian "your mom, Dana, an ER nurse at Brockton General">>\
<<var $guardianName "Mom">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You live with your mom. She was on shift that night. She was the one who met the gurney. She works nights, which means the house is empty more than it's full, and neither of you says Keisha's name.
#use-if ($background isnot "talker") ''The phone call.'' Your grandmother collapsed on the kitchen floor and you spent nine minutes begging a dispatcher, then three neighbors, to listen to you. Nobody did until you stopped asking. //(Not the talker: they'd have listened to you. That's the thing you do.)//
<<var $trigger "The phone call">>\
<<var $money + 25>>\
<<var $guardian "your grandmother Nana, home all day since the stroke, who speaks slowly now and misses nothing">>\
<<var $guardianName "Nana">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
Nana survived. She's home all day now, moving slowly, with a cane and a word-finding problem the therapist says will improve. She watches you with the same eyes she always had. You moved here together, because her sister's old house was paid off.
#use-if ($background isnot "fixer") ''The kitchen.'' Your mother's boyfriend took the big knife out of the block, and your little brother was behind you, and there was nothing between the two of them but you. You put your hand up. The blade went through the palm. //(Not the fixer: you'd have had something in your hand. You always do.)//
<<var $trigger "The kitchen">>\
<<var $money + 30>>\
<<var $guardian "your aunt Ruth, who took you and your brother in after January">>\
<<var $guardianName "Aunt Ruth">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
Aunt Ruth drove four hours the same night and took you and Theo back with her. Dale is awaiting trial. Your mother calls on Sundays, and Ruth lets you decide whether to pick up.
#''The photo.'' The day the sheriff's deputies put your family's furniture on the curb in the rain, a junior from your school drove past and took a picture. By Monday you had a new name, and the person you'd been for fourteen years was gone.
<<var $trigger "The photo">>\
<<var $money + 15>>\
<<var $guardian "your grandfather Walt, a retired Dockworker who still knows everyone on the waterfront">>\
<<var $guardianName "Grandpa">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
Your family moved into Grandpa Walt's house in the Docks, the three of you in two rooms. He drinks his coffee black, knows every foreman on the waterfront by first name, and has never once asked about the old school.
#''The brawl.'' Hookwolf and Lung took their argument through your mother's laundromat on a Tuesday in January. You spent an hour under a folding table while a man made of blades and a man who kept getting bigger tore the room apart around you, and something of both of them got into you.
<<var $trigger "The brawl">>\
<<var $money + 25>>\
<<var $guardian "your mother Rosa, who runs the laundromat two capes fought through and reopened it anyway">>\
<<var $guardianName "Ma">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Ma reopened two weeks later, because the rent didn't care. The plywood is still over the front window. She has one rule, the east side after dark, and she thinks you keep it.
#''The followers.'' After your father testified, the Empire made sure you saw them: the same man at your bus stop every morning, smiling; photos of you through your bedroom window, left in the mailbox. It ended with three of them in your apartment while you stood in the hall closet, and the big one opened the door and said your name.
<<var $trigger "The followers">>\
<<var $money + 30>>\
<<var $guardian "your aunt Ruth, who took you in after January">>\
<<var $guardianName "Aunt Ruth">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
Your parents thought a new city would fix things. Aunt Ruth has a spare room, a long memory for being the family's second choice, and a baseball bat by the door she thinks you don't know about. She doesn't push.
#''The vial.'' //(Cheat.)// There was no worst day. There was a woman in a lab coat, a man in a suit, a contract your father signed without reading aloud, and a glass of something that tasted like pennies and lightning. You woke up with all of it. Every power on this list, except the one you'd have to build. -> "cc-capename"
<<var $trigger "The vial">>\
<<var $money + 200>>\
<<var $guardian "your father, Gerald, a corporate lawyer who paid for something and has never once asked what it does">>\
<<var $guardianName "Father">>\
<<var $vial true>>\
<<var $power "vial">>\
<<var $powerName "Vial (every manifestation)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Manifold">>\
<<var $maxHealth + 50>>\
<<var $health + 50>>\
<<var $control + 2>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The paperwork said you'd get one power, maybe two. Nobody on their end seemed surprised when you got more. The woman in the lab coat wrote something down and said, pleasantly, that they'd be in touch about the balance owed. You've been waiting for that call for four months.
Your father moved the two of you here for a partnership. He works until nine, golfs on Sundays, and believes in you in the way people believe in good investments.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($trigger is "The fall")>>\
''The fall.''
They took an ankle each. That's the part you didn't expect: how easy it was for them, two seniors from the lacrosse team, how they laughed the whole time like it was a bit they'd rehearsed. You were upside down over the Boardwalk rail with your shirt in your face and the rocks eleven feet below, and one of them said "Say please," and you did, and he let go anyway.
The rocks arrived all at once. Something in your hips went, and the sound it made was inside you.
Then it was quiet. Above you, the Boardwalk kept going: shoes, strollers, somebody's radio. You shouted and your voice came out of a body that wasn't working right. Nobody looked over the rail. People don't. Forty minutes, by the clock on the bank across the street, and the tide coming in, and your legs not answering, and the water reaching your boots.
The hurt went into you. Every fall you'd ever taken before, it went in and then it went somewhere: a bruise, a yell, the ground. This one went in and stayed, and sat in your chest humming, and the rock under your hand had a crack through it that hadn't been there before.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Drag yourself. One arm at a time, up the rocks, away from the water.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You went up the rocks on your elbows with your legs behind you like luggage, and every pull was a sound you'd never made, and you did not stop. The lifeguard found you at the top of the breakwater with your fingers worn open. He asked how you'd climbed it. You didn't know.
#Scream until someone looks down.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You screamed until your voice went, and then you screamed with what was left, and a girl of about ten looked over the rail and went white and ran. There was an ambulance, and X-rays, and a technician who said "nothing's broken" twice, and the second time it sounded like a question.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The chase")>>\
''The chase.''
Three of them got off the bus behind you, and you knew by the second block. Merchants, by the smell and the clothes: a tall one with sores at the corners of his mouth, a woman with a bat she carried like an umbrella, a kid younger than you who kept laughing.
You ran. You ran for nine blocks through a neighborhood you'd lived in for eleven days, and every turn you took was the wrong one, and the last one was a dead end with a chain-link fence and a dumpster and the three of them walking now, because they knew.
The woman swung and you put your arm up and the bat broke it. You heard it. You went up the fence one-handed anyway, with your bad arm hanging, and you were halfway when the tall one got your ankle, and you hung there with the top of the fence a foot above your good hand and understood, completely, that you were not going to get over it.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Let go. Turn around. If this is happening, face it.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You let go of the fence and turned around with your back to it and your broken arm against your chest, and the woman swung again, and you were not where the bat was. You were four feet to the left, and then you were behind her, and then you were past them and out of the alley with your stomach somewhere back by the dumpster. You heard the kid stop laughing.
#Hold on. Climb. Whatever it costs.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You pulled with one arm and kicked at the hand on your ankle, and he didn't let go, and the fence cut your fingers, and then you were on the other side of it with no memory of the top, lying on your back on wet asphalt, and he was staring at you through the links with his mouth open and your shoe still in his hand.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The crossfire")>>\
''The crossfire.''
You were buying milk. That's what stays with you. A corner store on a street you'd been told to avoid, a quart of milk and a bag of chips, and the bell over the door, and then the street outside turning into noise.
Red and green on one side, in hoodies, with guns held sideways like they'd learned it from television. White and black on the other, older, with guns held like they'd learned it somewhere else. You were under a parked car before you'd decided to be, with gravel in your palms and someone's dropped cigarette an inch from your face, still burning.
There was a kid under the next car over. Younger than you. Red and green bandana. He'd been hit somewhere low and he was making a sound through his teeth, and he was looking at you. Nobody on either side was aiming at anything. The bullets just went where they went, into cars, into the store, into the air over your back, and there was no one to run from and nowhere to run to.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Reach across. Get him under your car. Get a hand on the wound.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You went across the gap on your stomach and dragged him by the jacket, and he screamed, and nobody heard him over everything else. You put both hands where the blood was and pressed, and somewhere in there the air above the two of you stopped being air, and a round that should have come through the door panel didn't. He died anyway. You didn't let go until the sirens.
#Stay flat. Make yourself small. Wait for it to stop.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You stayed. You made yourself as small as a person can be under a car, and you counted, and the kid under the next car stopped making the sound before the sirens arrived. You didn't go across. Something in you put a wall between you and the street anyway, and you've thought about which direction it was facing ever since.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The fever")>>\
''The fever.''
It started as a headache on a Tuesday and by Wednesday night you couldn't turn your head. Your mother was on doubles that week, which is how it works when the ER is short; she'd left soup and a note. You called her phone. The ER doesn't allow phones on the floor. It rang through to voicemail eleven times, and you know it was eleven because you counted, and then you couldn't count anymore.
The walls moved on Thursday, a little, and a little was enough. You lay on the bathroom floor because it was cold and watched your own hands on the tile and understood, with great calm, that they were somebody else's. You said your name to check and it came out wrong. Nobody was coming. You were fifteen and alone in an apartment with a thing in your spine, and the apartment was, you decided, the only place you were ever going to be again.
Somewhere in the fever you took a step back from the world, to see if it would let you, and it let you.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Get to the door. Get to the hallway. Make it real.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You crawled to the door and through it, and the hallway was there, and so was Mrs. Dalisay from 3B, who screamed, because you'd come through the door without opening it. She called the ambulance. You remember the ceiling of the elevator and nothing else for a week.
#Stop fighting it. Let the room go.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You let go, and the room went thin and quiet and far away, and you stayed there, outside everything, for a time you can't measure. Your mother found you on Friday morning, standing in the kitchen, and she says you looked straight through her, and that when she grabbed you her hands went through, and then they didn't. You were in the hospital for nine days. She hasn't worked a double since.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The table")>>\
''The table.''
You told Priya one thing. That your dad had moved out, and why, and what your mother had said about it. You'd been friends since you were six. You told her at a sleepover with your face in a pillow, and she held your hand and said she'd never tell anyone.
It took her three months to take everyone. She did it so well that you didn't understand it was happening until it was done: a joke here, a look, a party you weren't told about, a seat that was saved for someone else. By March the six people you'd grown up with would go quiet when you sat down. Nobody was cruel. That was the trick of it. You were just a person nobody could hear.
Your birthday was a Saturday. You'd booked the back room at the pizza place in January, before, for nine. You sat at the table with the cake and nine plates from six to seven-thirty, and at seven-twelve your phone showed you the photos going up from Priya's house, all of them, every one of them, with the caption //finally a good one.// You were removed from the group chat while you watched.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Walk to her house. Knock.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You walked the nine blocks with the cake still on the table behind you. She opened the door with six people behind her and started to say something, and you said "Sit down," not loud, and all seven of them sat down on the hall floor, and you looked at them sitting there, and you left without saying anything else. You've never been sure which part of that you regret.
#Sit there until the candles burn down.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You sat. You let them burn down into the frosting. The waitress came to ask if you wanted the check and you said "Stay," without meaning to, and she stood there for ten minutes with the check in her hand and tears on her face, unable to leave, and you watched her and understood what you'd become, and let her go.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The blackout")>>\
''The blackout.''
The cold came in on a Thursday and the power went out on Friday, and by Saturday the building was a refrigerator with stairs. Dani's fever started Saturday night. The super's phone rang through to nothing. The furnace in the basement was a thirty-year-old boiler with a pilot that wouldn't hold and a control board that had been repaired, at some point, with electrical tape.
You had a flashlight, a borrowed toolbox, and a phone at eleven percent. You had no idea what you were doing. You took it apart anyway, because the alternative was going back upstairs and listening to her breathe.
The second night, around three, something changed, and it wasn't the boiler, it was you. You looked at the board and read it the way you'd read a sentence: this goes here, this is wrong, this was never going to work, and this, with a soldering iron and a relay out of the dead microwave, would.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Keep going. Take the whole thing apart. Build it back the way it should have been.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
By six in the morning the boiler was running on a board you'd made from a microwave, a doorbell and a car charger, and it ran hotter and quieter than it had in a decade. You sat on the basement floor and shook. The super, when he finally came, took one look and asked who you'd paid.
#Carry her to the neighbor's first. Then come back down.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You carried Dani down two flights wrapped in every blanket you owned and left her with Mrs. Okafor, who had a space heater and a phone that worked. Then you went back to the basement and finished, and it took until noon, and when it caught you cried, and you've told nobody that part.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The window")>>\
''The window.''
Lord Street, a quarter to eight, nine people at the bus stop and the bus three minutes out. The car was a grey sedan with a dent in the rear door, and it slowed the way cars don't slow, and the back window came down.
You saw his face. Twenty feet, no mask, a kid not much older than you with a shaved head and a mouth that didn't move, and the barrel came up and found you, and stayed on you, and you had time to count. One. Two. You were nothing to him; you could see that. You were a choice he was making. Then the barrel moved a foot to your left, to Keisha from the fourth floor, who was wearing a green scarf her sister had knitted, and he fired twice, and the car kept going at exactly the same speed.
You held the scarf against her neck until the ambulance. Your hands did the counting for you after that: the car's speed, the distance, the angle, where it would be in three seconds, in five. You could have hit it with a rock. You know that now the way you know your address.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Run after the car. Get the plate.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You ran two blocks with a stone in your hand you don't remember picking up, and at the second corner you threw it, and it went through the rear windshield like the glass was a rumor. The car didn't stop. You got four of the plate's six characters. The police got him on Thursday. Keisha was in the ground by then.
#Stay. Keep your hands where they are.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You stayed, and pressed, and talked to her about nothing, and the stone you'd picked up without noticing grew hot in your other hand, hot enough to leave a mark on your palm you still have. The paramedics took her at eight-oh-four. Your mother was waiting at the bay doors. She didn't know it was you until the second gurney came in empty.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The phone call")>>\
''The phone call.''
She was on the kitchen floor with one hand open and one hand closed, and her face wasn't right on one side, and she was looking at you.
You called. You said the address. The dispatcher asked you to repeat it and you did and she asked you to repeat it and you did, and she asked whether your grandmother was breathing, and you said yes, and she asked you to calm down, and you had not raised your voice. Nine minutes. You know because the microwave clock was behind her head.
You went to the neighbors. The first one didn't answer. The second one answered and looked at you, a kid on the porch, and said she'd call someone, and closed the door. The third one let you talk until you ran out, and then said, "Okay, honey," and did nothing at all.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Go back in. Call again. Keep calling until someone hears you.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You went back and picked up the phone and said the address again, and this time you knew what the dispatcher was going to say three seconds before she said it, and you answered it before she asked, every time, until she went quiet and said, "They're coming," in a tone you had never heard an adult use on you. They were there in four minutes. You have never been sure whether they'd already been coming.
#Go back to the third door. Don't stop knocking.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You knocked until the third neighbor opened it again, annoyed, and you saw her reach for the door to close it before her hand moved, and you put your foot in the gap before it did, and said one sentence, and she went white and ran for her car keys and drove you both to the hospital at sixty miles an hour with Nana across the back seat. She hasn't spoken to you since. She crosses the street.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The kitchen")>>\
''The kitchen.''
Dale had been quiet all evening, and your mother had gone to bed early, and either one alone would have been a warning. Theo was at the table doing his spelling. You were at the sink. Dale came in and stood in the doorway and said something about the dishes, and then something about your mother, and then he took the big knife out of the block, slowly, like he was choosing it.
There was the width of the kitchen between him and the table. There was you.
You remember the knife more than his face: a cheap one, serrated near the handle, that you'd used an hour earlier on a tomato. You put your hand up the way people do, palm out, as if a hand were a door. He put the knife through it. You felt it go through the skin and the meat and the back of your hand and stop, and he was close enough that you could smell the beer, and he said, close to your ear, "Now you know." Behind you, Theo had stopped breathing.
What you needed, more than anything in the world, was for him to be a thing that could break.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Keep your hand up. Keep yourself between them.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You didn't move. You stood there with the knife through your hand and your body between him and the table, and you put your other hand on his chest to push him back, flat, the way you'd push a door, and the knife's handle came apart in his grip. Then the blade. Then, when he grabbed your wrist, something in his wrist. He screamed louder than you had. Theo called 911 from under the table, calm as a weather report.
#Go for the knife.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You closed your hand around the blade that was through it, which hurt in a way you don't have words for, and you pulled, and the knife came out of him in pieces: the handle, the rivets, the steel in three. He looked at his empty hand. You looked at it too. Then you put your bleeding palm on the counter between you and the counter split down the middle with a sound like a shot, and he left through the back door and didn't come back until the police brought him.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The photo")>>\
''The photo.''
The deputies were polite. That was the worst part. They stood in the rain in their hats while your dad carried the couch out, one end, and you carried the other, and your mother sat on the curb with the lamp in her lap. It took two hours. People walked past with umbrellas and looked and didn't look.
Carter Reyes drove past at the end of it. A junior, somebody's older brother, a face you knew from assemblies. He slowed down, and you saw the phone come up, and you were holding your own mattress at the time.
By Monday the photo had a name. Your name, for the first day. Then the other one: //Curbside.// It was on the lockers by Tuesday, printed. It was what people said instead of hello. Teachers heard it and smiled, because it sounded like a joke. The kid who'd been on the honor roll and the yearbook committee and had a seat in the second row of every class for three years was gone, and this new person was in all of their classes, and nobody could see the difference but you.
You triggered in the second-floor bathroom on Wednesday, scraping a sticker off your locker door with a house key, looking at a face in the mirror that you did not recognize. And then, for a long breath, you really didn't.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Walk into the cafeteria anyway. Let them look.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You walked in as yourself, more or less, with grey still fading off the backs of your hands, and you sat down at your old table, and you looked at every one of them until they looked away. Carter Reyes didn't come to school the rest of the week. You've never asked yourself why.
#Go out the side door. Don't come back.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You went out the side door as the other thing, because you couldn't get back yet, and you walked home along the tracks where nobody would see, and you let yourself be nothing anyone could name for eleven blocks. Your mother found a set of clothes torn through at the shoulders and didn't ask. The transfer paperwork went in on Friday.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The brawl")>>\
''The brawl.''
It was a Tuesday and the machines were half full and you were doing homework at the folding table, and then the front window came in.
Lung came through it first. He wasn't on fire yet, and you remember that part clearly. A tall man in a metal mask, tattooed to the waist, thrown through plate glass by something that had been a man a second ago and was now a moving pile of blades, and he got up out of the glass, and he was taller than he'd been when he landed. Hookwolf came through the wall after him. It had been a wall. It was a hole with metal coming out of it. You were under the table before you decided to be. Ma was behind the counter, screaming your name, and you couldn't get to her and she couldn't get to you.
It went on for an hour. The dryers died one at a time. Every minute Lung was bigger; by the twentieth his fire was rolling under the tables, and by the fortieth he wasn't shaped like a man. Hookwolf's blades passed close enough to take the edge off the table, and you felt the thing that moved them go through you like a change in air pressure. Under that, slower, you felt the other thing: the thing that was climbing in Lung, minute by minute, and had started, quietly, to climb in you.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Get the little kid under the next table. Hold on to him. Don't let go.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
There was a boy under the next table over, maybe six, whose mother was pinned behind a dryer. You went across on your stomach and got an arm around him and held on, and at some point Lung's fire rolled under both tables and over both of you and should have cooked you and didn't, and you felt it land, and you felt it start to climb.
#Watch them. Learn what powers look like up close, since you're going to die near them anyway.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You watched. You watched Hookwolf's metal and learned that it came from somewhere inside him, not from nowhere. You watched Lung and learned that he didn't start big: he was fed, a minute at a time, by the fight itself. When the fire finally reached under the table you did not flinch, and the thing that fed him went through you, and stayed, and started counting.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($trigger is "The followers")>>\
''The followers.''
Your father testified in October. An assault case, a man with an eighty-eight on his neck, a bar he'd happened to be in. The prosecutor said it was routine. The Empire thought otherwise.
They never touched you, because they didn't need to. The same man at your bus stop every morning, in a different jacket each day, smiling at you like an uncle. A car idling across from the school at three, the same car, the engine running. Photographs in the mailbox, no envelope: you at your desk through your bedroom window, you walking home, you asleep. The school counselor said to document it. The police said no crime had been committed. You stopped sleeping with the light off. You stopped sleeping.
They kicked the door in at four in the afternoon on a Thursday. Three of them, boots and shaved heads and the tattoo you'd learned to recognize, and you were in the hall closet because that's where you were when the door went. The slats were a half inch apart. You could see their belts. They were there for forty minutes, and they broke everything you owned, slowly, saying your name, and then the big one stopped in front of the closet, and opened it, and looked in, and said your name again, to your face, from two feet away.
<<choose "cc-power">>
#Don't breathe. Don't blink. Be a coat among coats.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You stopped being a person in a closet and became a coat among coats, and he looked at you for a count of four, and his eyes went over you and through you and found nothing, and he closed the door. You heard him tell the others you must have gone out a window. You stayed in the closet until your father came home at six and opened it, and he didn't see you either, and you had to say his name three times.
#Look at him. Learn his face. If this is the last thing you see, see it.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You looked straight at him, and he looked straight at you, and somewhere between the two of you his attention came loose like a tooth. You watched it happen. He frowned at the coats. He closed the door. You've seen him twice since, on the street, and both times you watched him almost remember you and fail. You've made very sure of it.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
<<include "cc-power">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The same day doesn't give two people the same thing. It depends on what you needed, in the moment, more than anything else in the world. But the shape of the day sets the shape of the power, and everyone who has studied it agrees on the shapes.
The PRT sorts what comes out into a dozen labels, and you've learned them the way other kids learn baseball positions. Brute: tough, or strong, or both. Mover: fast, or far. Thinker: you know things. Striker: it happens when you touch. Blaster: it happens at range. Shaker: it happens to an area. Master: other people do what you want. Stranger: nobody notices. Tinker builds. Breaker steps out of the rules. Changer turns into something. Trump is the one that only happens to people who were near a power when the day came.
This is what yours left you.
<<choose "cc-capename">>
#show-if ($trigger is "The fall") ''Densify.'' Under stress, your body goes heavy and hard. Bone like rebar, skin that turns a knife, and the strength to go with it: fully dense, you've lifted the back end of a car. You've taken a swing from a bat to test it; the bat lost. The catch: shifting takes a breath, and you sink in anything softer than concrete.
<<var $power "brute">>\
<<var $powerName "Densify (Brute)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Bulwark">>\
<<var $maxHealth + 50>>\
<<var $health + 50>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The chase") ''Skip.'' Anywhere you can see, you can be, instantly. Across a street, onto a roof, through a window a hundred yards off. No run-up, no sound, no flash, and whatever you're holding comes with you, people included. Chain them as fast as you can pick a spot. The catch: each one costs a lurch of nausea that stacks, and a dozen inside a minute will put you on your knees for one.
<<var $power "mover">>\
<<var $powerName "Skip (Mover)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Skip">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The crossfire") ''Cover.'' A pane of something hard and faintly blue, anywhere from a dinner plate to the side of a bus, appears where you point and stays as long as you want it. Stops bullets, stops fire, stops a truck. You can hold four, and shove one a few feet once it's up. The catch: each one only stops things from one side.
<<var $power "cover">>\
<<var $powerName "Cover (Shaker)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Bulkhead">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The fever") ''Lag.'' You can step one second out of the world. In that second nothing touches you: fire, bullets, hands, floors. You drift through walls at a walk, silent, a smear of yourself that eyes slide off, and you can bring one person with you if you're holding on when you go. The catch: you can't touch anything either, you come back wherever you happen to be, and the longer you stay out the harder it is to remember which side is real.
<<var $power "breaker">>\
<<var $powerName "Lag (Breaker)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Afterimage">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The table") ''Chorus.'' Say it, and anyone who hears you does it. "Stop." "Drop it." "Sleep." A short sentence holds for a minute; a single word holds until something breaks it. It works on anyone in earshot, friend or not, no eye contact, no cooldown. The catch: people remember being made to obey, and they don't forgive it.
<<var $power "master">>\
<<var $powerName "Chorus (Master)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Chorus">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The blackout") ''Jury-Rig.'' Give you a dead appliance, a junk drawer and twenty minutes and you'll hand back something that works: a shock baton out of a camera flash, a grapple out of a bike chain, smoke out of a fire extinguisher. The catch: nothing you build lasts more than a day or two, and every build eats parts, which means cash.
<<var $power "jury">>\
<<var $powerName "Jury-Rig (Tinker)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Scrap">>\
<<var $money + 20>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The window") ''Charge.'' Anything you hold stores kinetic energy, and the longer you hold it the more it stores. A pebble after one second hits like a brick. A ball bearing after five goes through a car door. A brick after ten is a cannon shell. Your fists count. The catch: your hands run hot, and after a dozen big throws the gloves start to smoke.
<<var $power "blaster">>\
<<var $powerName "Charge (Blaster)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Kickback">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The phone call") ''Glimpse.'' You see three seconds ahead, always, as faint overlays like a double exposure: where the fist is about to be, which way the car is about to swerve, whether the smile is about to turn. Focus, and it stretches to ten. The catch: it's seconds, not minutes, and after a few hours of leaning on it the headache comes to collect.
<<var $power "thinker">>\
<<var $powerName "Glimpse (Thinker)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Glimpse">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The kitchen") ''Shatterpoint.'' Touch anything and it remembers where it would break, and then it does. Locks, chains, a car door, a steel beam, armor: instant for anything dead, a held second for anything alive or growing back. The catch: it doesn't care whether you meant it, and you've learned to wear gloves.
<<var $power "shatterpoint">>\
<<var $powerName "Shatterpoint (Striker)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Fault">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The photo") ''Shed.'' You have a second body. Bigger, heavier, matte grey, hunched, with no face anyone could describe: it takes a bat without noticing and puts a man through a door. You look like nobody in it, and nobody is what you needed to look like. The catch: changing takes a long breath each way, the second body doesn't fit through most doors, and coming back leaves you shaking for a minute.
<<var $power "changer">>\
<<var $powerName "Shed (Changer)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Nobody">>\
<<var $maxHealth + 30>>\
<<var $health + 30>>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The brawl") ''Echo.'' Touch a parahuman, or get touched by one, and you get a copy of what they have. It starts at almost nothing, a candle's worth, and climbs minute by minute until at ten minutes it's theirs, all of it, for about a minute; then it's gone. Your body builds to carry it as it climbs: heat, plates, whatever the power needs. The catch: you need to get close to people who don't want you close, a fresh touch throws away whatever you've built, and you never know what you've caught until it's halfway up.
<<var $power "echo">>\
<<var $powerName "Echo (Trump)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Echo">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
#show-if ($trigger is "The followers") ''Blind Spot.'' People can't keep their attention on you unless you let them. Walk through a room and nobody remembers you were in it; stand still and you may as well be furniture. It covers whatever you carry and whoever you're touching, and the people watching the cameras forget to look. The catch: it works on people you want to notice you, too, and you've started doing it without meaning to.
<<var $power "stranger">>\
<<var $powerName "Blind Spot (Stranger)">>\
<<var $capeDefault "Blindspot">>\
It arrived in the worst hour of your life, and it has not left.
<</choose>>You've filled four pages with crossed-out names. Half of them sound like energy drinks. The other half sound like villains.
Settle it. What does the mask answer to?
<<textbox "$capeName" $capeDefault>>
And the Parahumans Online account you made in week two and have never posted from:
<<textbox "$phoName" "Transfer_Student">>
<<page "That's the one" "cc-stats">>/* Creation 8: core stats. The first visit seeds the sheet from the background and looks (guarded by $sheetInit), then cc-stats-pick spends $statPts and loops back here until they are gone. */\
<<if ($sheetInit is false)>>\
<<set $sheetInit to true>>\
<<if ($background is "athlete")>><<set $body to 2>><<set $agility to 2>><<set $athletics to 2>><<set $brawling to 1>>\
<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>><<set $mind to 3>><<set $academics to 2>><<set $capeLore to 1>>\
<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>><<set $mind to 2>><<set $agility to 2>><<set $tech to 2>><<set $perception to 1>>\
<<else>><<set $charm to 3>><<set $persuasion to 2>><<set $streetwise to 1>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($looks is 10)>><<set $charm to $charm + 1>><<elseif (($looks is 3) and ($charm gt 1))>><<set $charm to $charm - 1>><</if>>\
<</if>>\
''What you had before the power.''
Everyone at Winslow is made of the same five things in different amounts. <<if ($background is "athlete")>>Track gave you a body and the reflexes to use it.<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>The honor roll gave you a mind and not much else.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>Fixing things gave you a mind that sees how things come apart, and hands that are fast about it.<<else>>Talking your way out of everything gave you charm, and a reputation for it.<</if>> <<if ($looks is 10)>>The face helps more than you'd like to admit.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>The face doesn't help.<</if>>
<div class="cast-list">
<div>''Body'' <<skill $body 5>> Strength, toughness, how much you can take. Raises your health ceiling.</div>
<div>''Agility'' <<skill $agility 5>> Speed, balance, hands. The quiet options and the fast ones.</div>
<div>''Mind'' <<skill $mind 5>> Knowing things and seeing how they fit. Bombs, plans, the PRT's paperwork.</div>
<div>''Charm'' <<skill $charm 5>> Being liked, being believed, being asked out. Opens the dating options.</div>
<div>''Nerve'' <<skill $nerve 5>> Not flinching. Raises your stamina ceiling and holds the power steady under fire.</div>
</div>
<<if ($statPts gt 0)>>\
''Points left: $statPts.'' Spend them where the last three months went.
<<include "cc-stats-pick">>\
<<else>>\
That's the body and the mind you walked into Winslow with.
<<page "What you learned to do with them" "cc-skills">>
<</if>>\/* Point-spend loop for cc-stats. Each pick adds one dot, spends one point, and re-enters cc-stats. Options vanish at five dots. */\
<<choose "cc-stats">>
#use-if ($body lt 5) Body. Pull-ups on the door frame, carrying things that weigh too much.
<<var $body + 1>>\
<<var $statPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($agility lt 5) Agility. Stairs three at a time, catching things before they hit the floor.
<<var $agility + 1>>\
<<var $statPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($mind lt 5) Mind. Reading everything, including the things nobody assigned.
<<var $mind + 1>>\
<<var $statPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($charm lt 5) Charm. Learning what to say, and when to say nothing and smile.
<<var $charm + 1>>\
<<var $statPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($nerve lt 5) Nerve. The thing that kept you standing after the worst day.
<<var $nerve + 1>>\
<<var $statPts - 1>>\
<</choose>>/* Creation 9: skills. cc-skills-pick spends $skillPts one dot at a time, capped at three dots here; training can take them to four later. */\
''What you learned to do.''
Skills are the things you've actually practiced. Three dots is as good as anyone gets without a teacher. The story will mark the options that need one, like this: [Stealth].
<div class="cast-list">
<div>''Brawling'' <<skill $brawling 5>> Fists, elbows, a pipe if there's one. Taking a knife off someone.</div>
<div>''Athletics'' <<skill $athletics 5>> Running, climbing, rooftops, eleven blocks at a sprint.</div>
<div>''Stealth'' <<skill $stealth 5>> Not being where people look. Tailing someone who's careful.</div>
<div>''Streetwise'' <<skill $streetwise 5>> Whose block this is, what things cost, what the gangs say to each other.</div>
<div>''Academics'' <<skill $academics 5>> School, and what school was supposed to teach. Chemistry, history, how codes work.</div>
<div>''Tech'' <<skill $tech 5>> Scrap, wiring, improvised gear. Taking a bomb apart without a power.</div>
<div>''Cape Lore'' <<skill $capeLore 5>> PRT procedure, classifications, who's who, what a trigger looks like from outside.</div>
<div>''Persuasion'' <<skill $persuasion 5>> Talking people down, talking people round, asking the question that gets answered.</div>
<div>''Perception'' <<skill $perception 5>> Exits, tells, the third man in the car nobody mentioned.</div>
</div>
<<if ($skillPts gt 0)>>\
''Points left: $skillPts.''
<<include "cc-skills-pick">>\
<<else>>\
That's what you can do without the power. The power is a different conversation.
<<page "What's wrong with your life" "cc-problems">>
<</if>>\/* Point-spend loop for cc-skills. */\
<<choose "cc-skills">>
#use-if ($brawling lt 3) Brawling
<<var $brawling + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($athletics lt 3) Athletics
<<var $athletics + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($stealth lt 3) Stealth
<<var $stealth + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($streetwise lt 3) Streetwise
<<var $streetwise + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($academics lt 3) Academics
<<var $academics + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($tech lt 3) Tech
<<var $tech + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($capeLore lt 3) Cape Lore
<<var $capeLore + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($persuasion lt 3) Persuasion
<<var $persuasion + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
#use-if ($perception lt 3) Perception
<<var $perception + 1>>\
<<var $skillPts - 1>>\
<</choose>>/* Creation 10: Problems, one to three. Every Problem past the first buys a Perk on the next page ($perkPts is set from $problemCount in cc-perks). Effects are applied in cc-summary, not here, so the player can change their mind. */\
''What's wrong with your life.''
Nobody triggers from a good year. Pick at least one of these, up to three. Each one is a thing the story will keep coming back to, and each one past the first buys you a Perk on the next page.
<div class="cast-list">
<div><<if ($indebted is true)>>''✓ Indebted.''<<else>>''Indebted.''<</if>> Your household owes five thousand dollars to a man named Royce Hollis, who buys other people's paper and collects on it. He wants it by the first of May. If he doesn't get it, he takes the lease.</div>
<div><<if ($deaf is true)>>''✓ Hard of hearing.''<<else>>''Hard of hearing.''<</if>> One ear, mostly gone, and the other not what it was. People get behind you. Cars arrive without warning. Fire you can see is the only fire you know about.</div>
<div><<if ($injured is true)>>''✓ Injured.''<<else>>''Injured.''<</if>> Something from the worst day didn't heal right. You limp when you're tired, and you're tired sooner. Twenty off your stamina ceiling, Athletics capped at one to start.</div>
<div><<if ($marked is true)>>''✓ Marked.''<<else>>''Marked.''<</if>> You're queer, or close enough that Winslow doesn't bother with the difference. The gangs have a word for it, and they use it. A few people won't, and you'll learn who.</div>
<div><<if ($record is true)>>''✓ Record.''<<else>>''Record.''<</if>> Two suspensions and a file that follows you. Teachers read it before they meet you. So does the PRT. Hero Standing starts ten lower.</div>
<div><<if ($rival is true)>>''✓ Rival.''<<else>>''Rival.''<</if>> Another cape your age triggered the same month, with Arcadia money and a green glow, and has decided the city isn't big enough for two new ones. Greenlight turns up where you are and takes the credit. Greenlight is <<listbox "$glGender" autoselect>><<option "a guy" "guy">><<option "a girl" "girl">><</listbox>>.</div>
<div><<if ($fan is true)>>''✓ Fan.''<<else>>''Fan.''<</if>> Greg Veder saw something he shouldn't have and has decided you're his. He posts sightings on Parahumans Online as XxVoid_CowboyxX. Notoriety climbs five every arc whether you earned it or not.</div>
<div><<if ($dissonance is true)>>''✓ Dissonance.''<<else>>''Dissonance.''<</if>> Since the worst day the world has been slightly wrong around you. Clocks lose minutes. The harbor fog comes in on the wrong wind. You knew about Halifax before anyone told you. Whatever is in the fog will find you first.</div>
<div><<if ($nightmares is true)>>''✓ Nightmares.''<<else>>''Nightmares.''<</if>> You don't sleep through. Every morning starts twenty short of your stamina ceiling.</div>
</div>
<<if ($problemCount lt 3)>>\
''Chosen: $problemCount.''<<if ($problemCount gte 1)>> One Perk free, plus <<print $problemCount - 1>> more.<</if>>
<<include "cc-problems-pick">>\
<<else>>\
Three is enough for anyone.
<<page "What you got out of it" "cc-perks">>
<</if>>\/* Picker for cc-problems. Indebted also sets the $5000 $debt. The last option moves on once at least one Problem is chosen. */\
<<choose "cc-problems">>
#show-if ($indebted is false) Indebted. Five thousand to Hollis by the first of May.
<<set $indebted to true>>\
<<set $debt to 5000>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($deaf is false) Hard of hearing.
<<set $deaf to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($injured is false) Injured.
<<set $injured to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($marked is false) Marked.
<<set $marked to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($record is false) Record.
<<set $record to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($rival is false) Rival. Greenlight.
<<set $rival to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($fan is false) Fan. Greg Veder, with a camera phone.
<<set $fan to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($dissonance is false) Dissonance. The world is slightly wrong.
<<set $dissonance to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($nightmares is false) Nightmares.
<<set $nightmares to true>>\
<<var $problemCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($problemCount gte 1) That's enough. On to what you got out of it. -> "cc-perks"
<</choose>>/* Creation 11: Perks. First visit sets $perkPts to the number of Problems (one free Perk plus one per extra Problem). Effects are applied in cc-summary. */\
<<if ($perkPts is 0 and $perkCount is 0)>><<set $perkPts to $problemCount>><</if>>\
''What you got out of it.''
Everyone who's had a bad year got something for it, even if they'd give it back. One Perk for free, one more for every Problem past the first.
<div class="cast-list">
<div><<if ($willful is true)>>''✓ Willful.''<<else>>''Willful.''<</if>> A stubborn streak that shrugs off pain and humiliation. Nerve +1, and a few places where you simply don't flinch.</div>
<div><<if ($trained is true)>>''✓ Trained.''<<else>>''Trained.''<</if>> Three years of a martial art, for sport or for self-defense. Body +1, Brawling to at least two, and people who know fighting can see it on you.</div>
<div><<if ($readUp is true)>>''✓ Read up.''<<else>>''Read up.''<</if>> You knew more about parahumans than was healthy before you were one. Cape Lore to at least two, Power control +1.</div>
<div><<if ($connected is true)>>''✓ Connected.''<<else>>''Connected.''<</if>> Somebody on the PRT's front desk owes your family. Calls you make get answered, and Hero Standing starts five higher.</div>
<div><<if ($smart is true)>>''✓ Smart.''<<else>>''Smart.''<</if>> Mind +1.</div>
<div><<if ($powerful is true)>>''✓ Powerful.''<<else>>''Powerful.''<</if>> Your power came in bigger than the file will say. Power control +1, stamina ceiling +20, and the first real hit you land on Lung counts double.</div>
<div><<if ($tough is true)>>''✓ Tough.''<<else>>''Tough.''<</if>> Body +1, health ceiling +20. You've been hit before and it didn't take.</div>
<div><<if ($pockets is true)>>''✓ Pockets.''<<else>>''Pockets.''<</if>> A hundred and fifty dollars nobody knows about, and a prepaid phone already in the bag.</div>
<div><<if ($gamer is true)>>''✓ Gamer.''<<else>>''Gamer.''<</if>> A channel with forty subscribers, opinions about speedruns, and a Parahumans Online handle that Uber and Leet have replied to twice. Tech +1, and two capes in this city already like you.</div>
</div>
<<if ($perkPts gt 0)>>\
''Perks left: $perkPts.''
<<include "cc-perks-pick">>\
<<else>>\
That's what the bad year left you with.
<<page "So that's you" "cc-summary">>
<</if>>\/* Picker for cc-perks. */\
<<choose "cc-perks">>
#show-if ($willful is false) Willful.
<<set $willful to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($trained is false) Trained.
<<set $trained to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($readUp is false) Read up.
<<set $readUp to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($connected is false) Connected.
<<set $connected to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($smart is false) Smart.
<<set $smart to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($powerful is false) Powerful.
<<set $powerful to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($tough is false) Tough.
<<set $tough to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($pockets is false) Pockets.
<<set $pockets to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
#show-if ($gamer is false) Gamer.
<<set $gamer to true>>\
<<var $perkPts - 1>>\
<<var $perkCount + 1>>\
<</choose>>/* End of character creation. Awards the creation achievements, applies Perks and Problems once, derives the health and stamina ceilings from Body and Nerve, captures the replay baselines, then summarises the character. Leads to ch1-morning. */\
<<achieve "Cape in Waiting">>\
<<if ($vial is true)>><<achieve "Bottle Service">><</if>>\
/* One-time application of Perks and Problems, guarded so that returning to this page cannot stack
them. Order matters: Trained and Tough raise Body BEFORE the sheet block turns Body into health. */\
<<if ($problemsApplied is false)>>\
<<set $problemsApplied to true>>\
/* Perks */\
<<if ($willful is true)>><<set $nerve to Math.min(5, $nerve + 1)>><</if>>\
<<if ($trained is true)>><<set $body to Math.min(5, $body + 1)>><<set $brawling to Math.max(2, $brawling)>><</if>>\
<<if ($readUp is true)>><<set $capeLore to Math.max(2, $capeLore)>><<set $control to Math.min(5, $control + 1)>><</if>>\
<<if ($connected is true)>><<set $heroRep to $heroRep + 5>><</if>>\
<<if ($smart is true)>><<set $mind to Math.min(5, $mind + 1)>><</if>>\
<<if ($powerful is true)>><<set $control to Math.min(5, $control + 1)>><<set $maxStamina to $maxStamina + 20>><</if>>\
<<if ($tough is true)>><<set $body to Math.min(5, $body + 1)>><<set $maxHealth to $maxHealth + 20>><</if>>\
<<if ($pockets is true)>><<set $money to $money + 150>><<set $hasPhone to true>><</if>>\
<<if ($gamer is true)>><<set $tech to Math.min(5, $tech + 1)>><</if>>\
/* Problems */\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>><<set $heardPall to true>><</if>>\
<<if ($glGender is "girl")>><<set $glHe to "she">><<set $glHim to "her">><<set $glHis to "her">><<else>><<set $glHe to "he">><<set $glHim to "him">><<set $glHis to "his">><</if>>\
<<if ($record is true)>><<set $heroRep to Math.max(0, $heroRep - 10)>><</if>>\
<<if ($injured is true)>><<set $maxStamina to $maxStamina - 20>><<set $athletics to Math.min(1, $athletics)>><</if>>\
<</if>>\
/* Ceilings from the core stats, once: +10 health per Body dot above one, +10 stamina per Nerve dot above one. */\
<<if ($sheetApplied is false)>>\
<<set $sheetApplied to true>>\
<<set $maxHealth to $maxHealth + ($body - 1) * 10>>\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $maxStamina to $maxStamina + ($nerve - 1) * 10>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<</if>>\
/* Baselines for a fresh-Friday replay (reset-day restores these). Captured after the perks above. */\
<<set $baseHeroRep to $heroRep>>\
<<set $baseStreetRep to $streetRep>>\
<<set $baseTaylorTrust to $taylorTrust>>\
<<set $baseControl to $control>>\
So that's you.
''$name.'' Fifteen. A $girlGuy, <<if ($build is "small")>>small for it and quick<<elseif ($build is "tall")>>tall for it and not done<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>solid, built for carrying things<<else>>average build, the kind nobody describes<</if>>. Hair $hair, eyes $eyes<<if ($mark isnot "nothing anyone remembers")>>, and $mark. People notice that first<</if>>. <<if ($looks is 10)>>A face that gets described to other people, and in this city that is its own kind of problem.<<elseif ($looks is 7)>>A face people call striking when they're being careful with the word.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>A face that people's eyes slide off, and not in the useful way, and you've heard every joke there is about it.<<else>>A face that doesn't get a second look in either direction.<</if>> In a city that sorts by face, <<if ($empireStance is "poster")>>the Empire's recruiters noticed you in your first week, and you've noticed them noticing.<<elseif ($empireStance is "white")>>the Empire's kids assume you're on their side until told otherwise.<<elseif ($abbFit is true)>>the ABB assumes you'll come around, and the Empire assumes the opposite.<<elseif ($empireStance is "mixed")>>the Empire's kids can't decide what you are, and keep trying.<<else>>the Empire's kids made up their minds about you on day one, and you use the far stairwell.<</if>> <<if ($background is "athlete")>>Ran track, before.<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>Honor roll, before.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>Fixed things, before. Still do.<<else>>Talked your way out of everything, before.<</if>> Transferred into Winslow High in January, because Arcadia had a two-hundred-name waiting list and the district has rules about bus times. You live with $guardian. <<if ($vial is true)>>You didn't have a worst day. You had a glass of water that wasn't water, and now you have everything: $powerName. The twelve don't stay in their lanes. With enough control they mix, and nobody has a classification for what comes out.<<else>>The worst day of your life: $trigger. What it left you with: $powerName.<</if>> It draws on your <<print setup.pairName($power)>>, and you've got <<print setup.pstat($power)>> of five there.
<<if ($indebted is true)>>And there's the paper. <<if ($guardianName is "Ma")>>Ma rebuilt the laundromat after two capes went through it, and the money for the rebuild came from a man who sold the loan on to Royce Hollis, who collects for whoever pays him.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Mom")>>The hospital bills from the worst day went to a collections firm, and the firm sold them to Royce Hollis, who collects for whoever pays him.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>Uncle Tomas borrowed against the yard to keep it after the Dockworkers' contract fell through, and the loan is Royce Hollis's now, and Hollis collects for whoever pays him.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Marcus")>>Marcus signed something to get the apartment, and the something belongs to a man named Royce Hollis now, who collects for whoever pays him.<<else>>Your household owes five thousand dollars to Royce Hollis, who buys other people's paper and collects for whoever pays him.<</if>> Five thousand by the first of May, or he takes the lease. He's never raised his voice about it. He doesn't need to.
<</if>>\
<<if ($deaf is true)>>Your left ear is mostly decoration. You've learned to sit with your back to walls, and you still get surprised.<</if>><<if ($injured is true)>> You limp when you're tired, and you're tired sooner than you used to be.<</if>><<if ($marked is true)>> Winslow decided what you are in your first week, and the Empire's kids have a word for it that they use when teachers aren't close enough to hear.<</if>><<if ($record is true)>> Two suspensions follow you from school to school in a folder. The PRT will have read it before you sit down.<</if>><<if ($rival is true)>> There's a kid from Arcadia who triggered the same month you did, who glows green and has a publicist's instincts, and who has decided that Brockton Bay has room for one new cape. Greenlight. You haven't met. You will.<</if>><<if ($fan is true)>> Greg Veder saw you do something in week two that you've never been sure he saw, and he has a camera phone and a Parahumans Online account, and he loves you the way he loves Space Opera.<</if>><<if ($dissonance is true)>> The kitchen clock has lost four minutes since Tuesday. The fog came up the harbor last night against the wind. You read about Halifax a week before the thread existed. You've stopped mentioning any of it.<</if>><<if ($nightmares is true)>> You dream the worst day most nights, and wake up at four with the ceiling too close.<</if>><<if (($deaf is true) or ($injured is true) or ($marked is true) or ($record is true) or ($rival is true) or ($fan is true) or ($dissonance is true) or ($nightmares is true))>>
<</if>>In a gym bag at the back of your closet there's a costume that's about seventy percent finished. Dark fabric, a mask that covers more than it shows, and a name sewn in your head if nowhere else: ''$capeName.''
You check the Stats button at the top any time you want to see where you stand. Your health and your stamina, which every power move in a fight draws from. Your reputation with the heroes and with the street, how widely known your mask is, how much the people around you trust you, and how much cash is in your pocket. Choices move those numbers. The numbers open and close doors.
It's Friday. One more class before lunch.
<<page "Friday" "ch1-morning">><<set $metSchool to true>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Friday. The bus to Winslow smells like wet coats and somebody's weed. It takes forty minutes to do three miles, because it stops at every corner the Docks have.
Your reflection in the window is <<if ($build is "small")>>a kid who looks younger than fifteen and has stopped minding<<elseif ($build is "tall")>>too much leg for the seat and a face still catching up to the height<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>shoulders that fill the seat and a face people assume is slower than it is<<else>>a face nobody would describe twice<</if>>, hair $hair, eyes $eyes<<if ($mark isnot "nothing anyone remembers")>>, and $mark<</if>>. <<if ($looks is 10)>>Twelve weeks in, everyone at Winslow could pick you out of a lineup. You gave up trying to fix that around week four.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>Twelve weeks in, the only people at Winslow who could pick you out of a lineup are the ones who've made a joke about your face. There are more of those than you'd like.<<else>>Twelve weeks in, nobody at Winslow could pick you out of a lineup. You worked at that.<</if>>
Winslow High is three floors of brick the color of old liver, with chicken wire in the window glass and a metal detector in the lobby that has been broken since before you got here. Everyone walks around it. The stairwells are tagged red and green, and near the shop classes there's some of the Empire's red and black, because that's where the white kids who've decided what they are hang out. The teachers learned a long time ago not to see things.
<<if ($empireStance is "poster")>>\
The Empire kids by the shop classes picked you out in your first week, the hair, the eyes, the whole catalog<<if ($looks is 10)>>, and Travis Hull looked longer than the catalog needed<</if>>. Travis is a senior with red laces in his boots, and he has nodded at you every morning since, like you've already agreed to something you haven't.
<<elseif ($empireStance is "white")>>\
The Empire kids by the shop classes looked you over in your first week and decided you were probably fine. At Winslow that counts for something, and you didn't ask for it. One of them, a senior with red laces named Travis Hull, says hey to you in the stairwell most mornings, and you say it back, and every morning you mean to stop.
<<elseif ($empireStance is "mixed")>>\
The Empire kids by the shop classes looked you over in your first week and couldn't decide what you were. They're still trying. You learned the far stairwell by your second day anyway.
<<else>>\
The Empire kids by the shop classes made up their minds about you in your first week, the other way. You learned the far stairwell by your second day. Nobody has touched you, and they've let you know that this is a decision they make fresh every morning.
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbFit is true)>>\
The ABB kids on the second floor noticed you as well, and not in a hostile way. It was worse than that. They were expectant. A junior with red and green on her backpack straps, Mai Vo, asked where your family was from, and when you told her she nodded like it settled something. She saves you a seat at lunch sometimes. You haven't taken it yet.
<</if>>\
You've been here twelve weeks. You know which stairwell to avoid and which bathroom works, and you know which three girls run the sophomore class, because on your second day one of them, the redhead, looked you up and down across a hallway and then looked away like she'd finished.
<<if ($background is "athlete")>>\
You tried out for track in February, because three months without running was making you strange. Coach looked at your times and put you on the roster without a word, and Sophia Hess, who owns that team, has not said one word to you since.
<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>\
You stopped doing the reading for World Issues in week three, because you did it two years ago at a school that had books. You've started doing it again, lately, just to have something to hold.
<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>\
The metal detector in the lobby has a loose ribbon cable behind the left panel. You could fix it in ten minutes. You haven't told anyone, because a working metal detector at Winslow would be a worse problem than a broken one.
<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>\
You could have been somebody here by week three. You watched how it's done: who Madison Clements sits with, which stairwell the Empire kids own, which teachers trade grades for quiet. You decided to be nobody instead, and it turns out nobody takes practice.
<</if>>\
World Issues is second period. Mr. Gladly is already talking when you sit down.
"Okay! Capes, finally. Who can tell me, and I don't want the Wikipedia answer, who the first one was?"
Hands go up. Somebody says Scion, somebody says Vikare, and Gladly bounces on his heels. He gets through the Protectorate and the Wards, and the Triumvirate on a slide behind him in their classic V, and then he gets to the part he loves, which is New Wave, Brockton Bay's own, the family that took their masks off in public to prove heroes could be accountable. "Glory Girl," he says, "is sixteen. Think about that. She's a junior at Arcadia."
Two rows up and one over, Taylor Hebert is drawing something small in the corner of her notebook and not looking at the slides at all.
"So," Gladly says. "Big question, and I want a real discussion. Capes exist, so are we better off, yes or no? Somebody who hasn't talked yet." His eyes land on you. "New kid. Twelve weeks in. Fresh perspective."
<<choose "ch1-class">>
#"Depends who you ask. The people on the Boardwalk, yes. The people in the Docks, I don't think the capes have noticed them."
<<var $spokeInClass true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The room goes a little quiet, because that was more than anyone expected. Gladly, to his credit, doesn't flinch. "Okay! That's a real answer. Hold that thought for Monday." Taylor's pen has stopped moving, though she doesn't look up.
#"Better. Nobody's going to say worse with a floating fortress in the bay."
<<var $spokeInClass true>>\
<<var $gladlyLikesYou true>>\
Gladly points at you like you've scored. "The rig! Deterrence, that's the word. Hold that thought." Madison, two rows back, says something to her friend that makes them both laugh, and you're fairly sure it was about you. You decide it doesn't matter.
#Shrug. Say you're still figuring the city out.
Gladly moves on without a flicker; he's used to it. Another twelve weeks of being furniture is the plan, and the plan is working. Taylor's pen keeps moving.
<</choose>>The last ten minutes of the period are Gladly's favorite kind: discussion, where the popular kids talk and he agrees with them. He goes by "Mr. G." He ends class early to chat, hands out group work so friends can sit together, and runs mock trials instead of tests. He thinks everyone likes him. Most people do, in a way that doesn't cost them anything.
You're half listening, and the other half is on the girl two seats up and one row over.
Taylor Hebert. Tall, thin, dark curly hair she hides behind, glasses, a brown hoodie she keeps zipped to the collar. She sits alone in all three classes you share with her, and she doesn't speak unless she's called on. In your first week you watched a boy "accidentally" skip her when handing out worksheets, and nobody blinked.
Right now her pen is tapping. Her eyes keep going to the clock. Behind her, two rows back, Madison Clements is watching her too, with the look of someone who has plans.
Madison is small and cute and wears sky-blue pins in her hair. She's also wearing a strapless top in a month where you can still see your breath in the mornings. Boys like her. You've noticed that she is never alone when she's being cruel, not once.
"Let me wrap up," Mr. Gladly says. "Homework for the weekend: think about how capes have changed the world around you. Lists are optional. Monday we break into groups of four and the best list wins vending-machine snacks."
There's cheering, and chairs scrape, and the room comes apart into noise.
<<choose "ch1-hall">>
#Watch Taylor. Something is about to happen, and you'd like to know what.
<<var $noticedTaylor true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
Taylor is the first one out the door. She isn't running, but it's close. Madison counts to five, then gathers two friends and drifts toward the hall in the same direction, laughing at nothing.
#Drift over to Mr. Gladly's circle. Being new, it helps to be seen.
<<var $gladlyLikesYou true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
Mr. Gladly beams when you join the group at his desk. "The new kid! You're going to love this unit. We'll do the Protectorate, New Wave, maybe a debate on the Birdcage." Across the room, Taylor slips out alone. You catch the back of her hoodie disappearing.
#Say something to Madison. She's the one person in here who seems to run things.
<<var $madisonFriendly true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
Madison turns the full cuteness on you. "Oh my god, you're the transfer, right?<<if ($marked is true)>> I love that you're so //brave// about, you know, everything.<<elseif ($looks is 10)>> Okay, you're actually gorgeous, that's so unfair.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>> I love that you don't care what you look like, that's so brave.<<elseif ($mark is "freckles")>> I love your freckles, I'd kill.<<elseif ($hair is "dyed, a blue streak through it")>> And the hair, so brave.<<elseif ($mark is "glasses")>> Cute glasses.<</if>> You should sit with us sometime." Her friend elbows her. "Later," Madison says, "we have a thing." They leave in a cloud of giggles. They go the same direction Taylor went.
#Pack up and keep your head down. The new kid who notices nothing is the new kid who gets left alone.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You've gotten good at being furniture. You zip your bag and let the crowd carry you out.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The third-floor hall is thinning out. Lunch at Winslow is an hour long, longer than anyone needs.
You're at the top of the stairwell when you hear it: a bathroom door banging open, water running, and the particular pitch of girls giggling together that means someone is about to have a very bad time. The girls' washroom is four doors down.<<if ($gender is "guy")>> You can't open that door without the door being the story, whatever's happening behind it.<</if>>
Through the frosted glass you can make out three shapes. One of them has red hair. That would be Emma Barnes, who models for the department-store catalogs and who, you've been told, used to be Taylor's best friend. The athletic silhouette is Sophia Hess, track team, the one who looks through you like you're a window. The small one is Madison.
<<if ($power is "thinker")>>\
Your power flickers. Three seconds ahead, the overlay shows the door as it will be: Emma's shoulder braced against a stall, two arms reaching over the partition, plastic bottles tipping. You know what's coming and roughly when.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
You feel the familiar weight start to gather in your shoulders. Your body thinks this is a fight, and your body may be right.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>\
Four doors is nothing. You've been across the hall and back in the time it took to think that, in your head, twice.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>\
The word is already in your throat. One syllable. You've used it on a dog, a bus driver, and once, by accident, on Nana. You know what it would do in there.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "stranger")>>\
You've stopped moving without deciding to. Two sophomores walk past you close enough to brush your bag and don't see you at all.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "cover")>>\
Your hand is already up, fingers spread. There's a door-sized gap in the air waiting for you to fill it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "shatterpoint")>>\
The stall doors in this school are cheap. One hand on one of them, for one second, would do it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($vial is true)>>\
You have eleven ways to open that door and no idea which one is you. That's been the problem for four months.
<</if>>\
There is a voice from inside that is not laughing.
<<choose "ch1-bathroom">>
#Go in. Now.
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
You hit the door with your palm and it slams the inside wall.
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Go in now, but go for Emma's shoulder, not the door. You've already seen where she'll be standing.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Three seconds is enough. You're through the door and past the sinks before the first bottle finishes tipping, and your hip catches Emma square where the overlay said she'd be. She staggers off the stall door.
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Skip. Stairwell to sinks, one jump, before the next bottle tips.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The hallway lurches and you're standing on wet tile with your stomach somewhere behind you. One bottle has gone over. You get a hand on the second one, still in Madison's grip, before she understands there's a fourth person in the room.
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Open the door and say "Stop." Just that.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You open the door and say it, not loud. All three of them freeze mid-motion like a paused video, Madison with her bottle tilted and not quite tipping. It holds for a long breath. When it breaks, Sophia's head comes around to you first, and she knows something just happened to her.
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Go still, then go in. They won't see you until you want them to.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You walk in behind them and nobody turns. You stand at Madison's elbow while the first bottle empties, close enough to count her hairpins, and then you take the second one out of her hand, and now they notice you.
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Put a pane over the top of the stall. Let them pour onto that.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You push the door open and raise a hand and the air above the stall goes hard and blue. Two bottles empty onto it and run off the edges like rain off a windshield. Madison actually says "huh."
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Take the hinges. The door Emma's bracing is about to stop being a door.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You reach past Emma, put a hand on the stall door, and the hinges go like dropped glass and the door falls inward with Emma on it, and the second bottle goes over Madison instead of anyone else.
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if ($stamina gte 10) The flash baton's in your bag. Not for them. For the lights.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You touch the baton to the light switch plate and the whole bathroom goes dark with a pop. In the dark, three girls on wet tile stop doing what they're doing. You open the stall door by feel. Madison's bottle is still three inches from tipping.
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) You've got nothing caught. Go in anyway, with your hands.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
You go in empty, the way you are most days<<if ($willful is true)>>, and empty has never once stopped you<</if>>, and you put yourself between the stall and the bottles, and Madison's goes down your back instead, and it's cold. Sophia looks at you like she's trying to place you.
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Step out of the world. Walk through the stall wall. Be standing next to her when they look.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You go a second behind everything and walk through the door, and the partition, and come back inside the stall with your hand on Taylor's shoulder, and the bottle Madison is tipping pours onto the back of your head instead. Three girls look at a stall that had one person in it and now has two. Sophia is the only one who doesn't scream.
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 10) Shed. Not all the way. Enough that the door isn't a door.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $helpedTaylor true>>\
<<var $stoppedJuice true>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
You let it come halfway, shoulders and hands, and you put one grey hand flat on the stall door, and the door leaves its hinges. Emma goes with it. You're yourself again before Madison's finished screaming, mostly, and Sophia saw the hand.
#Find a teacher. Mr. Gladly's room is right there.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You turn back down the hall. Mr. Gladly is mid-story with three sophomores and takes a full minute to understand what you're saying. By the time he's following you to the bathroom, the door is open and the three of them are gone.
#Keep walking. You don't know her. You don't need enemies in your first semester.
<<var $ignoredTaylor true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<achieve "Bystander">>\
You take the stairs down. Behind you, the laughter spikes and then cuts off as the door shuts. You tell yourself you'll find out later what happened. You know what happened.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $metTaylor to true>>\
<<if ($ignoredTaylor is true)>>\
You eat lunch in the cafeteria, in a corner, and don't taste it. Twenty minutes later Taylor Hebert walks past the doors toward the exit, soaked from the hair down in something purple and red and orange, backpack dripping, not looking at anyone. Half the room turns to watch. A few people laugh. Most just go back to eating.
Nobody follows her out.
<<page "Afternoon classes" "ch1-art">>\
<<elseif ($stoppedJuice is true)>>\
<<achieve "Before the Second Bottle">>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 20>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
The stall door swings open and Taylor is standing in it, drenched from a single bottle of cranberry juice, glasses streaked, one arm still raised to shield her head. The second and third bottles are in Madison's and Sophia's hands, unopened.
For a second nobody moves.
Then Sophia drops lightly off the partition she was perched on and looks at you, and the look isn't angry. It's interested, the way you'd look at a dog that did a trick nobody taught it. "New kid," she says. "You move fast."
"Get out," you say.
Emma recovers first. She laughs, for the audience. "Oh, that's adorable. Taylor made a friend." She looks you over like a catalog page she's going to pass on.<<if ($gender is "guy")>> "A boy. In the girls' room. That's going to be such a fun story for the office."<</if>><<if ($mark is "braces")>> "Braces. Oh, honey."<<elseif ($mark is "glasses")>> "Two of you with glasses. You can share a case."<<elseif ($mark is "a scar through one eyebrow")>> "Love the scar. Very dramatic."<<elseif ($mark is "freckles")>> "Madison, look at the freckles. Isn't that sweet."<<elseif ($mark is "a nose that's been broken once")>> "Who broke your nose? I'd like to send them a card."<<elseif ($hair is "dyed, a blue streak through it")>> "And the hair. So brave."<</if>> "Enjoy that. Ask her about summer camp sometime." She walks out, and Madison scurries after her. Sophia goes last, and from the door she looks back at you for one beat too long.
Then it's just you and Taylor and the drip.
Taylor pulls her glasses off. Her hands are shaking. "I didn't ask you to do that," she says. It comes out angrier than she probably means.
"I know."
She stares at the juice on the floor. Then, quieter, "Thanks."
<<page "Help her clean up" "ch1-aftermath">>\
<<elseif ($helpedTaylor is true)>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
You're a few seconds too late to stop it, and in plenty of time to see it.
Madison and Sophia are perched on the stalls on either side of the middle one, each upending a bottle. Emma has her back against the stall door. Juice and soda run under the partition in a sticky red-purple puddle. From inside there's a thud as whoever's in there hits the door with their whole body, and the door doesn't move.
"Hey!" The word comes out louder than you expected.
Three heads turn. Emma smiles at you like you've walked into a party. <<if ($looks is 10)>>"Oh, hi. Transfer, right? You're way too pretty to be in here for her. You can go."<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>"Oh, hi. Transfer, right? God, you two are a matched set. You can go."<<else>>"Oh, hi. Transfer, right? You can go. This is a private thing."<</if>><<if ($gender is "guy")>> "Also, this is the girls' room. Not that anyone's going to believe that's why you're in here."<</if>>
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
You don't go. You walk up to the stall door and put your hand on it next to Emma's shoulder, and you let a little of the weight come. Not enough to show, but enough that when she pushes back it's like pushing a wall. Her smile slips.
<<else>>\
You don't go. You walk up to the stall door and shove Emma's shoulder off it. She's taller than you expected and she doesn't like being touched; she steps back with her lip curled like you've got something on your hands.
<</if>>\
The stall swings open. Taylor is on her knees in the puddle, hair plastered to her face, empty bottles rolling around her. She looks up at the three of them and then at you and her expression doesn't change for either.
"Boring," Sophia says, and drops off the partition. She brushes past you close enough that you feel it, and murmurs, "Careful who you pick," without looking at you. Madison follows. Emma pauses at the door.
"Ask her about summer camp," Emma says brightly, and leaves.
<<page "Help her up" "ch1-aftermath">>\
<<else>>\
Mr. Gladly stands in the doorway of the girls' bathroom and visibly decides not to come in. "Taylor?" he calls. "Are you all right in there?"
The answer is a long pause, then running water. Then: "I'm fine."
He turns to you with an expression that says he would really like this to be over. "I'll talk to them," he says. "Thanks for letting me know. That was the right thing to do." He goes. You know and he knows that talking to them will accomplish nothing.
You stand in the hall. A minute later Taylor comes out with her hood up and juice dripping from the hem, walks straight past you without looking, and takes the stairs down two at a time.
<<page "Afternoon classes" "ch1-art">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<achieve "Someone Noticed">>\
Taylor cleans her glasses on a paper towel and only manages to move the streaks around. Her backpack, which was khaki green this morning, has a dark purple bloom across the top where someone aimed. She shoulders it anyway.
"You're the transfer," she says, flat.
"$name. I sit behind you in World Issues. And bio, I think, except you're never in bio."
"Taylor." She wipes her glasses again. "You shouldn't have done that. They'll make it your problem now. Emma doesn't forget."
"I figured. I'd still rather have Emma Barnes mad at me than stand in the hall and listen to that again." You look at the bottles on the floor. "Do they do this a lot?"
"Define a lot." She says it without any inflection at all, and doesn't wait for you to.
<<if ($gender is "guy")>>
"You know this is the girls' bathroom."
"I noticed on the way in. It seemed less important than the other thing."
She looks at you a second longer than she has to. "It'll matter by sixth period. Someone will make sure of it."
<</if>>\
She almost smiles. It gets about a quarter of the way there and gives up. Up close you can see what you'd half seen in class, that she's wound tight, every muscle in her neck standing out, like somebody holding a door shut from the inside. You've seen that in mirrors.
She looks down at herself. Hoodie, shirt, jeans, all streaked red and orange and purple. "I can't go to art like this. Sophia's in art."
<<choose "ch1-art">>
#Give her your hoodie. You've got a shirt under it, and you're not the one who smells like a vending machine.
<<var $gaveHoodie true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $metTaylor true>>\
You pull it off and hold it out. She looks at it like it might be a trick. Then she takes it. "I'll wash it," she says. "I'll bring it Monday." She pulls it on over the wet shirt. It's too short in the arms. Neither of you mentions it.
#Offer to walk her to the office. She can call home from there.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
"No." It's out before you've finished. "They'll call my dad. He'll come down here and he'll yell at the principal and nothing will change except he'll know." She exhales. "I'll take the bus. Thanks, though. Really."
#Ask her what Emma meant about summer camp.
<<var $taylorTrust - 10>>\
Her face shuts. "Nothing. It's nothing." She picks up her bag and is gone before you can take it back. You stand in a bathroom with a sticky floor, and that's one question you won't ask again.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Fifth period is art, in the basement, where the windows are at sidewalk level and the radiators clank. The midterm project is due, Taylor's seat is empty, and nobody says anything about it.
<<if ($empireStance is "hostile")>>
The Empire kids take the back tables. They leave a seat's width around Sophia Hess, who is Black and who they step wide around for reasons that are hers, and they leave less around you.
<</if>>\
Sophia Hess sits two tables over, and she isn't working on her project, because she doesn't need to. The teacher, Mr. Quinlan, decided a long time ago that Sophia is a track-team problem and not an art-room one. She sits with her chin on her hand and watches the room, and after about ten minutes it's you she's watching.
<<if ($ignoredTaylor is true)>>\
She comes over when Quinlan steps out, and doesn't sit, and picks up the brush you were using and looks at it.
"You walked past," she says, "on the third floor." She puts the brush down. "Most of them try being nice to her first, and it takes about a week."<<if ($build is "small")>> "You're small. You don't move small."<<elseif ($build is "tall")>> "You're all legs. You didn't trip over them."<<elseif ($build is "solid")>> "You're built like a hydrant. You didn't move like one."<</if>><<if ($looks is 10)>> "Pretty ones sit with Emma by week two. You didn't."<<elseif ($looks is 3)>> "Nobody's going to try being nice to you either. Good. It's clearer."<</if>> <<if ($injured is true)>> "You limp. You didn't let it slow you."<</if>><<if ($trained is true)>> "And somebody taught you where to put your feet."<</if>> She almost smiles. "I could like you."
<<choose "ch1-afternoon">>
#"I'm not interested in being liked."
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Everybody's interested," she says, and goes back to her table. But she looks at you twice more before the bell, and the second time it isn't contempt.
#"What did she do to you? Any of you. Actually do."
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $sophiaSuspicious true>>\
Her face doesn't change. "Nothing," she says. "That's the point, she doesn't do anything, she just takes it." She taps the table once with two fingers. "Don't ask me that again." She goes back to her table, and whatever interest was in her face has gone.
#Say nothing. Paint.
She waits a count of five for an answer, shrugs, and goes back to her table. Being furniture has its uses.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
She comes over when Quinlan steps out, and doesn't sit, and picks up the brush you were using and looks at it.
"That was dumb today," she says, and puts the brush down. "Hebert's not worth it. Three months in, you didn't know that, and now you do." She waits for it to land. "That's me being nice, and I don't do it twice."
<<choose "ch1-afternoon">>
#show-if ($nerve gte 3) [Nerve] Hold her stare until she's the one who looks away.
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You don't say anything. You look at her, and keep looking, and Sophia Hess, who stares people down for sport, holds it for a count of six and then looks at the brush in her hand like it said something. "Huh," she says. She goes back to her table, and she doesn't look at you again, You're fairly sure nobody at Winslow has won that from her before.
#"Then don't."
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Something crosses her face, fast, closer to interest than anger. "Okay," she says, and goes back to her table, and she doesn't look at you again for the rest of the period, and it isn't the same as being ignored.
#"What did she do to you? Any of you. Actually do."
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
Her face doesn't change. "Nothing," she says. "That's the point, she doesn't do anything, she just takes it." She taps the table once with two fingers. "Don't ask me that again." She goes back to her table and sits with her back to you, and from Sophia that is an answer.
#"Noted." Then paint.
<<var $sophiaTested true>>\
She waits a count of five for more. "Noted," she repeats, flat, trying the word out like it tastes strange, and goes back to her table. You've bought nothing and lost nothing, and with her that counts.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The rest of the afternoon goes the way Winslow afternoons go. In the hall between periods, Emma Barnes passes you with two friends and says, loudly, <<if ($looks is 10)>>"That's the one. Shame about the personality,"<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>"That's the one. God, that face,"<<else>>"That's the one,"<</if>> and they all look. Greg Veder, who talks to everyone whether they want it or not, falls in beside you on the stairs and tells you about a game called Space Opera for an entire flight, and then says, out of nowhere, "Taylor's okay, by the way, Taylor Hebert, I saw you with her, people are weird about her but she's actually okay, she helped me with a thing once, anyway," and peels off before you can answer.<<if ($looks is 10)>> He forgot the name of his own character twice while telling you, and walked into a locker on the way off.<</if>>
<<if ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>\
Sophia Hess watches you from the far end of the hall with her arms crossed, and when you meet her eyes she holds them, and then she looks away first, slowly, like it was her idea.
<</if>>\
On the bus home you sit with your bag in your lap and your fingers finding the ball of your palm, pressing, the way you do when you're thinking about the costume in your closet.
Three months of practice. Three months of soon.
<<if ($helpedTaylor is true)>>\
You keep seeing Taylor on her knees in the juice, and the faces of the three girls who put her there, and how not one person in that hall this afternoon acted like anything had happened. There are three teams of heroes in this city and a floating fortress in the bay and none of it reaches the third floor of Winslow High.
<<elseif ($ignoredTaylor is true)>>\
You keep seeing Taylor walking past the cafeteria doors, dripping, and nobody moving. You were nobody too, and you tell yourself that's the smart play, that the new kid can't afford a war in week twelve. It doesn't sit any better on the bus than it did at lunch.
<<else>>\
You keep thinking about Mr. Gladly deciding not to step into the bathroom, and about how many adults in that building made the same decision today.
<</if>>\
Something's going to give, and you'd rather pick when.
<<if ($abbFit is true)>>\
<<set $abbApproach to true>>\
<<if ($empireStance is "hostile")>><<set $empireTarget to true>>On the stairs down, an Empire kid with a shaved head puts his shoulder into yours hard enough to turn you. <<if ($heritage is "Black")>>"Wrong stairs, $girlBoy," he says. "These ones are for white people." His friend laughs. "Eighty-eight."<<elseif (($heritage is "East Asian") or ($heritage is "Southeast Asian"))>>"Lung's little chink," he says. "Tell your dragon the east side's getting whiter."<<elseif ($heritage is "South Asian")>>"Somebody brought curry on the stairs," he says to his friend, loud, and then to you: "Go home. Not the Docks. Home."<<elseif ($heritage is "Latino")>>"Border's that way, wetback," he says, and points at the window, and his friend laughs like it's new.<<elseif ($heritage is "Middle Eastern")>>"Terrorist," he says, pleasantly, and his friend makes a whistling noise that ends in a boom.<<else>>"What even are you?" he says. "Pick one, so we know which stairs you get." His friend says, "Mutt," and they both laugh.<</if>> <<if ($marked is true)>>His friend adds, "And a fag," and they laugh harder, because the two things together are a joke to them. <</if>>He pitches it so the teacher at the door can decide not to have heard it, and she decides not to, and you keep walking.
<</if>>\
Mai Vo is at your bus stop, and it isn't her bus stop. She has her backpack on both shoulders and her hands in her jacket, and she doesn't say hello.
"You saw the news about the new tinker," she says, and it isn't a question. "People are going to get hurt this month, us first, because the Empire's going to feel brave." She looks at you the way she did in the hall, like you're a sum that's already been added. "Lung keeps us safe. The Empire would put you through a window for your face, and you know it.<<if ($indebted is true)>> Lung's people don't owe Hollis. Hollis knows better.<</if>><<if ($marked is true)>> Lung doesn't care what you are as long as you're ours. Oni Lee cares. I'm telling you so you hear it from me.<</if>> And if you ever stood next to a skinhead like you were friends, we'd know, and that would be worse than a window." She gives you a second with that. "When you need people, you know where we sit."
<<choose "ch1-home">>
#"What do you want from me?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Nothing yet," she says. The bus comes and she doesn't get on it. "That's the part people don't believe, that nobody wants anything from you until they do."
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] "You came to my bus stop. That's a lot of effort for a seat at lunch."
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $maiFlirt to true>>\
Mai Vo looks at you for a second longer than she meant to, and then she almost smiles, and puts it away. "Don't," she says. "I'm not the one you'd be dating." She looks east, toward the Docks. "If you're serious, there's a noodle place on Fourth. Thursday. Bring an appetite and don't bring anyone." The bus comes. She still doesn't get on it.
#"I don't wear colors. I'm not going to."
<<var $abbDeclined true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
She shrugs, one shoulder. "Nobody does, and then somebody puts you in a hospital and you find out you were wearing them the whole time." She says it without heat. "Seat's there."
#Say nothing. Get on the bus.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You get on. She watches the bus pull out with her hands in her jacket, and she heard the answer in that too.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif (($empireStance is "poster") or ($empireStance is "white"))>>\
<<set $empireApproach to true>>\
Travis Hull is at your bus stop, and it isn't his bus stop. Senior, shop classes, red laces, a jacket with nothing on it, because the ones who matter don't need the patches. He's friendly, and everyone says so.
"You're new," he says, like it's a compliment. "Saturday there's a cookout at the Kessler yard, out past the rail line. Food, music, people who look out for each other. Nobody's going to ask you for anything." He looks down the street toward the Docks. "You've seen it. The ABB's taken six blocks off the east side this year and the cops don't go in anymore, because it's 'their neighborhood' now. You walk into Winslow and half the stairwells belong to them, and the other half belong to the blacks and the Mexicans, and the teachers are scared of all of them. Somebody has to look after our people. We're the only ones who do.<<if ($indebted is true)>> We look after their debts too. Hollis doesn't collect from the Empire's families. Ask around.<</if>><<if ($marked is true)>> And I'm going to be straight with you, because somebody should be: the Empire's got standards about what you are, and I don't make them. But I've seen what gets overlooked for the right skills.<</if>>" He says //our// like he's handing you something. He holds out a folded flyer. There's an eagle on it you've seen on walls. "<<if (($empireStance is "poster") and ($looks is 10))>>You'd fit in. You'd be on the flyers inside a month, honestly.<<elseif ($empireStance is "poster")>>You'd fit in. You know you would.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>You'd be welcome. We don't care what anybody looks like, long as they're ours.<<else>>You'd be welcome. We don't get a lot of new faces that aren't trouble.<</if>>"
<<choose "ch1-home">>
#Take it. Say nothing. Find out what they want from you.
<<var $empireCourting true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You take it and put it in your pocket, and he smiles like something's been settled, and the bus comes. You've got a flyer with an eagle on it in your pocket and a reason you can say out loud, that you want to know what they want, and a second reason you can't say yet.
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] Smile back. Ask if he's going to be at the cookout himself, or just the flyer.
<<var $empireCourting true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<set $travisFlirt to true>>\
He grins, properly this time, and it's a nice grin, and that is the problem with Travis Hull. "I'll be at the grill," he says. "Come find me. I'll introduce you to people." He gives you the flyer and his number on the back of it, and the bus comes, and you have a date with the Empire Eighty-Eight on Saturday, and a reason you can say out loud, and a reason you can't.
#show-if ($mind gte 3) [Mind] Ask him what the Empire's actual plan for the Docks is. In numbers.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $empireAsked to true>>\
He opens his mouth with the speech ready and you ask how many blocks, how many people, who pays the rent on the yard, and the speech stops, because nobody's asked Travis Hull a question with a number in it before. "That's above me," he says, finally, and it's the first true thing he's said. He gives you the flyer anyway. He looks at you differently doing it.
#Tell him no. In a full sentence, so he hears it.
<<var $empireDeclined true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"No. I know what the eagle is. I'm not interested, and I'm not going to be." He smiles like you've said something cute and will come around. "Okay," he says. "Saturday's there." The bus comes, and he waves at it like he's seeing you off.
#Take it, and drop it in the first trash can he can see from the bus.
<<var $empireDeclined true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You take it, and when the bus pulls out you lean across the aisle and drop it in the can at the next stop, in the window, where he's still standing. His smile goes away. You've made some Saturday worse for yourself, and you can live with that.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
<<set $empireTarget to true>>\
On the stairs down, an Empire kid with a shaved head puts his shoulder into yours hard enough to turn you. <<if ($heritage is "Black")>>"Wrong stairs, $girlBoy," he says. "These ones are for white people." His friend laughs. "Eighty-eight."<<elseif (($heritage is "East Asian") or ($heritage is "Southeast Asian"))>>"Lung's little chink," he says. "Tell your dragon the east side's getting whiter."<<elseif ($heritage is "South Asian")>>"Somebody brought curry on the stairs," he says to his friend, loud, and then to you: "Go home. Not the Docks. Home."<<elseif ($heritage is "Latino")>>"Border's that way, wetback," he says, and points at the window, and his friend laughs like it's new.<<elseif ($heritage is "Middle Eastern")>>"Terrorist," he says, pleasantly, and his friend makes a whistling noise that ends in a boom.<<else>>"What even are you?" he says. "Pick one, so we know which stairs you get." His friend says, "Mutt," and they both laugh.<</if>> <<if ($marked is true)>>His friend adds, "And a fag," and they laugh harder, because the two things together are a joke to them. <</if>>He pitches it so the teacher at the door can decide not to have heard it.
<<choose "ch1-home">>
#Keep walking. You've had worse weeks than this one.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You keep walking, and behind you he says it again, to his friend this time, and they laugh. You've had worse weeks, and you'd like to stop having them.
#Stop. Turn around. Say his name, because you know it.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Dillon." He didn't expect you to know it, and you watch him not expect it. "Dillon Kessler, shop two. Your cousin's the one with the yard." You leave it there, because he'll remember that you know, and that's going to cost you something later, and it was worth it.
#Tell the teacher at the door. Make her have heard it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You stop in front of her and say it, what he said, in the voice you'd use to report a fire. She has heard it now, and she says she'll talk to someone. You both know who talks to whom at Winslow, and who doesn't.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
The house is empty when you get in. Mom's shift started at three and runs until the ER lets her go. The ER never lets her go on time. There's a note on the fridge, a twenty under a magnet, and a reminder to eat something that isn't cereal.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Aunt Ruth is at the kitchen table doing the crossword in pen. "Good day?" she asks, not looking up, and you say "Fine," and she lets you have that.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt is on the porch with the radio and a mug that stopped being coffee an hour ago. "Dockworkers' Association voted down the pay cut," he tells you, like you'd asked. "Danny Hebert's doing. Good man. Doesn't sleep." He turns the radio down a notch. "Halifax local isn't answering their hall phone. Week now." The name sticks, and you don't know why.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad's note is on the counter under the salt shaker: //Late run to Portsmouth. Leftovers in the fridge. Lock both locks.// You lock both locks.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
The condo is empty and smells like the cleaning service. There's a voicemail on the landline from your father's assistant confirming that he'll be late. He's late every day. There's a second one, and you play it twice. A woman's voice, pleasant, unhurried. "Just checking in. No action needed at this time." No name, and no number.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana is in her chair by the window with the afternoon light on her, cane hooked over the armrest. "You're... early," she says, finding the word on the second try. Her eyes go over you once, top to bottom, the way they've done since you were four. "Something," she says, and it isn't a question. "Later," you say, and she lets it go, and you can see what that costs her.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas is still at the yard; he's always still at the yard. There's a box on the kitchen table with your name on it in marker: a dead cordless drill, two phone batteries, and a car stereo with the face ripped off. He doesn't ask what you do with them. He says the yard runs on what people throw away, and so, apparently, do you.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma is at the laundromat until nine, because the laundromat is open until nine and the rent doesn't care who's tired. The apartment smells like dryer sheets, and the plywood over the front window downstairs is still there, four months on. She left rice on the stove and a note: //Eat. Don't go down there.// She means the laundromat after dark, and she means the whole east side.
<<else>>\
Marcus is on the couch in his café apron, asleep with his shoes on. He pulled a double. You put a blanket over him and leave him to it. The apartment smells like espresso grounds and the ABB tags across the street are fresh since Tuesday.
<</if>>\
You go to your room and shut the door and open the closet, and there's the gym bag.
The costume is mostly dark gray, with panels you reinforced yourself and a mask that covers everything above the mouth. The lenses were the expensive part. The belt is a hiking belt from the sports store. It doesn't look like a hero's costume. It looks like something that would rather not be seen. That was the whole brief.
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
It's cut loose through the shoulders, because you've learned the hard way what happens to a shirt when you densify in it.
<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>\
The belt has six small pouches, and each one holds a handful of steel ball bearings. You've been through four pairs of gloves getting the throw right.
<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>\
Everything on it is strapped down twice. The first time you skipped in a hoodie, the hoodie arrived a half-second after you did.
<<elseif ($power is "master")>>\
The mask has to leave your mouth clear. You spent a week trying to make the word work through fabric and it comes out muffled, and muffled doesn't count.
<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>\
It's plainer than the others would be. No emblem, no color. You tested it by standing in the corner of the kitchen for twenty minutes while Aunt Ruth made dinner. She set two places and never once looked your way.
<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>\
There's a hole cut in the right glove at the palm. You're not sure the pane needs it, but it feels like it does.
<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>\
There's no metal on it anywhere. A belt buckle taught you that.
<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>\
The belt is the costume. Six pouches of parts, a camera-flash baton that holds a charge for about a day, a bike-chain grapple, and a fire extinguisher cut down to a canister. Everything on it will be junk again by Tuesday. You'll build it again Wednesday.
<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>\
The gloves are fingerless, because you need skin. You've touched two parahumans in your life, in the same hour, and you remember what both of them felt like better than their faces: one all edges, one climbing. The jacket's seams are let out, because whatever you catch, your body builds to hold it, and you've torn two shirts finding that out.
<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>\
It's thin. You don't need armor, because nothing touches you when you're out. What you need is a mask that stays on when you come back somewhere you didn't plan to, so it's strapped twice.
<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>\
It's two costumes. One fits you. The other is a hood and a wrap of dark cloth big enough for the second body, folded into the bag, because the second body doesn't fit in clothes and you'd rather it didn't arrive in rags.
<<elseif ($vial is true)>>\
It's overbuilt. Pockets for ball bearings, a hole in the right palm, no metal, soft soles, earplugs, reinforced knees. You kept adding things for powers you'd only used once. It weighs more than it should and you still don't know which parts matter.
<<else>>\
You've practiced walking through the house in the dark with it on. The overlays make it easy; you see your own shin hit the table three seconds before it would have.
<</if>>\
<<if ($background is "fixer")>>You built it. Every panel, every seam, double-stitched and tested. You know which one goes first, and it won't be tonight.
<<elseif ($background is "athlete")>>It's cut from running gear, because that's what you had, and it moves like it.
<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>There's a laminated card in the inside pocket with the PRT's public emergency line, the Protectorate's, and the Wards', in that order. You've never been sure what the order means.
<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>The mask leaves more of your face than it should. You tried a full one and couldn't stand it. If you're going to say anything in this, people are going to see your mouth say it.
<</if>>\
You unfold the coded notebook. Page after page of tests, ranges, limits. A list of the city's players: the Protectorate ENE, the Wards, New Wave, the Empire Eighty-Eight, the ABB, Coil, the Merchants. Pages of planning.
There's a page near the back headed WARDS, with a phone number and two columns. The left column: a paycheck, a costume somebody else pays for, people who've done this before, a transfer to Arcadia. The right column: <<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>Mom would have to sign, and she'd do it in a heartbeat, and then she would never sleep again<<elseif ($guardianName is "Marcus")>>Marcus isn't your guardian on paper yet, and the PRT would ask, and then there'd be a social worker in the apartment<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>Grandpa Walt doesn't sign anything from the government on principle, and this would be eleven pages of it<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>Dad would say yes and mean no, and then he'd take the Portsmouth runs so he wouldn't have to watch<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>Nana can't hold a pen for long yet, and the forms are eleven pages, and the first thing the PRT would do is ask whether she's fit to sign them<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>Aunt Ruth would call your parents, and then it would be their decision, and you've seen how those go<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>Uncle Tomas isn't your guardian on any paper the PRT would recognize, and the first thing they'd do is call your mother<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>Ma would sign anything that kept you off the east side, and then she'd be a laundromat owner whose kid is a government cape, on a block the ABB walks twice a day<<else>>your father would read the contract, and the contract is the problem<</if>>. Your face in a file. A tracker on your belt. A schedule, a handler, a PR person deciding what you can say, and a year of being told you aren't ready by people who've never met the thing in your chest. You've read the forums. Every Ward who's ever posted about it says the same thing: it's safer, and it's a job, and nobody asks you what you want.
You haven't called the number. You keep telling yourself you'll decide after you've done it once on your own, so that if you ever do walk into their building, it's as someone they're recruiting and not someone they're managing.
And a date, circled, that says ''summer.'' After finals, when you're ready.
You keep the notebook open until the pages stop making sense.
<<choose "ch1-decision">>
#This weekend. No more soon.
<<var $wentOut true>>\
You close the notebook. The circled date can go to hell. You've been ready for a month and scared for two, and today was the first day you were angrier than you were scared.
#Stick to the plan. Summer. Finish the costume, finish the notebook, do it right.
<<var $wentOut false>>\
You close the notebook and put the bag back in the closet. The plan exists for a reason, you tell yourself.
<</choose>><<if ($wentOut is true)>>\
You sleep badly and wake up decided.
<<page "Saturday" "ch1-saturday">>\
<<else>>\
Saturday you do homework. Sunday you run the Boardwalk, twice, and don't look west.
Sunday night you lie awake and listen to sirens somewhere in the Docks. There are a lot of them. Around one in the morning there's a sound like a transformer blowing, and then another, and then the sirens get louder.
Monday morning the news says Armsmaster took down Lung in the Docks last night, "with assistance." There's footage of a steel cage welded to a sidewalk and a lot of dead bugs, and a reporter saying //unidentified parahuman// the way people say //alleged//.
You sit at breakfast and think about the gym bag in your closet, and the circled date, and the fact that somebody your age was on a roof in the Docks last night while you were in bed. You'll never know what you would have done. What you do next is still open.
<<set $stayedHome to true>>\
<<set $lungDown to true>>\
<<choose "ch2-morning">>
#Monday. Go to school. Whoever that was, they go to school somewhere too.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You put the notebook in your bag for the first time. You don't know why yet.
#Go back to Friday night and decide again. -> "ch1-home"
<<var $stayedHome false>>\
<<var $lungDown false>>\
The circled date can go to hell.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<include "refresh">>\
<<set $sawGloryGirl to true>>\
Saturday.
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Mom is asleep until noon, the way nights in the ER leave her. You leave a note that says //Boardwalk, back by dinner// and mean it.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Aunt Ruth drives you to the Boardwalk because she has errands, she says, and drops you at the north end without asking what yours are.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt walks the Boardwalk every Saturday "to keep an eye on the water," and you walk the first mile with him before you split off. He knows the man who runs the sports store. Everyone knows a man Grandpa Walt knows.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad has a Saturday route. The apartment is yours until six. You take the bus.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana does her exercises at the kitchen table with the therapist's rubber band, slow and furious, and when you say you're going out she says, "Shoes," and she means the good ones, because she thinks you're going somewhere that matters.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Your father is at the office. His card is on the counter with a note: //Get what you need.// He means clothes, and you take the card.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas opens the yard at seven and expects you at eight on Saturdays, and pays you in whatever you can carry. You carry a lot. By ten you've got what you came for, and he waves you off without looking up from a transmission.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma has the laundromat and you have the morning, on the condition that you text her from the Boardwalk, because the Boardwalk has cameras and the Docks don't.
<<else>>\
Marcus is at the café until three. He leaves you the twenty and a list of corners not to walk past that is two corners longer than it was on Tuesday.
<</if>>\
The sports store on the Boardwalk sells gear to people who ski in Vermont and jog on the beach, and it sells, if you know what you're looking at, almost everything a person needs to finish a costume. Tinted safety lenses. Elastic strapping. A climber's belt pouch that fits a notepad and a canister of pepper spray. Soft-soled water shoes that don't squeak on tile. It costs you forty minutes and thirty dollars, <<if ($money gte 100)>>pocket change<<else>>most of what you have<</if>>, and you don't buy anything together that would look like an outfit to a clerk.
<<var $money - 30>>\
<<floor0 "money">>\
Outside, there's a crowd at the rail, all looking up.
Glory Girl is doing a slow loop over the water, white dress, gold tiara, hair like a shampoo commercial, close enough that you can see her grinning. She comes down to the Boardwalk like she's practiced it, and you've read that she has, and lands in the middle of the crowd, and people hold out phones and napkins and one man holds out a baby, and she signs everything but the baby.
She's sixteen. She's a junior at Arcadia. Gladly said it yesterday like it was a miracle, and watching her now, three feet off the planks, you see what he meant, and also why Taylor didn't look up from her notebook.
<<choose "ch1-kestrel">>
#Get close. Listen to how she talks to people. You might need to know.
<<var $metGloryGirl true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You work your way to the front. Up close she's warmer than the costume: she asks a kid his name, she laughs at an old woman's joke before the punchline, she makes everyone feel like the only person at the rail. Her eyes pass over you once, and you feel it, a pressure like standing too close to a speaker: //admire me.// You've read about that part. It still works. "Hey," she says, to you specifically, out of nowhere. "You look like you're thinking about something. Don't. It's Saturday." Then she's gone, straight up, and the crowd exhales.
#Stay back. You don't need to be in anyone's photo.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You watch from the sports store doorway. You watch how she picks who to talk to, how she turns so the sun is behind her, how she leaves before the crowd gets bored. It's a performance, and a good one. You wonder who taught her, and whether anyone is going to teach you.
#Leave. A crowd of people looking up is a crowd of people not looking at you.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You go the other way with your bag of not-a-costume. Behind you the crowd cheers at something, and you don't turn around.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
You're halfway back along the rail when something lands on the sports store's awning behind you, badly.
It's a person. A girl, maybe seventeen, in a costume that looks like a wetsuit somebody added wings to: grey, panels of fabric between the arms and the ribs, a stencil of a small hawk on the chest that's starting to peel. She skids the length of the awning, catches the edge with both hands, hangs there a second, and drops to the planks next to you like it was planned.
"That one's on me," she says, to nobody, and then she looks at you, because you're the only person on the Boardwalk not watching the sky where Glory Girl just was. She's chewing. She has half a sandwich in one hand, and she did all of that without letting go of it.
"She makes it look easy," she says, nodding up. "It isn't. Eyes up, by the way. You've been staring at the water for ten minutes like it owes you money."
<<set $metKestrel to true>>\
<<choose "ch1-saturday-2">>
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] "Buy you a better sandwich sometime? Somewhere with chairs."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $kestrelFlirt to true>>\
<<var $rom_kestrel + 10>>\
She stops chewing. She looks at you the way she looked at the water, like you might owe her money. "Kestrel," she says, eventually. "Eight months, independent, no file. And I don't date people I haven't seen fight, so if you want chairs, you know where I'll be on Thursdays." She's up the drainpipe before you can answer. The gulls go with her. "Docks are bad tonight," she calls down. "Stay off Fourth."
#"Who are you?"
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Kestrel." She says it like a name on a form. "Independent, eight months, no wiki page, no PRT file worth the name, and one newspaper photo where I'm a smudge. I do the Boardwalk nights and the fish market days." She finishes the sandwich. "You're new, you walk like new<<if ($injured is true)>>, and like something hurts<</if>>.<<if ($rival is true)>> There's another new one, green, loud, Arcadia money. Don't be the green one.<</if>> The Docks are bad tonight, if you were thinking about it, because Lung's people are moving. Stay off Fourth."
#"You're an independent? Out here? Alone?"
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Alone's a strong word. I've got the gulls." She wipes her hand on her thigh and looks at you properly for the first time, up and down, quick, the way a lifeguard checks a pool. "Eight months, and nobody's recruited me, nobody's arrested me, I've stopped four purse snatchings and one actual stabbing, and I pay for my own tape." A shrug that moves the wings. "If you ever go out, look for the kid on the roofs, I'll be the one eating. Docks are bad tonight, so stay off Fourth."
#show-if ($empireCourting is true) Leave her to it. The flyer in your pocket says noon at the Kessler yard, and it's twenty to. -> "ch1-kessler"
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Rookie," she says to your back, not unkindly. "Docks are bad tonight. Stay off Fourth." You walk east, toward the rail spur, with the flyer in your pocket and her warning in your ear.
#show-if ($agility gte 4) [Agility] Go up the drainpipe after her. Match her to the roof.
<<var $rom_kestrel + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
She's up the pipe and you're up it behind her, hand over hand, and on the roof she turns around with the sandwich still in her hand and looks at you like she's rewriting something. "Okay," she says. "You're not new new." She gives you half the sandwich. "Docks are bad tonight. Stay off Fourth. Or don't, apparently."
#Say nothing. Nod. Keep walking.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
She watches you go for a second, then shrugs, and the wings shrug with her. "Rookie," she says, not unkindly, to your back. "Docks are bad tonight. Stay off Fourth." Then she's up the drainpipe and gone over the roofline, and the gulls go up with her.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The Kessler yard is a salvage lot off the rail spur with a chain-link fence and a hand-painted sign, and on Saturdays it's a cookout. Thirty people, maybe forty. Grills, folding tables, a flag on the side of the shed you don't look at directly, kids younger than you running between car bodies. It looks like a church picnic, on purpose.
Travis finds you inside a minute and puts a plate in your hand. "Told you," he says. "Nobody's going to ask you for anything." Dillon Kessler is at the grill with his cousin, and he looks at you and then at Travis, and Travis shakes his head a quarter inch, and Dillon goes back to the grill.
Two people here aren't like the others. A man in his late twenties in a good jacket, who moves like someone who has had lessons in everything, and who every adult in the yard defers to without looking at him. And a girl your age, sitting on the hood of a dead Buick with her boots on the bumper and her phone in her hand, who hasn't looked up once, and who, when a paper plate blows off a table, stops it in the air without looking up either, and sets it back down.
"Victor," Travis says, following your eyes. "And that's Rune. Don't stare. She hates it."
Victor comes over anyway. He has the kind of handshake they teach. "Travis says you're new," he says. "Winslow. That can't be easy." He asks about your family, your classes, what you want to do, and he listens to the answers like a man who will remember every one of them, and he never once says the word he's here about. Rune, from the Buick, says, "He does this with everyone. It's a whole thing," and goes back to her phone.
<<choose "ch1-saturday-2">>
#Show Victor what you can do. Quietly. Behind the shed.
<<var $empireRecruited true>>\
<<var $empireEyes true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Our People">>\
You do it small, behind the shed, where only he and Rune can see. Victor watches without any expression at all, and then he smiles, and it's a real smile, and a real smile from him is worse than the blank look. "Kaiser will want to meet you," he says. "Not yet. There's something happening in the Docks tomorrow night; Lung is gathering his people for something. We'd like eyes on it. Consider it an interview." He gives you a number. Rune, from the Buick, says, "Welcome to the family," in a voice that could mean anything.
#Eat their food. Keep your mouth shut. Learn what they want.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You eat two hot dogs and listen. By two o'clock you know who runs the yard, who's afraid of Victor, who Rune's uncle is, and that the thing on the shed is a flag everybody here has decided is a joke until it isn't. Nobody asks you for anything. Travis walks you to the gate and says, "Next Saturday," like it's settled, and you don't say it isn't.
#Leave before anyone asks your name.
<<var $empireCourting false>>\
<<var $empireDeclined true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You put the plate down and go. Travis calls after you, friendly, and Victor doesn't look up, and Rune looks up, <<if ($looks is 10)>>with something in it that is plainly envy, and something under that<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>with the look of someone filing you under harmless<<else>>with something in it that might be envy<</if>>.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "control">>\
You go home, to the basement or your room or wherever the door locks.
You spend the afternoon on Parahumans Online with the notebook open, because tomorrow is the first time any of this stops being theory. The ABB page is long. Lung, who grows. Oni Lee, who teleports and leaves a copy of himself behind that lasts long enough to be a problem, and who the wiki marks with a red box that says, in effect, //do not.// A new name, added ten days ago, with a photo of goggles and a gas-mask filter: Bakuda. The page doesn't say much yet, but the forum under it says plenty.
<<pho $phoName>>\
<<pho-topic "ABB has a new cape. Anyone know anything about 'Bakuda'?" "Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay">>\
<<pho-post "Brocktonite03" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Posted On Apr 9th 2011:">>Wiki entry went up ten days ago and it's two sentences. Goggles, gas mask, braided wire over one shoulder. Supposedly the Cornell thing. Supposedly Lung brought her in personally. That's a lot of supposedly for a tinker who builds bombs.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "(Showing page 1 of 3)">>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 9th 2011:">>It's her. Cornell was a drawn-out hostage situation, not a stunt. New York Protectorate ran her out. Lung picked her up within the week. Draw your own conclusions about what he wants her for.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► XxVoid_CowboyxX" "" "Replied On Apr 9th 2011:">>theres a video. 'Bomb Threat @ Cornell'. dont watch it at work<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► White Fairy" "" "Replied On Apr 10th 2011:">>the ABB are recruiting again too. my cousin got asked twice this week. he's 13.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Cuff" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 10th 2011:">>Report it. There's a number in every guidance office in the east end. I know it doesn't feel like it does anything. Report it anyway.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "End of Page. 1, 2, 3">>\
<</pho>>\
<<pho $phoName>>\
<<pho-topic "Uber and Leet: 'Frogger' on Lord Street (stream VOD, 40 min)" "Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay">>\
<<pho-post "► Laser_Augment" "" "Posted On Apr 9th 2011:">>they closed four lanes of Lord Street with traffic cones and made Uber cross it blindfolded while Leet drove the cars. the cars were RC. one of them was not RC. nobody died. 40 minutes, link in bio, the chat is the best part.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► XxVoid_CowboyxX" "" "Replied On Apr 9th 2011:">>the frog costume was a reference to the 1981 arcade cabinet NOT the atari port, people in chat kept getting this wrong<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(The Guy in the Know)" "Replied On Apr 9th 2011:">>For the new people: Uber is a Thinker who's briefly expert at anything, Leet is a Tinker who can build anything once and never the same thing twice. They stream crimes with a theme. The PRT rates them a nuisance. The Protectorate rates them a Tuesday. They have never hurt anyone on purpose, which is not the same as never hurting anyone.<<if ($gamer is true)>> Also, $phoName, they replied to you again. Stop encouraging them.<</if>><</pho-post>>\
<</pho>>\
You don't play the video.
The Empire page is longer. Kaiser, Hookwolf, Purity, names like a bad metal band. The Merchants' page is short and sad. Coil's page is three lines and a locked thread: mercenaries, body armor, laser rifles that shouldn't exist, and a leader nobody has a photo of. The Empire's own thread about him runs forty pages of people arguing over which blocks he's taken from them. The Undersiders have a page that's mostly blank: four names, two of them with nothing under them.
There's one more thread pinned to the top of the national board, locked, with a moderator note on it. You read it twice.
<<pho $phoName>>\
<<pho-topic "Halifax: what actually happened in the fog? (LOCKED: no fourth-Endbringer speculation)" "Boards ► News ► Events ► North America">>\
<<pho-post "Brocktonite03" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Posted On Apr 2nd 2011:">>My cousin works the container terminal in Halifax. Sunday a fog bank came in off the water in the middle of a clear afternoon and sat on the harbor district for six days. PRT Canada cordoned it. Nobody who went in came out, and then on Saturday the fog lifted and the people who were inside walked out on their own. Two hundred and twelve didn't. No bodies. The ones who came out can't tell you what happened. Not "won't." Can't. My cousin doesn't know his own daughter's name. He knows how to tie every knot he ever learned.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "(Showing page 1 of 14)">>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 2nd 2011:">>Official line is "atmospheric event with parahuman involvement, under investigation." The Guild has been in and out of Halifax all week. Dragon's suits were over the harbor on Thursday. For weather.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► XxVoid_CowboyxX" "" "Replied On Apr 2nd 2011:">>so its a fourth one. its a fourth endbringer. say it<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Tin_Mother" "(Moderator)" "Replied On Apr 2nd 2011:">>[Warning: Void_Cowboy. We do not do this here. Next one's a week.]<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 3rd 2011:">>Endbringers don't leave survivors who can't remember. They don't leave survivors. Whatever this was, it wanted something other than a body count, and that is not a comfort.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Cuff" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 3rd 2011:">>A friend in the Guild says the thing in the fog was tall, and slow, and pale, and that the fog came off it like breath. She asked me not to repeat that. I'm repeating it because people should be looking at the water. Pray it was weather.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Tin_Mother" "(Moderator)" "Replied On Apr 3rd 2011:">>[Thread locked pending the PRT statement. Halifax relief fund link in the sticky.]<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 14">>\
<</pho>>\
<<set $heardPall to true>>\
You close that one too. You live in a port city, and you look at the window for a while, at water you can't see from here, and then you make yourself stop.
<<if (($abbApproach is true) and ($abbDeclined is false))>>\
<<set $abbInvite to true>>\
Mai Vo is at the corner when you take the trash out, and she could have phoned, and she came instead. "Fourth and Lord," she says. "Tomorrow. Midnight. Wear something dark." She doesn't wait for an answer. "You'll see what we are. Then you decide."
<</if>>\
The afternoon is yours, and the basement, and <<print "$" + $money>>.
<<set $trainReturn to "ch1-saturday-3">>\
<<set $trainPts to 2>>\
<<page "Train" "training">>
<<page "Skip it. Rest." "ch1-saturday-3">>Sunday you test every seam twice. <<if ($power is "thinker")>>Sunday night you leave a pillow under the blanket, because you've seen how it goes if you don't, and go out the back.<<else>>Sunday night you leave a pillow under the blanket and go out the back.<</if>>
<<page "Sunday night" "ch1-docks-walk">>/* Training hub. $trainPts are sessions banked for the day; $trainReturn is where "Done" goes. Each option is a <<var>> ledger: the cost and the gain are the lines under it. Control caps at five, skills at four (training-skills). */\
<<capstam>>\
<<floor0 "money">>\
''Training.'' Sessions left today: $trainPts. Cash: <<print "$" + $money>>. Stamina ceiling: $maxStamina. Control: <<skill $control 5>>
Every session is an hour you don't get back, and something you're better at afterward.
<<choose "training">>
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($control lt 5)) Power drills. Push the thing until it pushes back. [1 session, +1 control]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<include "training-drills">>\
#show-if ($background isnot "athlete") use-if ($trainPts gte 1) Conditioning. Run until your lungs file a complaint. [1 session, +10 stamina ceiling]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $maxStamina + 10>>\
The Boardwalk, end to end, then the hill behind Winslow, then the Boardwalk again. Nobody looks at a kid running, and nobody would look at a costume doing it either, and you remember that.
#show-if ($background is "athlete") use-if ($trainPts gte 1) Conditioning. You know how to do this properly. [1 session, +15 stamina ceiling]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $maxStamina + 15>>\
Intervals, the way Coach taught you: the hill behind Winslow eight times, walk down, run up, until the last one is as fast as the first. Nobody looks at a kid running, and nobody would look at a costume doing it either, and you remember that.
#show-if ($background isnot "fixer") use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($money gte 40)) Costume work. Reinforce the panels over the vitals. [1 session, $40, +10 health ceiling]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $money - 40>>\
<<var $maxHealth + 10>>\
<<var $health + 10>>\
Kydex sheet from the hobby store, a heat gun borrowed from a neighbor, two hours of swearing. The panels over your chest and spine are a quarter inch thicker and you can still move. You test it with a hammer, gently. Then less gently.
#show-if ($background is "fixer") use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($money gte 25)) Costume work. You can do it for less, because you know where to cut. [1 session, $25, +10 health ceiling]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $money - 25>>\
<<var $maxHealth + 10>>\
<<var $health + 10>>\
Offcuts from the hobby store's scrap bin, your own heat gun, one hour and no swearing. The panels over your chest and spine are a quarter inch thicker and you can still move. You test it with a hammer, gently. Then less gently.
#show-if ($hasPhone is false) use-if ($money gte 30) Buy a prepaid phone at the corner store. [$30]
<<var $money - 30>>\
<<var $hasPhone true>>\
Cash, no name, a number nobody has. You program one contact into it: the PHQ public line, under "Pizza." It's a stupid joke, and you keep it.
#show-if ($job is "") use-if ($trainPts gte 1) Ask about weekend shifts at the sports store. [1 session]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $job "the sports store">>\
The manager looks at you for a long second and says Saturdays, nine to four, sixty dollars cash and a discount, and don't be late. You say yes before he's finished. It's the first thing anyone in this city has offered you that didn't come with a mask attached.
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($money gte 20) and ($control lt 5)) Workshop. Rebuild the kit properly, with parts you paid for. [1 session, $20, +1 control, +10 health ceiling]
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $money - 20>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $maxHealth + 10>>\
<<var $health + 10>>\
An afternoon at the yard with the good tools. Everything you own comes apart, gets looked at, and goes back together better. For a Tinker this is the whole job. The fights are the test.
#show-if (($indebted is true) and ($debt gt 0)) use-if ($money gte 50) Pay fifty toward the debt. Hollis's office takes cash, no receipt. [$50]
<<var $money - 50>>\
<<var $debt - 50>>\
<<var $debtPaid + 50>>\
The office is a dentist's waiting room on the second floor of a building that sells insurance. The woman at the desk takes the cash, writes a number in a ledger, and says, "He'll be pleased," in a way that makes it clear he won't be anything. <<print "$" + $debt>> to go.
#show-if (($indebted is true) and ($debt gt 0)) use-if ($money gte 200) Pay two hundred toward the debt. [$200]
<<var $money - 200>>\
<<var $debt - 200>>\
<<var $debtPaid + 200>>\
The woman at the desk counts it twice and writes the number, and for the first time looks at you properly, because people who bring two hundred at a time have usually found a job she'd rather not know about. <<print "$" + $debt>> to go.
#use-if ($trainPts gte 1) Work on a skill. [1 session, +1 to a skill, up to four dots] -> "training-skills"
#Done for the day. -> $trainReturn
<</choose>>/* Skill training. One dot per session, up to four; returns to training. */\
<<capstam>>\
''Skills.'' Sessions left today: $trainPts.
<div class="cast-list">
<div>Brawling <<skill $brawling 5>> · Athletics <<skill $athletics 5>> · Stealth <<skill $stealth 5>></div>
<div>Streetwise <<skill $streetwise 5>> · Academics <<skill $academics 5>> · Tech <<skill $tech 5>></div>
<div>Cape Lore <<skill $capeLore 5>> · Persuasion <<skill $persuasion 5>> · Perception <<skill $perception 5>></div>
</div>
<<choose "training">>
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($brawling lt 4)) Brawling. The boxing gym on Lord Street lets kids hit the bags for free if they sweep after.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $brawling + 1>>\
An hour on the heavy bag and twenty minutes with a retired middleweight who tells you your elbows are a disgrace, and fixes one of them. ''[Brawling +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($athletics lt 4)) Athletics. Rooftops, fire escapes, the fence behind the rail yard, timed.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $athletics + 1>>\
You learn which fire escapes hold and which ones are decoration, and that a chain-link fence is four seconds if you don't think about it. ''[Athletics +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($stealth lt 4)) Stealth. Pick a stranger on the Boardwalk and follow them home without being seen.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $stealth + 1>>\
The first one spots you at the second corner. The third one never does, and you stand across from her building feeling like something you don't have a word for, and go home. ''[Stealth +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($streetwise lt 4)) Streetwise. Sit on the Fourth Street steps with a soda and listen.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $streetwise + 1>>\
You learn what a Merchant lookout earns, which corner the ABB doesn't bother with, and that the Empire pays its taggers in beer. ''[Streetwise +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($academics lt 4)) Academics. The library, the chemistry shelf, and the part of the internet with footnotes.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $academics + 1>>\
Two hours on how a dye pack works and one on why Brockton Bay's harbor silted up, and the librarian stops watching you like you're going to steal something. ''[Academics +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($tech lt 4)) Tech. A dead microwave, a dead radio, and a screwdriver set from the dollar store.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $tech + 1>>\
The microwave becomes parts. The radio becomes a radio that works, and then a radio that hears the PRT's unencrypted dispatch channel, which is probably a crime. ''[Tech +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($capeLore lt 4)) Cape Lore. Parahumans Online, the PRT's public handbook, and the threads the moderators lock.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $capeLore + 1>>\
You learn what the classification numbers mean, what the PRT does with a cape under sixteen, and that every third post about Armsmaster is written by the same four people. ''[Cape Lore +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($persuasion lt 4)) Persuasion. Talk the sports store manager into letting you leave early, and then into not minding.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $persuasion + 1>>\
It takes three tries over an afternoon. On the third he laughs and says fine, and asks where you learned that, and you don't say "just now." ''[Persuasion +1]''
#use-if (($trainPts gte 1) and ($perception lt 4)) Perception. The food court at the mall, counting exits, cameras and hands.
<<var $trainPts - 1>>\
<<var $perception + 1>>\
By the second hour you can tell who's waiting for someone and who's waiting for something, and you spot a man in a good coat doing the same thing you are, and he spots you spotting him, and nods. ''[Perception +1]''
#Back to training. -> "training"
<</choose>>/* Flavour text for a power-drill session, one paragraph per power. Included by training; the control gain happens there. */\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
You practice the way you always do: against the concrete wall in the basement, until you're sure how much it takes and how much it costs. Dense, then not. Dense, then not. The shift is down to a breath and a half.
<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>\
You practice on targets: cans, a paper plate on a nail, the far wall. A charged washer goes through the plate, the drywall behind it, and into the stud. You put the plate somewhere else.
<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>\
You practice in the only way that works: by living with it turned up. You walk through the house with your eyes shut and the overlays on, three seconds ahead of every doorframe. You stop before you'd hit anything, every time.
<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>\
You practice in the backyard, in the dark, where the fence hides most of it. Porch to fence to roof to the neighbor's roof to porch. Twenty skips, and you're only a little green at the end. You pick up the cat on the last one, to see. The cat comes along fine. The cat does not forgive you.
<<elseif ($power is "master")>>\
You practice on nobody, because that's the rule you made. You say the words to the mirror to hear how they sound. You know how they sound. Tomorrow you'll say them to people.
<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>\
You practice where nobody can see. For you that's anywhere. You walk through the corner store, take a candy bar, put it back, and leave. The clerk never looks up. You feel worse about the candy bar than the power.
<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>\
Two panes in the backyard, angled, and a thrown brick, and the brick stops like it hit a wall, because it did. You hold them for six minutes before your arms shake.
<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>\
You put a hand on a cinderblock for one second, and it falls into two pieces so cleanly you could fit them back together. You try, and they fit, and they don't hold.
<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>\
You step out in your room and count. Thirty seconds. Sixty. Ninety. At two minutes the furniture starts to look like somebody's drawing of furniture, and you come back fast and sit on the floor until your name feels like yours again. Tomorrow you try for two and a half.
<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>\
You let the other body come, in the garage with the door down. You practice the breath in and the breath out until out is under a minute. You practice not breaking the workbench. You break the workbench.
<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>\
You practice the way Tinkers practice, by building. You strip the dead baton and rebuild it with a bigger capacitor out of a dead TV, and it holds a charge for two days instead of one. You spent six dollars. You've never been happier about six dollars.
<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>\
You practice with what you've got, and what you've got is nothing caught and nobody to catch anything from. So you practice the clock. You know its shape by heart now: nothing for the first minute, a candle by the third, a furnace by the ninth, one minute at full, and then the comedown, and you practice the comedown on the floor with a bucket. You've learned to put the bucket out first.
<<else>>\
You practice all of it, one after another, in the basement, until you can't tell anymore which one is tired. There's a word for someone with this many powers and no idea which one is them. You've looked. It's //Trump.// You don't love it.
<</if>>\<<include "refresh">>\
You cross out of the Boardwalk's light at twenty past eleven and the city changes under your feet.
The Docks have light. It just belongs to someone. Every lit window is a decision somebody made about who gets to be seen. You walk the way you practiced, close to walls, and you've gone four blocks when you hear the voices.
On a stoop two doors down from the only lit window on the block, a Merchant who isn't asleep watches you pass and says, not loud, "Hey. Mask. Skids is hiring lookouts. Two nights, forty bucks. Product, if you'd rather." You keep walking, and you remember which stoop.
<<set $merchantOffer to true>>\
There's a noodle place, the only thing open on the block, with a hand-lettered sign and steam on the inside of the glass. Two kids in red and green at the counter, one your age, one older, and a man behind it in an apron with his hands flat on the Formica. The older one is talking, friendly, the way you talk to someone you've decided already owes you. The younger one is looking at the door. He has a baseball bat held down along his leg like it's a part of him he's embarrassed about.
The man behind the counter is saying, in careful English, that he paid last week.
<<choose "ch1-docks">>
#Go in. Order noodles. Stand very close to the counter and be a witness. -> "ch1-docks-walk-2"
<<var $savedShopkeeper true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You push the door open and the bell rings, and three heads turn, and you say, "Hey. Pork, large, to go," as if nothing in the room is wrong. The older kid looks at you, at the mask, at the costume, and does math. The math comes out in favor of leaving. "Next week," he says to the counter, and they go, the younger one's bat knocking the door frame on the way out. The man gives you the noodles for free. You give him back the money anyway, and he watches you walk away with an expression you can't read.
#Wait for them to come out. Follow the one with the bat.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
They come out five minutes later with an envelope and no noodles. You give them half a block and follow. They go north, toward where the lights are even fewer, and you stop at the corner where they turn, because up ahead there's a spot of orange in the dark, and a lot of men standing around it.
#Keep walking. You're not here for shakedowns. You're here for something bigger.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You keep walking. You tell yourself you'll come back to the noodle place. You've told yourself that about a lot of places.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The envelope is still on the counter.
The older kid left it there when the math turned against him: a plain white envelope, soft with use, fat enough to be a month of somebody's protection. The man in the apron looks at it, and at you, and doesn't reach for it. He's waiting to find out what kind of thing walked into his shop.
<<choose "ch1-docks">>
#Slide it back across the counter. It's his.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $money + 20>>\
You push it toward him with two fingers. He looks at it like it might bite. Then he takes it, and he takes a twenty out of it and puts it on the counter next to your noodles, and when you shake your head he puts his hand flat over it and says, "Please." You take the twenty.
#Take it. Call it a finder's fee. The ABB can bill you.
<<var $money + 120>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $tookEnvelope true>>\
<<var $savedShopkeeper false>>\
You pick it up. It's heavier than it looks. The man in the apron watches you put it inside your costume and his face does nothing at all. He's seen this before, in different colors.
<</choose>><<achieve "Night One">>\
<<set $sawLung to true>>\
/* Snapshot so "Try that night again" can rewind the night's reputation changes too. */\
<<set $snapHeroRep to $heroRep>>\
<<set $snapStreetRep to $streetRep>>\
<<set $snapNotoriety to $notoriety>>\
<<set $snapTaylorTrust to $taylorTrust>>\
<<set $snapControl to $control>>\
It's past midnight now. You're in costume, deeper into the Docks than you've ever been, breaking every rule you were given when you moved here, and you feel more awake than you've felt in months. From here you can see the Protectorate rig out on the water, lit up like a cruise ship. It might as well be on the moon.
<<if ($power is "thinker")>>\
Your power keeps throwing overlays at nothing: a rat about to cross, a sign about to creak. You dial it down and save it.
<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>\
You've already walked past two Merchants nodding off in a doorway, close enough to smell them. Neither looked up. You keep still at every corner and the city keeps not seeing you.
<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>\
You came over the Boardwalk wall by walking through it. You've stayed out for as long as two minutes now, and come back knowing your name. You tell yourself that's enough.
<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>\
You're yourself for now, with the wrap for the other body rolled under your arm. You'd rather not need it, and you brought it anyway.
<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>\
You came over the Boardwalk's back wall in one skip and the roof of the pawnshop in a second, and your stomach took about four seconds to catch up. You've got more in you tonight than you'll need. You've told yourself not to count.
<</if>>\
You've gone maybe six blocks when you see the lighter.
A spot of orange in a dark street, and faces around it. Asian guys, hoodies and headbands, all in red and green. More coming out of a two-story building to join them. Nobody's talking, so they aren't hanging out.
<<if ($abbFit is true)>>\
Two of them are kids from Winslow. You know one by name. If they looked up they'd know you by yours, mask or not, because the mask doesn't cover the shape of you, and in this neighborhood a kid who looks like you on a roof over an ABB meeting is either one of theirs or a problem.
<</if>>\
Then the crowd parts for the man coming out the door, and you forget to breathe.
Six-two, shirtless in the cold, tattooed neck to waist in eastern dragons, and an ornate metal mask over his face. Lung. The leader of the ABB. The man who went toe to toe with whole teams of heroes and walked away. The man the internet says gets bigger, hotter, and more armored the longer a fight goes, until he's less a man than a thing with wings.
You back into the alley and find the fire escape. The roof is gravel and cigarette butts. You walk the raised lip to stay quiet, and you crawl the last ten feet to the edge.
<<if ($background is "athlete")>>Three flights, fast and quiet, and your heart rate barely moved. Two seasons of hill repeats finally paying for something.<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>>You count them. Twenty-two. You count exits. Two. You do it without deciding to, the way you used to annotate margins.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>The bottom bolt on that fire escape is sheared. The whole ladder would come down if someone heavy went up it in a hurry. You put it in the notebook in your head.<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>You read the crowd the way you'd read a cafeteria: who's in charge besides him, who's scared, who's bored, who's carrying because they were told to. The answer is that every one of them is terrified of the man in the mask.<</if>>
Lung is talking. His accent is thick and his voice carries. It takes you a minute to piece it together.
He's telling them to shoot. The children, he says. Just shoot, doesn't matter where, and if one goes down shoot it twice more to be sure.
<<if ($power is "thinker")>>\
Your overlay stutters. Three seconds ahead, nothing changes. He means it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You have a prepaid phone with one number in it, and twenty armed men between you and anything that number could send in time.<<else>>You don't have a phone, or change for a payphone.<</if>> You have a half-finished costume and a power you've only ever tested on things that couldn't fight back.
You also have the one thing everyone who has ever written about Lung agrees on: you don't fight him. He starts a fight as a man and ends it as something that shrugs off tanks, and every hit he takes feeds it. The heroes' playbook, as far as the forums can tell, is to keep him busy and keep their distance until Armsmaster or half the Protectorate arrives. Nobody sane goes at him alone. That leaves two things that can go badly before anyone arrives, twenty men with guns and whoever "the children" are.
<<if ($empireEyes is true)>>\
You're here for the Empire tonight, and you haven't said that sentence out loud to anyone. Victor's number is in your phone under "V."
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbInvite is true)>>\
Mai Vo is down there, near the back, with her hands in her jacket. She hasn't looked up. She told you midnight, and it's midnight, and she's leaving you the choice of which side of the street you're on.
<</if>>\
And you're not the only one up here.
On the roof of the building across the street, flat on her stomach at the edge, there's a shape that isn't a shadow. A girl, you think, in a costume as dark as yours. Yellow lenses catch the moonlight for a half second and are gone.
<<choose "ch1-fight1">>
#Go now. You can't beat him. You can make him deal with you instead of whoever he's hunting, and that might be enough.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You don't get the chance to go first.
#Hold. Fighting him only feeds him. Watch the gang, watch the other cape, and wait for the moment that actually matters.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You hold still and watch the yellow lenses. You aren't waiting long.
#show-if ($hasPhone is true) Call it in. Then stay, and watch.
<<var $calledPHQ true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You crawl back from the edge and dial the number under "Pizza," and a dispatcher takes the intersection twice and Lung's name once and tells you, in a voice that has done this before, to get clear. You say you will. You crawl back to the edge.
#show-if ($empireEyes is true) Text Victor the intersection and Lung's name. Let the Empire decide what happens to the east side tonight.
<<var $empireCalled true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You send it. The reply comes in under a minute: //Good. Stay clear. Watch.// Nobody stays clear tonight, you included.
#show-if ($abbInvite is true) Go down. Mai is in that crowd. You were invited. -> "ch1-abb-street"
You go back down the fire escape.
#Get out of here and find a phone. This is a job for the people with the floating fortress.
<<var $leftDocks true>>\
You crawl backward from the edge. You've made it to the fire escape when the screaming starts.
<</choose>><<set $abbMember to true>>\
<<set $sawLung to true>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
You go around the block and walk into the back of the crowd with your hands where everyone can see them, and nobody stops you, because Mai Vo peels off the edge of it and takes your arm like you're late.
"You came," she says. She doesn't sound surprised, more like someone checking a box. "Stay by me. Don't talk. He doesn't like new faces that talk."
Up close, Lung is bigger than the roof made him. He's finished telling them to shoot children; now he's telling them how, which streets, which car. Nobody around you looks happy about it, and nobody looks like they're going to say so. A kid you know from the second-floor stairwell, Danny Trang, is holding a pistol like it might go off on its own.
"Who are the children?" you say, under your breath.
"Undersiders," Mai says. "The dog girl's crew. They hit us twice this month." She looks at you sideways. "You asked. Don't ask again."
Then the bugs come.
<<choose "ch1-abb-after">>
#use-if ($stamina gte 20) Stand with them. Use what you have on the swarm, and on whatever's sending it.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Stood">>\
You use it, in front of thirty of Lung's people, on wasps and flies and something with too many legs, and for a minute you're worth something to the men around you. Mai doesn't flinch. Lung, between bursts of fire, looks straight at you, and nods once, like he's put you somewhere. The bugs don't care who you're with.
#use-if ($stamina gte 20) Get Mai and the Winslow kids out of the swarm. The rest can fend for themselves.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<achieve "Stood">>\
You get Mai by the collar and Danny Trang by the gun hand and you use what you have to clear a path to the alley, and three more of them follow you out of the cloud because you're moving and nothing else in the street is. Behind you, Lung explodes. Danny is crying and Mai isn't.
#Run. This was never yours.
<<var $abbMember false>>\
<<var $abbDeclined true>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
You run, and Mai sees you run, and she does you one last favor by not saying your name while you do it.
<</choose>><<set $lungDown to true>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($abbMember is true)>>\
You see it from the alley mouth with Mai's hand still in your sleeve: Lung on fire from head to foot, nine feet tall, climbing a building after something on the roof, and then three things the size of vans coming over the rooflines, with riders, and the sound of all of it hitting the street at once.
Mai pulls you back into the dark. "Lee," she says, to the air, and the air answers.
He's beside you between one blink and the next: a man in black with a white demon mask, and ash where he was a second ago, still falling. He looks at Lung in the street under the dogs. He looks at the crowd that isn't a crowd anymore. He looks at you, and at Mai's hand on your sleeve, and at the mask you're wearing.
"Lee," Mai says. "$capeName. With us. Stood."
Oni Lee says nothing for a count of three. Then he says, in a voice much quieter than Lung's, "Tomorrow. Fourth. Noon." He's gone before the sentence is finished, and a copy of him is still standing there, looking at you, until it isn't.
<<set $oniLeeKnows to true>>\
You walk Mai to the end of Fourth. She lets go of your sleeve there. "He doesn't say tomorrow to people," she says. "He says nothing, and then they're not around." She looks at you a second longer. "You did good. Don't be late."
<<else>>\
You see the end of it from four blocks away, over your shoulder: a light like a second sunrise in the Docks, and sirens, and then something that sounds like a very large animal hitting a car.
You were in that crowd and then you left it, and both of those are true now. The ABB is going to remember the second one longer.
<</if>>\
<<page "Get home" "ch1-home-late">>/* Lung in the street, round one. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<if ($leftDocks is true)>>\
You should keep going. You don't. You stop on the fire escape with one hand on the rail and look back.
<</if>>\
The street comes alive.
Every bug in the neighborhood arrives at once, a flood of them. Flies and wasps and things with too many legs come out of the storm drains and the window frames and the dark, and they go for the gang like the gang is the only thing in the world. Men scream. Guns go off at nothing. Lung lashes fire up at the sky and burns a thousand of them, and ten thousand more keep coming.
The girl on the roof across the street hasn't moved. The bugs are hers. You'd bet your costume on it.
Lung is changing. In the orange light you can see triangular plates pushing up through the dragon tattoos, silver and overlapping. His hands are torches now.
<<if ($leftDocks is true)>>\
You have three seconds to decide who you are.
<<choose "ch1-fight2">>
#Go back up. You're not leaving her alone with that.
<<var $leftDocks false>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You take the fire escape two steps at a time.
#Go. Find a phone. This isn't your fight. -> "ch1-gone"
<<var $leftDocks true>>\
You go.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Down the fire escape and into them with your hands.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You come down the fire escape and into the back of the crowd with your hands, and the first man goes down because nobody expected a kid, and the second because nobody expected the first.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. The roof's edge, the drainpipe, the parked cars. Get behind him.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You go over the edge and down the pipe and across the roofs of two cars while thirty men look at the bugs, and you're behind him with a length of rebar from the lot.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The transformer on the pole. The street has one light.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You throw a bottle at the transformer and the street goes dark, and thirty men who were shooting at bugs are shooting at nothing, and Lung is a shape with no eyes.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Shout his name like you know him.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Lung," you shout, from the roof, in the voice you'd use for someone who owes you money, and a man who has never been called like that turns to see who did.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk down the fire escape slow, in the open, so the bugs aren't the only thing he's looking at.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You walk down slow with your hands open, and thirty men watch a kid walk toward a dragon, and the dragon watches too, and the bugs finish what they started while he's watching.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You step off the roof as the heaviest thing in the Docks and land on him, and the street under both of you breaks.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body drops two stories and lands on him, and it's bigger than him, and he notices.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Twelve skips, twelve guns, and the thirteenth puts you on his shoulders.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk down and take the guns out of thirty hands, one at a time, and nobody feels it.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>His plating, then the car he's braced on, then the street, three seams, one touch each.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The canister, the grapple, and the thing you built in the stairwell on the way down, in one motion.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you've told the bug girl where his eyes will be before he's turned his head.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A handful of bearings charged to twelve different counts, opened in a fist, and the street is a drumroll ending at him.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Drop," to the street, and "Kneel," to him, and he kneels, with thirty men watching.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>His fire is yours in ninety seconds, and you come down the fire escape already burning.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You cross the street a second behind the world and come back inside his reach with both hands on his throat.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane across every gun and one across his mouth, and the street goes quiet.<</if>>
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
The gang is scattering. Lung isn't. He explodes, actually explodes, in a ball of rolling fire that sets a parked car's tires alight, and walks out of it taller.
What do you do?
<<choose "ch1-fight2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Drop off the roof onto him. Two stories, your full densified weight, right on the head.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You let the weight come all the way, and you step off the roof. Lung looks up at the last second. You hit him like a dropped safe, and the two of you go down through the hood of a car. Something in your shoulder goes sideways. Lung is already getting up.<<var $lungHurt + 1>><<if ($powerful is true)>><<var $lungHurt + 1>><</if>>
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> You land heavier than two stories should make you, because you've been heavy on purpose for years, and the car's hood folds instead of you.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge a handful of ball bearings and throw them. From up here, he can't see where it's coming from.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You hold six bearings in your fist until they hum, then throw them in a spread. They hit Lung like a shotgun blast and one of them goes clean through the plating on his forearm. He roars and sprays fire at the roofline. The heat finds you even up here.<<var $lungHurt + 1>><<if ($powerful is true)>><<var $lungHurt + 1>><</if>>
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> Six bearings, six different charges, so they arrive in a line instead of a spread, and the line walks up his chest.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch three seconds ahead, and call it. The bug girl's going for his eyes; you can see the wasp before it gets there.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You cup your hands and shout across the street: "Left eye! He blinks in two!" You have no idea if she hears you. But the next wasp goes straight through the gap in his guard and into his eyelid, and Lung's scream is the first thing tonight that's sounded like pain.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds, not three, and you call the bug girl's move before she's decided it, and she hears you and trusts it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip down into the middle of them. Take the guns while they're blind.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Roof to street in one lurch. You come up out of the nausea with a gun in your hand that was in someone's waistband a second ago, and you skip again before he can turn. Three guns down the storm drain, then four more, skip after skip, each one landing you behind a man who's still turning toward where you were. You stop when the waistbands run out, back on the roof, with your stomach somewhere down by the car.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> You take four guns in four skips and your stomach doesn't argue until the fifth.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) Use the word. "Drop." Every gun in the street.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You lean out over the lip of the roof and put everything you have into one syllable. A dozen guns hit the asphalt at once, a sound like a dropped toolbox. For a second even Lung's hands open. Then every head in the street, his included, turns toward your voice.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Drop," and the guns drop, and so do the hands that held them, open, and stay open longer than you asked.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Walk down there. Nobody's going to look at you. Pull the men out of the swarm one at a time.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You come down the fire escape at a walk. Nobody looks. You take the first man by the collar and drag him clear of the bugs and he thrashes at you like you're part of the swarm, and never once focuses on your face. You do it four times. The fifth one has a knife and gets lucky.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You walk through thirty of Lung's people like a draft, and two of them step aside for a reason they'll never find.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Go down into the street and put panes between the gang and the bugs. Let them run.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
You come down the fire escape and start raising walls, one at a time, between the men who are only shooting and the swarm that doesn't care. They run through the gaps you leave them. Lung notices the blue light.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go up faster than the men can turn, and the ones who fire into blue get their own rounds back at the knees.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Get down there and get a hand on him. One second on that armor.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You come down the fire escape and through the swarm and get a hand on his forearm plating. One second is a long time to hold a man who's on fire. The plate goes like a dinner plate, and under it he's just a man, briefly, before it grows back.<<var $lungHurt + 1>><<if ($powerful is true)>><<var $lungHurt + 1>><</if>>
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The plating has a seam your fingers know before your eyes do, and it comes off in one piece.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) Smoke canister into the street, then the grapple. Take the guns out of the smoke. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The canister goes down into the street and the block fills with white. You go down the grapple into it and take guns from men who can't see their own hands, four, five, and the baton puts a sixth on the ground. The canister dies after a minute. So does the baton. You're out of both by the time the smoke clears.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The canister has a second charge you added for no reason, and the reason is thirty men with guns.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get down there and touch him. Once. Start the clock.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $echoClock 1>>\
You come down the fire escape and through the swarm and put your bare palm on his forearm, and it's like grabbing a stove, and then, faintly, like being one. A candle's worth of his heat in your hand. It doesn't hurt him. It's the first minute. He looks down at you, and at your fingertips, which have gone a dull forge-red, and something behind the mask takes an interest. You get out of reach while it's still only interest.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> The clock starts hot, and by the second minute there's already a candle, and the candle is his.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out, cross the street through the swarm untouched, and come back in behind the men with guns. One at a time.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You go a second behind and the bugs pass through you like weather. You come back in behind the first man, take the gun, and go out again before he turns. Four times. The fifth time you come back in next to Lung by mistake, and the heat gets you before you're gone again.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You stay out through the whole crossing and come back exactly where you meant to, behind the man with the shotgun.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Drop off the roof as something nobody will recognize, into the gang.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The breath, the weight, and you go off the roof as the other thing. You land on a car and the car agrees. Men who were fighting bugs find a grey shape with no face taking their guns and bending them, and most of them decide to be somewhere else. Lung turns to look at the new animal in his street.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body drops two stories and lands like something that's done it before, because it has, in the dark, alone, practicing.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Go after his men instead. Lung can take care of himself. The guys with guns can't.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $hitGang true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You come down the fire escape fast and into the alley where three of them are running blind, swatting at their own faces. You take the gun off the first one and he doesn't even know you're there. The second one swings a butterfly knife at where he thinks you are and gets your arm, shallow. The third one just runs. You kick both guns down a storm drain.
#Stay down. Watch. Learn.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stay flat on the gravel and watch a cape fight the way nobody on the news ever shows it, slow and ugly and loud.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Down the fire escape and into them with your hands.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You come down the fire escape and into the back of the crowd with your hands, and the first man goes down because nobody expected a kid, and the second because nobody expected the first.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. The roof's edge, the drainpipe, the parked cars. Get behind him.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You go over the edge and down the pipe and across the roofs of two cars while thirty men look at the bugs, and you're behind him with a length of rebar from the lot.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The transformer on the pole. The street has one light.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You throw a bottle at the transformer and the street goes dark, and thirty men who were shooting at bugs are shooting at nothing, and Lung is a shape with no eyes.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Shout his name like you know him.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Lung," you shout, from the roof, in the voice you'd use for someone who owes you money, and a man who has never been called like that turns to see who did.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk down the fire escape slow, in the open, so the bugs aren't the only thing he's looking at.
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You walk down slow with your hands open, and thirty men watch a kid walk toward a dragon, and the dragon watches too, and the bugs finish what they started while he's watching.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You step off the roof as the heaviest thing in the Docks and land on him, and the street under both of you breaks.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body drops two stories and lands on him, and it's bigger than him, and he notices.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Twelve skips, twelve guns, and the thirteenth puts you on his shoulders.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk down and take the guns out of thirty hands, one at a time, and nobody feels it.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>His plating, then the car he's braced on, then the street, three seams, one touch each.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The canister, the grapple, and the thing you built in the stairwell on the way down, in one motion.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you've told the bug girl where his eyes will be before he's turned his head.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A handful of bearings charged to twelve different counts, opened in a fist, and the street is a drumroll ending at him.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Drop," to the street, and "Kneel," to him, and he kneels, with thirty men watching.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>His fire is yours in ninety seconds, and you come down the fire escape already burning.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You cross the street a second behind the world and come back inside his reach with both hands on his throat.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane across every gun and one across his mouth, and the street goes quiet.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Shed and Densify. Shed, go dense inside it, and step off the roof as a falling building.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The grey body comes out and goes heavy at the same time, and what steps off the roof weighs what a car weighs and lands on Lung like one, and the street under both of you gives, and thirty men watch something with no face and the mass of a truck stand up out of the hole first.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Skip and the Word. Skip behind each man with a gun and say the word in his ear.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $joinedFight true>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
Thirty skips in twenty seconds, and in each one you say "Drop" into an ear from an inch away, and thirty guns hit the asphalt one after another like a slow handclap, and by the last one your stomach has given up arguing and Lung is standing in a street full of empty hands.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<achieve "Bystander">>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
You find a payphone on the Boardwalk, eventually, and you don't have a quarter for it. You stand there in your mask with the sirens starting behind you.
You get home at two. The news in the morning says Armsmaster took Lung into custody in the Docks after an "altercation with unidentified parahumans." There's footage of a steel cage welded to the sidewalk and a lot of dead bugs.
There is no footage of a girl in a dark costume with yellow lenses. You don't know what happened to her. You spend Monday looking for her face in the halls without knowing what face you're looking for.
You heard a man order his people to shoot children, and you went home.
<<page "Monday" "ch1-home-late">><<set $lootDone to true>>\
The alley is full of dropped things. Two guns you've already put down a storm drain. A butterfly knife. A jacket somebody ran out of, and under it, where it fell out of the inside pocket, a roll of bills in a rubber band, fat as a fist.
Behind you the street is on fire and a man is turning into a dragon, and you have about four seconds to decide what kind of cape you are.
<<choose "ch1-fight2">>
#Take it. They stole it from someone. You're just moving it along.
<<var $money + 90>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
It goes inside the costume. It's warm from somebody's body. You don't think about that until later, and then you think about it a lot.
#Leave it. You're not that kind of cape.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You step over it. Somebody else will take it, probably somebody who needs it less than you do. You step over it anyway.
<</choose>>/* Round two; $lungHurt counts the hits. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<include "ch1-dead">>\
<<halt>>\
<<elseif ($health lte 15)>>\
<<include "ch1-burned">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
<<if (($hitGang is true) and ($lootDone is false))>>\
<<include "ch1-loot">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
Lung is on fire. All of him, head to toe, and he isn't putting himself out. He's nine feet of overlapping silver blades with flames rolling over them, and the street is lit like noon.
<<if ($lungHurt gte 1)>>\
You hurt him. That turns out to be the problem. He's bigger for it, and he's looking for whoever did it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
<<if ($health lt $maxHealth)>>You're back on the roof somehow. Your shoulder is screaming. You can feel the dense state wanting to drop and you hold it, because the alternative is being soft in front of that.
<</if>>\
<</if>>\
Most of the gang is gone. The bugs are mostly dead. The bug girl on the opposite roof has stopped sending them, and you can see her moving now, crouched, backing toward her fire escape.
Lung's head snaps up. Straight at her.
He doesn't look, he hears. Her boot crunched gravel, and whatever he is now has ears that don't miss things. He roars and it isn't a human sound anymore.
Then he jumps. From the street to three-quarters of the way up her building in one leap, claws buried in the brick, climbing.
She's not going to make it down the fire escape before he's over the edge, and you both know it.
<<choose "ch1-fight3">>
#Make noise. Make him come after you instead.
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You stand up on the lip of the roof and scream the worst thing you can think of at him. Lung's head turns. His one open eye finds you across the street, molten and bright, and his grip on the brick shifts. He jumps again. The wave of fire that comes with him hits you before he lands and throws you across the gravel.
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Throw everything you've got left at his hands. Make him let go of the wall.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Both fists, every bearing, charged until your gloves smoke. They hit his hands and the brick around them like a jackhammer. Lung drops ten feet, catches himself, and his head comes around to you. He's off her building now and coming for yours, and the fire comes first.<<var $lungHurt + 1>>
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> Both fists, and you've charged bearings this long before, and your gloves don't catch.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip to her roof. Get her off it before he's over the edge.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $pulledHerOut true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Street, then her roof, two skips back to back, and you arrive retching with Lung's claws already over the parapet. You grab a fistful of her costume. "Hold on." She doesn't argue. The third skip takes you both down into the alley behind her building and your legs stop working, and above you Lung roars at an empty roof.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> You're on her roof in one skip, with the second saved for the two of you, and the nausea waits.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop." At him. You've never tried it on a parahuman.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
He stops. Nine feet of burning metal, frozen on a brick wall for one full heartbeat. Then whatever he's become shakes it off, and his head turns toward your voice, and he comes off her building in a single leap with the fire ahead of him.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Stop," and a parahuman stops, and you feel it land in him like a hand on a chest.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Throw a bottle at the far wall and stand still. Let him hunt a sound that isn't you.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
The bottle shatters three roofs over. Lung's head snaps toward it, and he lets go of her building and lands on yours on the way, close enough that the heat off him crisps your sleeve. You don't move. He stands six feet away, looking for a sound.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> The bottle breaks and you're nowhere, not even in your own head, and he hunts the sound past you twice.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Put a pane under his hands. Make the wall he's climbing stop being a wall.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You throw a pane flat against the brick between his claws and the building, and for one second he's holding onto nothing. He drops a full story. He lands on his feet, and then he lands on your roof.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The pane under his hands holds his full weight and his fire, and your hands don't shake.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Get to the wall he's climbing. Take the brick out from under his hands.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You're across the street with your hand flat on the corner of her building. The brick face sheets off like a cliff calving and he comes down with it. He lands looking straight at you.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The brick remembers the frost of nine winters, and you remember which course the frost got into.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The grapple, across the street, to her fire escape. Get her down it before he's up. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $pulledHerOut true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
The grapple catches her fire escape on the second throw and you go across the street on a bike chain with Lung climbing underneath you. "Down. Now. Me first." She comes. The chain snaps three rungs from the bottom and you land in the alley together, in the trash, and the grapple is scrap.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The grapple sets first time, because you tested it on Tuesday, on a drainpipe, for an hour.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if (($stamina gte 20) and ($echoClock gte 1)) Four minutes in. His fire is climbing in you. Light yourself up and make noise.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $echoClock 2>>\
You stand up on the roof edge with your arms burning, his fire, four minutes old and hotter with every breath, and the skin under it going hard and dull like something being forged, and you shout. Lung's head comes around. Whatever he is now, it has never seen itself coming up behind it, and it does not like it. He comes off her wall at you like a thrown car.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> His fire is four minutes in you and you can already hold it in one hand.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out, cross to her roof, and take her with you.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $pulledHerOut true>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You're across the street a second behind the world, up the wall he's climbing, past his claws, and you get a hand on her and go. She comes with you, out of the world, into the quiet. Her mouth is moving and no sound comes out. You walk her down through four floors of building and come back in a stairwell, both of you, and she throws up, and above you Lung roars at an empty roof.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You cross to her roof a second behind the world and take her out of it without losing your name, or hers.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed all the way and go up the wall after him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $drewLung true>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
Grey and heavy and faceless, you climb the brick beside him, and you take hold of his ankle and pull, and he comes off the wall with you, and the two of you land in the street together with a sound the whole block hears. He gets up first. He's looking at something he doesn't have a name for.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body goes up the wall after him the way it went up the rail-yard fence on Tuesday, when nobody was watching, for practice.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Stay hidden. She has her own tricks. You've done what you can.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You stay down. You hear him haul himself over her roof edge, and you hear a sharp hiss and a scream that isn't hers. Pepper spray, you think. She hit him in the eyes with pepper spray. Then there's a wall of fire and you can't see anything.
#Run. Right now, while he's looking at her. -> "ch1-gone"
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
<<var $leftDocks true>>\
You go down the fire escape and you don't look back until the first impact shakes the street behind you.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Up the fire escape after him, hand over hand.
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You go up the iron faster than he goes up the brick, and you're on her roof before him, and you put yourself between her and the edge.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Across the gap between roofs. Get to her first.
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
It's nine feet and you've jumped nine feet, and you land on her roof rolling and have her by the collar before she's seen you.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The roof's gravel bags and the water tank. Make him climb into something.
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You cut the water tank's valve and the wall he's climbing is a waterfall, and brick is a different thing when it's wet.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Tell him she's a Ward. Make him stop and think.
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
"She's a Ward," you shout, "and the rest are two minutes out," and Lung, who has never once in his life stopped to think, stops to think.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand on the edge of her roof and don't move.
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
You stand on the edge above him with the fire coming up the wall and you don't step back, and he looks up at a kid who won't step back, and the bugs find his eyes while he looks.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You take the wall out from under him with your shoulder and he comes down with it, onto you, and you're still standing.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body goes up the wall faster than he can, and takes him off it.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Skip to her roof, skip her to the ground, skip back to him with a length of rebar.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>He hunts a sound you made past you three times, and the fourth time you're on his back.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The wall he's climbing becomes gravel in the order you chose, and he goes down ten feet in it.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The grapple, her fire escape, and the thing you've been building on the roof while he climbed, and the thing is a net.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you've put her exactly where his fire won't be, four times.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>Every bearing at once, charged until the gloves smoke, into his hands and the brick together, and the wall comes down.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Let go," and he lets go of a wall three stories up.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>His fire, six minutes in you, and you light the whole roof and he comes for you instead.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You take her out of the world and leave him climbing an empty wall toward an empty roof.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane under his hands, and one over her head, and one across the alley to break his fall exactly as much as you want to.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Pane and Charge. Charge a pane like a coin and put it under his hands.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You charge the pane the way you'd charge a bearing, until it hums, and put it under his hands on the wall, and when he grabs it the whole three stories of brick lights up blue and he lets go of everything, and falls, and the pane is still humming when he hits.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Lag and Skip. Step out, and skip her from inside the second behind the world.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You go a second behind the world and skip from there, and the skip costs nothing in that place, and you take her off the roof and down to the street and back up to the next building in three jumps that happened before Lung finished turning his head.
<</choose>>/* Round three; needs $drewLung. Leads to the Undersiders or Armsmaster. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<include "ch1-dead">>\
<<halt>>\
<<elseif ($health lte 15)>>\
<<include "ch1-burned">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($drewLung is true)>>\
Lung lands on your roof hard enough to crack it.
He's limping. One eye is swollen shut from stings, the other is a slit of light. The pepper spray and the venom and your hits are all in him and none of it is enough. He turns toward you, slow, like he has all the time in the world, and the flame on his hands climbs to his elbows.
<<if ($lungHurt gte 2)>>\
Except that he's slower. Whatever you've put into him is costing him, and he knows it, and it's making him angrier. Hurt is fuel for Lung, but it's also weight, and he's slower.
<</if>>\
<<if ($health lte 30)>>\
You're running on fumes. One more hit like the last one and you don't get up.
<</if>>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
You stand up, heavy and hurt, and you're not moving fast enough to get away, so you don't try.
<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>\
Your palms are raw inside the gloves. You have four bearings left and you can't feel your fingers.
<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>\
Plenty of skips left in you. Your stomach disagrees, and is overruled.
<<elseif ($power is "master")>>\
He's heard the word once. He'll hear it again. The question is whether anything with that much armor still has ears.
<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>\
He's six feet away and looking straight through you. As long as you don't want him to see you, he won't.
<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>\
Two panes. Each faces one way. He can walk around them, and you both know it.
<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>\
You'd need one second with a hand on him. You'd be on fire for it.
<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>\
The baton's dead. The grapple's gone. You have a pocket of parts and a roof full of junk, and twenty minutes would be enough, and you have maybe ten seconds.
<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>\
<<if ($echoClock gte 1)>>Eight minutes. His fire is most of the way to his, and your forearms have stopped looking like arms. Two more minutes and the copy is him. One minute after that, it's gone.<<else>>You haven't caught anything tonight. One touch starts the clock at nothing, and he is not going to give you ten minutes.<</if>>
<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>\
You could step out and stay out. He'd burn an empty roof. The longer you stay gone, the less sure you are that you'd come back as you.
<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>\
You're still the other thing. It's slower than you and it doesn't feel the heat the way you do, and somewhere under it you're fifteen and shaking.
<<elseif ($vial is true)>>\
Eleven answers and you have to pick one. You can feel all of them at once, like a hand with too many fingers.
<<else>>\
The overlay shows you the next three seconds and they're all fire. You move before any of them happen, and you can feel how long that will last.
<</if>>\
"Make a sound," Lung says, in English, between breaths. "Let me find you."
<<choose "ch1-dogs">>
#show-if ($lungHurt gte 2) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Hit him with everything. He's hurt and he's slow. It might actually be enough.
<<var $health - 40>>\
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You go at him, and because he's slow, you land it. All of it. He goes down on one knee and stays there for a long, long second, and you think, //I did that,// and then he gets up anyway, and the fire that comes with him takes you off your feet.
#show-if ($lungHurt lt 2) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Hit him with everything. You haven't really hurt him yet, and this is how people end up in burn wards. Finish it or don't.
<<var $health - 70>>\
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You go at him. It's the stupidest thing you've ever done and for about two seconds it almost works.
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Grab him and don't let go. You can't win. You can make him stay here.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You close your arms around nine feet of burning blades and you hold on. It's like hugging a stove. Your costume starts to smoke. Lung tries to throw you and finds out how much you weigh.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> You've carried heavier than a man on fire. You hold him a count longer than anyone has, and he feels it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge the gravel under his feet and let the roof do the work.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You scoop two fistfuls of gravel, charge them until they burn through the gloves, and throw them down at his feet. The roof under him bucks like a trampoline. He staggers to one knee.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> You put the charge where the gravel is thinnest over the joists, because you looked, and the roof goes where you wanted.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Dodge. Three seconds at a time, as long as your head holds out.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Left. Down. Back. Every blast of fire goes where you were. The migraine arrives behind your eyes, and you keep going anyway.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, not three, and the migraine arrives later than it should.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip. Roof to roof, as many times as your stomach allows.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Gone. Gone again. Each time the fire arrives where you were. Eight skips, nine, roof to roof around him in a circle, until he's spending fire on empty gravel and you're crouched on a roof two buildings over, breathing hard, with the world turning gently.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Your stomach is a runner's stomach, and the fourth skip doesn't cost you the fifth.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Kneel." Everything you have into it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Lung kneels. It is the longest second of your life, nine feet of dragon on one knee on a gravel roof because you told it to. Then the second ends and he comes up swinging, and the backhand you don't quite dodge takes you off your feet.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> It comes out in a voice people obey because they want to, and for one second Lung wants to.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Don't move. Not an inch. Let him burn the empty roof.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He sweeps the roof with fire twice, blind, in a wide arc. The second pass catches your boots and the heat is a wall, and you stand in it, and you do not move, and he walks right past you to the fire escape.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You don't breathe, because you've practiced not breathing, and he walks past close enough to touch.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane after pane. Keep one between you and him until you black out or help comes.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Blue, blue, blue. Each one takes the fire and goes to pieces, and you put up the next before the pieces land. Your arms are shaking by the sixth.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes don't flicker when he roars. Your hands do, and the panes don't care.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) One hand. One second. Whatever it costs.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $health - 35>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You grab the plating over his ribs and hold on while he burns you. The whole side of him goes like a dropped mirror. He roars, and under the roar you hear him breathing wrong.<<var $lungHurt + 1>>
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> Your hand finds the seam first time, the way a pickpocket finds a wallet.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) Ten seconds and a roof full of junk. Build something. Anything. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
A satellite dish, a length of conduit, the flash baton's dead capacitor and the last of your parts. It's a mirror, roughly, not a weapon, and when his fire hits it, it goes back at him, roughly. He flinches from his own heat. It buys you the width of the roof.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> You see what the roof's junk is before you see what it was, and the build takes six seconds instead of ten.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ((($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) and ($echoClock gte 1)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Don't touch him again. Ride the clock. Two minutes, and then you're him.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
You don't touch him, because a fresh touch throws away eight minutes, and you need the eight minutes. You take his fire for ninety seconds, and it hurts less every second, and then it doesn't hurt at all, and the plates come up through your forearms the way they came up through his tattoos, and for one minute on a gravel roof there are two of him. You hit him with a fist his size. He goes down. He gets up. So do you, and the clock runs out, and you're fifteen again and shaking, and he's slower.
#show-if ((($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) and ($echoClock is 0)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Touch him now. Start the clock. You won't get ten minutes; take what you get.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 30>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $echoClock 1>>\
You go through his fire to get a hand on him and it costs you the skin on that hand, and what you get for it is a candle. A first-minute copy of a man who is nine feet of furnace. You hold the candle up anyway, and he looks at it, and at you, and for a second he's curious instead of angry, and a second is what you needed.
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out and stay out. Let him burn nothing. Come back when it's over, or when you can't remember why you left.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You go a second behind and the fire comes through you like light through glass. You stand in it. You stand in it long enough that the roof starts to look like a drawing of a roof, and you say your own name to keep it. When the dogs come you're still standing there, and you have to think about how to come back.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You've held still inside your own skull before, and you stay out as long as you decide to, and come back with your name.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Take the hits. The other body can. Keep him here.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
He hits you and the grey body takes it, and hits back, and for a minute two things that aren't people trade blows on a gravel roof. You're losing. You're losing slowly. That's more than anyone has managed.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is built on a frame that's been carrying things for years, and it doesn't shake when he hits it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Stall. Talk. Anything to buy her time to get off that roof.
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"You were going to shoot kids," you say, backing along the lip of the roof. "That's the plan? Lung, scourge of the Protectorate, big man against twelve-year-olds?" The fire that answers you is wide and blind and you only lose the sleeve.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Put your hands on him anyway.
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You grab what isn't on fire and hold, the way you'd hold a door in a storm, and it costs you skin, and it's the second Taylor needed.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Make him chase something fast.
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You run the roof's edge and he throws fire at where you were, four times, and the fourth time he's facing away from the girl with the bugs.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The roof has a water tank, and the tank has a valve.
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You open it. The roof is steam for ten seconds, and Lung is a shape in it, and the shape can't see the bugs coming.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Say the thing nobody says to Lung.
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"You're losing to a girl with bugs," and he turns to look for her, and her bugs are already in his eyes.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand in the fire and don't run, so she doesn't.
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You stand in it, and it costs you, and Taylor sees you standing, and stays, and the bugs don't stop.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense all the way, denser than you've let yourself, and you pick Lung up.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body comes all the way out, and it's bigger than him, and he notices.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Eleven skips in six seconds, every one a hit, and the twelfth puts you behind Taylor on your feet.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>He forgets you exist mid-swing, and swings at nothing, and you're inside his reach with both hands.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>His plating has a seam, and under it his ribs have one, and you find both with one touch.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>Four seconds, and the roof's dead air conditioner is a thing that eats heat, and it eats his.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead. You move before he decides.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A handful of gravel charged in a fist, and opened in his face.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Kneel," and he kneels, and stays kneeling for a count of five that nobody in this city will believe.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>You've had his fire for nine minutes, and it's yours now, and you give it back.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You step out and take him with you, for one second, into a world where nothing burns, and bring back only yourself.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane inside his mouth, and he stops roaring.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Echo and Densify. Catch his fire. Then go dense with it burning in you.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You touch him and the clock starts hot, and by the second minute there's a furnace in you, and you go dense around it, and what you are now is a thing the weight of a car with Lung's fire inside the stone, and when you hit him it's his own heat coming back through something that doesn't burn.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Overlay and Skip. Five seconds ahead, and skip into every gap the overlay shows.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $lungHurt + 2>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The overlay shows you where the fire isn't going to be and the skip puts you there, every time, and for forty seconds Lung throws everything at a kid who is already somewhere else, and on the forty-first you're on his back with both hands on the mask.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($silencedHer is true)>>\
He stays like that for a long five seconds, hanging on the brick under her roof, waiting for a sound that you've decided he doesn't get to have. Then he drops back to the street and starts to walk the block in a slow circle, hunting by smell now, burning nothing. He's going to find one of you eventually, and it's going to come down to which.
<<page "Watch" "ch1-dogs">>\
<<elseif ($pulledHerOut is true)>>\
You're on your back in an alley with the sky going around, and the bug girl is crouched over you with her mask an inch from yours.
"What //was// that," she says.
"Give me a second."
Above you, Lung roars at the roof you both just left. He sets it on fire, all of it, and the light comes down the alley walls orange. He's going to work out where you went in about five seconds, because the bugs are still coming out of the drain you're lying next to and he's learned what that means.
She stands up. You hear the hiss of a pepper spray can being readied. She is going to make a stand in an alley against that, with a keychain.
<<page "Get up" "ch1-dogs">>\
<<else>>\
The fire clears.
Lung is standing on her roof, one hand clamped over his good eye, swaying. She hit him point blank with pepper spray and he's still standing, because of course he is. He lashes out blind. Fire rolls across half her roof and you can't see her under it.
He's going to find her by sound in about five seconds.
<<page "Watch" "ch1-dogs">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<include "ch1-dead">>\
<<halt>>\
<<elseif ($health lte 15)>>\
<<include "ch1-burned">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($health gt 15)>><<set $lungDown to true>><<achieve "Dragon, Grounded">><</if>>\
Something the size of a van lands on Lung.
It isn't a vehicle. It's an animal, or it was one once: muscle and bone and exposed sinew where the skin should be, with a head like a lizard crossed with a bulldog and claws the length of garden shears. It hits Lung from above and drives him to his knees. He punches it in the snout and it rears back, and then it rhino-charges him clean off the edge of the roof. They hit the street together, and you feel it through the roof.
Two more of the things land. Each has riders.
A tall guy in black motorcycle leathers with a helmet visor molded into a skull. A blond girl in black and lavender with a domino mask and a grin like a fox. A boy in a white half-mask with a silver circlet, ruffled shirt and leggings like he's late for a Renaissance fair. And a girl in a plaid skirt, army boots, and a plastic dollar-store dog mask, who whistles once, sharp, and sends the other two monsters over the edge to join the first.
<<if ($drewLung is true)>>\
They landed on your roof. The bug girl is across the street, on her feet now, watching.
<<elseif ($silencedHer is true)>>\
They land in the street around him. He was looking there anyway. You let the sound back in, and the first thing that arrives is the skull helmet's voice, raised to carry up to two roofs at once.
<<elseif ($pulledHerOut is true)>>\
They land at the mouth of the alley. The skull helmet looks down at the two of you in the trash and the bug-drift and says, "Huh."
<<else>>\
They landed on her roof. You cross the fire escape and the alley and climb to join them before you've decided whether that's smart.
<</if>>\
"Well," says the skull helmet, looking between you and the bug girl. His voice is deep and muffled. "You two saved us a night."
<<page "Meet them" "ch1-interlude-tt">><<set $hospital to true>>\
<<achieve "Burn Ward">>\
The last thing you remember is heat.
You wake up in Brockton General with your hands wrapped in gauze and a PRT officer sitting by the door. Your costume is in an evidence bag. Your mask is in another one. Your guardian is in the hall, and through the little window in the door you can see from the set of their shoulders how this is going to go.
The nurse tells you that you were lucky. Someone put you out. Someone with a lot of bugs, the officer says later, watching your face.
They know your name. They know your face. By the end of the week they'll know your school. There's a woman named Piggot who would like to talk to you about the Wards, and the way she says it makes clear it's not really an offer.
''This is one of the crappier outcomes. Lung does not care how brave you were.''
<<page "Try that night again" "ch1-retry-night">><<set $health to 0>>\
<<achieve "Ash">>\
The last thing you feel is heat, and then a kind of quiet you've never heard before.
You don't get the rest. Nobody does.
<<pho "Guest">>\
<<pho-topic "PRT confirms a cape died at the Lung arrest" "Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay">>\
<<pho-post "Brocktonite03" "(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)" "Posted On Apr 11th 2011:">>Statement went up an hour ago. Lung in custody, Armsmaster on scene, and one line near the bottom: "an unaffiliated parahuman was fatally injured prior to Protectorate arrival." That's the whole line.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "(Showing page 1 of 6)">>\
<<pho-post "► Reave" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>Name withheld pending family notification. Read that again. Pending family. That's a kid.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► White Fairy" "" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>my cousin was two streets over. says it was someone in a dark gray costume, homemade. <<buildword>>, a $girlBoy they think. says nobody on the street had ever seen them before.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► XxVoid_CowboyxX" "" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>did anyone get a name? a cape name even?<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Bagrat" "(The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>No. And the statement says a second cape was on scene and left before officers arrived, also unidentified. So somebody out there watched this happen and went home.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-post "► Cuff" "(Verified Cape)" "Replied On Apr 11th 2011:">>I'm going to say this once and then I'm logging off. If you're reading this and you're new, and you've been telling yourself you'll call the number when you're ready: call the number. Tonight. I don't care which number. Please.<</pho-post>>\
<<pho-page "End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6">>\
<</pho>>\
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>At Brockton General, a nurse who has worked nights for eleven years is asked to step out of her own trauma bay, and doesn't understand why until she sees the mask in the evidence bag.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Marcus")>>Marcus gets the call at the café, between the breakfast rush and the lunch one, and the manager has to take the phone out of his hand.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>Walt hears it from a foreman before the PRT gets to the house, because that's how news travels on the waterfront, and he's sitting on the porch with the radio off when the car pulls up.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>Ray is on the Portsmouth run when his phone goes. He pulls over, and he doesn't drive again that day.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>Nana knows before the knock. She's known since the back door closed on Sunday night. She finds the words for it on the first try.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>Ruth makes the calls herself, to both of your parents, and does not let either of them make it about which of them should have had you.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>Uncle Tomas hears it on the scanner at half past one, the way he hears everything, and he's at Docks and Fourth before the PRT tape goes up, and they won't let him through, and he stands at the tape until morning.<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>Ma opens the laundromat at six, because the rent doesn't care, and she's folding the first load when the PRT car pulls up outside, and she knows, and she finishes folding the towel.<<else>>Your father reads the PRT's statement twice, standing in the kitchen, and then calls a number that isn't in his phone, and the woman who answers says, pleasantly, that the balance is considered settled.<</if>>
The bug girl isn't at school on Monday. On Tuesday she is, and she sits where she can see your empty seat all through World Issues and doesn't write a word.
''This is the crappiest outcome. Lung does not care how brave you were, and the city has moved on by Wednesday.''
<<page "Try that night again" "ch1-retry-night">>/* Rewind to Sunday night: full health, none of the night's consequences. Friday's choices stand. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<if ($nightmares is true)>><<set $stamina to $maxStamina - 20>><</if>>\
<<set $hospital to false>>\
<<set $wipedSeat to false>>\
<<set $inTaylorGroup to false>>\
<<set $groupWon to false>>\
<<set $calledOutMadison to false>>\
<<set $stayedForGladly to false>>\
<<set $witnessOffer to false>>\
<<set $stoodWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $tookBagBack to false>>\
<<set $followedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $skippedSchool to false>>\
<<set $taylorKnows to false>>\
<<set $tailedTaylor to false>>\
<<set $atMeet to false>>\
<<set $atLoft to false>>\
<<set $savedFromDogs to false>>\
<<set $taylorJoined to false>>\
<<set $joinedUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $joinedWards to false>>\
<<set $metWards to false>>\
<<set $sophiaHunting to false>>\
<<set $pingedTt to false>>\
<<set $boughtLunch to false>>\
<<set $sawGun to false>>\
<<set $leftWithTaylor to false>>\
<<set $metLisaUnmasked to false>>\
<<set $hasPhone to false>>\
<<set $calledPHQ to false>>\
<<set $lootDone to false>>\
<<set $tookEnvelope to false>>\
<<set $sharedTrigger to false>>\
<<set $calledSophia to false>>\
<<set $askedBoss to false>>\
<<set $challengedLisa to false>>\
<<set $toldRenickTrigger to false>>\
<<set $toldPartial to false>>\
<<set $savedShopkeeper to false>>\
<<set $metGloryGirl to false>>\
<<set $spokeInClass to false>>\
<<set $sophiaTested to false>>\
<<set $swap to false>>\
<<set $taylorWards to false>>\
<<set $taylorAtPRT to false>>\
<<set $independents to false>>\
<<set $taylorHurt to false>>\
<<set $heroRep to $snapHeroRep>>\
<<set $streetRep to $snapStreetRep>>\
<<set $notoriety to $snapNotoriety>>\
<<set $taylorTrust to $snapTaylorTrust>>\
<<set $control to $snapControl>>\
<<set $leftDocks to false>>\
<<set $joinedFight to false>>\
<<set $hitGang to false>>\
<<set $drewLung to false>>\
<<set $lungHurt to 0>>\
<<set $echoClock to 0>>\
<<set $empireApproach to false>>\
<<set $empireCourting to false>>\
<<set $empireDeclined to false>>\
<<set $empireTarget to false>>\
<<set $abbApproach to false>>\
<<set $abbDeclined to false>>\
<<set $empireRecruited to false>>\
<<set $empireEyes to false>>\
<<set $empireCalled to false>>\
<<set $abbInvite to false>>\
<<set $abbMember to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeKnows to false>>\
<<set $merchantOffer to false>>\
<<set $stance to "">>\
<<set $nodderBeaten to false>>\
<<set $rafeKnown to false>>\
<<set $dinahSeen to false>>\
<<set $dinahFree to false>>\
<<set $dinahLost to false>>\
<<set $wentForDinah to false>>\
<<set $bankRole to "">>\
<<set $bankEscape to true>>\
<<set $bankCaught to false>>\
<<set $arrested to false>>\
<<set $panaceaHostage to false>>\
<<set $caughtRegent to false>>\
<<set $ledgerSeen to false>>\
<<set $kaiserMet to false>>\
<<set $empireName to "">>\
<<set $empireSeen to false>>\
<<set $bakudaBomb to false>>\
<<set $abbHunted to false>>\
<<set $bakudaObeyed to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDefied to false>>\
<<set $wardsConsole to false>>\
<<set $metPanacea to false>>\
<<set $metDinah to false>>\
<<set $stayedHome to false>>\
<<set $metKestrel to false>>\
<<set $foughtLedger to false>>\
<<set $ledgerWon to false>>\
<<set $kestrelAssist to false>>\
<<set $coilNoticed to false>>\
<<set $heardPall to false>>\
<<set $pulledHerOut to false>>\
<<set $silencedHer to false>>\
<<set $lungDown to false>>\
<<set $metUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $withUndersiders to false>>\
<<set $tattletaleNumber to false>>\
<<set $metArmsmaster to false>>\
<<set $tookCredit to false>>\
<<set $gaveCreditToBug to false>>\
<<set $armsmasterCredit to false>>\
<<set $wardsInterest to false>>\
<<set $abbTarget to false>>\
<<set $owedFavor to false>>\
<<set $bugContact to false>>\
<<set $suspectTaylor to false>>\
<<set $guardianKnows to false>>\
<<set $toldGuardian to false>>\
Sunday afternoon again. The costume is laid out on the bed, every seam tested, and the night hasn't happened yet.
<<page "Sunday night" "ch1-docks">>''Interlude: Tattletale''
Lisa had been awake for nineteen hours, and her power had been awake for all of them.
Angelica's back was all shoulder blade and no padding, and Rachel rode her like a motorcycle, which meant every landing came up through Lisa's spine. Two blocks back Brian was arguing with nobody inside his helmet. Alec was humming. Of the four of them, only the dogs seemed to think tonight was going well.
The night was supposed to be simple. Lung was coming for them; the boss had been clear about that and about what he expected them to do about it. Brian had wanted to be somewhere else when it happened. Rachel had wanted to meet it head on. Lisa had split the difference and talked them into hitting the ABB first, which had gone fine right up until they'd found Oni Lee with six guys and no Lung.
//Lee's confused. Not here on his own initiative. Waiting for orders that didn't come.//
Her power had handed her that one for free, and then, when she pushed: //Lung diverted. Two blocks east. Engaged.//
Engaged with //what// was the question her power wouldn't answer without being paid for, and the price was the usual one. She'd paid it, and the headache had moved in behind her left eye and started unpacking.
Now they came over the last roofline and she saw.
A street full of dead bugs, like black snow. One man on fire from head to toe and nine feet tall, Lung, on a good night. <<if ($pulledHerOut is true)>>Two kids in a pile of garbage at the mouth of an alley, one of them green around the gills and the other holding a can of pepper spray out in front of her like a crucifix.<<else>>One skinny figure flat on a roof, and another one, <<if ($drewLung is true)>>across the street, standing up on the lip of the building and yelling at a dragon<<else>>across the street, not moving<</if>>.<</if>>
"Huh," said Brian.
Rachel whistled. Brutus went over the edge. Lisa's power, unasked, started reading.
//The bug one. Tall for a girl her age, and she stands like she expects to be hit. Costume homemade; not a sewing machine, the stitching's wrong for that. Spider silk. She grew the spiders. Months of work. Nobody helped. Bullied, recent, bad. Hasn't spoken because she doesn't trust her own voice yet.//
Lisa pushed it away. It came back.
<<if ($power is "brute")>>\
//The other one. Took a flame burst that should have put $herHim on $herHis back and got up instead. Heavier than $sheHe looks. Brute, body-based, something about density. Costume cut loose at the shoulders because $sheHe's learned what happens otherwise.//
<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>\
//The other one. Gloves scorched through at the palms, pockets sagging with something small and heavy. Threw it. Blaster, with a touch component. Hurts $herHim to use it. $SheHe used it anyway.//
<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>\
//The other one. Flinched a half second before Lung moved. Every time. Short-range precognition, seconds, not minutes. Thinker.// Her power delivered the word with something like distaste, which Lisa found hilarious and did not have time for.
<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>\
//The other one. No fire escape on that side. No way up. And there $sheHe is. Mover, line of sight, no range I can find. Pale under the mask; it costs $herHim, but not much. Oni Lee is going to// hate //$herHim.//
<<elseif ($power is "master")>>\
//The other one. Mask built around the mouth; everything else covered, lips clear. The power is in what $sheHe says.// Her own power supplied the word //compulsion// and her shoulders went up. //Do not let $herHim talk to Rachel.//
<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>\
//The other one.// She had to look at the roof twice before it would give her a person. //Stranger. Attention-based. Holds still and the eye slides off.// Her power hated that, and so did she.
<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>\
//The other one. Blue barriers, one at a time, each only facing the way $sheHe's looking. Shaker, defensive, holds as long as $sheHe concentrates. Already learned to angle them. Quick study.//
<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>\
//The other one. Things break when $sheHe holds them. Striker, structural. Hands wrapped in cloth, no rings, no metal. Scared of what $sheHe can do to the wrong thing. Good instinct.//
<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>\
//The other one. Belt full of junk, half of it already dead. Tinker. Improvisation, short shelf life. Built all of that in a kitchen. Poor. Smart. Going to be very expensive to be friends with.//
<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>\
//The other one. A candle of Lung's fire in one hand at the start and a furnace by the end, and plates coming up through the forearms like his. Trump, copy by touch, on a clock: starts small, climbs, burns out. Brute tint, Changer tint; the body builds to hold what it catches.// Her power went quiet for a second and came back with: //Don't let $herHim touch me.// She found she agreed.
<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>\
//The other one. Went thin, went through a wall, came back shaking. Breaker, out of phase. Stays out too long and doesn't come back the same, and knows it. Lonely power. Lonely kid.//
<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>\
//The other one. Was something else a minute ago, big and grey and no face, and now is fifteen and sick with it. Changer. Hates the other body. Needs it. Somebody made $herHim into a thing once, and the power took notes.//
<<elseif ($vial is true)>>\
//The other one.// Her power stuttered. It did not like the other one. //Three different powers in ten minutes. Four. That isn't how it works. Nobody gets that. Nobody// earns //that.// And then, in a flat voice that wasn't quite her own: //Bought.// Her power offered her a word she had no context for, and the headache doubled. //Vial.//
<</if>>\
//First night out for both of them. Transfer student, the second one. <<if ($build is "small")>>Small, fast, costume cut for someone expecting to grow.<<elseif ($build is "tall")>>Tall for fifteen; hasn't grown into the hands yet.<<elseif ($build is "solid")>>Solid; carries weight like it's used to it.<<else>>Average build. Good camouflage.<</if>> Hair $hair, and the mask doesn't quite hide it.<<if ($vial is false)>> Something ugly a few months back, the kind that moves a family. Stands like the ground might go out from under $herHim.<<else>> Money. New shoes under the costume. Doesn't stand like someone who's been hurt. Stands like someone who's waiting for a bill.<</if>><<if ($background is "athlete")>> Runner. Breathes like one. Track, probably; the shoes are wrong for anything else.<<elseif ($background is "scholar")>> Picked the one roof with sightlines on both exits before anything started. Studied this. Honor roll, somewhere that had one.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>> Costume's better than it should be. Double seams, reinforced where it matters, hand-done. Builds things. Useful. Dangerous, if they ever get bored.<<elseif ($background is "talker")>> Watching my mouth, not my hands. Talker. Knows what I'm doing, because they do it too. Careful with this one.<</if>><<if ($empireStance is "poster")>> Blond under the mask, blue through the lenses, white at the wrists. Kaiser's recruiters found $herHim before I did; I'd bet the costume on it.<<elseif ($abbFit is true)>> Asian kid on a roof over Lung's meeting, the night he goes down. The ABB is going to want $herHim very badly, one way or the other.<</if>><<if ($empireRecruited is true)>> And $sheHe smells like the Kessler yard. Victor's had a look. The Empire has $herHim halfway in, and $sheHe knows it.<</if>>//
"Okay," Lisa said, to nobody, and pressed the heel of her hand against her left eye until the colors came. "Okay, enough."
The thing about knowing everything about a person inside of six seconds was that you couldn't //say// any of it. Say it, and you watched them close up like a fist, and then you had a stranger who was afraid of you instead of a stranger who might, if you were charming and lucky, become something else. The boss wanted recruits. You did not get recruits by reading someone's diary back to them.
So she put the grin on. It was a good grin; she'd had practice. She picked the three things she was allowed to say out loud, all of them true and none of them the real ones, and she let Brian land first because Brian liked to do the introductions.
Lung had called them children. Lisa decided she would be insulted about that later, when she had time.
<<page "Back to the roof" "ch1-undersiders">><<set $metUndersiders to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
"Introductions," the skull helmet says. "Grue. That's Tattletale. Bitch, her choice; the PRT calls her Hellhound because they're squeamish about press releases. And Regent."
"Charmed," says the boy in the circlet, not sounding it.
Tattletale is leaning over the edge watching the dogs work. "Oh, he is having a //night//," she reports. "Pepper spray, bee stings, fire ants, spider bites somewhere I'm choosing not to specify<<if ($drewLung is true)>>, and whatever you did to him, which I would call rude if I weren't so impressed<</if>>. He's going to wake up tomorrow and reconsider his whole life."
She turns around and gives you a once-over that goes on a half second longer than it needs to, and then grins. <<if ($looks is 10)>>"Wow, okay. Full mask was the right call, that face would be a liability. First night?"<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>"You stand like someone who's used to not being looked at. Useful, in this business. First night?"<<else>>"First night?"<</if>>
You don't answer.
"Don't bother, your shoulders did. Relax. Everybody's first night looks like that. Mine involved a dumpster." She says it lightly, and moves on fast. "Nice costume, by the way. Homemade, right? I mean that as a compliment, because the store-bought stuff always looks like a Halloween aisle."
The bug girl hasn't said a word. She's standing with her arms around herself, yellow lenses fixed on Tattletale, and you think she's shaking a little.
Tattletale notices, and doesn't poke at it, and that surprises you. "And you're the bugs," she says, in a different voice. "That was //vicious//. I'm a fan."
<<if ($suspectTaylor is false and $taylorTrust gte 30)>>\
There's something about the way the bug girl is standing, something in the shoulders, and you've seen somebody hold herself like that this week, in a bathroom that smelled like cranberry juice. You put the thought down and don't look at it too hard yet.
<<set $suspectTaylor to true>>\
<</if>>\
Grue's helmet turns toward you. "You've got about a minute before this roof fills up with people who ask harder questions than we do. Anything you want to ask first?"
<<choose "ch1-undersiders-offer">>
#"Who are you people?"
"The Undersiders," Grue says. "You'd have heard the name if you'd been in town longer."
"We're big in certain circles," Regent says.
"Very small circles," Tattletale says. "Mostly people Lung wants dead, which as of tonight includes both of you. Welcome to the club. We don't have jackets."
#"He was going to shoot you. He called you children. He told them to shoot twice, to be sure."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Regent laughs. Grue doesn't. "We heard," Grue says, and his voice goes lower. "That's why we didn't stay home."
"Technically accurate, though," Tattletale says. "We //are// children. I'm going to be so insulted about that later, when I have a minute."
#"You're villains."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
"We prefer 'independent,'" Regent says.
"Bank robbers," Tattletale says cheerfully. "Among other things. For what it's worth, the man with the halberd who's about to land on this roof is going to call //you// something too, and you're going to like it less than you think."
#"Why come out at all? He had twenty guns. You could have run."
"Run where?" Grue says. "He finds us next week with twice as many."
"Dogs don't run," says the girl in the plastic mask. It's the first thing she's said, and it seems to be the only thing she intends to.
"Also," Tattletale says, "and I say this with love, our fearless leader would rather get set on fire than go into anything without a plan, and the plan was 'hit them first.' Credit where due. It sort of worked."
#Say nothing. Let them talk.
"Shy," Tattletale says. "Okay, one of each, apparently." She doesn't push, and you weren't expecting that.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
Tattletale's head comes up like a dog hearing a whistle. "Time's up. Motorcycle, two blocks, coming fast. That'll be the Protectorate's finest." She swings up onto a dog behind Bitch and looks down at the two of you. "Free advice, since you did us a solid tonight. He finds two strangers standing over Lung, he is not going to open with 'which of you were the good guys.' Get gone, or get your story straight."
Grue holds out a hand. "Or come with. Room for one more."
<<choose "ch1-armsmaster">>
#Decline. You're a hero. You're not riding off with villains, however friendly.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"No," you say. "Thanks, but I'm not what you are." Grue shrugs, not offended. "Fair enough. Most people aren't, at first." The bug girl shakes her head too.
#Ask for a way to reach them. You're not joining anything. But you're also new, alone, and just watched the only competent people on this roof.
<<var $tattletaleNumber true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
"Give me a way to reach you," you say. "I'm not signing up, I'd just like to know who's in town." Tattletale laughs, delighted, and rattles off ten digits. "Don't write it down. You're the type who writes things down." You memorize it.
#Take the ride. -> "ch1-ride"
<<var $withUndersiders true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<achieve "Bad Company">>\
"Okay," you say, before you've finished deciding. "Okay. Yeah." You take Grue's hand. The dog under you smells like a slaughterhouse and changes gear when it moves. The bug girl watches you go with an expression you can't read through a mask, and then the roof falls away.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
Riding a monster across rooftops is nothing like anything.
Bitch's dogs clear alleys like puddles. Regent, behind you, is laughing. Tattletale leans in close enough to talk over the wind. "He's going to take Lung in and put his own name on it," she says. "Armsmaster. Not out of spite. It's just how the math works over there. You'd have gotten a lecture about the Wards and a pat on the head."
"You don't know that."
"I know a lot of things. It's sort of my whole deal." She waits a second, then grins. "Okay, that sounded ominous. I mostly use it to win arguments."
"Why are you telling me any of this?"
"Because you're new, and alone, and you just did more in one night than most capes manage in a month, and I collect strays. Also we have an opening. Long story. Involves a lot of dog hair." She says it lightly. "Nobody's asking tonight. Think about it. There's money. There's people who'll have your back. There isn't a lot of that going around for someone like you."
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know you didn't run," she says. "That's most of what I need."
They drop you eight blocks from home, on a quiet corner, without asking where home is. You're fairly sure she knows anyway, and you're fairly sure she'd never say so.
Grue's helmet turns toward you before they go. "You did good tonight," he says. "Whatever you decide." Then they're gone.
You stand on the corner and realize your hands are shaking and you aren't sure whether it's the fight or the offer.
<<page "Walk home" "ch1-home-late">><<set $metArmsmaster to true>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The Undersiders go over your head on their monsters and are gone. The fire escape screams as one of them steps on it on the way down.
<<if ($pulledHerOut is true)>>\
The two of you climb back up to her roof, slowly, because the alley is full of dying bugs and the street is full of dog. From up here you can see Lung on his back in the intersection, not moving, and three monsters standing over him like they're waiting to be told they can stop.
<</if>>\
You hear the motorcycle before you see him. Then a grappling line hits the roof lip, and Armsmaster is standing on the gravel.
He looks the way a superhero is supposed to look, dark blue armor with silver highlights, a sharp V-shaped visor over the top half of his face, a beard trimmed with mathematical precision, and a six-foot halberd that, according to a hundred magazine articles, can cut steel and fire EMPs and probably make coffee. You owned a lunchbox with his logo on it. You do not say this.
<<if ($background is "scholar")>>You know his file by heart. Tinker, efficiency specialist: he doesn't build big, he builds small and makes it do more. The halberd in the magazines is a different halberd. He's rebuilt it since.<<elseif ($background is "fixer")>>There's a seam near the butt of the halberd's haft that isn't in any of the photos. New component. He's been working on something, and he brought it out tonight. You notice because you can't not notice.<<elseif ($background is "talker")>>He leads with the halberd pointed down so that you'll notice the courtesy. You notice. You also notice that he wanted you to.<<elseif ($background is "athlete")>>He came up a grappling line in sixty pounds of armor and he isn't breathing hard. Whatever's in that suit, he earned the rest of it.<</if>>
"Stay where you are," he says, not loud. He keeps the halberd pointed at the gravel, as a courtesy. "Both of you. Hands where I can see them. Which of you is responsible for the man in the street?"
"Both of us," you say. "Her more than me. We're heroes, new ones, as of about an hour ago."
"I'm," the bug girl starts, at the same time, and stops. Her voice is scratchy and tired and you think you've heard it before.
Armsmaster is quiet, and something inside the helmet is measuring you. "True," he says, in the tone of a man reading a dial. The visor passes over you once, top to bottom, and you'd bet it has just logged your height and weight<<if ($mark is "a scar through one eyebrow")>>, and the scar<<elseif ($mark is "glasses")>>, and the glasses under the lenses<<elseif ($mark is "a nose that's been broken once")>>, and the nose<</if>>. Then, almost as an afterthought, "You should know that neither of you dresses like it. That's going to be a problem for you. Not tonight."
The bug girl flinches. "That," she starts. "Wasn't on purpose."
"It rarely is." It's neither unkind nor warm. He plants the halberd and a panel on the haft lights under his thumb.<<if ($calledPHQ is true)>> "Dispatch logged an anonymous call at twelve forty-one. This intersection, Lung, twenty armed men. That was you." "Yes." "That's the first thing anyone's done right tonight. It's why I'm here and not three blocks over." He almost sounds pleased.<</if>> "I need to know what happened here. Take your time. Be accurate."
<<choose "ch1-armsmaster-credit">>
#Give him the whole thing, start to finish, in order.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You give it to him the way you'd want it written down: the gathering, the order, what she did, what you did, the dogs. He doesn't interrupt. His thumb moves on the haft twice. When you're done he says, "That's a good report," in the same tone as everything else. It's the highest compliment he has.
#Ask him what happens to Lung now.
"PRT custody tonight. Arraignment inside seventy-two hours. After that..." He visibly weighs how much to tell a stranger. "His record makes him a candidate for the Birdcage." The prison under a mountain in British Columbia, the one with no door on the inside. "If that's the outcome, you won't see him again." He says //you// like he's still deciding whether it's true.
#Ask him about the four on the dogs.
He stops moving, so you've touched something. "The Undersiders. Grue and Hellhound have files. The other two are blank." He paces, two steps and back. "They've slipped us four times this year. If one of them can tell when we're coming, that would explain a great deal." The visor turns to you. "They talked in front of you?" "Some." "Then you know more about them than my department does. Write it down tonight. All of it, before you sleep."
#Tell him what Lung said. "He was going to shoot kids. Twice each, to be sure."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Teenage villains," Armsmaster says. "I'll note it." You wait for more. There isn't more. He catches whatever your mask isn't hiding, and the visor tilts a degree. "It matters," he says. "It goes in the file. The file is what gets him the Birdcage." He chooses the next part. "Outrage doesn't change the arrest count. It changes how you sleep. Spend it carefully."
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
"Lung is unconscious in the intersection," he says. "I've sedated him and welded a containment cage to the asphalt. He'll be in a PRT cell by morning." He turns the halberd a quarter turn in his hand, a tic you'd guess he doesn't know he has. "Which leaves the question of the report."
You both look at him.
"Hear me out before you answer. Lung's organization runs across three cities. He has two parahuman lieutenants. Oni Lee, who you've likely heard of. Bakuda, who you haven't, because she's new. She spent last month holding Cornell University hostage with bombs she built from scratch, and Lung recruited her the week after the New York Protectorate ran her out. Whoever is named as the one who put Lung down will have both of them looking inside the week."
"You're saying don't take the credit," the bug girl says.
"I'm laying out the options. One: the Wards. Support, training, and backup when they come looking, and they will. Two: keep your names out of it, and let the credit go where it can be absorbed without anyone's house burning down." He doesn't say //to me//. He also doesn't quite look at either of you. He's more uncomfortable with this part than he's letting on, because he thinks it's obvious, and he knows how it sounds anyway.
<<choose "ch1-roof-after">>
#Take the credit. You did this. Let Oni Lee come.
<<var $tookCredit true>>\
<<var $abbTarget true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 30>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Headline">>\
"Put my name on it," you say. "$capeName. I was here. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't." Armsmaster takes a second. "Then it'll be in the report. Accurately." His visor stays on your lenses. "Think hard tonight about whether that's still what you want tomorrow. The Wards offer stays open either way." He means it. You also suspect he's already composing the paragraph where your name comes second.
#Let him have it. Head down. You're fifteen and you don't want Bakuda knowing your school.
<<var $armsmasterCredit true>>\
<<var $owedFavor true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<achieve "Unsung">>\
"Keep us out of it," you say. "Both of us. If anyone asks, you got here first." The bug girl nods, slowly. Armsmaster's shoulders ease a fraction. "That's the right call," he says, and then, more awkwardly, like he's reading from a card someone else wrote: "Thank you. If you're ever in over your heads, the PHQ switchboard knows my name." He doesn't say //I owe you//, and he doesn't have to.
#Point at the bug girl. She did the heavy lifting. If anyone's name goes on it, it's hers.
<<var $gaveCreditToBug true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Credit Where It's Due">>\
"She beat him," you say. "Bugs, venom, pepper spray. Before the dogs, before me, before you. If a name goes on this, it's hers." The bug girl's lenses snap to you. Armsmaster is silent long enough that you can hear the dogs breathing in the street. "She hasn't got a name," he says finally. "Then she's got until the press release." Another silence. "That isn't how this is usually handled," he says. He doesn't say no. He says, "I'll make sure the report is accurate," and from him, when he doesn't like the answer, that is a yes.
#Ask about the Wards. A question, not a yes.
<<var $wardsInterest true>>\
<<var $armsmasterCredit true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
"What would that actually look like," you say. "The Wards. Not the brochure." His posture changes; this is a part he knows. "Training. Equipment built for your power instead of bought at a sporting goods store. A team. A stipend. Oversight you'll hate and backup you'll need.<<if ($looks is 10)>> And an image department that will be very pleased with you, and that you will learn to dread.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>> The image department will want to discuss the mask. Keep the mask.<</if>>" He produces a card from somewhere in the armor: a number and a name, Deputy Director Renick. "Call. They'll want to meet you this week." He hesitates, and then adds, "I started young. I'd have liked someone to tell me it was worth it. It was."
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
Armsmaster steps off the edge of the roof and drops out of sight. A minute later you hear the motorcycle start, heavy, and move off, presumably towing a steel cage with a dragon in it.
It's just you and the bug girl and the smell of smoke.
She sits down right where she is, suddenly, like her legs decided for her. "I almost died," she says, to nobody.
"Me too. Twice, I think." You sit down a few feet away, and your hands start shaking now that they're allowed to.
<<if ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>\
"You didn't have to do that," she says. "The credit thing."
"You earned it. I threw things and yelled. You took him apart."
"He's going to hate me now."
"He's going to hate whoever's name is on it. I'd rather it was the person who actually beat him." You think about it. "I'd rather it wasn't anyone. That wasn't on the list."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh.
<</if>>\
"I haven't got a name yet," she says. "You heard. Do you know how hard it is to pick a bug name that doesn't sound like a villain or a joke?"
"Mine's $capeName. Four pages of crossed-out ideas to get there, and I'm still not sure it's right." You try to think of a bug name and don't get far. "I'll help, if you want. I'm good at crossing things out."
"Huh. That's... actually good. You got lucky." A pause. "I had 'Swarm' for about a day. Then I said it out loud."
<<if ($suspectTaylor is true)>>\
You've been trying not to think it, and you think it anyway. The voice. The way she holds her shoulders. A tall thin girl in a dark hoodie, who sits alone, who gets juice poured on her head and doesn't make a sound, and who went home Friday angrier than she was scared.
You say nothing tonight, but you know.
<</if>>\
<<choose "ch1-home-late">>
#Offer her a way to reach you. Two new capes with a mutual enemy and no backup should probably compare notes.
<<var $bugContact true>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You tell her about a message board, Parahumans Online, and a username: $phoName. She repeats it twice. "I'll think about it," she says. From her it sounds like yes.
#show-if ($suspectTaylor is true) Say it. "Taylor?"
<<var $taylorTrust - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
She goes rigid. For a second you think she's going to run, or send every bug in the Docks at you. "Don't," she says, and her voice cracks on it. "Don't. I don't know you." She's down the fire escape before you can say anything else. You hear her hit the ground running. You tell yourself that went about as well as it could have, and you don't believe it.
#Say goodnight and go your separate ways. Secret identities exist for a reason.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Good luck with the name," you say. "You too, with the whole Lung's-lieutenants thing," she says, instead of goodbye.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($leftDocks is true)>>\
You slip in the back door at a little past two.
<<else>>\
You slip in the back door at a little past three. Your costume is in a plastic bag inside your backpack, and you've changed into the sweatshirt and jeans you stashed under the porch. You still smell like smoke.
<</if>>\
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
The kitchen light is on.
Mom is at the table in her scrubs, home early for once, with a mug she isn't drinking from and her phone face-up in front of her. She's been crying and has stopped. When she sees you, her face lets go all at once, and then tightens right back up into something much worse.
"Where," she says, in her work voice, "were you."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
There's a lamp on in the living room.
Aunt Ruth is in the armchair with a book she hasn't turned a page of in hours. She doesn't get up. She looks at you over her reading glasses, at the backpack, at the smell of smoke you can't hide, and for a second she looks older than she is.
"Sit," she says.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt is at the kitchen table with the police scanner on low and a cup of coffee that is, this time, actually coffee.
He turns the scanner off when you come in. He looks at you a while, at the smoke smell, at the way you're holding your arm. "Docks," he says. He doesn't make it a question. "Heard the whole thing on that. Lung." He pushes the second chair out with his foot. "Sit down before you fall down."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
The apartment is dark. Dad's not due home for three hours.
You're almost to your room when the hall light comes on behind you. He's standing in the kitchen doorway in his work jacket with his keys still in his hand, and he hasn't been to Portsmouth. He came back at midnight because the run was cancelled, and he's been sitting in the dark since.
"Both locks," he says, very evenly, "were open."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Your father is in the kitchen in his shirtsleeves with a glass of something expensive, and he isn't drinking it.
"I had a call," he says, before you've got the door shut. "At one in the morning. A woman. She said you'd been //active// tonight, and that it had been noted, and that I shouldn't worry." He turns the glass a quarter turn on the counter. "I signed a lot of paper for you. I'd like to know what I bought."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana is awake. Of course she is.
She's in her chair with the lamp off and the cane across her knees, and she doesn't speak when you come in, because the words are slow at night and she won't waste them. She just looks, at the bag, at your hands, and at your face longest.
"Sit," she manages. Then, with effort, "Tell."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas is at the kitchen table with the box, a soldering iron, and a scanner he hasn't given you yet, and the scanner is on. He doesn't look up. "Docks and Fourth," he says. "Lung. Two kids on a roof." He sets the iron down. "Sit. Tell me which kid."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma is on the stairs between the apartment and the laundromat, where she can see both doors, with her coat on over her nightgown. She's been there a while. "Four months," she says. "Four months I keep you off that street." Her voice doesn't rise. "Where."
<<else>>\
Marcus is sitting on the kitchen counter in the dark with his phone.
"I called the ER," he says. "I called the cops. They said twelve hours. Twelve hours before they'll even //look// for a kid in this neighborhood." His voice is shaking. He hasn't turned the light on. "Where were you."
<</if>>\
<<set $guardianKnows to true>>\
<<choose "ch1-home-late-2">>
#Tell the truth. All of it.
<<var $toldGuardian true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You tell $guardianName. The trigger, the practice, the costume. Tonight. It takes most of an hour, and it's the first time you've said any of it out loud, and your voice does things you didn't expect. When you're done the kitchen is very quiet. "Okay," $guardianName says finally, and it isn't okay, and neither of you pretends it is. "Okay. We'll figure it out. But you don't go out again without telling me. Promise me." You promise. You might even keep it.
#Tell part of it. You went out. You went to the Docks. You saw the Lung fight from a rooftop. Leave out the costume.
<<var $toldGuardian false>>\
<<var $toldPartial true>>\
You give $guardianName the version with no mask in it. A walk, bad judgment, a cape fight you watched from too close. It's a good lie because most of it is true. $guardianName listens and decides, visibly, to believe it, because the alternative is worse. "Never again," $guardianName says. You say never again. Both of you know what that's worth.
#Say nothing. Go to your room.
<<var $toldGuardian false>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You don't have anything to say, so you don't say it. You walk past $guardianName and up the stairs and shut your door with a click. Through the floor, you hear a chair scrape, and a long silence, and then nothing. You lie on your bed in your clothes and listen to the house be awake around you until the sky goes gray.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<if ($toldGuardian is true)>>\
There's a silence after, the kind that has furniture in it.
"Show me," $guardianName says finally. "Not the costume." You hesitate, and then you do, small, the way you'd show someone a scar. <<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense, and the chair you're sitting on creaks, and you come back.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>You tell $guardianName what they're about to say, three seconds before they say it, twice, and the second time they stop talking entirely.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>You put a pane between the two of you, pale blue, and $guardianName reaches out and touches it and takes the hand back fast.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>You hold a penny until it hums and set it on the table, and it leaves a dent.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>You put a hand on a mug that was already chipped, and it comes apart along the chip into two neat halves.<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>You're across the kitchen and your stomach objects, and $guardianName is staring at the chair you were in.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You don't. You tell $guardianName what the word does and that you will never use it in this house, and you watch them decide whether to believe you.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You stand up and let yourself go unnoticed, and $guardianName looks for you, in a kitchen with two people in it, for almost five seconds.<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>You take the dead toaster off the counter and, in four minutes, with a butter knife and the battery out of the smoke detector, make it into something that lights the kitchen like noon when you press the lever. Then you put the battery back in the smoke detector.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>You have nothing to show, so you explain instead, and explaining is harder than a demonstration would have been: that you need to touch one of them, that for ten minutes afterward you become a little more of what they are with every minute until you're all of it, and that tonight, for one minute, you were Lung.<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>You step out, one second behind the kitchen, and $guardianName watches you go thin and quiet and put your hand through the table, and you come back on the other side of it.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>You take a long breath and let the other body come, and the chair goes out from under it, and $guardianName stands up and backs into the counter, and you take a long breath and come back, and sit on the floor shaking, and nobody says anything for a while.<<else>>You do three things in a row, small ones, and stop when $guardianName's face tells you to.<</if>>
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Mom puts her hand over her mouth. She works in an ER; she has seen capes come in and seen what comes in after them. "Okay," she says, through her fingers. "Okay. We're going to talk to someone. I don't know who yet. Not the PRT, not yet. Someone."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Aunt Ruth takes her glasses off and cleans them on her sweater until they can't get any cleaner. "Your mother," she says, "is going to blame me for this." Then she says, "Good. Let her."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt nods slowly, like you've told him the price of something. "Danny Hebert's girl," he says, apropos of nothing you can follow. "He thinks she's got something going on too. Different. Doesn't know what." He looks at you. "Don't tell him I said that."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad says nothing for a while, and then he gets up and takes the new lock off the kitchen door with a screwdriver, and puts it in the junk drawer, and sits back down. "That was stupid of me," he says. "You can't lock that in."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana reaches across the table and puts her good hand flat on your chest, over your heart, and holds it there. "Mine," she says. It takes her two tries. "Still mine."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Your father looks at the card on the counter and then at you. "I thought I was buying you a chance," he says. "I think I bought you a job." He pours the drink down the sink. "We find out who she is. Both of us."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
Uncle Tomas picks the soldering iron back up, looks at it, puts it down again. "Your mother's going to say I did this. The yard. The junk." He shakes his head. "Maybe I did." He pushes the box across the table. "Scanner's yours. You listen before you go anywhere. Every time."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
Ma puts both hands flat on the table and breathes through her nose, slow, four times. "They came through my shop," she says. "Two of them, and I rebuilt it. I'm not rebuilding you." Then, quieter: "Show me how to help. I mean it. Show me."
<<else>>\
Marcus laughs, the wrong kind. "Mom and Dad are going to lose their minds." Then, "I'm not telling them, you hear me? That's yours to tell. But you text me every time, and I don't care if it's three in the morning."
<</if>>\
<<elseif ($toldPartial is true)>>\
$guardianName believes you, or decides to, and there's a silence after that you both work hard not to look at. You've bought a week, maybe two. The lie is a good one because most of it is true.
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
"The ER got three ABB kids tonight," Mom says. "Burns and bug bites. The bites were worse." She looks at your hands. "Go to bed."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
"I'm not your mother," Aunt Ruth says. "I'm not going to pretend I know how to do this. But I know what a half-answer sounds like, and that was a good one." She picks up her book. "Go to bed."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt turns the scanner back on, low. "Rooftop," he says. "Huh." He doesn't look at you. "Forty years on that waterfront. Never went up a ladder I didn't have to." The scanner mutters. "Go to bed."
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Dad looks at the new lock, and at you, and leaves it on the door. "Go to bed," he says. He's still sitting in the kitchen when you fall asleep.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Nana doesn't believe you. It's in her face, plain as a sign. She also doesn't say so. "Bed," she says, and then, with effort, "Tomorrow." Tomorrow is a deadline.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
"A walk," your father repeats. He's a lawyer; he's heard better. "Fine. A walk." He picks up the cream-colored card and puts it in his jacket. He's going to find out on his own.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
"A walk," Uncle Tomas says, and turns the scanner off, and that's worse than anything he could have said.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Ma")>>\
"A walk." Ma takes her coat off, finally, and hangs it up, and locks the door to the stairs, a door she has never once locked. "Then tomorrow you walk to school and back and nowhere else, and I'll know, because Mrs. Pham sees everything on that street and she owes me."
<<else>>\
"A walk," Marcus repeats. "In the Docks. At midnight." He laughs without any fun in it. "Okay. Sure. I did dumber at fifteen." He didn't, and you both know it.
<</if>>\
<<else>>\
You lie on your bed in your clothes and listen to the house be awake around you. Downstairs, $guardianName doesn't go to bed either.
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Around four you hear her on the phone to someone at the hospital, asking what they do when a kid comes in with burns and no explanation.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Aunt Ruth")>>\
Around four you hear the kettle. Aunt Ruth doesn't drink tea at four in the morning. She's making it to have something to do with her hands.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Around four you hear the scanner come back on, low, and stay on. He's listening for your name.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Dad")>>\
Around four you hear him test the new lock. Twice.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Nana")>>\
Around four you hear her cane on the stairs, slow, one step at a time, and stop outside your door, and stand there, and go back down.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Father")>>\
Around four you hear him on the phone. He says the number on the cream-colored card out loud, digit by digit, to someone who is writing it down.
<<else>>\
Around four you hear Marcus's phone buzz, and buzz, and then him typing, and typing, and then nothing. In the morning there's a text from him on your phone that just says //?// and you don't answer it, and you've never not answered him before.
<</if>>\
<</if>>\
<<page "Monday morning" "ch1-end">>/* Arc 1 wrap-up: looks checkpoint, arc achievements, a summary of where things stand, then on to ch2-morning or a replay. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<achieve "Gestation Complete">>\
<<if (($taylorTrust gte 50) and ($toldGuardian is true))>>\
<<achieve "Stuck the Landing">>\
<</if>>\
''End of Arc 1: Gestation''
It's Monday morning. The sun is coming up over the bay and the rig is a dark shape against it. In a few hours the morning news will say something about Lung, and Winslow High will open its doors, and whatever you started this weekend will keep going whether you're ready or not.
Here's where things stand.
<<if ($abbMember is true)>>\
''You stood with the ABB.'' In a street full of bugs, in front of thirty of Lung's people, and Oni Lee said tomorrow to you, which Mai says he doesn't do. Lung is in a cage. The ABB is going to need people, and they've got both your names.
<</if>>\
<<if ($empireRecruited is true)>>\
''The Empire has your power on file.'' Victor watched you behind a shed and smiled. <<if ($empireCalled is true)>>You texted him Lung's intersection before the fight. Whatever the Empire does with the east side this month, you helped aim it.<<else>>He asked for eyes on the Docks and you gave him none, and he'll ask what you saw.<</if>> Kaiser wants to meet you.
<</if>>\
<<if ($tookCredit is true)>>\
''The name $capeName is on the news.'' Lung's capture, credited to an unknown new hero. By noon it'll be on Parahumans Online. By tonight, Oni Lee and a bomb tinker named Bakuda will be saying it to each other. You wanted the spotlight, and now you're in it.
<<elseif ($gaveCreditToBug is true)>>\
''The news credits "an unidentified insect-controlling parahuman."'' Armsmaster said the words like they tasted bad. Whoever she is, she's famous now, and the ABB's remaining capes are going to want to know her name. You did that to her. You might also have done it for her.
<<elseif ($armsmasterCredit is true)>>\
''Armsmaster took Lung down, according to the news.'' Single-handed. There's footage of the cage. You and the bug girl are nowhere in it, exactly as you asked. The Protectorate's leader in Brockton Bay owes you a favor he will never admit to.
<<elseif ($withUndersiders is true)>>\
''Armsmaster took Lung down, according to the news.'' You know better, and so do four teenage villains who dropped you off eight blocks from home and told you to think about it. You have a phone number in your head that you were told not to write down. You haven't written it down.
<<elseif ($leftDocks is true)>>\
''Armsmaster took Lung down, according to the news.'' You were there for the first five minutes. You've decided not to think about the rest, and you're thinking about it.
<<else>>\
''Armsmaster took Lung down, according to the news.'' Lung is in a PRT cell. His lieutenants are loose.
<</if>>\
<<if ($vial is true)>>\
Someone called your father at one in the morning to say that your night had been noted. You still don't know who they are. Whatever you owe them, it's coming due.
<</if>>\
<<if ($wardsInterest is true)>>\
There's a card with Deputy Director Renick's number in your jeans pocket. You've looked at it four times.
<</if>>\
<<if ($tattletaleNumber is true)>>\
There's a ten-digit number in your head that a girl with a fox's grin gave you on a rooftop. You could forget it, if you tried.
<</if>>\
<<if ($bugContact is true)>>\
The bug girl has your Parahumans Online handle. You check it before breakfast, and there's nothing.
<</if>>\
<<if ($suspectTaylor is true)>>\
And you're fairly sure the bug girl sits two seats up and one row over in World Issues. You haven't decided what to do with that.
<</if>>\
<<if ($gaveHoodie is true)>>\
Taylor Hebert has your hoodie. She said she'd bring it Monday.
<</if>>\
<<if ($ignoredTaylor is true)>>\
You still haven't said a word to Taylor Hebert. She still hasn't said a word to anyone.
<</if>>\
<<if ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>\
Sophia Hess has been looking at you like she's trying to place where she's seen you before. You should probably worry about that.
<</if>>\
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> still owed to Royce Hollis, due the first of May. <<if ($hollisMet is true)>>He's found you once in costume already.<<else>>He hasn't come looking yet. He will.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>You've met. Green, loud, and faster than you'd like, and on Parahumans Online for the thing you did.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' Greg posted a sighting thread this week with a photo that's mostly thumb. Notoriety up five, whether you earned it or not.
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' <<if ($dissonanceSeen is true)>>The streetlights went out toward the water, one at a time, and your reflection was late. You've stopped explaining it to yourself.<<else>>The kitchen clock lost another minute. The fog came in against the wind again. Nobody else has noticed.<</if>>
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor's Trust" $taylorTrust>>\
<div>Power control: <<skill $control 5>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 2, Insinuation.'' Monday at Winslow. Group projects. A redhead who doesn't forget. A blond girl with a message board account and a lunchbox full of cash.
<<page "Continue: Arc 2, Insinuation" "ch2-morning">>
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay from Friday" "ch1-replay">><<include "refresh">>\
<<set $health to Math.min($health + 20, $maxHealth)>>\
<<include "set-stance">>\
''Arc 3: Agitation''
Wednesday.
Three days since Lung, and the city has stopped holding its breath and started arguing about what to do with the air. The news has moved on to the Protectorate's Endbringer readiness drills. That is the phrase they use instead of saying that half the local heroes will be in a conference room in Boston on Thursday. Parahumans Online has a thread about the Halifax fog that keeps getting locked and reopened under new names. The ABB has gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when somebody new walks in.
<<if ($guardianName is "Grandpa")>>\
Grandpa Walt says the Halifax local still isn't answering its hall phone, and that a Dragon suit went over the bay at two in the morning, low, with its lights off. He says it the way he says the weather.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Mom")>>\
Mom says the ER got a memo about "fog-related presentations" and a list of questions to ask anyone who comes in confused. She says it like a joke and doesn't laugh.
<<elseif ($guardianName is "Tomas")>>\
The scanner on Uncle Tomas's table has picked up a new channel that only talks at night, in call signs, about the harbor. He hasn't said anything about it, and he's left it on.
<<else>>\
Somebody at school says a Dragon suit went over the bay last night with its lights off. Somebody else says that's not a thing Dragon does. Nobody knows which of them is right, and that's new too.
<</if>>\
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
Taylor Hebert was in school Monday and Tuesday and isn't today. Her seat in World Issues has a sub's attendance sheet on it with her name unchecked. <<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>You know where she is, or near enough. You know she'd rather you didn't.<<else>>You've stopped pretending you don't notice.<</if>>
<<elseif ($taylorWards is true)>>\
Taylor Hebert is in school, and tired, and has a new habit of checking her phone under the desk at the top of every hour. Shadow Stalker's schedule, you'd guess. Sophia Hess watches her do it from two rows back with an expression you can't read and don't like.
<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>\
Taylor Hebert sits next to you in World Issues now. The whole room has noticed. Nobody has said anything, because the people who'd say something are still deciding what it means. She has a lunchbox of villain money in her closet and two weeks before she calls the number. You can see her counting the days.
<<else>>\
Taylor Hebert is in school with her hood up, and she looks at you once, across the room, the way you'd look at a door you haven't decided to open.
<</if>>\
Mr. Gladly announces a quiz for Friday and a field trip he hasn't gotten approved. Madison says something about your hair<<if ($looks is 10)>>, a compliment with a hook in it<<elseif ($looks is 3)>>, and her friends laugh longer than it deserved<</if>>, and the day goes.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
<<page "After school: the loft" "ch3-u-loft">>\
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
<<page "After school: the PRT building" "ch3-w-hq">>\
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
<<page "After school: the phone rings" "ch3-e-call">>\
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
<<page "After school: Fourth Street, again" "ch3-a-fourth">>\
<<elseif ($ulMember is true)>>\
<<page "After school: Leet's garage" "ch3-ul-wed">>\
<<else>>\
<<page "After school" "ch3-i-wed">>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
The loft smells like pizza and dog. Rachel has the three of them on the mat by the far wall, running them through something that looks like a drill and sounds like a fight, and she doesn't look up when you come in. Alec is on the couch with a controller. Brian is at the kitchen table with a map of downtown spread out under a coffee mug.
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
Taylor is at the other end of the table, in jeans and the hoodie, with a notebook open in front of her and the costume folded on the chair beside her. She looks up when you come in and then back down, fast, the way she does at school. <<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>You're the only person here who knows what she's doing, and both of you are very careful never to look at each other for too long.<</if>>
<</if>>\
Lisa comes out of the kitchen with a bag of chips and the expression she gets when she's been right about something for a while and is about to be right about it out loud.
"Okay, so," she says. "Thursday."
Brockton Bay Central Bank, Lord Street branch, two-thirty in the afternoon. The boss wants it hit, the boss wants it loud, and the boss has been very specific about the time, which Lisa says is the tell. "He's never specific. He says 'this week' and lets me work it out. Thursday, two-thirty, twenty minutes inside. Something else is happening at two-thirty on Thursday, and he wants every hero in the city looking at us instead."
"The Protectorate's in Boston," Brian says. "Endbringer prep. It's been in the paper."
"The Protectorate's in Boston," Lisa agrees. "Which leaves the Wards, who are children, like us, except with a van and insurance. Four minutes to respond, maybe five. We're out in twelve." She drops the chips on the map. "Roles."
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>\
She looks at you while she says it, and adds, lightly: "The man with the pen works for the boss, by the way. He writes up new hires. You've been written up. Congratulations; it means you're on the payroll, so you're on this." <<if ($ledgerWon is true)>>"He wasn't happy about his file, either. Don't let that go to your head. Do, a little."<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<choose "ch3-u-loft-2">>
#"Crowd. Hostages. Keep them down and keep them calm."
<<var $bankRole "crowd">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Crowd," Lisa says, and writes it. <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>"With Taylor. Bugs and whatever you've got, between the counters and the door. Nobody gets hurt, nobody gets brave."<<else>>"With me, then, until I go in the back. Nobody gets hurt, nobody gets brave."<</if>> Brian nods like that's the answer he'd have picked for you.
#"Front door. With Grue and the dogs. If the Wards come in, they come through us."
<<var $bankRole "door">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Door," Lisa says. Rachel looks up from the mat for the first time, at you, and then back down. From her that's a vote. Brian says, "You stand where I put you and you don't go past the dark. The dark's the whole point."
#"Roof across the street. Eyes on the Wards' van. I call it when they move."
<<var $bankRole "lookout">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Lookout," Lisa says, and taps the map, and gives you a roof, and a second roof in case the first one's wrong. "You see the van, you text one word. You see anything that isn't the van, you text two." Alec says, "Boring," without looking up. Lisa says, "Boring is the job."
#"What does the boss want out of this? Not the money. The other thing."
<<var $bankRole "crowd">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $askedBoss true>>\
Lisa's grin doesn't move, and a grin that doesn't move is as close as she gets to admitting she doesn't know. "If I knew that," she says, "I'd be him. Crowd, for you. Hostages. Nobody gets brave." Brian looks at her, and she looks at the map, and Alec says, from the couch, "She knows," and nobody disagrees.
<</choose>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The rest of the afternoon is the part of this nobody puts in the stories.
Rachel runs the dogs until they're panting and then runs them again, and when Brutus clips your knee on the way past she says "Move," not "Sorry," and you move. Alec shows you where the Wards' van usually parks, and he knows because he has watched it from a diner across the street twice, eating pancakes. Brian walks the map with you three times, exits, alleys, where the dogs will be, where the dark will be, and says, at the end, "If it goes wrong, you run, and you don't stay for us. We'll be fine. You run." He says it like he's said it to someone else, and recently.
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
Taylor catches you alone by the fridge. She has the costume over her arm. "Lisa wants me to pick a name by tomorrow," she says, low. "She says the PRT will pick one for me otherwise and I'll hate it." She looks at the costume. "Everything bug sounds like a villain, which I guess I am." She stops. "I had one, and I said it out loud and it sounded stupid."
<<choose "ch3-wed-evening">>
#"Say it. I won't laugh."
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
"Skitter," she says, very fast, and then watches your face, and you don't laugh, and something in her shoulders comes down a quarter inch. "It's a verb," she says. "It's what they do." "It's good," you say, and she looks at you like she's checking whether you mean it, and decides you do.
#"Pick something that isn't about the bugs. Pick something about you."
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
She thinks about that with the costume over her arm, long enough that the dogs finish a drill. "There isn't anything about me that isn't about the bugs," she says, finally. "Not anymore." She says it the way you'd read out a measurement. She goes back to the table.
#show-if ($taylorKnows is true) "Whatever you pick, pick one you can say to Armsmaster with a straight face. Afterward."
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
She stops moving, and looks past you at the loft, at Brian with the map and Alec with the controller and Rachel with the dogs, and then back at you. "Yeah," she says, almost no sound. "I know." She picks "Skitter" an hour later, in front of everyone, and Alec says it's gross, and Lisa says it's perfect, and you watch her not look at you.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Lisa catches you alone by the fridge. "Tomorrow's going to be loud," she says, "and some of it's going to be ugly, and I need to know you're not going to do the thing where you find out halfway through that you're a hero after all." She says it lightly. Nothing about her eyes is light. "Are you?"
<<choose "ch3-wed-evening">>
#show-if ($charm gte 3) [Charm] "Ask me again over dinner. Somewhere that isn't this fridge."
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $lisaAsked to true>>\
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
Lisa grins the wide one and shakes her head. "I don't do that. Any of it. Ask me in six months and I'll say no then too, nicely." She takes a chip. "But I'm flattered, and I'll remember you asked, and that's worth more than dinner with me, trust me." She does, once more, with her eyes, at the door, and you give her a straight answer.
#"I'm here. I'll be there. Don't ask me again."
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
She studies you for two seconds longer than is comfortable and then grins. "Okay, I won't." She does, once more, with her eyes, at the door, and you give her the same answer.
#"I don't know what I am yet. I know I'm not going to leave you in there."
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"That's a better answer than the one I wanted," she says. "Keep it." She takes a chip out of the bag and offers you the bag, and from Lisa that's a contract.
#"Nobody gets hurt. That's my line. If it crosses that, I'm out."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Nobody gets hurt is everyone's line until the Wards come through the door," she says. "But okay, noted. I'll try to make it true." She sounds like she means it, and that surprises you, and you suspect it surprises her.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $metWards to true>>\
The Wards' quarters are under the PRT building, through two doors that need a card and one that needs your face, and they look like a dorm somebody rich built for children they didn't trust: a common room, a kitchen with a sign about labeling your food, a console desk with six screens, and a corridor of rooms with names on them. Yours says $capeName on a printed label, slightly crooked. Somebody has drawn a small smiley face on it. You suspect Clockblocker.
<<if ($taylorWards is true)>>\
Taylor's room is two down from yours. Her label says SKITTER, the name she picked on Tuesday with her jaw set, and under it somebody has written //welcome// in marker, in handwriting that isn't Clockblocker's. Vista's, you think. Taylor looks at it every time she passes it, and hasn't said anything.
<</if>>\
Aegis runs the afternoon. He's seventeen and built like a lifeguard and he has a clipboard, and he uses the clipboard, and he's good at it, because he's been doing it since he was fourteen. Patrol rotations. Console rotations. "Thursday the Protectorate's in Boston for the Endbringer thing, so we're it. Two on console, four on call. Nothing's going to happen. Nothing ever happens when they're gone, because the villains know they'll get blamed twice as hard." He says it like he believes it. Gallant, behind him, doesn't.
Kid Win asks you three questions about the physics of your power before you've sat down. Vista, who is twelve and has been a Ward longer than anyone in the room, watches you answer and makes a note on her own clipboard. Hers is smaller. Clockblocker says, "Okay, new rule, nobody with a clipboard gets to talk until five," and Aegis says, "Dennis," and Clockblocker says, "That's a name, that's a name in costume, that's a fine," and Aegis puts a dollar in a jar on the counter without breaking stride.
And then Shadow Stalker comes in from the locker room with her cloak over her arm, and the room changes temperature by a degree nobody but you notices.
<<if ($calledSophia is true)>>\
She knows you know. You told her so in a hallway. She walks past you to the fridge like you're furniture, and takes a water, and says, to the fridge, "Console with the new kid Thursday, Aegis. I'll train them." Aegis says sure. She turns around and looks at you over the bottle, and the look says //I'll train you.//
<<elseif ($sophiaSuspicious is true)>>\
She stops when she sees you, for one second, and then she keeps walking, to the fridge, and takes a water, and doesn't look at you again, with great care, for the rest of the afternoon. She knew your face from the third floor. Now she knows the rest of it, and you know hers, and neither of you has decided what that costs yet.
<<else>>\
She looks at you the way she looks at everyone, like a problem that hasn't become hers yet. She doesn't know your face from school; you've made sure of that. You know hers. You decide, for now, to keep that.
<</if>>\
Armsmaster comes down at five with a tablet and briefs the room for six minutes by the clock: the Protectorate's absence Thursday, the ABB's silence, a note that Empire activity on the east side is up eleven percent, and a sentence about Halifax he reads off the tablet without inflection: "Guild liaison requests all coastal teams report unusual fog." Clockblocker says, "Unusual how," and Armsmaster says, "Unusual," and leaves.
<<choose "ch3-wed-evening">>
#Volunteer for console Thursday. Learn the city from the desk before you learn it from the street.
<<var $wardsConsole true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Aegis writes it down. "Console with Vista, one to four. She'll show you the boards. Don't touch the red one." Vista looks pleased, and then hides it, and then looks pleased again. <<if ($calledSophia is true)>>Shadow Stalker, at the fridge, says, "I said I'd train them," and Aegis says, "Thursday you're on call, Stalker," and she lets it go the way a cat lets go of a bird.<</if>>
#Volunteer to ride along Thursday. If anything happens, you want to be in the van.
<<var $wardsConsole false>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Van, Thursday, with Aegis and Gallant and Browbeat," Aegis says, writing. "You stay behind me and you do what Gallant says if I'm busy." Gallant looks at you a half second too long again and nods. Clockblocker says, "Van's boring. Console's boring. Everything's boring. Enjoy your boring."
#Ask Armsmaster, before he goes, what Halifax has to do with coastal teams.
<<var $wardsConsole true>>\
<<var $heardPall true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He stops in the door. He weighs it, the way he weighs everything, and decides you've earned a sentence. "Something was in the fog at Halifax that the Guild could not classify, and it left two hundred people alive who don't remember being there. We have been asked to watch the water. I am asking you to watch it." He goes. Aegis puts you on console Thursday without asking.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<if (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>\
Taylor's basement is a washer, a dryer, a bare bulb, a workbench her dad built and stopped using, and a wall where the spiders live, in jars and a terrarium and, when she's working, on everything. She's making you something and won't say what. She measured your arms on Monday with a tape and wrote the numbers on her hand.
"The silk's stronger than the PRT's armor weave," she says, not looking up from the spinner she's got going on the bench, hundreds of them, moving like a thought. "Lighter. It breathes. It took me five months for mine." She glances at you. "Yours'll take two weeks. I've gotten faster."
You train in her backyard, after, where the fence hides most of it. She tells you where her range ends, and it's further than you'd have guessed. You tell her what yours costs, and it's more than she'd have guessed, and the two of you stand in a yard in the Docks at dusk being honest about limits, and it's the most normal hour you've had in a week.
"Two weeks," she says, at the gate. "Then I call the number, or I don't. You said you'd help me decide." She says it like a contract. You said it like one.
<<else>>\
You go home and do homework, and the costume sits in the closet.
At seven your phone buzzes<<if ($hasPhone is false)>>, except you don't have one, so at seven there's a knock, and when you open the door there's nobody there and a folded sandwich wrapper on the step with marker on it<</if>>. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>//Boardwalk, north end, tonight 10. Merchants pushing at the arcade. Bring food. K.//<<else>>It's a group text from somebody at school: //merchants at the boardwalk arcade again, like 8 of them, cops did nothing.//<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-wed-evening">><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
Victor calls at four, on the number he gave you. You haven't given it to anyone.
"Good afternoon." He says it like a man at a desk. "Rune will be outside in twenty minutes. Dress for a meeting. Not the costume; bring the costume." He hangs up before you can ask what kind of meeting needs both.
Rune is outside in nineteen, in the passenger seat of a car driven by a man who doesn't speak, with her feet on the dash and her phone in her hand. "Hey, new kid," she says, without looking up. "Don't talk in the car. Don't talk in the room until he talks to you. Don't stare at the walls." She pauses. "You'll want to stare at the walls."
<<page "The meeting" "ch3-e-kaiser">><<set $kaiserMet to true>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
It's a warehouse near the rail yard. Everything in this city that doesn't want to be seen happens near the rail yard. Inside, somebody has made the room into a hall, with a long table, chairs along one side, and a flag on the wall that you've now seen three times and still don't look at.
You stare at the walls. They're growing.
Blades, flat and grey and faintly sheened, coming out of the brick in slow fans, a foot long, two, like frost on a window if frost were steel, and at the center of the far wall they've grown into something like a chair, and in the chair sits a man in armor made of the same metal, with a crown of it on his head, and he is watching you look at his walls.
"Kaiser," Rune says, under her breath, unnecessarily, and goes to stand by the far door with her arms folded like she's twelve and bored, and she's neither.
There are others. The man in a greatcoat and a gas mask, standing very straight, is Krieg. Victor is at the table with a folder. The woman with red hair and a smile, you'll learn, is Othala. Nobody introduces anyone. You're a new face in a room where faces are the point, and everyone is waiting for the man in the chair.
"Victor tells me you're from Winslow," Kaiser says. His voice is cultured and unhurried, and the armor doesn't muffle it, because he's chosen that. "He tells me your family came here this winter. He tells me what you can do, and that you did it in the Docks on Sunday night, in a street full of the ABB's animals, for no one's benefit but your own." He pauses. "I'd like to know why."
<<choose "ch3-e-kaiser-2">>
#"Because nobody else was going to. Not the Protectorate. Not the PRT. Somebody had to."
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
"Yes," Kaiser says, and something in the room eases, because that was the right answer, and you can feel how much that frightens you. "That is the whole of it. Somebody has to. The heroes protect the Boardwalk and the rig and their own careers, and the rest of this city is left to whoever will take it. We take it. We keep it. For our people." Krieg nods, and Victor writes something.
#"Because I was there, and I didn't want to be the kind of person who runs."
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"An honest answer," Kaiser says. "Rarer than you'd think, in this room." Rune makes a small noise by the door. "Honesty is useful to me. So is the other thing you didn't say: that you're fifteen and you have no one, and you went looking for a street to stand on. I understand that better than you'd credit." He leans forward a half inch. "I'm offering you a street."
#"Why does it matter? You've already decided what I am. Everyone in this city has."
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
The blades on the wall behind him stop growing. The room gets very quiet. Then Kaiser laughs, short, and the blades start again. "Everyone in this city has decided what you are," he says. "That's true. The difference between us and them is that we've decided you're worth something. Hold on to the anger. You'll need it. Point it where I tell you."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
"Tomorrow," Kaiser says, "a bank on Lord Street will be robbed at half past two in the afternoon by a group of children calling themselves the Undersiders. Victor has a friend in the PRT's dispatch office. The Protectorate will be in Boston. The Wards will respond, late and badly, and the city will watch children fight children on the evening news."
"We'd like the city to see something else," Victor says. "We'd like it to see who keeps order on Lord Street when the heroes are at a conference."
"You and Rune will be on the roof of the building opposite," Kaiser says. "You will watch. When the Wards fail, and they will, you will be seen succeeding where they failed. Publicly. In colors." He stands, and the blades on the walls stand with him. "That is the interview. Victor will give you a name to be seen in. Use it or don't; the cameras won't know the difference. But if you step onto Lord Street tomorrow, you step onto it as one of us, and the city will remember which street you chose."
Victor's folder has a name in it. He's written three, actually, in careful print, Norse the way the Empire likes them, and he turns the folder so you can read them: //Hrist. Skuld. Vali.// "Pick one," he says, "or keep your own. Kaiser doesn't care, but the news will."
<<choose "ch3-wed-evening">>
#Keep $capeName. You picked it. It's yours.
<<var $empireName "own">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"$capeName," Victor says, and writes it, and closes the folder. "Fine. It's a good name. They'll put it under the eagle anyway." Rune, at the door, says, "Nobody keeps their own name," in a tone that might be respect.
#Take one of theirs. If you're going to be seen in their colors, be seen in their name.
<<var $empireName "given">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
You put a finger on the middle one. Victor nods like you've passed something. "Skuld," he says. "She decided what was owed. It suits." Kaiser, from the door, says, "Welcome," and he sounds as if he means it, and that is the part that scares you.
#Ask what happens to the Undersiders if the Empire catches them.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Krieg answers. It's the first time he's spoken. His accent is faint and careful. "They are children. We are not the ABB. They will be handed to the PRT in front of cameras, unharmed, and the city will see who did the handing." Victor adds, "The dog girl is a different conversation." Nobody has that conversation in front of you.
<</choose>><<set $sawLung to true>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
You went to Fourth on Monday at noon, because Oni Lee said noon, and Mai said he doesn't say that to people.
It was a restaurant with its grille down and a kitchen that went back further than kitchens should, and a door at the back of that, and stairs. Mai took you down them. Danny Trang was already there, and six others your age or a little older, standing against a wall in a basement that smelled of bleach and solder, and Oni Lee stood at the bottom of the stairs with his arms folded and his mask on and didn't move for the whole twenty minutes, except once.
She came in from the other door. Goggles, a gas-mask filter, a braid of wire over one shoulder, a lab coat over body armor, and a voice like a teacher who has already decided you're stupid.
"Lung trusted people," Bakuda said. "Look where Lung is."
She explained it the way you'd explain a form. A device, the size of a grain of rice, placed at the base of the skull with a tool that looked like a dentist's. It did nothing. It would continue to do nothing for as long as the people in this room continued to be useful and loyal and quiet. It was, she said, insurance. Everyone who stood with the ABB from today would have it, starting with the people in this room, starting now. That was when Oni Lee moved, once. He took the tool from the tray and held it out to her, and she took it.
"Who's first," she said, and looked at you, because you were the one with the mask.
<<choose "ch3-a-fourth-2">>
#Step forward. You stood with them Sunday. You stand with them now.
<<var $bakudaBomb true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Insurance">>\
It felt like a bee sting and then like nothing. She patted your cheek through the mask, twice, like a dog. "Good," she said. "See? Nothing." Mai was next, and didn't look at you, and you understood that you'd made it easier for her and that she would never thank you for that. Danny Trang cried. Nobody said anything about it.
#Refuse. Out loud. "No. I stood with you. That doesn't make me yours to wire."
<<var $abbMember false>>\
<<var $abbHunted true>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The basement went very quiet. Bakuda tilted her head, interested, the way she'd look at a device that didn't do what the manual said. "Then you're not ours," she said. "Then you're a test." Oni Lee moved, and you moved first, and you don't entirely remember the stairs, only the grille, and the street, and Mai's voice behind you saying your cape name once, flat, like she was closing a door. You have not been back to Fourth. Fourth has been to your bus stop twice.
#Ask her what happens if someone stops being useful. Make her say it in front of them.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $bakudaBomb true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<achieve "Insurance">>\
She said it. In detail, with numbers, radius and yield, while six kids against a wall listened and Danny Trang started to shake. Then she looked at you with something that might have been approval. "You asked. Nobody asks. Hold still." It felt like a bee sting and then like nothing, and the whole room had heard what it was, and that had been the point, and you're going to turn over whose point it was for weeks.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>\
That was Monday. It's Wednesday, and Mai finds you after school with a shoebox in a plastic bag.
"Tomorrow," she says. "Two-thirty-five. Lord Street, the bench outside the Central Bank, the one by the bus shelter. Leave it under the bench and walk north. Don't run. Don't look back at it." She holds out the bag. "She says it's a camera. She wants to see how the Wards respond to something."
The box is heavier than a camera. You both know that.
"Danny's going with you," Mai says. "He asked. I think he wants to not be alone with it." She looks at you. "Two-thirty-five, and she was specific about it, and she's never specific."
<<else>>\
That was Monday. It's Wednesday, and you've changed your bus stop twice, and this morning there was a red-and-green bandana tied to the fence outside your building, neat, like a flag.
You don't have a plan for this. You have a costume and a power and a city that's decided what you are twice this week, and tomorrow is Thursday, and you've heard, from the second-floor stairwell, that something is happening on Lord Street at two-thirty that the ABB wants to watch.
<</if>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-wed-evening">><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
Wednesday night. Whatever tomorrow is, there's tonight first, and the Boardwalk, and a text about Merchants at the arcade that half your school has seen and nobody has done anything about.
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel's note said ten, the north end, bring food. It's a quarter past nine.
<</if>>\
<<page "Go out. The Boardwalk." "ch3-nodder">>
<<page "Go out. Anywhere but the Boardwalk." "patrol-wed">>
<<page "Sleep. Tomorrow's going to need all of you." "ch3-thursday">>/* Arc 3, Nodder and the Merchants. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The north end of the Boardwalk after dark is the part the tourist board doesn't photograph: a shuttered arcade, a fried-dough stand with its lights off, benches, and the rail, and tonight eight people in layers who shouldn't be in layers in April, moving product out of a duffel bag to a line of customers who are trying not to look like a line.
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel is on the arcade roof with her legs over the edge and a bag of fries. She doesn't wave. She points, with a fry, at the bench by the rail, and you look.
<</if>>\
There's a man on the bench. Skinny, forties, a bathrobe over what might be body armor, bare feet in sandals, and he's nodding. Not sleeping, nodding, the slow heavy drop of the head that you've seen in doorways all over the Docks, except that everybody within forty feet of him is doing it too. The customers in the not-a-line. The Merchants with the duffel. A woman walking a dog, who stops, and sways, and sits down on the planks with the leash in her hand and her mouth open, and the dog lies down beside her. The whole north end of the Boardwalk is going under, gently, like a room where somebody left the gas on.
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
"Nodder," Kestrel says, from the roof, not loud. "Skids' new one. Three weeks. Nobody's got a good look at him because nobody can stay awake long enough." She drops off the roof and lands next to you, light, and for once she isn't eating. "Forty feet, about. You go in, you've got maybe twenty seconds before you're on the planks with the rest. I've been going over the top. It doesn't reach up."
<<else>>\
You've read about him, barely: a PHO stub, three weeks old, //Merchants' new cape, Shaker, "the nod", avoid.// Nobody's got a good look at him because nobody inside forty feet can keep their eyes open.
<</if>>\
One of the Merchants with the duffel is a kid about nineteen with Kestrel's jaw and Kestrel's way of standing, and he's the only one near the bench who isn't nodding. He's counting cash. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel has stopped breathing.<</if>>
<<choose "ch3-nodder-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and walk in. Heavy things are hard to put to sleep.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
The nod hits you at forty feet like warm water and you let the weight come and walk through it, slower than you'd like, with your eyes going. At ten feet you can't feel your face. At five you fall on him. That was the plan, and two hundred pounds of dense fifteen-year-old is enough to make a man stop concentrating. The Boardwalk wakes up all at once, coughing.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> Heavy things are hard to put to sleep, and you're heavier than you were in April, and the nod slides off.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip to the bench. Be on him before the field knows you're in it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
One skip, roof to bench, and you're sitting next to him with your hand on his collar before the nod has time to climb your spine. It climbs anyway. You skip again, with him, to the water's edge, and drop him in two feet of April harbor, and the cold does what you couldn't. The field goes out like a light.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Skip to the bench, and the field is still deciding you're in it when you've got him by the bathrobe.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane between him and the Boardwalk. See if the nod goes through blue.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
It doesn't. You put a pane between the bench and the planks and the woman with the dog sits up and says "What," and the not-a-line starts to shuffle, and Nodder opens his eyes and finds himself in a box of his own making. He stands up, swaying, and the Merchants with the duffel realize they're awake and in trouble at the same moment, and run. Nodder, in the box, sits back down.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The nod doesn't go through blue, and you've got four panes up before he's finished nodding.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Whatever the nod is, it's made for people who are here.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
A second behind the world, the nod is a color on the air, and you walk through it the way you'd walk through smoke in a photograph. You come back in beside him, inside his reach, and you have about four seconds before the field takes you, and you use them to put his own duffel over his head and his sandals in the harbor. He stops concentrating. People wake up annoyed.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You stay out through the whole field and come back on the bench next to him, awake, with your name.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Wake up." To everyone. Then "Sleep," to him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Forty people sit up on the Boardwalk at once like a film run backward, and before Nodder can put them down again you give him the other word, and he goes face-first into the planks and stays there. The Merchants with the duffel look at you the way the ABB looked at you on Sunday. Forty people are going to remember who told them to wake up, and that it worked.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Wake up," to forty people, and all forty do, at once, and the Boardwalk is a crowd again.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) Smoke canister into the field, grapple over it. He can't nod what he can't see. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
White fills the north end and the nod, it turns out, needs eyes. You come in over the top on the grapple while he's coughing and put the baton to the back of his neck, and the field goes out, and so does he. The canister's dead. So's the baton. You're keeping the bathrobe.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The grapple clears the field in one throw because you measured forty feet on Tuesday, pacing it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge a bottle cap for five seconds and put it through the bench, next to his hand.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The bench comes apart under him and he sits down hard on the planks and the nod stutters, and in the gap the Boardwalk wakes up long enough to see what's happening and start running. He gets the field back. You put a second cap through the duffel, and the Merchants decide the product isn't worth the night, and leave him there, nodding alone on a broken bench.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The bottle cap goes through the bench an inch from him, where you aimed, and he stops concentrating.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch the field three seconds ahead. Find where it isn't.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The overlay shows it: the nod isn't a circle, it's a breath, in and out with his, and on the out it pulls back six feet. You walk in on the outs. It takes a minute and it looks insane and it works, and you take the duffel out of the nineteen-year-old's hands on the last out-breath and put it in the harbor, and Nodder opens his eyes to find you sitting next to him.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and the field has a shape, and the shape has a gap, and you walk through it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Get to the bench. One hand on the planks under him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You get fifteen feet in on your feet and the last twenty on your knees, and your hand finds the planks under the bench, and twelve feet of Boardwalk lets go and drops him into the harbor with the bench still under him. The field goes out in the water. You lie on the planks for a while, waking up.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The planks under him come apart in the order you chose, and he goes into the harbor feet first.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Whatever the nod is, see if it works on a body that isn't shaped like one.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
It works less. The grey body comes through the field like a man wading, slow and getting slower, and it reaches the bench before it stops, and it picks Nodder up by the bathrobe and holds him off the ground until he stops concentrating. The Merchants see a faceless thing holding their cape in the air and leave the duffel.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body isn't shaped for sleeping and the nod can't find anywhere to put it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on him. Catch the nod. Then see who falls asleep.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You crawl the last ten feet and get his bare ankle, and the clock starts, and a candle's worth of the nod is enough to make him blink, which breaks his, and then it's yours, climbing. For three minutes the north end of the Boardwalk belongs to you, and you put the Merchants on the planks one at a time, without hurting them, and let the customers go. You turn it off before it gets to full. You didn't like how much you wanted to see full.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> You have the nod by the second minute, and he's the first one on the planks.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) He can't nod what he isn't paying attention to. Walk up and take the duffel.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
The nod needs him to notice you, it turns out. You walk forty feet through a crowd of sleeping people to a man on a bench and take the duffel out of the hands beside him and put it in the harbor and sit down next to him, and he never looks at you once, and when you pinch the nerve behind his ear the way Grandpa showed you once, the whole Boardwalk wakes up and he doesn't.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You walk up and take the bathrobe's belt and his attention never once finds you.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($metKestrel is true) "You go over the top. I'll give him something to look at from the front."
<<var $rom_kestrel + 5>>\
<<var $kestrelAssist true>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You walk in from the front. It's stupid. The nod has you on your knees at twenty feet, and that's where he's looking when Kestrel comes down out of the dark behind him and hits him in the back of the head with a fist of compressed air that would have put a grown man through a window. He's not a grown man. He's a skinny guy in a bathrobe, and he goes to sleep, and everybody else wakes up.
#Stay out of the forty feet. Call it in from the arcade's pay phone and watch.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You call it in. The dispatcher knows the name; everyone does by now. A PRT van comes in eleven minutes. For the north end that's fast, and the Merchants are gone by then with the duffel, and Nodder goes with them, waking up in stages in the back of a car with no plates, and the woman with the dog is still sitting on the planks when the troopers get there, not sure how she got down.
#Leave it. Merchants selling to Merchants. Tomorrow matters more.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You walk back south. Behind you forty people sleep on a boardwalk and a nineteen-year-old counts money. You've got a bigger night tomorrow. You tell yourself that most of the way home.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Forty feet of planks and a bench. Cross it before the nod gets you.
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You cross forty feet in four seconds and your knees go on the last step and you take him off the bench with you going down, and he hits the planks first.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Over the arcade roof and down onto the bench.
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You go over the roof and drop onto the bench from behind him, and the field is pointed the wrong way, and you've got his hands.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The arcade's fire alarm. Forty people wake up when it's loud enough.
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You pull the arcade's alarm and the north end of the Boardwalk is a siren, and forty people wake up annoyed, and the nod has nothing to hold.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Talk to the kid holding the cash.
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You talk to the kid with the duffel, not the man on the bench, and the kid looks at you, and at the money, and walks away with it, and Nodder opens his eyes to find his payroll gone.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk into the field and keep walking.
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You walk into the forty feet and your knees go and you keep walking on them, and he watches a kid crawl toward him and loses his concentration out of sheer disbelief.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You walk into the field as the heaviest thing on the Boardwalk and the nod slides off you and you pick him up by the bathrobe.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body walks into the field and the field has nowhere to put a body like that, and he's in the harbor.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Skip to the bench, skip him into the harbor, skip back, and the forty people wake up to you standing there.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk in and take the belt of his bathrobe and tie his hands with it before his attention finds you.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The bench, the planks, the pier under them, and he's in the harbor with the bench.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>Smoke, grapple, and a thing on a stick that you built for exactly a man on a bench.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and the field has a gap, and the gap has a bench in it.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>Three bottle caps through the bench's slats, into the planks, and the bench is in the harbor and so is he.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Wake up," to forty, and "Sleep," to him, and the whole north end of the Boardwalk is awake but him.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>The nod by the first minute, and you nod at him, and he's the only one on the planks.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You walk through the field a second behind the world and come back on the bench with his bathrobe belt in your hand.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane between him and the Boardwalk, and one around him, and he nods at the inside of a blue box.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Null and Lag. Step out, catch the nod from outside the world, and bring it back pointed at him.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You go a second behind the world and walk into the field, and the field can't find you there, and you touch him and take the nod with you, and when you come back you've got it, and you nod at him, and Nodder is the only man on the Boardwalk asleep.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Charge and Pane. A pane across the Boardwalk, charged like a coin.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $nodderBeaten true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You put a pane between him and the north end and charge it until it hums blue, and the nod hits it and comes back the wrong way, and forty people wake up at once and one man on a bench finds out what his own field feels like with electricity in it.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($nodderBeaten is true)>>\
<<achieve "The Nod">>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
The nineteen-year-old with the duffel doesn't run with the others. He stands there with cash in both hands and looks at Kestrel, and Kestrel looks at him, and neither of them says anything, and the silence tells you what it is before either of them does.
"Rafe," she says.
"Jo." He says it like he's testing whether it still works. "You look stupid in that."
"You look high."
"Yeah." He puts the cash in his jacket, slowly, like it's not the point. "Skids'll want to know who did his guy."
"Tell him the Boardwalk Pigeon," Kestrel says. "He'll like that."
He goes. He doesn't run. She watches him all the way to the end of the planks and then she sits down on the bench, the half of it that's left, and eats a fry, and says, without looking at you, "Don't."
You don't.
<<set $rafeKnown to true>>\
<<else>>\
Nodder's crew comes back for him in the end, two of them, dragging, and you let them, because he's a skinny man in a bathrobe who is going to wake up in a van and be told he lost a Boardwalk to a kid, and that seems like enough. The woman with the dog thanks you. The dog does too, after its fashion.
<</if>>\
<<else>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel comes down off the roof afterward, and watches the Merchants go, and watches the nineteen-year-old with the duffel go last, and says nothing until he's off the planks. "Thursdays," she says, finally. "Nine. Bring food." It isn't about tonight, and you leave it there.
<</if>>\
<</if>>\
<<page "Home" "ch3-thursday">><<include "refresh">>\
Thursday.
The morning is a morning. Mr. Gladly's quiz is Friday and everybody knows it and nobody has studied. Madison has a new pin. <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor is absent again. The sub doesn't notice. You notice Sophia Hess noticing.<<elseif ($taylorWards is true)>>Taylor has her phone under the desk at the top of every hour, and at the top of second period she looks at it and goes still, and then puts it away, and doesn't look at anything for the rest of the hour. Something's on the Wards' schedule for this afternoon that wasn't there yesterday.<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>Taylor passes you a note in World Issues, and she has never passed a note in her life. It says //Lisa texted. "Stay out of downtown this afternoon." What did she tell you?// You write //Nothing// and pass it back, and it's true, and you both sit there with it.<<else>>Taylor is in school with her hood up.<</if>>
At one-fifty, a bell rings that isn't the school's. It's the fire alarm in the building across the street, a false one, and everyone goes to the windows, and in the two minutes everyone is at the windows your afternoon arrives.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
Your phone has a text from a number you memorized on a roof. //Go time. Side door, 2:20. Don't be the one who's late. Tt.//
<<page "Two-twenty" "ch3-bank-inside">>\
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
Your phone has a text from the PRT's scheduling system, and the scheduling system doesn't do texts. //Wards: report to HQ immediately. Console at 2:00. Van on standby.// Under it, from Clockblocker: //told you nothing ever happens. this is nothing. bring snacks.//
<<if ($wardsConsole is true)>>\
<<page "Two o'clock: the console" "ch3-console">>\
<<else>>\
<<page "Two o'clock: the van" "ch3-bank-wards">>\
<</if>>\
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
Your phone has a text from Rune. //Roof. 2. Don't be late. Don't wear the eagle, we bring that.//
<<page "Two o'clock: the roof" "ch3-bank-empire">>\
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>\
Danny Trang is waiting outside the school's side door with the shoebox in its bag, holding it with both hands like it's full of water.
<<page "Two-fifteen: Lord Street" "ch3-bank-abb">>\
<<else>>\
You've got a bandana on your fence, a basement you ran out of, and a feeling about Lord Street at two-thirty that you can't explain to anyone.
<<page "Two-fifteen: Lord Street" "ch3-bank-abb">>\
<</if>>\
<<elseif ($ulMember is true)>>\
Leet texted at seven this morning: //roof across from central bank. 2pm. bring the good mask. this is the one.// Uber texted at seven-oh-one: //ignore him. come anyway.//
<<page "Two o'clock: the roof across from the bank" "ch3-ul-thursday">>\
<<else>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Your phone has a text from a number that only ever sends one line. //Boardwalk. Now. Something's wrong downtown and the sirens are going the wrong way. K.//
<<else>>\
Through the window, past the false alarm, the sirens start. Downtown. A lot of them, and all going the same direction, and then two of them peeling off the wrong way, east, toward Arcadia.
<</if>>\
<<page "Two-fifteen" "ch3-i-thursday">>\
<</if>>\/* Arc 3, inside the bank with the Undersiders. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<set $bankEscape to true>>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<achieve "Inside Job">>\
Brockton Bay Central Bank is a long room with marble on the floor and a line of tellers' windows and a security guard who is sixty and sitting down, and at two-thirty-one on a Thursday it has nineteen customers, six staff, and the Undersiders.
It goes the way Lisa drew it. Grue's darkness comes in through the front door first, a wall of it, rolling, and takes the sound and the light and the guard's will to stand up. Rachel's dogs come through the dark, big now, van-sized, and sit down in the middle of the floor like furniture, and the room understands that it is not going to be a room where anybody is brave. Lisa walks through to the back with the manager's elbow in her hand, talking the whole way. Alec sits on a desk.
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
And Taylor, in the costume, the mask with its yellow lenses, stands in front of the hostages with her hands at her sides and bugs rising off the floor around her feet like steam, and nobody in the room so much as shifts their weight. She's good at this, and you knew she would be. You hadn't known how much she'd hate it. You can see that in her shoulders.
<</if>>\
<<if ($bankRole is "crowd")>>\
You're between the counters and the door with the nineteen customers on the floor in front of you. A woman with a stroller. Two men in suits who keep looking at each other. A teenager with earbuds in who hasn't taken them out. <<if (($ledgerSeen is false) and ($foughtLedger is true))>>And, third from the left, face down on the marble with his hands laced behind his neck like a man who's read the manual, Ledger, out of costume, in a good suit, who turns his head one inch and looks at you and winks. You keep your face still. He isn't here by accident.<<set $ledgerSeen to true>><</if>>
<<elseif ($bankRole is "door")>>\
You're inside the front door with Grue on your left and Angelica on your right, and the dark is up to your neck, and through it, faintly, you can hear Lord Street: traffic, a siren that's still blocks off, and then another, closer.
<<else>>\
You're on the roof across the street with a view of Lord Street in both directions and the Wards' van's usual corner, and your phone in your hand, and for four minutes nothing moves except the traffic and your own pulse.
<</if>>\
Four minutes and ten seconds. The van comes around the corner from the wrong direction, because Alec assumed, and six people get out of it in costume in a drilled order: Aegis first, Clockblocker and Vista behind him, Kid Win on a hoverboard, Gallant, Browbeat. <<if ($taylorWards is true)>>And a seventh, slower, in black and grey with yellow lenses and bugs coming out of her sleeves. Taylor. On the other side of the glass.<</if>>
Then the front of the bank comes in, not the door, the //front//, the whole plate window and a foot of marble, and a girl in a white dress with a gold tiara flies through the hole she made and lands on the floor in a crouch with the dogs already turning toward her, and a second girl in a hooded white robe with a red cross on it steps through after her, out of breath, and says, "Vicky, //wait//," to a sister who has never waited for anything in her life.
Glory Girl. Panacea. And the Wards coming through the door into the dark behind them, and the room goes from a room into a fight in the time it takes Lisa to say, from the back, very calmly, "Okay, so. Plan B."
<<choose "ch3-bank-out">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Glory Girl's the problem. Go dense and get between her and the dogs.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $metGloryGirl true>>\
She hits like a thrown car and you take it, dense, and slide eight feet across marble on your heels and stay up, and she stops, surprised, because nothing in this city stays up when she hits it. "Huh," she says, and hits you again. You stay up again. The second time cost you a rib. The third time Angelica takes her in the side and the two of them go through a teller's window together, and you can breathe.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> Glory Girl hits you and you don't move, and you've been hit by heavier than a girl who can lift a truck, somehow.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip. Hostage to hostage, Ward to Ward. Be everywhere the Wards look and nowhere they reach.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Behind Clockblocker, and his hand closes on air where your shoulder was. On the counter above Vista, and she folds the space under you and you land on the wrong side of the room. Beside Kid Win, and you take the hoverboard out from under him and skip it out the broken window into Lord Street. The nausea arrives on the sixth and you ride it. Aegis is shouting your position. You keep making it wrong.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Hostage to hostage, Ward to Ward, nine skips, and the nausea arrives at the van, not before.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Panes. Wards on one side, hostages on the other. Make the fight happen somewhere people aren't.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Blue, blue, blue, blue: a wall down the middle of the bank, the nineteen customers on the floor on one side of it and the Wards on the other, and Gallant stops with his hand up and looks at the wall and then at you, and understands what it's for, and nods. Clockblocker touches a pane and freezes it, the first time anyone has, and it holds anyway.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go up between the Wards and the hostages before Aegis has finished saying "Spread," and the fight happens on your side of the glass.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Be the thing nobody can touch, and get Lisa out of the back before the Wards reach it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
A second behind the bank, the fight is a silent film, and you walk through it, through Browbeat, through a wall, into the vault corridor where Lisa is zipping a bag, and you take her wrist and go, and she says something that doesn't make a sound, and the two of you come back in the alley behind the bank with the bag between you, and she throws up, and says, "Warn me next time," and that is her thank-you.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You stay out all the way to the back and come back with Lisa's elbow in your hand and her mid-sentence.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Down." To the Wards. All of them.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
Six Wards and a girl in white hit the floor at once, and Panacea with them, and nineteen hostages who were already down press themselves flatter, and for a full second the only people standing in Brockton Bay Central Bank are Undersiders. Lisa, from the back, says, "Okay, //that's// going in the report," and Glory Girl, on the floor, says a word that would get her grounded, and starts to get up anyway, because the aura's hers and the word was yours and she's always been stronger than words.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Down," and six Wards go down, and so does the girl in white, and nobody in this city has ever made her do that.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) Smoke into the lobby. Grue's dark and your white together. Nobody sees anything. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
The canister rolls into the lobby and Grue's dark and your smoke meet and make something neither of you has seen: a grey that eats the lights and the sound and the Wards' sense of where the door was. Kid Win flies into a pillar. Vista's warping has nothing to look at. Lisa, on comms, says, "I don't know what that is and I love it," and the dogs take the bag out through the hole in the front.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The smoke canister's second stage puts out the lights too, because you wired it that way on Tuesday for no reason.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge a roll of quarters from the teller's drawer and put it through the ceiling over the Wards. Make them look up.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
A roll of quarters, five seconds hot, through the drop ceiling and the concrete above it, and the lobby fills with dust and tiles and the Wards look up. It's the second you needed, and the second Rachel needed more. Browbeat takes a tile to the head and sits down. Gallant doesn't look up. Gallant looks at you, through the dust, with an expression you recognize from Monday.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The roll of quarters goes through the ceiling over Clockblocker's head so close he feels the wind, and looks up, and looking up was the point.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch the room three seconds ahead. Call it for Lisa. Who moves, where, when.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
"Clockblocker left, two seconds. Vista's folding the door. Glory Girl's going for the dogs, not us." You say it flat and fast and Lisa, who already knows half of it, uses the other half, and for ninety seconds the Undersiders are a team with a weather report. Lisa says, "Okay, we are keeping you," and Clockblocker freezes a hostage's dropped purse by accident and says a word his mother wouldn't like.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and you're calling it for Lisa before her power does, and she looks at you like a mirror.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The floor under the Wards. A hand on the marble.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You put a palm on the marble and the floor between the Wards and the hostages remembers where it was poured in sections, and comes apart along those lines, a foot down, and six Wards are standing in a trench they weren't standing in a second ago, and Vista, who bends space, looks at a floor that bent without her and makes a small outraged noise.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The marble under the Wards comes apart along a vein you saw from the door, and they go down a foot, all six, together.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Give the Wards something to fight that isn't a kid.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
The grey body stands up out of the hostages like something coming out of the floor, and the Wards' formation was drilled for teenagers in costumes, and stops being a formation. Browbeat goes for it, because Browbeat is brave, and the grey body puts him through a teller's window, as carefully as a thing that size can. Glory Girl hits it, and it rocks, and it doesn't go down, and she looks at it the way she's never looked at anything.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is the biggest thing in the lobby, including the dogs, and the Wards' formation stops being one at the sight of it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Glory Girl's in arm's reach. Touch her. Start the clock on that.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $metGloryGirl true>>\
She hits you. A hit is a touch. The clock starts, and a candle's worth of Glory Girl is a kid who can lift a desk and doesn't bruise easily, and by the third minute you're lifting the desk at her. She's never been hit with herself. Nobody has. "What //are// you," she says, and it's the most interested anyone's ever been in you, and then Angelica takes her through a window and the clock keeps climbing in a bank that's emptying.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> Glory Girl's strength comes into you by the second minute, and you pick up a desk to show her, and she stops.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Go still. Walk out the front past the Wards with the bag.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
Lisa hands you the bag in the back without a word, because she's worked it out, and you walk through the lobby, through the fight, past Aegis shouting positions and Vista folding the room and Glory Girl in a teller's window, out the hole in the front, onto Lord Street, and nobody looks at you, and you're two blocks away before the Wards realize the money isn't in the building. Lisa calls you a cheat, later, with love.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You walk out the front past six Wards and a girl in white with the bag on your shoulder and nobody turns their head.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($taylorJoined is true) Taylor's got the hostages. Panacea's wide open and Glory Girl's across the room. Get to Panacea before anyone else does.
<<var $panaceaHostage true>>\
<<var $metPanacea true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $taylorTrust - 5>>\
You get to her before Taylor does, which Taylor was about to, and you can see her decide to let you. Panacea is smaller than she looks on the news and she doesn't fight; she looks at your hand on her arm and says, under the noise, "I can stop your heart from here, you know," and you believe her, and you say, "Then we'd both be in trouble," and she doesn't. Glory Girl, across the room, goes white and still. Nobody in this city has ever managed to make her do that.
#Grab the bag from Lisa and run for the dogs. Let the capes fight the capes.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You run for the dogs with the bag, through the dark, and Judas takes you on his back like it's nothing, and Rachel whistles, and you're out through the front and onto Lord Street with Lord Street looking at you. You didn't fight anybody. Nobody's going to write that down.
#Stand in front of the hostages and do nothing. If this goes wrong, they come first.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stand there. Clockblocker gets past the dogs and reaches you and you put your hands up, open, and say, "Hostages. Just hostages," and he looks at the nineteen people behind you and then at you and freezes the woman's stroller instead, so it can't be moved, and says, "Stay," like you're a dog, and goes for Alec. It's the kindest thing anyone does in that bank all day.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Get the hostages behind the counter with your hands.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You move nineteen people behind a marble counter in forty seconds by lifting the ones who won't move, and the fight happens on the other side of it.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Over the counter, under the dogs, out the side door with the bag.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You take the bag off Lisa's shoulder and go over the counter and under Brutus and out the side door before Aegis has finished his first sentence.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The vault's time lock. Lisa's stuck on it. You aren't.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You read the panel over Lisa's shoulder and say the thing she can't see because her power's busy, and the door opens, and she looks at you like a mirror.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Talk to Glory Girl. Give her a reason not to.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You tell Glory Girl her sister's three feet from the dogs, and it's true, and she stops in the air, and the stop is all Bitch needed.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand in front of the hostages and don't move for anyone.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You stand in front of nineteen people and six Wards come through the door and you don't move, and Aegis says "Hold" to his own team because of it.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense between Glory Girl and the dogs and she hits you with everything, and you're still standing, and she isn't sure what you are.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body stands up in the lobby and the Wards' formation stops being one, and Glory Girl looks at it the way she's never looked at anything.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Hostage to hostage, Ward to Ward, and the last skip puts you on the dog with the bag and Lisa.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk out the front with the bag past six Wards and a girl in white, and then you walk back in for Lisa.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The marble, the counter, the vault door, in the order you chose, and the Wards are fighting on a floor that isn't there.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>Smoke, lights, and the thing you built that makes a sound only the dogs like.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you're calling it for the whole team, and Lisa stops talking and lets you.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>The roll of quarters through the ceiling, and a second through the floor, and six Wards look two ways at once.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Down," and six Wards and a girl in white go down together, and Lisa says "Oh, //wow//."<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>Glory Girl's strength in you by the first minute, and you hold the ceiling up while Lisa gets the bag out the wall.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You take Lisa out of the world and walk her through the Wards to the dogs.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>Panes between every Ward and every hostage and one across the hole in the front, and the fight happens in a room you built.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Shed and Echo. Shed, and touch Glory Girl with the grey hand.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The grey body touches the girl in white and the clock starts, and by the second minute the thing with no face has her strength, and it picks up a teller's counter and holds it over its head, and Glory Girl, who has never seen anything do that, stops in the air.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Skip and the Word. Skip to each Ward and say "Sit" from an inch away.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
Six skips, six Wards, six "Sit"s, and six Wards sit down on the marble in the order you reached them, and Aegis is last and knows it's coming and sits anyway, and Lisa, with the bag, says, "I have //questions//."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $bankEscape to false>>\
<<set $bankCaught to true>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($bankCaught is true)>>\
You wake up on marble with a Ward's boot on your chest and Aegis saying your cape name into a radio, and Thursday ends there.
<<include "ch3-caught">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
It ends the way Lisa said it would, twelve minutes in, give or take the minute Glory Girl cost.
Regent takes Glory Girl's leg out from under her mid-swing and she puts herself through the ceiling. Vista folds the door shut and Rachel's dogs go through the wall beside it. <<if ($panaceaHostage is true)>>Panacea walks out between you and Taylor with your hand on her arm and Glory Girl frozen in the air behind her, not frozen by Clockblocker, frozen by a sister saying "Vicky. //Don't.//"<<elseif ($taylorJoined is true)>>Panacea walks out with Taylor's hand on her arm and a hundred thousand bugs making the point for her, and Glory Girl hangs in the air behind her with her fists shut and does nothing, because her sister told her to.<<else>>Lisa talks to Panacea for eleven seconds in the back, and whatever she says makes the healer go white and step out of the way, and Glory Girl, who would have torn the building down, stops when her sister says her name.<</if>> Clockblocker gets a hand on Judas and Judas is a statue for thirty seconds, and then isn't, and bites him.
And then you're on a dog, in the dark, going down an alley at thirty miles an hour with a bag of money against your chest, and the sirens are behind you, and Lord Street is a noise getting smaller.
<<if ($taylorWards is true)>>\
You saw Taylor once, in the fight, on the other side of the glass, with her bugs on your side of it, and she saw you. Neither of you did anything about it. Both of you are going to have to decide what that means.
<<set $taylorTrust to $taylorTrust - 10>>\
<</if>>\
Six blocks on, Rachel pulls the dogs up in a loading bay and Brian comes out of the dark and Lisa slides off Brutus and sits down on the concrete with the bag and starts to laugh, and then stops, very suddenly, and goes grey.
"Something else happened," she says. "At two-thirty, while we were in there." She has her phone out. She's reading something. Her power is reading something. "A girl. Twelve. Outside the Arcadia annex. Two men, a grey van." She looks up at nobody. "The mayor's niece. That's what the bank was for. That's what we were //for.//"
Alec says, "We didn't do that." Brian says, "Lisa." Rachel says nothing and holds Judas's collar like it's the only solid thing in the bay.
"No," Lisa says. "We just stood in front of it." She puts the phone face down on the concrete. "Okay. Okay. Nobody says anything about this to anyone until I know more. Especially not to him."
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
Taylor is looking at you<<if ($taylorKnows is true)>>, because you're the only person here she can look at<</if>>. Her hands are shaking inside the gloves. She hasn't said anything yet, but she's going to, later. She's going to say it to Armsmaster, if she gets the chance, and both of you know it.
<</if>>\
<<page "Home" "ch3-end">><<set $arrested to true>>\
<<achieve "Processed">>\
PRT holding is a room with no corners and a cot and a camera, and you're in it for nineteen hours before anyone who matters comes in.
The one who comes in is Armsmaster. He has your mask in an evidence bag. He puts it on the table between you and doesn't sit.
"$capeName," he says. "Fifteen. Winslow. Guardian notified at six this morning." He lets that land. "You were on a roof over Lung on Sunday<<if ($armsmasterCredit is true)>>, and I owed you for it, and I have discharged that debt by arguing for probation instead of juvenile detention. You'd get less from anyone else in this building<</if>>. You were in a bank on Thursday with the Undersiders. The Director would like to know which of those two people you are."
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
There's a lawyer outside who you've never met and who was paid for by someone who pays on time. There's a folder on the table with the Wards' logo on it and the word //probationary// stamped across it. There's a window in the door, and through it, after a while, your guardian's face, and no power covers that.
<</if>>\
''This is one of the crappier outcomes. The Undersiders got out. You didn't.''
<<page "Try Thursday again" "ch3-retry">>/* Retry the bank day after an arrest or a death: clears Thursday's flags only. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<if ($nightmares is true)>><<set $stamina to $maxStamina - 20>><</if>>\
<<set $bankCaught to false>>\
<<set $bankEscape to true>>\
<<set $arrested to false>>\
<<set $panaceaHostage to false>>\
<<set $dinahSeen to false>>\
<<set $dinahFree to false>>\
<<set $dinahLost to false>>\
<<set $caughtRegent to false>>\
Thursday again. One-fifty. The fire alarm across the street.
<<page "Two-fifteen" "ch3-thursday">><<achieve "Console Jockey">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The console is six screens and a headset and Vista, who has done this since she was ten and runs it like a cockpit. "Red board's dispatch, don't touch it. Green's our comms. Yellow's the PRT feed. The two on the left are cameras we're allowed to see and the one on the right is cameras we're not supposed to be able to see, so don't mention it." She pulls up a chair for you that's too tall for her and too short for you. "Mostly you listen, and mostly nothing happens."
At two-thirty-one the red board lights up like a tree.
//Central Bank, Lord Street, silent alarm. Multiple parahumans. Darkness effect reported.// Vista is already on the green board: "Aegis, it's the Undersiders, Lord Street, go, go." You hear the van start in the garage below you through the floor. You hear Clockblocker say, "Nothing ever happens, he said," and Aegis say, "Dennis," and the garage door.
And then, on the red board, under the bank and three lines down where nobody's reading, a second call. //Possible abduction, juvenile female, approx. 12, Arcadia annex, two adult males, grey van, no plate. Caller is a crossing guard. Priority: 3.// Priority three, because every unit in the city is on its way to Lord Street.
Vista hasn't seen it, because Vista is talking Aegis through traffic.
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-console-2">>
#Tell Vista. Make her see it. Make her send someone.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Vista sees it. Vista swears, a word she'd be fined for, and gets on the red board and asks dispatch for a unit for the annex and is told, by a tired voice, that every unit is committed and the annex call is a crossing guard who "sees a lot of vans." "It's a //kid//," Vista says, in a voice that's twelve for the first time all afternoon, and the tired voice says it's noted. She looks at you. "I can't leave console, I'm the only one who's allowed to touch the red board." She means that you can.
#Say nothing. Get up. Go. The bank has six Wards. The van has nobody. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<var $wentForDinah true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You take the headset off and Vista says, "Where are you," and you say, "Arcadia annex, the van," and she says, "You can't," and then, "//Go,//" in the same breath, and you're up the garage ramp on foot before the second one finishes. It's eleven blocks. You've never run eleven blocks faster in your life, and you've been chased.
#Stay. It's priority three. The bank is the job, and the job is listening.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stay, and you listen to six Wards fight the Undersiders in a bank through a headset, and you listen to Glory Girl arrive, and you listen to Aegis say "Panacea's a hostage," and you listen to the annex call get closed at two-fifty-eight with the note //no unit available; caller advised to contact BBPD.//
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The bank goes the way the bank goes. You hear all of it. Clockblocker gets bitten. Browbeat goes through a window. Gallant says "She's got Panacea" and then nobody says anything for four seconds, and then Aegis says "Stand down, stand down, let them go," and the green board is quiet except for Vista breathing.
<<if ($taylorWards is true)>>\
You hear Skitter once, on comms, say "I can track them. I've got bugs on the dogs," and Aegis say "Negative, stand down," and her not answer, and Aegis say her name twice, and her answer, finally, "Copy," flat, and nothing after it.
<</if>>\
At two-fifty-eight the annex call closes on the red board. //No unit available.// Vista reads it before you do and puts her hand flat on the desk. At four o'clock the news will say the mayor's niece is missing. At four-fifteen the PRT will say it has no comment. At four-thirty Vista will still be at the console, and so will you.
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">>/* Arc 3, outside the bank with the Wards. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<achieve "Wrong Side of the Glass">>\
The van takes four minutes and ten seconds, which Aegis says is a record, and you spend them on a bench seat between Gallant and Browbeat with your heart in your throat and Clockblocker in the front saying "nothing ever happens" in six different voices.
Lord Street. The bank's front window is intact, for about three more seconds, and then a girl in a white dress goes through it from the outside, because Glory Girl was downtown with her sister and doesn't wait for anyone, and Aegis says a word a team leader shouldn't and you're all running.
Inside, the dark. Grue's: it takes the light and the sound and your sense of which way the door was, and you come out of it into the lobby with Gallant's hand on your shoulder and six people on the floor in front of you and three dogs the size of vans in the middle of the room, and the Undersiders, who are children, like you, except that one of them is sitting on a desk with his legs crossed and makes Browbeat's knee buckle by looking at it.
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
And a girl in black and grey with yellow lenses standing in front of the hostages, with bugs rising off the floor around her like steam. Taylor. On the other side of the glass. She sees you. You see her see you. Neither of you does anything about it for one full second. In a fight that's a year.
<<set $taylorTrust to $taylorTrust - 10>>\
<</if>>\
Tattletale is in the back with a bag. She looks out through the dark, and finds you, and grins. <<if ($metUndersiders is true)>>"Hi, rookie," she calls. "Wrong side of the glass."<<else>>"Oh, they gave the new one a //van,//" she calls. "That's adorable."<</if>>
Glory Girl is already in the air going for the dogs. Panacea is in the doorway with her hands up saying "Vicky, //wait//." Aegis is shouting positions. Regent's attention has moved to you.
<<choose "ch3-bank-wards-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and put yourself between the dogs and the hostages. Hold the line Aegis is shouting about.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Brutus hits you and you don't move, and nobody in the room expected that, least of all Brutus, and Bitch whistles him off and looks at you like you've done something to her personally. You stand there dense for four minutes with your ribs going and nineteen people behind you, and nothing gets past, and Aegis says "Good" once, on comms. From him that's a parade.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The dogs hit the line you're holding and the line holds, and Browbeat looks at you like he's taking notes.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip behind Regent. He can't take a nervous system he can't see.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Caught One">>\
He's looking at Browbeat when you arrive behind him, and he has time to say "oh, come //on//" before you've got his wrists and Clockblocker's got his shoulder, and Clockblocker touches him, and Regent is a statue on a desk with his mouth open on the second syllable. Tattletale, from the back, stops grinning for the first time anyone has ever seen.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> You're behind Regent in one skip and he never gets to look for you.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Panes over the hostages. Whatever happens next happens above them.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
Blue, blue, blue, blue, a roof over nineteen people on the floor, and Glory Girl puts a dog through the space where the roof is and the roof holds and the dog doesn't, and Gallant says "Keep that up" and you do, for four minutes, until your arms shake, and nobody under it gets so much as dust in their hair.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go over the hostages before the first dog lands, and the fight happens above nineteen people who never see it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Walk through the dark to the back. Find out what Tattletale's really here for.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $dinahSeen true>>\
You go a second behind the fight and walk through Grue's dark like it's a photograph of dark, into the back, where Tattletale is zipping a bag and talking to the manager and saying, into a phone, "Yes, I know what time it is, I know what //else// is happening at this time, I'd just like it noted that I" and she stops, because she's seen the shape of you in the doorway. "Okay," she says, to the air. "Hi. You didn't hear that." You heard that.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You walk through the dark a second behind the world and find Tattletale's phone before she's finished the call.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop." To the whole room. Villains, dogs, Glory Girl. Everyone.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Everyone stops. Three dogs, five villains, six Wards, a girl in a white dress in the air, nineteen hostages who were already stopped. For one second Brockton Bay Central Bank is a photograph. Then Glory Girl, who is stronger than words, moves, and the second ends, and Aegis says "//Do not// do that to us again," and Tattletale, in the back, says, "Oh, I //want// one of those."
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Stop," and the whole room stops, villains and dogs and the girl in white, and Aegis uses the three seconds you bought.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The grapple. Onto the dog with the bag. Ride it out of the dark and make them come back for you. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The grapple catches Judas's harness and you go out through the wall with him into Lord Street on a bike chain, and Bitch has to stop the whole exit to whistle him around, and the thirty seconds that costs them is thirty seconds the Wards didn't have. Then the chain snaps and you're on Lord Street with a bleeding palm and a dog looking at you, and then not.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The grapple sets on the dog's collar first throw, and you ride it out of the dark into daylight with the bag.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge the pen in your pocket. Put it through the desk Regent's sitting on, an inch from his hand.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
A ballpoint pen, four seconds hot, through an oak desk and the marble under it, an inch from Regent's hand, and he looks at the hole, and at you, and takes his attention off Browbeat's knees. That's all Browbeat needed. "Rude," Regent says, and gets off the desk.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The pen goes through the desk an inch from Regent's hand with the exact charge that makes him flinch and nothing else.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch the room three seconds ahead. Call it for Aegis.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
"Regent's going for Gallant. Dog on the left, two seconds. Tattletale's moving to the back door." You say it flat and fast on comms and Aegis uses it, and for ninety seconds the Wards are a team with a weather report. Tattletale, in the back, stops and looks at you across the whole bank with an expression that is almost professional respect. "//Thinker,//" she says. "Great. Fantastic."
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and Aegis stops asking and starts doing what the voice says.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The hole in the front. A hand on the frame. Close their exit.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You put a palm on what's left of the front of the bank and the facade remembers it was built to come down one day, and comes down now, across the hole Glory Girl made, a ton of brick and glass in a neat pile. Bitch's dogs stop. Grue's dark hits the pile. Tattletale, in the back, says, "Okay, so, Plan C," and you can hear in her voice that she doesn't have one.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The frame around the hole in the front comes down in a curtain of brick, and the Undersiders' exit is a wall.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. The dogs are the only things in this room bigger than you. Change that.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
The grey body stands up in the lobby and Brutus, who is the size of a van, decides it would rather bite something else. Bitch whistles and the dogs don't come, and the dogs always come, and she looks at the thing you are with her plastic mask tilted and says, "What //is// that," and you don't have an answer she'd want.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is bigger than the dogs, and the dogs are the first to notice.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Regent's on the desk, in reach. Touch him. Catch what he does and give it back.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You get his wrist as he reaches for your knees, and the clock starts, and a candle's worth of Regent is a twitch in his own fingers, and by the second minute it's his left foot stepping where he didn't tell it to, and by the third he says, "Okay, that's //deeply// unpleasant," and gets off the desk to get away from you, and Browbeat, free, takes him to the floor.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> You have Regent's trick by the second minute and give it back to him, and he sits down hard.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Go still. Walk through the fight to the back and take the bag off Tattletale's shoulder.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
Nobody sees you walk through a bank robbery, and Tattletale is the only person in the building who might have, and she's on the phone. You take the bag off her shoulder. She turns around to a room with nobody in it and a bag that isn't there and says, "Oh, you have //got// to be kidding," and you're already in the vault corridor with a hundred and ten thousand dollars and a new reputation.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You walk through the fight to the back and take the bag off Tattletale's shoulder, and she says "Hey" to an empty room.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($taylorJoined is true) Go for Skitter. Not to hurt her. To be the one who's in front of her when this ends.
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You go through the bugs to her. They don't bite you, and they should, and the Wards will ask about that later. You end up a foot from her mask with your hands open and she says, through the lenses, so only you hear, "Don't." You don't. You stand there while the Undersiders go out through the wall, and Aegis will write it as a stalemate, and it was something else.
#Do what Gallant says. Cover the hostages. Let Aegis run the fight.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Gallant says "Hostages," and you get between the nineteen people on the floor and the rest of the room and stay there, and it isn't glorious and nobody puts it on the news, and when the Undersiders go out through the wall with the bag, every one of the nineteen is still breathing. Gallant says "Good" after, and in his book that's the whole job.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. The dog with the bag. Grab the collar and hold.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You get both hands into Judas's collar and plant your feet and the dog drags you four feet and stops, and the bag is on the floor.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Across the lobby, over the desk, onto Regent.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You go over the desk before he's seen you and he's on the floor under you with his scepter three feet away and a Ward's knee in his back.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. Tattletale's on the phone. Take the phone.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You take her phone out of her hand while she's mid-sentence and the sentence stops, and so does whatever she was doing, and she says "Rude" in a voice that means something else.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Talk to Skitter. Say her name, the real one, low, so only she hears.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You say it low and her bugs stop for one second, and one second is all Gallant needed.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk into the dark.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You walk into Grue's dark without a light and keep walking until you hit a wall, and the wall is Grue, and he says "What the hell" and the dark flickers.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense in front of the hostages and the dogs hit the line and bounce, and Regent looks at his hands.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body picks up Regent off the desk by the costume, and he says "Hey" to a thing with no face.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Skip behind Regent, skip him to Aegis, and Tattletale says a word she doesn't usually say.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk through the fight to the desk and take Regent off it, and he doesn't know who has him until the cuffs.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The desk, the floor under it, and Regent is in a hole with his scepter three feet out of reach.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The grapple on Regent's ankle and the winch on the van's bumper, and he leaves the bank feet first.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and Aegis stops running the fight and starts repeating you, and Regent is in cuffs on the seventh.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>The pen through the desk, the second through the scepter, and Regent's hands have nothing in them.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Stop," to the whole room, and "Sit," to Regent, and he sits, and stays sat.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>Regent's trick by the first minute, and you take his legs out from under him with his own power.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You walk through the dark and take Regent out of the world with you, and bring him back next to Aegis.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane around Regent and the desk, and he's in a box, and the box has no door.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Overlay and Pane. Panes where the dogs will be, three seconds before they're there.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You put the panes down ahead of the dogs the way you'd put stepping stones in a river, and three dogs run into three boxes that weren't there when they jumped, and the Undersiders' exit is a kennel.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Skip and Null. Skip to Regent, take his trick, and skip him to Aegis.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $caughtRegent true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
Two skips with a touch between them, and on the second you've got Regent under one arm and his own nerves in your other hand, and you set him down in front of Aegis and he says, "Rude," and can't stand up to say it.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($caughtRegent is true)>>\
They get out. Four of them. Grue's dark comes down like a curtain and the dogs go through the wall and Tattletale goes with them, and the last thing you hear from her is "We'll be back for him, you know," and she says it the way you'd say a bus time.
Regent sits on the marble in Clockblocker's freeze with his mouth open on a syllable, and when the freeze lets go he finishes the syllable, "//on//," and looks around at six Wards and a PRT van pulling up and says, "Huh," and holds out his wrists. "I want a lawyer and a sandwich. In that order."
<<set $notoriety to $notoriety + 10>>\
<<elseif ($taylorJoined is true)>>\
They get out. Panacea walks out of the front of the bank with Skitter's hand on her arm and a hundred thousand bugs making the argument for her, and Glory Girl hangs in the air with her fists shut and does nothing, because her sister said "Vicky. //Don't.//" Then the dark, and the dogs, and a wall that isn't there anymore.
<<else>>\
They get out. Panacea walks out of the front with Tattletale's hand on her arm, and whatever Tattletale said to her in the back has made the healer white and quiet, and Glory Girl hangs in the air with her fists shut and does nothing, because her sister said her name. Then the dark, and the dogs, and the wall.
<</if>>\
Aegis stands in the hole in the front of the bank with his hands on his hips and says, into comms, "Stand down. All units, stand down, let them go, we've got hostages to clear," and nobody argues, and Clockblocker sits down on a teller's counter and looks at the bite on his arm and says, "Nothing ever happens."
<<if ($dinahSeen is true)>>\
Afterward, in the van, you tell Aegis what Tattletale said on the phone, about what //else// was happening at two-thirty. He stops moving. He gets on the radio. The radio tells him about a crossing guard, a grey van, a girl of twelve, and a call closed at two-fifty-eight.
<</if>>\
At four o'clock the news says the mayor's niece is missing. At four-fifteen the PRT has no comment. At four-thirty Aegis is still in the van with the radio in his hand, and he hasn't said anything since.
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "control">>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel is on the arcade roof with no food, so something's wrong. "Bank on Lord Street," she says before you've stopped. "Undersiders. Wards are on it; you can hear the van from here." She points east with her whole arm. "And that. Two minutes ago. Grey van, two guys, a kid about twelve, outside the Arcadia annex. They put her in the back like luggage. Crossing guard called it in and I watched dispatch do nothing because every car they've got is on Lord Street." She looks at you. "A bank's a bank. That's a kid."
<<else>>\
You're on the Boardwalk when the sirens split: most of them to Lord Street, two of them east. A woman in a crossing guard's vest is standing at the corner of the Arcadia annex with a phone in her hand and her face white, telling anyone who'll listen about a grey van and a girl about twelve, and nobody's listening, because the bank is on every radio in the city.
<</if>>\
<<if (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>\
Your phone buzzes. Taylor. //Lisa's text. "Stay out of downtown." Something's wrong. Where are you.// You tell her. The reply is one word: //Coming.//
<</if>>\
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-bank-outside">>
#The van. A kid in the back of a van isn't a thing you walk away from. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<var $wentForDinah true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel is already off the roof. "North on Pearl, it's a one-way, they'll have to come up through the light at Fourth. Go."<<else>>The crossing guard says north on Pearl. You go north on Pearl.<</if>>
#The bank. It's the Undersiders, and Lisa texted Taylor to stay away, and you want to know why.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel looks at you for one second and says, "Okay. Then I'm getting the van," and is gone east over the roofs before you can argue, and she's just told you what she thinks of your choice without saying a word about it.<</if>> You go south, toward Lord Street, toward the sound of a window coming in.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Lord Street is a window on the pavement and a hole where the front of a bank was, and dark coming out of it like smoke, and inside the dark a fight you can hear and not see. The Wards' van is at the curb with its doors open. A girl in white goes through the ceiling of the bank from inside, upward, and you didn't know that could happen.
You're an independent in a homemade costume on the edge of a fight between two teams with insurance. Nobody has asked you to be here.
<<choose "ch3-bank-outside-2">>
#use-if ($stamina gte 20) Go in. Pick the side with the hostages behind it.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $metGloryGirl true>>\
You go in through the hole and into the dark and come out of it next to a Ward in silver and grey who looks at you a half second too long and says, "You're not supposed to be here," and then, "Hostages. Left," and you take left. For four minutes you're a hero with no file and a borrowed line, and nineteen people on a marble floor don't get stepped on. Glory Girl, afterward, on the pavement, says, "Who //are// you?" and you don't have time to answer before Aegis asks the same thing less kindly.
#Watch the exits. When the Undersiders come out, be the one who sees where they go.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
They come out through the wall, not the door, on the dogs, in the dark, going north, and you're on the roof above the alley when they pass under, and Tattletale looks up, straight at you, and puts a finger to her lips, grinning, and then she's gone. You know which loading bay they stop in. You decide, for now, to be the only one who does.
#Stay out of it. Independents who walk into Ward fights become Wards or get arrested. Watch, and learn.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You watch it from the diner across the street with a coffee you don't drink, like Alec does, apparently, and you learn that the Wards are brave and badly led and that the Undersiders are better than their file and that Glory Girl is a different kind of problem from anything you've seen. You learn where the Wards parked. You learn how long it took them. You're going to need all of it.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
The Undersiders get out. The news will say the mayor's niece is missing at four o'clock. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel texts you at four-oh-five: //lost the van at the overpass. two guys, lasers. LASERS. the kid looked at me through the back window and shook her head like she knew something. im going to be sick.//<</if>>
<<set $dinahLost to true>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">>/* Arc 3, Dinah and Coil's men. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<set $metDinah to true>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Pearl Street is a one-way with a light at Fourth, and the grey van is at the light, and you're there because you ran eleven blocks or because Kestrel said so or because a crossing guard pointed, and for one second the van and you are the only two things on the street that know what's about to happen.
Two men in the front. Body armor under windbreakers, neater than gang muscle. The one in the passenger seat has something across his lap that isn't a shotgun, something with a lens where a barrel should be, and when he sees you he brings it up without hurry, like a man who's done this before and been paid well for it.
In the back, through the rear window, a girl of about twelve in a school uniform, with her hands zip-tied in her lap and her face pressed to the glass, looking at you. She isn't crying. She's counting something.
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>\
There's a second car behind the van. Grey, clean. A man in a good suit in the driver's seat with a pen in his hand, who sees you, and puts the pen down, and shakes his head once, slowly, the way you'd warn a child off a stove. //Not this one. This one's expensive.//
<</if>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel comes down out of the dark on the van's roof with a sound like a dropped coat and the passenger window goes out in a fist of air, and the man with the lens-gun fires it at nothing, a line of light that makes a parked car's door run like wax.
<</if>>\
The light changes. The van starts to move.
<<choose "ch3-dinah-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and stand in front of the van. Let it decide.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
The van decides to hit you, and it does, and you go over the hood and the van stops, because two hundred dense pounds through a windshield stops a van. The man with the lens-gun fires it through the glass and the light goes into your shoulder and through it, and it hurts the way nothing has ever hurt, and you get your hands on the rear doors anyway and they come off, and the girl in the back looks at you and says, "You weren't in the numbers," and you have no idea what that means.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The van hits you and you don't move, and you don't fall either, because you've braced against heavier.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip into the back. Skip out with her. Two skips, before the light finishes changing.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You're in the back of a moving van with a zip-tied twelve-year-old and a man turning around in the passenger seat with a lens pointed at your face, and then you're on the sidewalk two blocks east on your knees with her in your arms and your stomach somewhere back at the light. "Ninety-one percent you'd throw up," she says, into your shoulder. "I didn't want to say."
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Two skips become one, and you're in the back and out with her before the lens has turned.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane in front of the van. Pane behind it. Pane across the passenger window. Box it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Blue in front and the van stops the way a van stops when it has hit a truck, and blue behind, and blue across the window as the lens comes up, and the line of light goes into your pane and the pane goes soft and holds, barely. The men in the front look at a van in a box. The driver gets out and runs. The other one doesn't, until you shove the front pane back into the hood, and then he does. The rear doors aren't locked. They never thought they'd need to be.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The box holds against the van's engine, and you've held heavier things still.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out, walk through the van, and bring her with you.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
A second behind Pearl Street, you walk into the side of a moving van the way you'd walk into fog, and she's there, and you put a hand on her zip-tied wrists, and go, and the two of you come back in a doorway across the street while the van keeps going with its rear doors shut and nothing inside. She throws up on your boots. "Sorry," she says. "That was a hundred percent. I knew that one."
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You hold her through the walk, and she doesn't lose a second of it, because you didn't.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop the van. Get out. Walk away." All three.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The van stops in the intersection. Two men in windbreakers get out and walk away, east, at an even pace, with their weapons still in their hands, and don't look back, and will remember this for the rest of their lives, and will not forgive it. You open the rear doors. "That was a two percent," the girl says, staring at you. "Nobody does the two percents."
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> All three land, and the man with the lens gets out and walks away, and keeps walking.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) Smoke canister under the van at the light. Grapple the rear doors. Pull. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The intersection fills with white and the van is a shape in it, and the grapple takes the rear door handle on the first throw, and you wrap the chain around a lamppost and the van drives away from its own doors. The man with the lens fires into the smoke and hits a mailbox. You're in the back of a doorless van with a twelve-year-old before he's turned around. "Clever," she says, like a judge. "Twelve percent clever. It worked, though."
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The smoke canister you built last week has a second stage you added for no reason, and the reason is now.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) A stone, five seconds hot, through the engine block. The van stops here or it doesn't stop.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The stone goes through the grille and the engine and out the back of the van under the floor, and the van stops the way a van stops when it has no engine anymore, in the intersection, with steam coming off it. The man with the lens fires through the windshield at you and the light goes past your ear and takes the top off a parking meter. You put a second stone through his door, an inch from his knee. He reconsiders.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The stone goes through the engine block and not an inch into the cab, because you aimed.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Watch the lens three seconds ahead. Be where the light isn't, and get to the doors.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He fires four times and you're not there four times, and the fourth time you're at the rear doors with your hand on the handle, and the girl inside is looking at you through the glass with her head tilted. "You're like me," she says, when the doors are open. "Shorter. Three seconds? I get days. It's worse." She's twelve. She says it like a diagnosis.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead: the lens, the swerve, the door, and you're at the door before the swerve.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The van's a machine. Machines have a place they come apart. Find it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You get a hand on the fender as it passes and the van remembers it was built on a frame, and the frame remembers it was welded, and the whole rear third of the vehicle sits down in the street with the front still trying to drive away from it. The girl in the back looks at the sky where the roof was. "Huh," she says. "Zero percent. That's new."
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The axle, not the engine, and you knew which before you touched it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Step in front of the van as something it won't drive through.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
The grey body stands in the intersection and the van hits it, and the van loses, and the man with the lens fires into a thing that has no face and the light goes into the grey and doesn't come out and it hurts, somewhere under, where you are. You take the rear doors off with hands that aren't your size. The girl inside looks up at you. "You're scared," she says. "Under it. I can tell. It's okay. Eighty-eight percent you turn back."
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is bigger than it was in April, and the van sees that and brakes before you're sure it will.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on the man with the lens. Find out what he is. Then find out what she is.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He's nothing; the clock starts on a man with good training and no power and gives you a candle's worth of knowing how to fire a weapon you've never held. It's enough to take it off him. Then you reach into the back and touch her wrist, and the clock starts again, and a candle's worth of what she has is a whisper: //sixty-two percent the second car follows you.// You look at the second car. "Don't," she says. "Mine's worse than yours. Don't catch mine."
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> The clock runs faster in you than in him, and you have the candle by the second minute.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Go still. Walk up to the van at the light and open the back door, and walk away with her.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Nobody sees you cross Pearl Street. Nobody sees you open the rear door of a van at a red light and help a zip-tied girl down onto the pavement and walk her into a doorway. The light changes and the van drives away empty, and the man with the lens doesn't notice for four blocks. "That's the one I couldn't see," she says, in the doorway. "You were a blank. Nobody's a blank."
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> The man with the lens looks at the open door and doesn't see you, or her, or the gap in his own memory.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($metKestrel is true) Kestrel's on the roof. Keep the lens on you and let her do the rest.
<<var $kestrelAssist true>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<achieve "Wingman">>\
You stand in the street and make yourself the most interesting thing on it, and the lens finds you, and the light takes a piece out of your arm you'll have for the rest of your life, and while it's doing that Kestrel comes through the passenger window feet first and the man with the lens meets the dashboard. The driver runs. Kestrel opens the rear doors from inside. "Hi," she says to the girl. "Eyes up. We're leaving."
#Throw something at the windshield and run the other way. Make them chase you instead of driving.
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $dinahLost true>>\
They don't chase you. Professionals don't. The man with the lens fires once, at your legs, and misses on purpose, and the van goes through the light and north and you stand in Pearl Street with a girl's face in a rear window getting smaller, shaking her head at you like she knew.
#It's two men with laser rifles and body armor. You're fifteen. Get the plate, get a description, and call it in.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $dinahLost true>>\
There's no plate. You get the description, and the direction, and you call it in from a pay phone, and a tired voice says it's noted, and the van is gone north at the speed limit, and the girl's face in the rear window is the last thing you see of her, and she wasn't crying, and her lips were moving, counting.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Through the driver's window with your hands.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
The window goes, and the driver goes, and the van stops because nobody's driving it, and you're at the back doors with glass in your knuckles.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Onto the roof at the light, in through the back.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You're on the roof before the light's changed and through the rear doors before the man with the lens has turned, and she's lighter than she looks.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The light's timing, the pedestrian box, and a coin.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You make the light red early with a coin in the pedestrian box's housing, and the van stops because vans do, and the man with the lens is looking at the light when you open the back.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Walk up to the window like a kid asking directions.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You keep the man with the lens talking about Pearl Street for two changes of the light, and the second time it changes, the back door is already open.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand in the crosswalk and don't move.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
The van decides at the last second that you're a person, and stops, and you've got your hand on the rear door before the driver's finished swearing.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You lift the van's back end off the road, wheels turning on nothing, and open the doors with the other hand.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body tears the doors like paper and folds the lens-gun in half with the man still holding it.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Inside, out with her, back for the man with the lens, and he's on a roof three blocks away with no idea how.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>Both men forget the van, and get out, and walk home, and she's in the back seat looking at an open door.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The van comes apart along every seam at once and settles like a house of cards, with her in the middle, untouched.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The canister, the grapple, and a third thing that kills the engine, in one motion, like you'd rehearsed.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>You're at the doors before the van has finished deciding to stop.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>The lens-gun in his lap, off, before his hand reaches it.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Sleep," and both of them do, at the light, and the van rolls gently to the curb.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>You take the man's power and give it back to him through his own windshield.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You walk through the van and out with her, and the zip ties stay inside, cut by nothing.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>Four panes, and the van is in a box the size of a van, and the box has a door only you can open.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Shatterpoint and Overlay. The van comes apart where the overlay says, and nowhere near her.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
Five seconds ahead you can see which seams open safely and which don't, and your hand finds the safe ones, and the van unfolds around a twelve-year-old like a paper model, and she's sitting on the road in the exact place the overlay said she'd be, untouched.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Lag and Shed. The grey body, a second behind the world, walks through the van.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $dinahFree true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The grey body steps out of the world and walks through the van like it's weather, and comes back inside it with the girl in one arm, and the man with the lens fires at where a thing with no face isn't anymore.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $dinahFree to false>>\
<<set $dinahLost to true>>\
You wake up on Pearl Street with a crossing guard's jacket under your head and a paramedic saying your name off your school ID, and the van is gone, and so is the girl, and so is whatever you were an hour ago. There's a PRT trooper at the end of the ambulance. Your mask is in a bag in her hand.
''This is one of the crappier outcomes. Two men with lasers and a plan, and you were fifteen.''
<<page "Try Thursday again" "ch3-retry">>\
<<halt>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($dinahFree is true)>>\
<<achieve "Forty-One Percent">>\
<<set $notoriety to $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $heroRep to $heroRep + 15>>\
Her name is Dinah. She tells you on the sidewalk, with the zip ties still on, like she's decided you've earned it. "Dinah Alcott. My uncle's the mayor, that's why. They said it on the drive like I wasn't there." She looks at the ties. "Can you cut these? I get a headache if I ask too many questions and I've asked a lot today."
You cut them. She rubs her wrists. She's twelve and she's calm, and the calm is being held in place with both hands.
"You weren't in the numbers," she says again. "I ask it every morning. What are the chances something bad happens today. It said forty-one percent and then it said the van and then it said a basement and a man with a snake on his chest. It didn't say you." She looks up at you. "I don't know what that means. I think it's good. I think it's really good."
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>\
The grey car is gone. It was gone before the van stopped. Ledger doesn't stay for the parts that get written up by someone else.
<</if>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel walks her to the PRT building, because that's where a mayor's niece goes, and you don't, because you're bleeding and because an independent who walks into the PRT building with the mayor's niece doesn't walk out an independent. "Thursdays," Kestrel says, over her shoulder. "You're buying."
<<else>>\
You walk her four blocks to a police station and leave her at the door with a desk sergeant who goes white when she says her name, and you're gone before he looks up.
<</if>>\
At four o'clock the news will say the mayor's niece was briefly abducted and recovered. It won't say by whom. Somewhere in a basement, a man with a snake on his chest is going to want to know, very badly, and he is going to ask people who are paid to find out.
<<else>>\
<<set $heroRep to $heroRep - 5>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel finds you on Pearl Street afterward and sits down on the curb next to you and doesn't say anything until the sirens stop. "Lasers," she says, finally. "Who has //lasers.//" She looks at her hands. "She looked at me through the back window and shook her head. Like she knew I was going to lose them. Like she'd already done the math." She stands up. "Thursdays. We're going to find that van."
<</if>>\
At four o'clock the news says the mayor's niece is missing. At four-fifteen the PRT has no comment. You were there, and you saw her face, and you keep seeing it.
<</if>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The roof opposite the bank is tar and gravel and a view of Lord Street, and Rune is already on it, sitting on an air conditioner with her feet dangling and a duffel bag beside her. She unzips it and takes out a red and black armband and holds it out without looking at you. "Kaiser says colors. So, colors."
<<if ($empireName is "given")>>"Skuld," she says, trying it. "Fine. Better than mine; I didn't get a pick."<</if>>
Below, at two-thirty-one, the bank's front window holds, and then a girl in white goes through it from outside, and Rune says, "Oh, //her,//" with real feeling. The Wards' van takes four minutes. Rune counts them on her phone. "Four-ten. Victor said five. He's going to be insufferable."
Inside the bank: dark, and dogs, and a fight you can hear across the street. Rune has a chunk of concrete the size of a mailbox floating beside her head, idly, the way you'd bounce a ball. "Kaiser wants us to wait until they lose. Then we go down and be seen." She watches the hole in the front of the bank. "I want the dog girl. She put one of mine in the hospital in February. Nobody remembers that. I do."
<<if ($empireCalled is true)>>\
Your phone buzzes. Victor. //Good eyes Sunday. Same today. Watch the alley behind, not the front. Children run out the back.//
<</if>>\
Then, east, past the end of Lord Street, where Pearl meets Fourth: a grey van, at a light, with something in its back window that might be a face, and two sirens going toward it that peel off and come back to the bank, because the bank is louder.
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-bank-empire-2">>
#Wait for the Wards to lose, then go down in colors and be seen stopping the Undersiders' getaway. The job.
<<var $empireSeen true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<achieve "Seen Helping">>\
You go down when the dogs come out through the wall, and Rune drops her mailbox on the alley mouth and you put yourself in the gap in colors with your power out where the diner's windows can see it, and for thirty seconds the Undersiders have to go around you, which costs them, and a man with a phone gets all of it. The dog girl looks at Rune and Rune looks at the dog girl and the dogs are faster. Tonight the news will say the Empire held Lord Street while the Wards didn't. Kaiser will be pleased. You'll find out what that's worth.
#Go down now, before the Wards lose. Help them, in colors, in front of the cameras. Make it a different story.
<<var $empireSeen true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<achieve "Seen Helping">>\
Rune says "That's not the //plan//" and you're already off the roof. You go in through the hole in the front in an Empire armband and stand next to a Ward in silver and grey who looks at the armband and then at you and says, "You have //got// to be kidding," and you say, "Hostages. Left," and he takes left, because what else is he going to do. Tonight the news is a photograph of an Empire cape and a Ward on the same side of a bank, and nobody, on either side, knows what to do with it. Kaiser, you'll learn, loves it.
#The van. Rune won't care. You do. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<var $wentForDinah true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
"That's a kid," you say. Rune looks east, at the van, and back at the bank, and says, "That's not our problem," flat, like Kaiser taught her. "Kaiser said the bank." You go anyway. She doesn't stop you. She does say, to your back, "He's going to ask where you were," and you say, "Tell him," and you're on the fire escape before she decides whether she will.
#Stand down. Watch. Let the Wards lose and the Undersiders win, and give Kaiser nothing to put on the news.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stand on the roof in an armband and do nothing, and Rune watches you do nothing, and the Undersiders go out through the wall and the Wards stand in the hole and the Empire is not on the news tonight. Rune zips the duffel. "He's going to want to know why," she says. "Figure out what you're going to say. Make it good. He can tell."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
At four o'clock the news says the mayor's niece is missing. Rune, in the car, looks at her phone and says, "Huh. That's what the van was," with no inflection at all, and goes back to her game. <<set $dinahLost to true>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>\
Lord Street at two-fifteen, with Danny Trang beside you holding the shoebox in its bag with both hands, and the bench by the bus shelter outside the Central Bank, like she said. Thirty people on the sidewalk who don't know what's about to happen and nineteen inside who are about to find out.
"She said two-thirty-five," Danny says. His voice is a whisper. "Why two-thirty-five? What happens at two-thirty-five?"
At two-thirty-one you find out: the bank's front window goes out from the inside in a wall of dark, and the sidewalk screams and runs, and the Wards' van comes around the corner four minutes later, and Danny is looking at the box in his hands, and at the van, and at you, and he understands it before you say it, because he's not stupid, he's just fifteen.
"It's not a camera," he says.
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-bank-abb-2">>
#Do it. Under the bench, walk north, don't look back. Whatever's in it, it's hers, not yours.
<<var $bakudaObeyed true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<achieve "Dye Pack">>\
You put it under the bench and walk north and don't look back, and Danny walks with you crying, and at two-thirty-five it goes off behind you with a sound like a door slamming, and when you finally do look back there's green. Everywhere. The bus shelter, the pavement, the Wards' van, a Ward in silver and grey who was standing by it: dye, bright green, the kind banks put in money bags. Nobody's hurt, and nobody was going to be. She wanted to know if you'd do it, and now she knows.
#Open it. Here, now, before you put it anywhere.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You open it. It's a device, real, wired, with a timer counting down from four minutes, and a canister that says nothing, and could be anything, and Danny makes a sound. You look at it for ten seconds. Ten seconds is a long time to look at a bomb. Then you see what it is, because there's no charge. There's a canister and a timer and a very small pop. It's a dye pack with a countdown, a test, to see what you'd do with four minutes.
#Take it off Danny and throw it in the bay. Whatever it is. Whatever it costs.
<<var $bakudaDefied true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You take the bag out of his hands and run two blocks east to the water and throw it as far as a fifteen-year-old can throw a shoebox, and it goes off in the air over the harbor with a pop and a cloud of bright green that drifts down onto the water like a flag. Dye, and a test, and you failed it on purpose, in front of Danny, and Danny is going to be asked about that, and so are you.
#Leave Danny with the box and go east. There's a grey van at the light on Pearl with a kid in the back, and that's a real thing. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<var $wentForDinah true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
"Put it under the bench or don't," you tell him. "It's a test. It's hers, not yours. I've got somewhere to be." He stares at you. You go east, toward Pearl, toward a van you saw at the light while everyone else was looking at a bank, and behind you, at two-thirty-five, something goes off with a pop and a cloud of green, and you don't look back at it.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Lord Street at two-fifteen. You're here because the second-floor stairwell said the ABB would be watching, and because you've got a bandana on your fence and nobody to tell, and because standing still has stopped feeling like an option.
Across the street, in the window of the diner, Mai Vo is drinking a coffee she isn't drinking, watching the bank. She sees you, and doesn't wave, and doesn't do anything but watch.
At two-thirty-one the bank's front window goes out from the inside in a wall of dark. At two-thirty-five something goes off under the bench outside the bus shelter with a pop and a cloud of bright green that paints a Ward and a van and twenty feet of Lord Street, and Mai, in the diner, writes something on a napkin. She was watching to see who'd do it.
East, past the end of Lord Street, a grey van sits at the light on Pearl with a face in its back window.
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-bank-abb-2">>
#The van. You don't owe the ABB anything. You might owe her. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<var $wentForDinah true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
You go east. In the diner window, Mai watches you go, and writes something else on the napkin.
#Stay. Watch the bank. Learn what the ABB wanted to see here.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You watch. The Wards lose. The Undersiders get out through the wall. The green on Lord Street dries. Mai leaves the diner without looking at you, and the ABB now knows two things: that the Wards take four minutes and ten seconds, and that you were on Lord Street and did nothing, and they'll read that as an answer.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
At four o'clock the news says the mayor's niece is missing. On Fourth Street, in a basement, a woman with a braid of wire over one shoulder reviews a video of a bus shelter turning green and decides what you are. <<set $dinahLost to true>>\
<<page "Evening" "ch3-end">>/* Arc 3 wrap-up: pay, looks checkpoint, achievement, per-team summary. Leads to the Friday patrol or ch4-friday. */\
<<if ($job isnot "")>><<set $money to $money + 60>><</if>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<achieve "Agitation Complete">>\
''End of Arc 3: Agitation''
Thursday night. A bank on Lord Street has a hole where its front used to be and a hundred and ten thousand dollars less than it had at lunch. The Wards have a bite, a concussion and a photograph they'd like to forget. <<if ($dinahFree is true)>>The mayor's niece is home, and the news is calling it a brief abduction, and somewhere a man who plans very carefully is finding out that his plan had a hole in it shaped like you.<<else>>The mayor's niece is not home, and the news has stopped saying "briefly," and the PRT has no comment, and somewhere a girl of twelve is in a basement doing math.<</if>>
Here's where things stand.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
''You robbed a bank.'' <<if ($bankCaught is true)>>And you were caught, and then you weren't, because that was a different Thursday.<<else>>In, out, twelve minutes, on a dog. Lisa knows what the bank was for now, and she's gone grey about it, and she asked you not to tell anyone, especially not him.<</if>> <<if ($panaceaHostage is true)>>You held Panacea's arm and she told you she could stop your heart, and didn't. Glory Girl is going to remember your mask for the rest of her life.<</if>> <<if ($ledgerSeen is true)>>Ledger was on the floor with the hostages. He winked. He was counting something too.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
''You were on the other side of the glass.'' <<if ($caughtRegent is true)>>And you caught one. Regent is in a PRT cell asking for a lawyer and a sandwich, and the Undersiders are four, and Tattletale said they'd be back for him, and she doesn't say things she doesn't mean.<<elseif ($wardsConsole is true)>>You spent it at a console, listening, <<if ($wentForDinah is true)>>until you didn't.<<else>>and you heard a call close at two-fifty-eight that you're going to keep hearing.<</if>><<else>>Six Wards, three dogs, five villains, a girl in white, and nineteen people on a marble floor who all went home. Aegis wrote it as a stalemate.<</if>> <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor was in that bank on the wrong side. You both know. Neither of you has said it.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
''You stood on Lord Street in colors.'' <<if ($empireSeen is true)>>The city saw an Empire cape where the Wards weren't. That was the job. Kaiser is pleased with you, and you're going to have to live with that.<<elseif ($wentForDinah is true)>>And then you left the roof, and Rune is going to tell Kaiser where you went, and he's going to ask you why a kid in a van mattered more than his street.<<else>>And did nothing, and Rune's going to tell him, and he can tell when people lie.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>''There is a device at the base of your skull.'' <<if ($bakudaObeyed is true)>>You put a box under a bench and walked north, and it was a test, and you passed it, and the thing you passed it into is worse than failing.<<elseif ($bakudaDefied is true)>>You threw her test in the harbor, in front of Danny Trang, and she will have the video by now, and she has a button.<<else>>You left Danny with the box and went east. She'll want to know why. She has a way of asking.<</if>><<else>>''The ABB has a bandana on your fence.'' You refused Bakuda's insurance in front of six kids who didn't, and you've been changing bus stops since. Mai watched you on Lord Street today and wrote something down.<</if>>
<<else>>\
''You're nobody's.'' <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel says Thursdays, and she'll be there, and after today you have some idea what a third door looks like from the inside.<<else>>You were on Lord Street with no team and no file, and the Wards asked who you were less kindly the second time.<</if>> <<if (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>Taylor has twelve days left on her two weeks. She hasn't mentioned the number. She knows you're counting too.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($dinahFree is true)>>\
''Dinah Alcott is home.'' She told you you weren't in the numbers. You don't know what that means yet. The man with the snake on his chest is going to find out who you are, and he has people for that.
<<elseif ($dinahLost is true)>>\
''You saw the van.'' You saw her face in the back window, and she wasn't crying, and she shook her head at you like she'd already done the math, and you keep seeing it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($nodderBeaten is true)>>\
''The Merchants know your mask.'' You put their new cape in the harbor, or on the planks, or to sleep, and Skidmark takes that personally, in his disorganized way. <<if ($rafeKnown is true)>>Kestrel's brother was holding the money. She said "Don't." You didn't.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($heardPall is true)>>\
''Something was in the fog at Halifax.'' The Guild has asked every coastal team to watch the water. You live in a port city. You've started watching it too.
<</if>>\
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> still owed to Royce Hollis, due the first of May. <<if ($hollisMet is true)>>He's found you once in costume already.<<else>>He hasn't come looking yet. He will.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>You've met. Green, loud, and faster than you'd like, and on Parahumans Online for the thing you did.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' Greg posted a sighting thread this week with a photo that's mostly thumb. Notoriety up five, whether you earned it or not.
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' <<if ($dissonanceSeen is true)>>The streetlights went out toward the water, one at a time, and your reflection was late. You've stopped explaining it to yourself.<<else>>The kitchen clock lost another minute. The fog came in against the wind again. Nobody else has noticed.<</if>>
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor's Trust" $taylorTrust>>\
<div>Power control: <<skill $control 5>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 4, Shell.'' A woman with a braid of wire and a grudge, a city that starts going off a block at a time, and a hospital with someone you know in it.
<<page "Friday night. One more walk before the city changes." "patrol-fri">>
<<page "Continue to Arc 4" "ch4-friday">>
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay Wednesday" "ch3-replay">>/* Rewind to Wednesday with Arcs 1-2 intact: clears only the flags Arc 3 can set. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<if ($nightmares is true)>><<set $stamina to $maxStamina - 20>><</if>>\
<<set $nodderBeaten to false>>\
<<set $rafeKnown to false>>\
<<set $dinahSeen to false>>\
<<set $dinahFree to false>>\
<<set $dinahLost to false>>\
<<set $wentForDinah to false>>\
<<set $bankRole to "">>\
<<set $bankEscape to true>>\
<<set $bankCaught to false>>\
<<set $arrested to false>>\
<<set $panaceaHostage to false>>\
<<set $caughtRegent to false>>\
<<set $ledgerSeen to false>>\
<<set $kaiserMet to false>>\
<<set $empireName to "">>\
<<set $empireSeen to false>>\
<<set $bakudaBomb to false>>\
<<set $abbHunted to false>>\
<<set $bakudaObeyed to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDefied to false>>\
<<set $wardsConsole to false>>\
<<set $metPanacea to false>>\
<<set $metDinah to false>>\
Same you. Same week. A different Wednesday.
<<page "Wednesday" "ch3-wednesday">>/* Patrol entry point. Sets where "Head home" returns to (ch2-home-late (Arc 2, Monday)) and which night it is, then runs patrol-hub. */\
<<set $patrolReturn to "ch2-home-late">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "Monday">>\
<<include "patrol-hub">>/* Patrol entry point. Sets where "Head home" returns to (ch2-end (Arc 2, Tuesday)) and which night it is, then runs patrol-hub. */\
<<set $patrolReturn to "ch2-end">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "Tuesday">>\
<<include "patrol-hub">>/* Patrol entry point. Sets where "Head home" returns to (ch3-thursday (Arc 3, Wednesday)) and which night it is, then runs patrol-hub. */\
<<set $patrolReturn to "ch3-thursday">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "Wednesday">>\
<<include "patrol-hub">>/* Patrol entry point. Sets where "Head home" returns to (ch3-friday-end (Arc 3, Friday)) and which night it is, then runs patrol-hub. */\
<<set $patrolReturn to "ch3-friday-end">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "Friday">>\
<<include "patrol-hub">>/* End of the Friday patrol and of Arc 3's week: the Problems tick over (Fan adds notoriety every arc) and the numbers are shown. Leads to ch4-friday. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Friday ends the way the week should have started, with you in your own bed and nobody on fire. Whatever you saw out there tonight is in the city now, waiting for the next arc to pick it up.
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> still owed to Royce Hollis, due the first of May. <<if ($hollisMet is true)>>He's found you once in costume already.<<else>>He hasn't come looking yet. He will.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>You've met. Green, loud, and faster than you'd like, and on Parahumans Online for the thing you did.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' Greg posted a sighting thread this week with a photo that's mostly thumb. Notoriety up five, whether you earned it or not.
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' <<if ($dissonanceSeen is true)>>The streetlights went out toward the water, one at a time, and your reflection was late. You've stopped explaining it to yourself.<<else>>The kitchen clock lost another minute. The fog came in against the wind again. Nobody else has noticed.<</if>>
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 4, Shell.''
<<page "Continue to Arc 4" "ch4-friday">>
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay Wednesday" "ch3-replay">>/* Patrol: pick a zone. Resets the step counter, counts the patrol (Beat Cop at three), tops stamina up to 30 so a fight is possible, and shows a team-flavoured intro. Flow: patrol-hub -> patrol-enc -> enc-* -> patrol-after -> (patrol-enc again or $patrolReturn). */\
<<set $patrolStep to 0>>\
<<set $patrolLen to 2>>\
<<var $patrolCount + 1>>\
<<if ($patrolCount gte 3)>><<achieve "Beat Cop">><</if>>\
<<if ($stamina lt 30)>><<set $stamina to 30>><</if>>\
<<if ($patrolCount is 1)>>\
$patrolNight night, and the bag comes out of the closet for no reason anyone gave you. Nobody is on fire and nobody has texted. You put the costume on because the alternative is lying on your bed listening to the house, and because a city this size has a thousand things happening in it at ten o'clock, and you have never once gone to look.
<<else>>\
$patrolNight night, and you're getting faster at the costume. The city is the same size it was, and you know a little more of it than you did.
<</if>>\
<<if ($stance is "ward")>>\
Probationary Wards don't patrol alone. You know that, and your PRT phone knows that, so the phone stays home on the charger and the mask goes in the bag. If a cruiser spots you, that's a conversation.
<<elseif ($stance is "undersider")>>\
Lisa's last text said //don't get arrested on your own time, it's embarrassing for everyone//. You've decided that counts as permission.
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
Victor calls it making rounds. You're supposed to be seen in colors on the Empire's streets and not seen anywhere else, and you've got an eagle on your sleeve you can take off with two snaps.
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
Nobody in the ABB uses the word patrol. Mai says Lung's people walk their blocks so the blocks remember who walks them, and tonight you're one of those people, with a red bandana folded in your pocket.
<<else>>\
No team, no schedule, nobody to report to. The whole city is the same amount of yours as it is anyone's.
<</if>>\
Where to?
<<choose "patrol-enc">>
#The Docks. Warehouses, the fish market, the ABB's blocks and the Empire's, and the streets in between that nobody owns.
<<set $patrolZone to "docks">>\
You go east, toward the water and the smell of it.
#The Boardwalk. Tourists until eleven, then the people who work the tourists.
<<set $patrolZone to "boardwalk">>\
You go south, where the lights are.
#Downtown. Office towers, the PRT building, the good bars, and the alleys behind them.
<<set $patrolZone to "downtown">>\
You take the bus halfway and walk the rest, with the mask in your pocket until the last block.
#The Trainyard. Dead rails, the Merchants, and anything anyone wants to test where nobody will hear it.
<<set $patrolZone to "trainyard">>\
You go north, past the last working streetlight.
<</choose>>/* Roll and show one encounter. The $encTurn guard makes a page reload re-show the same encounter instead of rolling a new one. setup.pickPatrol (GameScript) chooses the id; the passage "enc-" + id is included in place. */\
<<if ($encTurn isnot State.turns)>>\
<<set $patrolStep to $patrolStep + 1>>\
<<set $enc to setup.pickPatrol()>>\
<<set $patrolSeen.push($enc)>>\
<<set $encTurn to State.turns>>\
<</if>>\
<<set _encP to "enc-" + $enc>>\
<<include _encP>>/* After an encounter: looks checkpoint, never die on patrol (health floors at 1), then either one more stop (up to $patrolLen) or home via $patrolReturn. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>><<set $health to 1>><</if>>\
<<if ($patrolStep lt $patrolLen)>>\
The street goes quiet again behind you. It's not late yet, not for this city.
<<else>>\
It's late enough that the buses have thinned out, and your legs have started telling you about the day.
<</if>>\
<<choose "patrol-enc">>
#show-if ($patrolStep lt $patrolLen) Keep going. One more block, one more something.
You keep walking.
#Head home. -> $patrolReturn
<<if ($patrolStep lt $patrolLen)>>You've seen enough for one night.<<else>>You take the long way back, out of the costume two blocks before your street.<</if>>
<</choose>>A woman in a reflective vest is running toward you on the far sidewalk, earbuds in, and she sees the mask from forty feet. She doesn't slow down and she doesn't speed up. She crosses the street at an angle that keeps a parked van between the two of you and keeps running, and she doesn't look back until the corner, where she does, once, to make sure.
<<if ($stance is "ward")>>You're wearing a costume the PRT hasn't approved yet, so to her you're nobody in particular, and nobody in particular is what people in this city cross the street for.<<elseif (($stance is "empire") or ($stance is "abb"))>>She saw the colors before she saw the mask, and she's right to cross.<<else>>You don't have a name she'd know yet, and she didn't wait to find out which kind of nobody you were.<</if>>
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Keep walking. That's the city.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You keep your hands where she can see them, out of habit you didn't know you had, and keep walking.
#Raise a hand. Hello, just hello.
She lifts two fingers off her hip without breaking stride, and the whole exchange is more than you expected.
<</choose>>A kid of maybe fourteen is pulling the grate down on a corner store, and the grate sticks halfway, and he's standing on the sill hauling at it with both hands when he sees you and freezes with his whole weight on the handle.
"I don't have the drawer," he says, fast. "My uncle takes the drawer." Then he sees the mask isn't one he knows, and his shoulders come down an inch, and he says, "Can you get this? It sticks."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Get the grate.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You get the grate down with one hard pull and he locks it and stands there with the keys, and then he asks if you'd walk him to the bus, three blocks, because the Merchants have been on the corner by the laundromat. You walk him. Nobody's on the corner. He gets on the bus and doesn't say thanks, and you didn't need him to.
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) Get the grate, and bend the track straight while you're at it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
You go dense enough to put a thumb into the bent track and push it true, and the grate drops like it's new. He stares at the track. "That's been like that since I was nine," he says, and you're going to be a story at that dinner table tonight.
#Nod and keep going. He's got it.
He gets it down on the fourth pull. You hear it bang shut behind you a block later.
<</choose>>A man in a company polo with his tie in his pocket is sitting on a bench with his shoes off, and when he sees you he stands up too fast and wants a photo. He has his phone out before you've decided. "My kid's going to lose it," he says. "Which one are you? Are you one of the new ones? You're one of the new ones.<<if ($looks is 10)>> You're gonna be famous, you've got the face for it.<<elseif ($looks is 3)>> The scary one. You're the scary one, right?<</if>>"
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Let him take it. One photo, mask on, no name.
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
He takes four, and thanks you twice, and asks you to make sure he gets home, and you point him at the taxi rank and he goes, waving the phone. You're on somebody's feed by midnight, mask and all, with a caption that spells nothing right.
#No photo. Walk him to a cab instead.
<<var $control + 1>>\
He's disappointed for about ten seconds and then grateful for the rest of the walk, and he tells you his daughter's name and his dog's name and the dog's vet's name, and he gets into the cab still talking.
#Keep walking.
"Okay," he says, to your back. "Okay. Cool. Thanks anyway." He sits back down and starts putting his shoes on the wrong feet.
<</choose>>Headlights behind you slow to walking pace. A PRT cruiser, white with the shield, and the spotlight on the passenger side finds your back and holds there while the car matches your speed for half a block.
<<if ($stance is "ward")>>\
If they run the costume against the Wards' file they won't find it, because it isn't on file yet, and if they call it in they'll find a probationary Ward who is supposed to be at home.
<<elseif (($stance is "empire") or ($stance is "abb"))>>\
They can see the colors from the car. They're deciding whether colors on one kid is worth the paperwork.
<<else>>\
Unaffiliated cape, no file, on foot, at night. Whatever happens next is up to whoever's driving.
<</if>>\
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Stop. Turn. Hands open. Let them look.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The window comes down. A trooper with a mustache looks at you the way troopers look at dogs that haven't growled yet. "You registered?" "Working on it." "Work faster." The window goes up and the car moves on, and you've been added to a list somewhere, and you can live with a list.
#show-if ($persuasion gte 2) [Persuasion] Walk to the window and talk first. Give them the version where you're not a problem.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You get to the window before they've decided anything, hands open, and tell the trooper with the mustache your cape name and that you're walking home from the Boardwalk because the buses stopped, and ask if he wants the name of the independent who's been helping with the purse snatchings up there, because you've got it. He didn't expect manners. He writes down your name, spells it back, and tells you to get registered before somebody less patient stops you. The car moves on, and the list you're on is a better list.
#Keep walking at the same speed. Don't give them a reason.
The spotlight stays on you for the rest of the block and then clicks off, and the cruiser takes the next right, and you let your breath go.
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) Be somewhere else before they decide.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You're on the roof behind them before the trooper has his hand on the radio, and you watch the spotlight sweep an empty sidewalk twice.<<else>>You stop wanting to be noticed, and the spotlight slides over you and keeps going, and the trooper says something to his partner about kids.<</if>> They log a cape that ran, and capes that run go on a different list.
<</choose>>Under the overpass there's a fire in a drum and eleven people around it, and most of them are too old or too sick to be anyone's mooks. A woman with a shopping cart full of blankets sees the mask and says, loud enough for the whole camp, "It's not one of Skidmark's," and the camp goes back to its fire.
One of them, a man with no front teeth, holds a can of beans toward you like a toast. "Cape," he says. "You looking for somebody, or you looking?"
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($money gte 10) Leave a ten with the woman with the cart. For the fire.
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
She takes it without looking at it and says, "Merchants come through Thursdays. They take the cans. You want to do something, do it Thursday." You remember that.
#Ask what they've seen tonight.
<<var $control + 1>>\
The man with no teeth tells you about a grey van that's been through twice, and a kid on a bike who watches the camp for someone, and that the Merchants have a new one who makes people fall asleep, and that the woman on the end there hasn't talked since she walked up from the water on Sunday with her shoes in her hand.
#Keep walking. It isn't your fire.
Nobody stops you. The woman with the cart says, "Thursdays," to your back, and you don't know what she means yet.
<</choose>>Two kids on bikes, ten or eleven, have been shadowing you for a block, and when you stop they stop. One of them has clearly dared the other one, because the other one gets off the bike and walks over with his chin up and touches your sleeve with one finger and runs back.
"Told you," the first one says. "Not a hologram."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Tell them to go home.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"It's ten o'clock." "It's nine-fifty." "Go home." They go, standing on the pedals, and one of them yells back to ask what your name is, and you tell him, and he yells it to the other one wrong.
#Show them something small.
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You pick up the end of a parked car by the bumper, two inches, and put it down.<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>You're on the other side of the street and back before the bike's wheel has stopped turning.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>You put a pane in the air and let one of them knock on it.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>You put a stone through a street sign from thirty feet, and the sign rings.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You bring every moth from the streetlight down to spell nothing in particular in front of them.<<else>>You do the smallest thing your power does, and it's enough.<</if>> They both scream, the good kind. You're going to be on a playground tomorrow in a version that's three times taller.
#Keep walking. Let them have the mystery.
They follow you for two more blocks, arguing about whether you can fly, and then peel off toward a street with porch lights on it.
<</choose>><<set _z to $patrolZone>>\
Two men have a third against the wall of a closed bakery, and the third has his wallet out already, and the one with the knife is explaining, patiently, that the wallet isn't enough and the phone is next. They haven't seen you. The man against the wall has.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Go in loud. Let them see the mask coming.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
The knife one turns and makes the decision every knife one makes, and you let him close the distance and <<if ($power is "brute")>>take the blade on a forearm that's gone to rebar, and then he doesn't have a knife, and then he doesn't have a working wrist.<<elseif ($power is "mover")>>aren't there, and he puts the knife into brick, and you're behind him with his own elbow in your hand.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>put a pane between the blade and you so hard he feels it in his teeth.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>touch the knife and the knife is two knives, neither one useful.<<else>>use the thing you do, fast, and he's on the ground with the knife six feet away.<</if>> The other one runs. The man with the wallet says "Thank you" four times and then, with his phone already out, asks what your name is.
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Go in quiet. From behind, before the knife one knows there's a third person in the alley.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You come up the wall side where the streetlight doesn't reach, and the first thing the knife one knows about you is the knife leaving his hand. His friend sees the mask and goes. The man with the wallet says he didn't even see you, and he means it as a compliment.
#show-if (($brawling gte 2) and ($stamina gte 10)) [Brawling] Take the knife off him bare-handed. No power. Let him see it done.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
He comes in low and you take his wrist the way the man at the gym showed you, turn it, and the knife goes on the ground and his face goes on the wall, and you did it with nothing but practice. His friend sees that it was nothing but practice and decides you must have a power too, and runs. The man with the wallet says he's never seen anything like it. He has, in movies, and he thought it was fake.
#Talk. "Two of you, one knife, and a wallet with maybe forty in it. Tonight's not the night."
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The knife one weighs you, the mask, the hands, the fact that you walked in instead of running in. "Who are you supposed to be?" "The reason you're walking away." It works, barely, and mostly because his friend is already moving. The man with the wallet puts it back in his pocket with shaking hands.
#Walk past. Not every wallet is your problem.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You walk past. The man against the wall watches you walk past, and you hear the phone change hands behind you. <<if ($stance is "abb")>>Mai would say that's not your block.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Victor would say it's not the Empire's bakery.<<else>>You tell yourself a reason. It doesn't hold for the length of the street.<</if>>
<</choose>>Three Merchants are working a parked sedan, and working is a strong word. One has a screwdriver in the door, one has a brick, and the third is keeping watch by staring at his own phone. The brick goes through the window while you're still deciding.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Stop it. Put them on the pavement.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
The lookout sees you last and runs first. The brick one swings the brick, and you take it on the shoulder or you don't, depending on how fast you were, and then the two of them are on the ground with the screwdriver in a storm drain, and a light has come on in the building above you, and someone is already calling it in.
#Shout. Let them run. The car's the point, not them.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
They run, all three, and the brick one drops the brick on his own foot, and you stand by the car until the owner comes down in slippers to look at the glass and thank you and then ask, less grateful, why you didn't stop them.
#Watch. Learn which way they go, and where.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
They strip the stereo in under two minutes, with the ease of practice, and go north toward the Trainyard with it in a backpack. You follow at a distance until they go down a ramp under the rail bridge, and now you know where one of the Merchants' doors is.
#show-if (($stance is "empire") or ($stance is "abb")) Not your car, not your block. Keep moving.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You keep moving, and the lookout looks up from his phone long enough to see the colors, and looks back down. Merchants don't fight anyone who isn't already losing.
<</choose>><<if ($stance is "empire")>>\
Two Empire kids, shaved and fifteen, are painting an eighty-eight over a red-and-green dragon on the side of a laundromat, and one of them sees your sleeve and grins and holds out the can.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Take the can. Finish the second eight.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You finish it. It's a clean eight. The kids are thrilled, and one of them says, "Victor said there was a new cape," and now there's a story about you that has paint in it.
#Tell them to go home. Tagging's for kids who can't do anything else.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Victor says every wall," one of them says, but they go, and they leave the can, and you put it in a bin. The dragon stays half covered. Somebody will be back for it, both sides.
#Walk on. It isn't your paint.
They keep painting. The laundromat has a light on upstairs that doesn't come on while they do it.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
Two kids in red and green are painting a dragon over a fresh eighty-eight on the side of a laundromat, and one of them sees the bandana and says something in Vietnamese to the other, and holds out the can.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Take the can. Give the dragon its tail.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You put a tail on it. The kids say the name you were given on Fourth, and now the block knows a cape painted here, and the Empire kids who come back for the wall will know it too.
#Send them home. Mai would say a wall isn't worth a kid.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
They argue, and then they go, because the bandana outranks them, and they leave the can. The eighty-eight is half a dragon now. It'll be something else by Friday.
#Walk on.
They keep painting, and they're better at it than the other side.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Two Empire kids, shaved and fifteen, are painting an eighty-eight over a red-and-green dragon on the side of a laundromat, and one of them sees the mask and says, "Shit," and the other one says, "It's nobody," and keeps painting.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Take the can off them.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
You take it. The one who kept painting says you're a <<if ($empireStance is "hostile")>>race traitor's pet, and worse, with the words the Empire teaches fifteen-year-olds<<else>>cop, and a few other things<</if>>, from a safe distance, backing up the whole time. They go. The wall's a mess of both.
#Paint over both. Grey, from the can the landlord left by the door.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
There's a can of grey primer by the laundromat's back door, and you use it, and the kids watch you from the corner like you've done something obscene. By Thursday there'll be a dragon or an eagle on it, but tonight the wall is grey.
#Walk on. Paint is paint.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
They finish the eight. One of them photographs it. Somebody in red and green will photograph it tomorrow, and the week will go on like that.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<if ($stance is "abb")>>\
Three ABB teens are inside a noodle shop that's trying to close, and the owner is counting bills onto the counter with a face that's done this before, and the oldest of the three sees the bandana in your pocket and nods you in like you're late.
"Collection," he says, in English, for your benefit. "You want to watch, or you want to learn?"
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Watch. This is what the bandana is.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
You watch. The owner gives them two hundred and a container of something that smells good, and he doesn't look at you once, and that's what you'll remember about the night.
#Tell them it's enough. The man's closing.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The oldest one looks at you for a second to see if the bandana means you can say that, and decides it might, and takes what's on the counter and leaves the rest. "Mai's new one," he says, to the others, on the way out, and you don't know yet whether that's a good thing to be.
#Pay it yourself. Put a fifty on the counter and tell them to go.
<<var $money - 50>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
They take the fifty and go, laughing, and the owner slides it back across the counter to you after they've gone, and you leave it, and he leaves it, and it's still there when you go.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Three ABB teens are inside a noodle shop that's trying to close, and the owner is counting bills onto the counter with a face that's done this before. The oldest one sees the mask through the glass and says something, and the other two turn around.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Go in. Nobody's collecting tonight.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
One of them has a knife and one of them has a phone already out to call someone older, and you deal with the knife first and the phone second. The owner watches you do it with the face of a man calculating what it'll cost him next week. <<if ($abbFit is true)>>"They know your face," he says, after, in English, and means your real one.<<else>>"Go," he says, after. "Please. Before they call."<</if>>
#show-if ($streetwise gte 2) [Streetwise] Tell them Lung's lieutenants don't collect from a shop that's closing, in the words they'd use.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You use the right names and the right corner and the thing Oni Lee is supposed to have said about shops that feed the block, and the oldest one looks at you to figure out how a mask he doesn't know learned the ABB's own rules. He can't. He takes half of what's on the counter, to save face, and leaves, and the owner looks at you like you're a different kind of problem.
#Stand in the doorway. Say nothing. Let them decide if you're worth it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
They decide you're not, tonight, with a mask they don't know and the shop's lights on. They take what's on the counter and leave past you, close, and the oldest one looks at your eyes through the mask like he's memorizing them.
#Call it in from the corner and keep walking.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<if (($hasPhone is true) and ($connected is true))>>You call the PRT line and say the name of the woman on the front desk who owes your family, and the tired voice stops being tired, and a cruiser is on the corner in six minutes, and the teens leave the money on the counter when they see it.<<var $heroRep + 5>><<elseif ($hasPhone is true)>>You call the PRT line, and a tired voice logs it, and nobody comes, and the teens leave with the money before you're off the phone.<<else>>You find a payphone that works on the third try, and by the time anyone picks up the shop is dark.<</if>>
#Walk past. The owner's eyes say he'd rather you did.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You walk past. The owner's eyes say he'd rather you did, and you're not sure that's a comfort.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\A Merchant with a hoodie and a limp is working the corner by a shuttered pharmacy, and he's not subtle, because subtle takes energy. He sees the mask and doesn't run. "You buying or you preaching?" he says. "I got both prices."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Move him along.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
He argues for a minute, and then he goes, slow, and he'll be back on the corner before you're home, and you both know it.
#Ask what's new on the street. Dealers hear things.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
For ten dollars he tells you that Skidmark's got a new cape who puts whole blocks to sleep, that somebody in a suit has been asking about new masks, and that the ABB's tinker buys batteries by the case. For free he tells you to stay off Fourth.
#Take his money. He's a dealer.
<<var $money + 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
He has thirty-one dollars and a bag of something, and you take the dollars and leave the bag in the drain, and he calls you something that doesn't need repeating and limps off. You're a cape who robbed a Merchant now. The Merchants will remember that, in their way.
#Walk past.
"Preaching, then," he says, to your back. "Cheaper."
<</choose>><<if ($stance is "empire")>>\
Outside a bar on the edge of the Empire's blocks, three men with the right boots have a man on the ground, and they're taking turns, and one of them sees your sleeve and steps back to make room, like you're expected.
"Spic was selling on our corner," he says. "You want some?"
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Take some. This is what the eagle means.
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You take some. You don't use the power, because you don't need it, and not needing it is the worst part, and the three of them walk you to the end of the block afterward like you've been in the Empire for years.
#Tell them that's enough. A dead dealer is a police problem.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
They stop, because the sleeve says they stop, and one of them spits next to the man's head and says Kaiser would've let them finish. The man on the ground is breathing. You walk away before you find out if he can stand.
#Pull them off him. Hard enough that they feel it.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
You put one of them into the bar's wall and the other two stop, and then they look at your sleeve, and then they look at each other, and one of them says, "Victor's going to hear about this," and he's right.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
Outside a bar on the edge of the Empire's blocks, three men with the right boots have a man on the ground, and they're taking turns, and the one doing the talking is saying what the man is, over and over, in the word the Empire uses for it.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Go in hard. Three on one is the kind of math you were made for.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<if ($empireStance is "hostile")>>The talker sees the mask and sees what's under the mask's edges and says it, the word, with his whole chest, and then he doesn't say anything, because you've put him through the bar's front step.<<else>>The talker sees the mask and calls you a race traitor, and the other two come at you together.<</if>> Three on one goes the way three on one goes when the one has a power. Someone inside the bar is filming, and the man on the ground gets up while they're looking at you, and runs, and that was the point.
#show-if (($brawling gte 2) and ($stamina gte 10)) [Brawling] Three on one, and you've trained for worse odds. Hands only.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
You take the talker first, because talkers go down loudest, and the second one gets a boot in before you put him into the bar's railing, and the third one looks at two of his friends on the ground and a kid in a mask who hasn't used a power yet, and does the math. The man on the ground gets up while they're doing it, and runs. You've got a split lip and a story the Empire will tell wrong.
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Get him out. Not them. Him.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You take the man on the ground three blocks in a blink and he's sick on the sidewalk and alive.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>You box the three of them in panes and walk the man out of the box.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>Nobody sees you take him. He doesn't see you take him. He's just somewhere else, with you, and his nose is broken.<<else>>You use the thing you do to make a gap, and you put him through it, and you follow.<</if>> He doesn't thank you. He asks if you're a cop. You tell him no, and he says "Good," and limps off into a street with no cameras on it.
#Call it in from the corner. Loud. Make them hear you do it.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You say "PRT" and "Empire" and the cross streets into the phone loud enough to carry, and two of the three decide a cape with a phone is a cape with backup, and they go, and the talker goes last, pointing at you.<<else>>You shout that you've called it in, a lie, and it works on two of them, and the talker goes last, pointing at you.<</if>> The man on the ground is breathing.
#Walk past. Three on one and all of them watching the door.
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You walk past, and you hear it continue, and you hear it stop, and you don't know which kind of stop.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\Something with four tires and a truck's engine and a school bus's door is doing circles on the Trainyard gravel, and it has more lights on it than a carnival ride, and the music coming out of it is a crime on its own. It's not Squealer herself, you think; it's one of hers, with a kid at the wheel who can barely see over it.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Stop it. Nobody should be driving that.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You stand in front of it and it hits you and the front axle loses the argument.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>You touch the frame as it passes and the frame remembers it was welded by a Merchant.<<elseif ($power is "jury")>>You put something together from the Trainyard in forty seconds that kills its electrics at thirty feet, and it dies mid-donut.<<else>>You get it stopped the hard way, and it costs you a little skin.<</if>> The kid gets out, fourteen if he's a day, and runs, and the thing sits there blinking. By morning Squealer will have a grudge and a tow bill.
#Watch where it goes when it's done.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
It finishes its circles and limps off east, down a service road, to a warehouse with its doors open and a light on inside, and you note the warehouse, and you note the second vehicle in there under a tarp, bigger.
#Leave it. It's loud, not dangerous, and the Trainyard's empty.
You leave it. The music follows you four blocks.
<</choose>><<set $hollisMet to true>>\
<<achieve "Paper">>\
A sedan the color of nothing pulls to the curb ahead of you and the rear window comes down, and the man inside is sixty, in a cardigan, with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a folder open on his knee. He looks at your mask the way he'd look at a hat.
"$name," Royce Hollis says, in your real name, pleasantly. "Or whatever we're calling you tonight. Sit in, it's cold."
You don't sit in. He doesn't mind. "I'm not here about the costume," he says. "I don't care about costumes. I'm here because the first of May is closer than it was, and <<print "$" + $debt>> is a lot of money for a household like yours, and I'd rather talk now than then." He turns a page. "I've had people with your kind of evening job before. They find money quickly, or they find me work I can use. Either is fine."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($money gte 100) Pay him a hundred now, in cash, through the window.
<<var $money - 100>>\
<<var $debt - 100>>\
<<var $debtPaid + 100>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He takes it without counting it and writes a figure in the folder. "Good," he says. "That's a tone. Keep the tone." The window goes up. <<print "$" + $debt>> to go.
#Ask what kind of work.
<<set $hollisJob to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Holding things," he says. "Walking things from one address to another. Standing somewhere so that a man who owes me sees you standing there. Five hundred a time, against the balance." He writes a number on a card and holds it out of the window, and you take it, because not taking it would be a decision too. "Call when you want to be a person who did that."
#"You bought a debt. You didn't buy me. The first of May, you'll have it."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He smiles, the first real expression he's shown, and it's a good smile, the kind that's used to being right later. "That's what they all say in April," he says. "I'll see you in May." The window goes up and the sedan goes, under the speed limit, with its signal on.
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Put a hand on the car. Let him feel what a cape is.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
The roof of the sedan dents under your hand, or goes cold, or goes soft, depending on what you are, and Royce Hollis watches it happen with the expression of a man watching weather. "That's a tone too," he says. "It's more expensive than the other one." The window goes up. The debt is the same number it was, and now he knows what you can do, and so will whoever he tells.
<</choose>><<set $rivalSeen to true>>\
<<achieve "Green Light">>\
A woman is yelling on the next block, the specific pitch of a purse leaving with someone else, and you're moving before you've decided to, and so is something green.
It comes off a roof in a streak that leaves an afterimage, hits the sidewalk in front of the runner, and the runner goes over it like a hurdle he didn't see. By the time you get there the purse is back in the woman's hands and a kid in a green-and-black costume with a visor shaped like a smile is standing with one boot on the thief's chest, saying, "Greenlight," to the three phones that have already come out. "Two words, one capital. Tag me."
The visor turns toward you. "Oh, hey," the kid says. "You're the other one." <<print $glHe.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + $glHe.slice(1)>> makes it sound like a consolation prize.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Let $glHim have it. The purse is back. That's the job.
<<var $rom_greenlight + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You nod and keep walking, and behind you $glHe's spelling $glHis name for a phone, and one of the three phones turns toward your back, and tomorrow there'll be a thread with a photo of a mask leaving. The woman with the purse says thank you to $glHim. <<print $glHe.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + $glHe.slice(1)>> deserved it, mostly.
#"You landed on a civilian's foot to make that entrance. Look at her."
<<var $rom_greenlight + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
The woman with the purse is holding her ankle. Greenlight looks, and for a second the visor's smile is just a shape, and then $glHe says, "Collateral," to the phones, lightly, and the phones laugh. <<print $glHe.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + $glHe.slice(1)>>'s going to be very good at this and you're going to hate every minute of it.
#show-if (($athletics gte 2) and ($stamina gte 10)) [Athletics] Beat $glHim to the next one. The thief has a friend, and the friend is running.
<<var $rom_greenlight + 10>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
There's a second runner, and you're on him before the green streak has finished posing: three blocks, a fence, a wrong turn he makes and you don't. You walk him back by the collar past the phones, and Greenlight says, "Teamwork," to the cameras, like $glHe planned it, and the visor says something else entirely.
#Say nothing. Learn $glHis tells. Rivals have patterns.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<print $glHe.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + $glHe.slice(1)>> needs a run-up, looks at the cameras before the threat, and favors the left when landing. By the time $glHe's finished spelling $glHis name you know more about $glHim than the PRT does, and $glHe hasn't looked at you twice.
<</choose>><<set $fanSeen to true>>\
<<achieve "Content">>\
There's a kid two blocks back who has been two blocks back for ten minutes, walking the way people walk when they think they're being subtle, with a phone held at chest height like a tray. You know the walk. You know the jacket. Greg Veder has found your costume, and he has the expression of a boy who's found a dragon.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if (($stealth gte 2) or ($power is "mover") or ($power is "stranger")) [Stealth] Lose him. Properly, so he doesn't know where he lost you.
<<set $fanTreatment to "lost">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You're on a roof and he's on a corner looking at an empty sidewalk, and he says "Aw," loud enough to carry.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You stop wanting to be seen and he walks straight past you, scanning, and says your cape name to a mailbox.<<else>>Two alleys, a fire escape, and the back of a bus, and Greg is standing at the end of a street with his phone up, filming nothing, and he films it for a while.<</if>> Tomorrow's thread will say you can teleport, whatever you are.
#Turn around. Walk up to him. Give him something to post, and a reason to be careful.
<<set $fanTreatment to "photo">>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
He nearly drops the phone. "I knew it," he says, and then, "I mean, I didn't know, I guessed, is this okay, can I," and you tell him he can have one photo and that if he follows a cape at night again he's going to get a cape he doesn't like. He takes four photos. He says sorry eleven times. He's going to do it again.
#show-if ($persuasion gte 2) [Persuasion] Talk to him. Make him your source instead of your problem.
<<set $fanTreatment to "source">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You give him a job: he watches the Boardwalk threads and the ABB sightings and he sends you what's real before he posts anything, and in exchange he gets a photo a week and the knowledge that he's the only person in the city a cape talks to. His face lights up in a way you'll remember. He's going to be worse at this than he thinks and better than you expect.
#Scare him. One flash of what you are, from the dark.
<<set $fanTreatment to "scared">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
You let him see the thing you do, for one second, from a doorway, and Greg Veder sits down on the sidewalk. He doesn't post the photo. He posts about it, later, in a thread that nobody believes, and he stops following you, and he looks at the back of your head in World Issues on Monday like it's a word he can't read.
<</choose>><<set $dissonanceSeen to true>>\
<<set $heardPall to true>>\
<<achieve "Off By One">>\
The streetlights go out toward the water. They don't go all at once. One, and then the next, and then the next, a block at a time, like something is walking down the street ahead of you putting them out as it goes, and when you turn around the ones behind you are still on. Your reflection in a dark shop window turns around half a second after you do.
A woman in a bathrobe passes you, walking toward the harbor with her shoes in her hand, and when you say something she says, "It's warm, isn't it," and keeps walking, and the next streetlight goes out for her.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Follow the lights. Whatever is doing this is going somewhere.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You follow the dark down to the water, and at the end of the street the fog is standing on the harbor like a wall with no wind behind it, and the woman in the bathrobe is standing at the edge of it, and when you reach her she's looking at nothing and says your name. Your real one. She's never seen you before. The fog doesn't come any closer. You take her by the arm and walk her back up the street, and the lights come on behind you, one at a time.
#Stop the woman. Whatever this is, she doesn't go into it.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
She doesn't fight you. She looks at your hand on her arm like she's never seen a hand. You walk her four blocks to a diner with its lights on and she sits down in a booth and asks for coffee and says, "Did I go out?" The waitress knows her. The waitress says it's the third time this month, and looks at you like you might know why.
#Stand still. Let it finish. Watch what it does when it runs out of street.
<<var $control + 1>>\
The last light at the end of the street goes out, and the fog on the water is close enough that you can hear it, low, like a ship's horn held too long, and then every light on the block comes on at once, and your reflection in the window catches up to you, and the woman in the bathrobe is sitting on a curb two blocks back asking what time it is. The clock in the laundromat window says a time that's wrong by four minutes, and you know without checking that your kitchen clock says the same.
<</choose>><<set $gregTriggered to true>>\
<<achieve "Broadcast">>\
Greg Veder is two blocks back again, phone up, and you've decided to let him be two blocks back tonight, and that is the decision you'll remember.
The two Merchants come out of a doorway between you and him. They want the phone. He says something about it being his dad's, and one of them hits him, and the phone goes into the street, and he goes down after it, and the second one kicks him while he's reaching for it. You're already moving. You're two blocks away. Two blocks is a long time.
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You're there in a blink, and it's still too late, because it was never about getting there.<<else>>You're halfway there when it happens.<</if>> Greg, on the ground, with blood coming out of his nose, says, "Stop," and the two Merchants stop. They don't stop the way people stop when they decide to. They stop the way a tape stops. They stand over him with their hands open and their faces turned down to him like flowers, and every person on the block, you included, is looking at Greg Veder, and cannot look at anything else, and he says, "Get off me," and they get off him, and he says, "I said it was my dad's," and they both say sorry, in the same voice.
Then it lets go, and the Merchants run, and Greg is sitting in the street with his phone in his hand, and the screen is cracked, and he's looking at his own hands like they belong to someone louder.
<<if (($fanTreatment is "source") or ($fanTreatment is "photo"))>>\
<<set $gregAlly to true>>\
He looks for you first. Before the phone, before his nose. He finds the mask and says, "Did you see that," and then, "I didn't mean to," and then, because he's Greg, "Is this what it was like for you?"
You sit on the curb with him until his hands stop. He says he's going to call it Broadcast. He says he'll tell you before he tells anyone. He says it like a promise he's going to keep, and you believe him, and that is going to be a problem for both of you.
<<else>>\
<<set $gregRival to true>>\
He looks for you second. The first thing he looks at is the two blocks between where you were and where he was, and then he looks at the mask, and he doesn't say anything, and Greg Veder has never in his life not said anything.
"You weren't there," he says, finally, with his nose bleeding. "You've got all that, and you weren't there." He picks up the phone. He walks home. Tomorrow there'll be a thread with a new handle on it, and it won't be about you, and the one after that will be.
<</if>>\
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Tell him what happens next. The PRT, the Wards, the number to call.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You give him the PHQ number and the version of the next week that nobody gave you. <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>He writes it on his arm because the phone's dead. "You're the only one who knows," he says, and you're going to have to decide what to do with that.<<else>>He takes it without looking at you, and says thanks to the sidewalk, and you don't know whether he'll call it or call someone worse.<</if>>
#Tell him nothing. He's a cape now, and capes find out the hard way.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You leave him on the curb with his cracked phone. <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>He watches you go like you've forgotten something, and you have.<<else>>He watches you go the way he'll write about it later.<</if>>
#show-if ($gregAlly is true) "Don't post this. Not tonight. Not ever, if you can manage it."
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
He nods eleven times. He's never kept a secret in his life. He keeps this one, for a while, and the while is worth more than you'd think.
<</choose>><<set $metTenant to true>>\
<<achieve "Always Been Here">>\
There's a woman on the stoop of your building when you get back to the block, in a housecoat, smoking, with the door propped open behind her, and she says your name as if she's said it every night for years.
"Late," she says. "You're always late Tuesdays." It isn't Tuesday.
You don't know her. You know everyone in the building. She's in 2B, she says, and 2B is the Okafors', and when you say so she looks at you with the mild patience of someone who's been through this with you before. "The Okafors moved out in the fall, hon," she says. "I brought the pie." And you remember the pie. You remember it the way you remember things you've read.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Ask $guardianName about her when you get upstairs.
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Mrs. Avery? She's been there since before we moved in." $guardianName says it without looking up. "She watched you for me when you had the flu." You didn't have the flu. You have a very clear memory of having the flu. The kitchen clock is four minutes slow.
#Go past her like she's always been there. Maybe she has.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Night, hon," she says, and you say goodnight, and in the morning there's a slice of pie in the fridge with foil over it, and nobody in the apartment remembers putting it there, and everybody remembers the pie.
#Stand on the step and ask her where she's from.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Up the coast," she says. "Little place. You wouldn't have heard of it." She puts out the cigarette. "Everybody's from somewhere, hon. Go to bed." The fog is in the street behind you when you turn around, and it wasn't there when you walked up, and it's warm.
<</choose>><<set $compass to true>>\
<<achieve "Halvorsen Marine">>\
You know this block. You've walked it twice tonight. The third time there's a shop on the corner that wasn't there the first two times, a ship's chandler with a hand-painted sign, HALVORSEN MARINE, and its lights on, and an old man inside polishing a brass thing with a rag.
The sign in the window says EST. 1911. The newspaper on the counter is from 1998. The old man looks up and says, "You're the one with the clock trouble," and doesn't explain how he knows.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Go in. Ask him what he's selling.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
He sells you a compass. Brass, heavy, with a cracked crystal, and the needle doesn't point north. It points at the harbor, and when you walk to the door and turn around it points at the harbor through the wall. "Points at the fog," he says. "Always has. You'll want it in May." He takes a dollar for it. When you look back from the corner the shop is dark, and the sign is faded, and the door is bricked.
#Don't go in. Walk the block a fourth time and see if it's still there.
<<var $control + 1>>\
It isn't. The corner is a bricked doorway with a faded sign, HALVOR, and the rest gone, and a newspaper on the step from this week. You go home. You don't check the kitchen clock. You know what it says.
#Ask him about the fog. He looks like a man who'd know.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Came up the coast in '98," he says. "Took the fleet. Took the town, mostly, after. Nobody remembers that, because that's what it does." He puts the brass thing down. "It's coming back for the ones it missed, son." You aren't a son, or you aren't his, and he doesn't correct himself, and when you leave the shop is dark and bricked, and in your pocket there's a compass you didn't pay for that points at the harbor.
<</choose>><<set $metTideBoy to true>>\
<<achieve "No Shadow">>\
There's a boy sitting on the breakwater with his feet over the water, ten or eleven, in a life jacket that says HALIFAX PILOT AUTHORITY, and he's dry, and he's humming, and under the streetlight behind him there's nothing on the stones where his shadow should be.
"Hi," he says. "You're the one who was in <<if ($trigger isnot "")>><<print $trigger.toLowerCase()>><<else>>the bad thing<</if>>. I can tell. It's all over you." He swings his feet. "I came in on the tide. It's warm. Everybody says that, and it's true."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Sit with him. Ask him his name.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
He doesn't have one, he says, not anymore, but he had one, and it started with an M, and his mother's did too. He asks if you'd remember his for him, if he told you, and you say yes, and he thinks about it and says, "Better not. Then you'd have two." He's gone when you look back from the steps. The stones where he sat are wet.
#Ask him what's in the fog.
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Everybody," he says, like it's obvious. "Everybody who went in. It keeps them. It's not mean about it." He looks at you with his head on one side. "It's going to ask you. It asks everybody who's been in a bad thing. You can say no. Most people don't, because it's warm." The fog is on the water. The fog is closer than it was.
#Walk him to the lifeguard station. He's a kid, whatever else he is.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
He comes along without arguing, dry, humming, and at the lifeguard station he sits on the bench and says thank you, and you turn to press the call box, and when you turn back the bench has a wet patch on it the shape of a sitting child, and the life jacket is on the ground, and the tag inside says a name that starts with M.
<</choose>><<set $sawCoilMen to true>>\
<<achieve "Men in Grey">>\
A box truck with no name on it is backed up to a warehouse with new locks on an old door, and two men are moving crates from one to the other with the economy of people who've been paid to do it right. Grey body armor, no insignia, helmets with the visors up. One of them has a rifle slung with a sight on it that costs more than your guardian's car. They aren't Empire and they aren't ABB and they are a long way from being Merchants.
The one with the rifle sees you at sixty feet and doesn't raise it. He says something into his collar. The other one keeps loading.
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>"The accountant said you'd be around," the rifle one calls, conversationally. "He said don't shoot you. So."<</if>>
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Stay where you are and watch. Count crates. Count men.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Fourteen crates, long and flat, heavier than their size. Two men visible and a third you never see who closes the truck's rear door from inside. They finish in nine minutes and the truck goes north without lights until the corner. The rifle one gives you a two-finger salute before he gets in. Somebody with money and discipline has a warehouse in the Docks, and now you know which one.
#show-if ($perception gte 2) [Perception] Count the shadows. Somebody's missing from this picture.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Two men loading, one rifle, and a truck that rocks on its springs when nobody's touching it. There's a third man inside the box, and he hasn't shown himself because he's the one who matters. When the rear door comes down from inside, you see a glove and a sleeve of the same grey, and a watch that cost more than the rifle. You've seen the man who pays for all this, or his hand, and that is more than most people in this city have.
#Walk up. Ask who they work for.
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He lets you get to twenty feet. "We work for a man who pays on time," he says, "and who'd prefer you went and did something heroic somewhere else tonight." You ask if the man has a name. "Everyone has a name," he says, and the other one laughs, and neither of them tells you it. The truck leaves. The warehouse lock is a kind you've never seen.
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Stop the truck. Whatever's in those crates, it isn't groceries.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You get three steps before something hits you in the shoulder with a sound like a cough, and it isn't a bullet, because you're still standing, and then you aren't. A dart. The gravel comes up slow. The rifle one crouches next to you while the world goes soft and says, "That was a tranq. The next one won't be. Tell the accountant we were polite." You wake up forty minutes later with a headache and the warehouse empty and a business card on your chest with nothing printed on it but a phone number.
<</choose>><<set $sawPurity to true>>\
<<achieve "Nightlight">>\
A pharmacy that's open all night, and in the formula aisle a woman in a parka with a stroller, young, tired, blond hair up in a knot, reading the back of a can like it's a contract. A man at the end of the aisle with the shakes is working up to asking her for money, and he asks, and then he asks again, closer, and puts his hand on the stroller's handle.
The lights in the aisle dim, not flicker, dim, the way they would if something near them were pulling the power out of the air. Her hair comes loose from the knot by itself and it's white, not blond, and there is light coming out from under her eyelids, and the man with the shakes takes his hand off the stroller and backs the full length of the aisle without turning around.
Then it stops, and she's a tired woman with a stroller again, and she looks up and sees you seeing her.
<<if ($stance is "empire")>>You know the face. It was in Victor's folder, in a photo with a line through it and one word written under it, and the word was //Purity//. She knows the eagle on your sleeve too, and her mouth goes flat.<</if>>
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Pretend you saw nothing. Pick up a bottle of something. Read the label.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You read the back of a bottle of children's cough syrup for a full minute, and when you look up she's at the register paying cash, and she nods to you, once, on the way out, the way you'd nod to someone who'd held a door.
#Help with the stroller. The door's heavy.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You hold the door. The baby is asleep with one fist up. "Thank you," she says, and then, lower, not looking at you, "Don't." You don't know yet what she's asking you not to do, and you nod anyway, and she pushes the stroller out into a street that has gone very bright around her for a second and then hasn't.
#show-if ($stance is "empire") "Kaiser's people are asking about you."
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
She stops with one hand on the stroller. "Kaiser's people can ask," she says, and her eyes have gone white to the edges. "Tell him nothing. Tell Victor less." She leaves, and the register girl, who saw all of it, decides very firmly that she didn't.
<</choose>><<set $metGregor to true>>\
<<achieve "Back Door">>\
Behind a club called Palanquin there's a fire escape with a boy on it who is bright orange, all over, sitting on the rail with his tail hanging down, smoking. Below him a man the size of a refrigerator, with skin you can see through and things moving under it, is putting trash bags into a dumpster with great care.
The orange one sees you first. "Gregor," he says. "Customer."
"Not a customer," the big man says, without turning. His accent is from somewhere cold. "Costume. Homemade." He turns. His face is round and calm and made of something that isn't quite skin. "You are not here for the club. Are you here for us?"
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#"I'm just walking. Who are you?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Faultline's crew," the orange boy says. "Mercenaries. Very professional, very expensive, don't touch me, you'll be asleep for an hour." The big man says his name is Gregor, and pours tea from a thermos into the lid and offers it to you, and when you take it he says, "Newter is correct about the touching. He is not correct about much else." You drink the tea. It's good. He asks nothing about your power and tells you nothing about his, and this is how the professionals do it.
#Ask what they are. The tattoos. The skin.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Gregor shows you the mark on his forearm without you asking a second time: a stylized omega, like a brand. "I woke up with this, and no memory of before it," he says. "Newter also. There are others. We are called Case Fifty-Threes, by people who like filing." He puts the thermos down. "You have heard about Halifax. People who came out of the fog and did not know their names." He looks at you. "I have thought about that more than most."
#Nod and keep walking. Mercenaries aren't your business.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Smart," Newter says, to your back. "If you're ever not smart, the back door's always open and Faultline pays on time." Gregor lifts the thermos an inch, in a toast.
<</choose>><<set $foundBakudaCache to true>>\
<<achieve "Dud">>\
A crater in the Trainyard gravel, ten feet across and glassed smooth, and the glass is still warm. Twenty feet from it, sitting in a cradle of bent rebar, there's a second one: a cylinder the size of a thermos wrapped in tape and wire, with a kitchen timer taped to the side that is counting down from four minutes and has been doing it for longer than four minutes. It's stuck at 2:14. Something in it clicks every few seconds.
A kid in red and green is sitting on a flatcar a hundred yards off with his phone up, filming the crater, and when he sees you he drops off the far side and is gone.
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>You know what the inside of that looks like. You can feel the shape of it at the base of your skull.<</if>>
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ((($power is "jury") or ($power is "thinker") or ($power is "shatterpoint")) and ($stamina gte 20)) Take it apart. You can see how it's put together.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $bakudaPart to true>>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>You see it the way you see everything: two paths, one of them a lie. The timer is decoration. The real trigger is a tilt switch under the tape, and the tape comes off in one piece, and the switch comes out between two fingers, and then you're holding the heart of a Bakuda bomb, and nobody has held one of those and lived.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>The overlay shows you three seconds ahead, and three seconds ahead of every wrong move is a white flash, so you move the way the overlay doesn't flash, and it takes nine minutes, and at the end of it the timer says 2:14 and the cylinder is in three quiet pieces.<<else>>You find the point where it was never going to hold together and touch it, and the cylinder comes apart along a seam she didn't know she'd left, and whatever was going to happen doesn't.<</if>> You wrap the pieces in your jacket. Somewhere, a woman with a braid of wire is going to count her tests and come up one short.
#show-if ((($tech gte 2) or ($capeLore gte 2)) and ($stamina gte 10)) [Tech] Take it apart the slow way, with a pocketknife and what you know.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $bakudaPart to true>>\
<<if ($tech gte 2)>>Tape, wire, a kitchen timer that's a decoy, and under it a tilt switch wired the way a bored genius wires things. You've taken apart enough dead electronics to know that the ugly connection is the one that matters, and you cut the ugly one.<<else>>You've read every thread about her. She likes a decoy on the outside and the real trigger on the inside, and the threads were right. You lift the tape and the tilt switch is exactly where the forum said it would be.<</if>> Eleven minutes. Your hands don't shake until after. You wrap the pieces in your jacket, and somewhere a woman with a braid of wire is going to count her tests and come up one short.
#Call the PRT bomb squad and back off to where you can watch.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You call it in with the cross streets and the word //Bakuda//, and that word gets you a human being in under a minute.<<else>>You run to the gas station on the service road and the night clerk makes the call for you with your mask in his window.<</if>> Two PRT vans and a robot on tracks arrive in sixteen minutes, and you watch from a flatcar as the robot picks the thing up and the thing goes off inside the robot's box with a sound like a wet sheet tearing, and the box is fine, and the robot comes back out of it an inch shorter in every direction.
#Get away from it. Fast. Whatever it does, you don't want to learn by watching.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You're two hundred yards off and behind a boxcar when it goes, and it doesn't go with a bang. It goes with a sound like a held breath, and when you look, the cradle of rebar and the gravel around it for thirty feet have turned the color of old photographs and the air above it is doing something slow. You leave it for the PRT to name.
#show-if ($stance is "abb") Leave it. It's hers, and she'll want to know who touched it.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You leave it where it is. The kid on the flatcar will have your mask on his phone by now, standing next to her work and not touching it, and that is the kind of thing she notices.
<</choose>><<set $sawTravelers to true>>\
<<achieve "Out of Towners">>\
A drunk is trying to feed a parking meter, and the parking meter is standing where a man in red and black was standing a second ago, and the man in red and black is where the meter was, with a top hat on and his arms crossed, watching the drunk try to put quarters into his belt. The drunk hasn't noticed yet.
"Knock it off," says a big man leaning on a van across the street, in a hoodie, with a voice that's done this before. In the van's passenger seat a girl is asleep under a blanket with her mouth open, and there's a second girl, awake, in the back, who looks like she's deciding whether to wake her.
The top hat sees you. He sighs theatrically. "And now there's a local. Hi, local."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#"Who are you people?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Travelers," he says, and swaps places with the drunk, so the drunk is suddenly on the far sidewalk with a quarter in his hand and the top hat is next to you. "Just passing through. Boston got crowded. Don't make it a thing." The big man says, "Trickster," in the tone of a man saying //enough//, and the top hat shrugs and swaps himself into the van's driver's seat, and they go, and the drunk sits down on the curb and looks at his quarter.
#"This city's full. Keep passing through."
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
He grins under the hat like you've given him a present. "That's exactly what the last city said." The big man gets in the van without a word and starts it, and the top hat is in the passenger seat without having crossed the street, and the girl under the blanket doesn't wake up for any of it.
#Say nothing. Watch them go.
They go. The second girl in the back looks at you through the rear window until the van turns, and her face is a question you don't have the context for yet.
<</choose>><<set $sawSophiaCross to true>>\
<<achieve "Off the Leash">>\
This isn't a Wards street. Wards don't come past the rail spur after dark without a Protectorate shadow, and there's no shadow here, only a dealer against a chain-link fence with a crossbow bolt through the meat of his thigh and a girl in a hooded costume standing over him with the crossbow reloaded. It isn't a tranquilizer bolt. It's the real kind. He's making a sound that isn't words.
<<if ($deaf is true)>>You didn't hear her. You never would have. <</if>>Shadow Stalker turns her head and sees you, and goes still<<if ($stance is "ward")>>, and then relaxes, because she knows the costume, and that's worse<</if>>.
"Go home, $girlBoy," she says. "You didn't see this."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Stop her. Get between the bolt and the man.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
She fires through you, or where you were, and goes to smoke when you reach her, and comes back solid behind you with the crossbow's stock in your ear. "Last time," she says. "Go home." The dealer crawls while you're down. She lets him, because you've made it a thing now, and being a thing is what she can't afford. She's gone over the fence before your vision clears.
#"That's a real bolt. That's not a Ward's call. That's a felony."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"It's a dealer," she says, as if that's the whole answer, and for her it is. <<if ($calledSophia is true)>>"And you've got nothing. You had nothing in that hallway and you've got nothing here."<<else>>"You want to make a report, make it. See how far it gets."<</if>> She pulls the bolt out of him herself, worse than leaving it in, and he screams, and she walks off through the fence like it's a curtain.
#Call it in. Now. With her name.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You say //Shadow Stalker// and //lethal bolt// and the cross streets to a PRT voice that goes very quiet and asks you to repeat it.<<else>>You get to a payphone and say it to a PRT voice that goes very quiet and asks you to repeat it.<</if>> By the time anyone comes she's gone and the dealer's gone and there's blood on the fence, and somewhere a report exists with her name and yours on it, and that is going to matter.
#Leave. She said go home.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You go home. Behind you the sound the dealer is making stops, and you tell yourself that means he passed out.
<</choose>><<set $metTessa to true>>\
<<achieve "First Night">>\
A laundromat that's open all night, with its windows fogged from inside, and through the fog everything is moving. Not the machines. Everything loose: quarters, hangers, a bottle of detergent, a child's sneaker, somebody's keys, all of it drifting in slow orbits around a girl sitting on the floor between the dryers with her knees up and her hands over her ears. The night attendant is behind the counter with only her eyes showing over it.
The girl is maybe sixteen. She's been crying so long her face has stopped doing it. Every time she breathes in, the orbit tightens.
You know what this is. You were this, once, with nobody watching.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Go in slow. Sit on the floor. Talk to her like she's a person and not a weather event.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
You sit six feet away with the quarters going past your head and tell her your cape name and that this is going to stop, and that it stopped for you. She looks at you for the first time. "Did it," she says, and it isn't a question. Her name is Tessa, and it was her stepfather, and she isn't going back, and after twenty minutes the orbit slows and the keys drop and the sneaker drops, and she's a girl on a laundromat floor again with a power she doesn't want. You give her the PHQ number and tell her she doesn't have to call it. She puts it in her shoe.
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($power is "cover") or ($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) Hold the room still so nothing hits anyone. Then talk.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<if ($power is "cover")>>You put panes between her and the counter and the door, and the orbit hits them and slides along them, and inside the box you sit down.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You bring every moth in off the streetlight and give the orbit something to carry that isn't keys, and she watches them go round and the crying changes.<<else>>You go dense and let the detergent bottle hit you and not matter, and she sees that it doesn't matter, and something in the orbit eases.<</if>> Her name is Tessa. She has nowhere to go tonight. You walk her to the all-night diner on the corner and buy her the soup, and the spoons on the table drift an inch and settle.
#show-if ($capeLore gte 2) [Cape Lore] Talk her through it the way the PRT pamphlet says, and then the way it actually goes.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
You know the words, because you've read the pamphlet the PRT gives to schools and the forum threads that correct it. Name, if she wants to give it. Breathing. The power is hers and it's listening to her, not the other way around. You say it from the doorway, and then from six feet, and the orbit slows to a crawl. Her name is Tessa. You tell her what the PRT will do if she calls, step by step, including the parts the pamphlet leaves out, and she listens to all of it, and says she'll think about it, and the keys drop out of the air into her lap.
#Call the PRT from the door. They've got people for this.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $tessaPRT to true>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You call it in, and the voice on the line knows the word //trigger// and gets quieter and faster.<<else>>You send the attendant to the payphone with the number, and she goes, grateful to have a job that isn't hiding.<</if>> A PRT van and a woman in a cardigan who isn't a trooper arrive in twelve minutes, and the woman goes in alone and sits on the floor the way you'd have sat, and in half an hour the girl walks out with her under a blanket. You never get her name. The Wards get it, probably.
#Leave. You can't be here when the PRT comes, and the PRT is coming.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
You leave, and you hear a window go behind you, and you don't look back, and you were this once with nobody watching, and now you know what nobody felt like.
<</choose>><<set $pallSign to true>>\
<<set $heardPall to true>>\
<<achieve "Came In With The Tide">>\
There's a man standing in the surf with his shoes on. Ankle deep, facing out, in a windbreaker that's soaked to the shoulders, with a lanyard around his neck that says HALIFAX PORT AUTHORITY under a photo of him that's smiling. He isn't smiling now and he isn't anything. When you say hello he turns around politely, like you've asked him the time.
"I'm sorry," he says. "Do I know you?" He looks at the lanyard, and reads it, and it doesn't help. "The fog was warm," he says, as if that explains it. "I remember that. It was warm, and then I was here."
Halifax is six hundred miles up the coast.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Walk him to the PRT building. They've been asking people to watch the water.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
It takes an hour. He's good company in the way of someone with nothing to be anxious about, and he asks your name three times and apologizes each time. At the PRT building the trooper on the desk sees the lanyard and picks up a phone without taking his eyes off the man, and says the word //Halifax// into it, and two people come down fast who aren't troopers. One of them thanks you with a face that isn't thankful about anything.
#Ask him questions. Anything he remembers at all.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
He remembers that the fog was warm and that there was a sound in it, low, like a ship's horn held too long, and that people were walking into it and not walking out, and that he wasn't afraid, and that he should have been. He recites a phone number he doesn't recognize. He says a child's name, Mira, and then can't say whose child. You write all of it down and he watches you do it with mild interest, like you're writing about someone else.
#Leave him at the lifeguard station call box. You've got your own night.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You show him the call box and press the button for him, and a voice answers, and you leave him explaining to it that the fog was warm. On the way off the beach you count the shoes in the tideline, and there are more than there should be.
<</choose>><<achieve "Bus Fare">>\
The Greyhound station at eleven is six people and a vending machine, and one of the six is Rafe, Kestrel's brother, with a duffel between his feet and a handful of Merchant money he's counting under the schedule board like it might have changed since he last counted it.
He sees the mask and knows it. He doesn't run. He looks at the money and then at you and says, "She told you not to."
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#"Where are you going?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Anywhere Skids isn't." He has enough for a ticket to Providence and not much past it. He says his sister thinks he can be fixed and he's tired of being a project. "Tell her I got on the bus," he says. "Or don't. She'll know anyway." He gets on the bus.
<<set $rafeGone to true>>\
#show-if ($money gte 40) Buy the rest of the ticket. Somewhere further than Providence.
<<var $money - 40>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $rafeGone to true>>\
You put forty dollars on the counter and he's got enough for New York, and he stares at the ticket like it's a trick. "She'll kill you," he says. "She'll kill me," you say, and he laughs, the first time you've seen it, and he looks like her when he does. He gets on the bus with the Merchant money still in his pocket, and you let him keep it.
#"Call her first. Then get on whatever bus you want."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $rafeStayed to true>>\
He calls her from the payphone with his back to you. It goes on for a while. When he hangs up he picks up the duffel and walks out the front door, not toward the buses, toward the Boardwalk, and he doesn't look at you on the way. The bus to Providence leaves without him.
#Take the money. It's Skidmark's, and he can't carry it where he's going.
<<var $money + 60>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<set $rafeGone to true>>\
He gives it up without a fight, so he's really leaving. He has a ticket already. He gets on the bus with the duffel and nothing else, and you have sixty dollars that smells like a Merchant's pocket, and Kestrel is going to ask.
<</choose>><<set $metDanny to true>>\
<<achieve "Union Hall">>\
The Dockworkers' Association is a two-story brick building with a hand-painted sign, and at ten at night the front window is on the sidewalk in pieces and a tall thin man with glasses is sweeping it up alone. There's a brick on the step with an eighty-eight on it in marker. He sees the mask and stops sweeping and holds the broom in both hands, not like a weapon, like something to hold.
"We've got nothing worth taking," he says. "If that's what this is."
You know the face. You've seen it in a photo on a bookshelf, in a house with a basement, and you've heard the name at a bus stop. Danny Hebert.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Help him sweep. Say nothing about his daughter.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He finds a second broom. You sweep. He talks the way tired men talk to strangers, about the ferry that's never going to run again and the Empire wanting the union to hire by complexion and the brick being the third one. "My daughter's out most nights now," he says, to the glass. "Fifteen. She tells me it's a friend's. I don't know the friend." You keep sweeping.
#Ask about the brick.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
"Kaiser's people want the hiring hall," he says. "They want it white. They've been asking politely for a year and this week they stopped asking politely." He looks at the eighty-eight. "I'm not going to give it to them. I don't know what that costs yet." He looks at you. "You're not one of theirs." "No." "Then you're the first cape who's stood on this step." He says it without any bitterness at all, and that lands harder than bitterness would.
#show-if (($taylorKnows is true) or ($taylorJoined is true) or ($leftWithTaylor is true)) "Your daughter's all right. I can't tell you how I know."
<<var $taylorTrust - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
He puts the broom down. For a second he looks like a man about to ask a hundred questions, and then he looks like a man who has decided not to, because the answers might be worse than not knowing. "Is she," he says. "All right." "Yes." "Is she safe." You take too long. He picks the broom back up. "Thank you for telling me," he says, and he means the first part. Taylor is going to hear about this, and she's going to know who it was.
#Nod and keep walking. He's got a broom, and it isn't your window.
He goes back to sweeping. The brick stays on the step. Someone will pick it up in the morning and put it in a drawer with the other two.
<</choose>><<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
<<set $arc to 4>>\
''Arc 4: Shell''
Friday, April fifteenth. The bank on Lord Street has plywood where its front used to be, and at six this morning something went off in the Trainyard that the news is calling a gas main, and the PRT is calling nothing at all.
You know what it was. Everybody who was awake knows what it was. It sounded like a held breath, and then the rail bridge over the service road was a different color.
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>At the base of your skull, nothing happens, very carefully.<</if>>
At school, Mr. Gladly has the news on in homeroom because he can't help himself, and the news has a helicopter over the Trainyard, and the bridge is the color of old photographs for thirty feet in every direction, and a reporter is saying the word //parahuman// the way they say //suspect//. <<if ($metSchool is true)>>Taylor is in her seat<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>, with a bandage under her sleeve that wasn't there yesterday, not looking at you<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>, and she looks at you once, and that once has the whole of yesterday in it<<else>>, with her hood up<</if>>. Madison says, "Oh my //god//," at the screen, and means the helicopter.<<if (($ulFriend is true) or ($ulMember is true))>> On the shop-class stairs two seniors you've never looked at twice, one in blue and one in green, are watching the same helicopter, and the one in green is explaining the yield to the one in blue with his hands, and something about the hands is familiar, and you can't place it yet.<</if>><<if ($fan is true)>> Greg Veder has the thread open under his desk and is typing with his thumbs.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($gregTriggered is true)>>Greg Veder isn't in his seat. His seat has been empty since the night the Merchants broke his phone. <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>He texted you at two in the morning: //I can't turn it off. Everyone in the house keeps listening to me. Help.//<<else>>His thread has a new handle on it now, and the handle has already posted twice.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
Your phone has a text from a number you memorized on a roof. //Loft. After school. Bring money, we're going shopping. Not a joke. Tt.//
<<page "After school" "ch4-u-market">>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
Your phone has a text from the PRT's scheduling system, and this time it's the scheduling system. //Wards: HQ, 3:30. Mandatory. Transport provided.// Under it, from Clockblocker: //they said mandatory. they never say mandatory.//
<<page "After school" "ch4-w-briefing">>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
Your phone has a text from Victor. //Yard. 4. Everyone. Wear the colors under something.//
<<page "After school" "ch4-e-friday">>
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
Your phone has a text from a number that only ever sends one line. //Fourth. Now. She wants everyone.//
<<page "Now" "ch4-a-friday">>
<<elseif ($ulMember is true)>>\
Your phone has a text from Leet. //garage. now. NOT a stream.// Leet has never once texted the words "not a stream."
<<page "After school" "ch4-ul-friday">>
<<else>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Your phone has a text from Kestrel. //Boardwalk. 4. Bring food. Bring a lot.//<<else>>Nobody texts you. That's the independent's whole deal.<</if>>
<<page "After school" "ch4-i-friday">>
<</if>><<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
The loft at three-thirty has Lisa on the couch with four phones, Brian on the floor with a map, Alec on the other couch with the controller, and Rachel in the corner with Angelica's head in her lap and a tube of ointment, not looking at anyone. <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor is at the table with her costume laid out and a needle in her hand, fixing a tear at the shoulder that Glory Girl put there.<</if>>
"Okay," Lisa says, and puts down three of the phones. "Yesterday happened. We got paid. The boss is pleased. I'm going to say that sentence once and then never again. Today we go to the Market, because Brian needs a jacket that isn't the jacket, Alec needs to be seen in daylight for medical reasons, and I need to not be in this room when the next thing happens."
"What next thing," Brian says.
"The next thing." She looks at the fourth phone. "Something went off in the Trainyard this morning. Something with a Tinker signature. The ABB's new one has been building for three weeks and now she's testing outdoors, and Lung's transfer to the Birdcage is scheduled, and I don't like the shape of the week. So: Market. Normal things. Jackets."
<<if ($indebted is true)>>She glances at you. "You're buying nothing, by the way. I know what you owe. Save it."<</if>>
The Lord Street Market is six blocks of stalls under tarps, and on a Friday afternoon it's the most normal place in the city. Brian buys a jacket in four minutes. Alec buys sunglasses and wears them indoors. Lisa buys a scarf, a second scarf, and a bag of candied nuts she eats while explaining to a stall owner why his prices are wrong. <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor stands in front of a rack of coats through two other customers and doesn't buy one, and Lisa, without turning around, says, "The grey one. You can afford it. Stop doing math," and Taylor buys the grey one.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-u-onilee">>
#Walk with Brian. He's the one who'll tell you how yesterday actually went.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Brian walks with his hands in the new jacket's pockets and tells you the version with the numbers in it. Nineteen hostages, none hurt. A Ward with a concussion. A hundred and ten thousand dollars, of which the boss takes none, because that wasn't what the boss wanted. "He wanted us in the bank at two-thirty," Brian says. "Lisa knows why. She won't say. She's gone grey about it." He doesn't ask you, and he waits.
#Walk with Lisa. Ask her what the bank was for, now that it's done.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
Lisa eats a candied nut and doesn't answer for a block. Then, "A girl. Twelve. The bank was so every Ward in the city would be on Lord Street at two-thirty." She says it to the stall in front of her. <<if ($dinahFree is true)>>"And then somebody took the van apart on Pearl Street, and he doesn't know who yet, and I do, and I'm not telling him, and that's the first thing I've ever not told him." She looks at you. "So. Thanks. And also, what have you done."<<else>>"And it worked. And I helped." She eats another nut. "Don't ask me how I feel about it. I know how I feel about it. I just can't find a place to put it."<</if>>
#show-if ($taylorJoined is true) Walk with Taylor. She's got a new coat and a stitched wrist and nobody's asked her how she is.
<<var $taylorTrust + 10>>\
<<var $rom_taylor + 5>>\
Taylor walks with the coat zipped to the chin like armor. "I had Panacea's arm," she says, after a block, "and she said she could stop my heart." She looks at the stalls. "I believed her. I still said the thing I said." She pushes her glasses up. "Is this what it's like? You do a thing that's the worst thing you've done, and then you buy a coat?" You don't have an answer. She didn't want one. She wanted somebody to walk next to.
#show-if ($charm gte 4) [Charm] Take the stall owner off Lisa's hands. Beat her at her own game, with her watching.
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
<<var $money + 20>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You get the scarf for half and the second scarf for free and the man's phone number, which you don't want, and Lisa watches the whole thing with a candied nut halfway to her mouth. "I use a //power// for that," she says. "What do you use." You tell her you don't know. She doesn't believe you, and she's right not to.
#Walk with Alec. Somebody should keep an eye on the sunglasses.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<if ($alecFlirt is true)>><<var $streetRep + 5>>Alec walks with you like it's the Friday he said yes to, and buys you a pretzel without asking, and says, "This counts," and you're not sure whether he means the date or the pretzel.<<else>>Alec tells you, in the tone of a weather report, that the Ward he hit yesterday will be fine, that Gallant's armor is expensive, and that he has never once in his life bought a jacket. "People bring them," he says. "It's a thing that happens to me." He isn't joking, and he doesn't, really.<</if>>
<</choose>>/* Arc 4, Oni Lee at the market. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<set $sawOniLee to true>>\
It happens in the alley behind the Market, where the stalls take deliveries. Lisa stops walking. All four phones are in her hands at once. "Back," she says. "Back, back, out of the alley, now."
A man is standing at the far end of it. Black bodysuit, a white demon mask, and nothing in his hands, and he's thirty feet away, and then he's ten feet away, and the one at thirty feet is still there for a second, falling into ash.
Oni Lee.
Brian's darkness goes up like a wall. It doesn't matter, because Oni Lee doesn't need to see you. He's already been where you are. He's behind Brian with a knife, and Brian is on the ground, and the Oni Lee behind Brian is ash, and the real one is on the fire escape above you with something in his hand that has a pin in it.
<<if ($deaf is true)>>You don't hear the pin. You see Lisa's mouth make the shape of the word.<<else>>You hear the pin.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-u-after">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and cover Brian. Let the grenade find you first.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
You go heavy over Brian and the grenade goes off against your back, and it isn't fire. It's cold, a cold that goes into the density and stops there, and when it lets go you're frosted white down one side and Brian is alive under you and the alley is quiet. Oni Lee is gone, and he looked at you before he went, and you felt it.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The cold goes into the density and stops at the bone, and you've got a lot of bone, and Brian's alive under you.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip to the fire escape. Be where he is before he's somewhere else.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You're on the fire escape with him and he's already not there, and the grenade is, and you skip again with it in your hand and put it in the air over the alley, and it goes off up there with a sound like a held breath, and the fire escape above it turns the color of old photographs. Oni Lee watches you from the roof opposite. He doesn't come back. You've taken something from him, and he's deciding what.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> You're on the fire escape and gone again before the pin's finished falling, and the nausea waits until after.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Pane over Brian. Pane over Lisa. Pane over the grenade.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
Three panes in three breaths, and the grenade goes off inside the third one, and whatever it does, it does to a cubic yard of air inside a blue box, and the box goes the color of old photographs and holds. Oni Lee looks at the box for a second longer than he's looked at anything. Then he's ash on the fire escape and gone.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go up in a row like a thought, and the grenade goes off inside the third one, and the third one holds.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out, and take Brian with you.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You're a second behind the world with Brian's arm in your hand, and the grenade goes off in a world you're not in, and when you come back the alley has a circle in it where the cobbles are glass, and Brian is on his knees being sick, and Lisa is saying your name over and over like a count.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You take Brian a second behind the world and bring him back with all of him, standing.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Drop it." Up, at the fire escape, with everything.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
He drops it. He drops it onto the fire escape at his own feet, and for one second the demon mask looks at its own hand, and then he's ash and the real one is on the roof, and the grenade goes off on an empty fire escape and makes it the color of old photographs. You told Oni Lee to do something, and he did it. He's going to remember that longer than you'd like.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> "Drop it," and he drops it, and the hand that dropped it stays open long enough for you to see it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The radio you built that hears dispatch. He's a teleporter; teleporters have a tell. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You've had the radio on since the Trainyard, and every time he jumps it clicks, a quarter second before, and you've been counting clicks. You shout "Left" before the click and Lisa goes right, and the grenade goes off where she was, and the cobbles go the color of old photographs, and Oni Lee looks at the radio in your hand. He's going to want that.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The radio clicks a quarter second early because you tuned it on Thursday, and a quarter second is a grenade's width.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge a coin. Put it through the grenade before the pin finishes.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
The coin hits the grenade in his hand and the grenade goes off in his hand, and the Oni Lee on the fire escape turns the color of old photographs from the elbow up and falls into ash, and the real one, on the roof, looks at his own arm for a long second. He's fine. The copy wasn't. You've learned something about how the copies work, and so has he.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The coin hits the grenade in his hand with the exact charge, and the copy goes to ash from the elbow up.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Three seconds ahead. Teleporters are only fast in the present.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
The overlay shows you where he'll be, and where the grenade will be, and where Brian will be, and you move Brian with your foot and say "Lisa, down" and the grenade goes off in a square yard of alley that has nobody in it, and Oni Lee, on the roof, watches you not be surprised. "Thinker," Lisa says, from the ground, and it's a compliment.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and you've moved Brian and Lisa and yourself before the pin was a decision.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) Hand on the fire escape. He's standing on something that can come apart.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
The fire escape remembers it was bolted by a landlord, and lets go, and Oni Lee rides it down with the grenade in his hand and turns to ash a foot above the alley, and the grenade goes off under forty feet of falling iron, and the iron goes the color of old photographs and stops in the air. The real one, on the roof, looks at the iron and goes.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The fire escape's bolts are the landlord's bolts, and you knew which one first.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. The other body doesn't care about cold.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The grey body takes the grenade on its chest and the grenade does to it what it does, and the grey body is the color of old photographs down one side and still standing, and Oni Lee looks at the thing you are the way Bitch did in the bank. Then he's gone. When you come back you're shaking and one of your hands is cold to the bone.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body takes the cold on its chest and doesn't care, and Oni Lee looks at it the way Bitch did.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on him. Catch what he is.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You touch the one on the fire escape and he's ash under your hand, and the clock starts anyway, and for the first minute there's nothing, and for the third there's a candle's worth of being somewhere else, and you use it to be six feet left of the grenade. Oni Lee watches from the roof. By the ninth minute you could have followed him. You don't. You're not sure what you'd be when you got there.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> The clock runs hot, and by the third minute you're six feet left of everything, every time.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) He can't teleport to what he isn't thinking about. Stop being thought about, and get the grenade.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
He looks at Brian, at Lisa, at the alley, and not at you, and you walk up the fire escape and take the grenade out of a hand that doesn't notice, and throw it into the delivery dumpster, and the dumpster goes the color of old photographs. Oni Lee looks at his empty hand. For a second the mask has an expression, and then he's gone.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> He looks at Brian, at Lisa, at the alley, and never at you, and you take the grenade like a phone from a child.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Get Lisa out. Brian's down and the grenade's coming and you can carry one person.
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
You get Lisa around the corner and the grenade goes off behind you, and the alley behind you goes quiet in a way alleys don't, and when you look back the cobbles around Brian are glass and Brian is on his knees being sick into them, alive, because the grenade went off six feet short. Oni Lee is gone. Lisa is looking at you like she's rewriting something.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Over Brian with your body.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You cover Brian with yourself and the grenade goes off six feet short, and the cold takes your jacket and leaves you, and Brian is under you breathing.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Up the fire escape. Take the grenade.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You're up the fire escape before he's finished being there and the grenade is in your hand and over the wall into the dumpster, and he looks at his empty hand.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. Teleporters have a tell. Call it.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You've been counting the quarter-second he takes to arrive, and you shout "Left" before he's left, and Lisa goes right, and the grenade goes off where she was.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Talk to him. Nobody talks to Oni Lee.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"She's going to use you up," you say, to the mask, and the mask stops, for one second, because nobody has ever said anything to it, and the second is enough.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand between the fire escape and Brian and don't move.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
You stand between a teleporter with a grenade and a man on the ground and don't move, and Oni Lee, who has never been stood in front of, looks at you for a second longer than he looks at anything, and the pin stays in.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go dense over Brian and the grenade goes off against your back and you stand up in the color with him under you, and walk out of it.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body takes the grenade on its chest, and then it takes the fire escape off the wall, with him on it.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Skip to the fire escape, skip with the grenade to the roof, skip back, and he's looking at an empty hand.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk up the fire escape and take the grenade and the knife and his mask, and he's standing there with nothing.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The fire escape, the wall behind it, and the grenade's casing, and it goes off empty in your hand.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The radio's count, a quarter second early, and the second thing you built that makes a teleporter arrive somewhere else.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you know where the real one is before he does, and you say so to Lisa.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>The coin through the grenade, then one through the fire escape's bolt, then one into the roof where the real one is going to be.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Drop it," and "Stay," and Oni Lee stays, on the fire escape, for four seconds, longer than he's stayed anywhere.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>His trick by the first minute, and there are four of you in the alley, and he can't tell which one is the real one either.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You take Brian and Lisa out of the world together, one in each hand, and the alley goes the color of old photographs around nobody.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane over the grenade, one under the fire escape, and one around him, and he's in a box that can't be teleported out of, briefly.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Null and Skip. Take his trick from a copy, and skip the way he does.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You touch the copy before it's ash and take what he is, and then you're doing it too, leaving ash behind you, and for the first time in his life Oni Lee is in an alley with someone who moves like him, and he doesn't like it, and the grenade goes off in a hand that isn't attached to anyone.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Pane and Charge. A charged box around the grenade.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The box goes up around the grenade in the air, humming blue, and whatever Bakuda built does its work inside a cubic foot of electrified nothing, and the box goes the color of old photographs and stays in the air, buzzing, and Oni Lee looks at it like a man looking at a bill.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<set $oniLeeUltimatum to true>>\
Brian's phone rings while he's still on his knees. A number he doesn't know. He answers it because Lisa tells him to.
A woman's voice, loud enough that everyone hears it, with the rhythm of someone reading from a card they wrote themselves. "That was a demonstration. The next one is not. Here is what happens. Sunday morning the PRT moves Lung to the airport for the Birdcage. You are going to help us stop that, with your dogs and your darkness and whatever the new one does. If you do, you keep your bodies. If you don't, I have one hundred and forty devices in this city and I will start with the ones nearest your parents. Oni Lee will tell you where to be." A pause. "Also, your fire escape is a crime against engineering."
She hangs up. Lisa has gone the color of the cobbles.
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor, who was buying a coat an hour ago, says, "My dad," very quietly, and then nothing else.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#"We're not helping her. Say it out loud so she hears it, if she's listening."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $undersidersRefuse to true>>\
Brian says it, into the dead phone, and then to the alley: "We're not." Lisa closes her eyes. "The boss will want to know she called," she says. "The boss will have an opinion." Alec says, "The boss can have the opinion at my parents' house," and nobody laughs.
#"We can't fight a hundred and forty bombs. We go to the loft and we think."
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
Lisa nods, too fast. "Loft. Think. Yes." She looks at the fire escape. "I need to call someone. I need to not want to call him." She calls him from the corner, with her back to all of you, and when she comes back she says the boss has people, and the people have a van, and nobody in this alley has to decide anything until tomorrow.
#show-if ($bakudaPart is true) "I've got the heart of one of her bombs in a jacket at home. She doesn't know that. That's a start."
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $undersidersPlan to true>>\
Lisa looks at you with the expression she usually saves for things her power hands her for free. "You've got //what//." You tell her. She takes your face in both hands for one second, and from Lisa that's a kiss. "Okay. Okay. That changes the week. Loft. Bring it. Don't drop it."
#Say nothing. Help Brian up. Everyone else is talking.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
You get Brian on his feet. Rachel, who hasn't said anything, takes his other arm without being asked, and looks at you across him, and it's the first time she's looked at you like a person who might be useful to dogs.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $wardsBriefed to true>>\
The Wards' briefing room at three-thirty has every chair full and Armsmaster at the front, which hasn't happened since you joined, and a photo on the screen of the rail bridge the color of old photographs.
"Bakuda," Armsmaster says. "Tinker, bombs, ABB. Three weeks in the city, no engagements until this morning. The device at the Trainyard was a time-dilation effect with a thirty-foot radius. The two people inside it are still inside it. They will be for an estimated eleven years." He lets that sit as long as it needs. "She has issued a demand. Lung is scheduled for transfer to the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center on Sunday at oh-six-hundred. She wants him not transferred. She has stated that she has one hundred and forty devices placed in the city. We have no reason to believe she's lying."
Aegis asks about the transfer. "Proceeds," Armsmaster says. "The Protectorate escorts. The Wards hold the city. Console is doubled. Patrols are paired, no exceptions." His visor turns to the back of the room, where Shadow Stalker is sitting with her arms crossed. "No exceptions."
<<if ($sawSophiaCross is true)>>She looks at you when he says it, because she knows what you saw past the rail spur, and she's wondering if it's in a report, and it is.<</if>>
<<if ($caughtRegent is true)>>"Regent," Armsmaster adds, "is in holding downstairs. The Undersiders have made no attempt to recover him. Tattletale has sent the PRT a fruit basket." Clockblocker laughs once and stops when nobody else does.<</if>>
Aegis reads the pairings. <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>You get Vista, so you get console, and you'll hear it when it happens instead of seeing it. Before you can object, Aegis says, "You've got a civilian contact who triggered on Tuesday and hasn't registered. The Director wants him in before Sunday. That's your other job."<<else>>You get Vista, so you get console, and you'll hear it when it happens instead of seeing it.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-w-bomb">>
#Take console. Vista's the best there is at it, and someone has to hear the whole city at once.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $wardsConsole4 to true>>\
Vista hands you the second headset without a word. The red board already has four calls on it that aren't fires.
#Ask to be paired with Shadow Stalker. If she's going off-book this weekend, better it's with you.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 10>>\
<<set $wardsStalker to true>>\
Aegis looks at Armsmaster. Armsmaster looks at you for a full second, and then says, "Granted," in the voice of a man filing something. Shadow Stalker uncrosses her arms. "Great," she says, to the ceiling. "A chaperone."
#show-if ($mind gte 3) [Mind] Ask the question nobody's asking. If the device is destroyed, does the glass let go?
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $askedGlass to true>>\
Armsmaster looks at you through the visor for a second longer than the question needed. "Unknown," he says. "The Tinker from Boston believes so. I believe it is worth finding out." He writes something. Aegis writes something. You've just been put on a list you'd want to be on.
#Ask about the convoy. If Bakuda's going to hit anything, it's that.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $wardsConvoyAsk to true>>\
"The convoy route is classified," Armsmaster says, and then, because he has decided something about you: "It goes up the Harbor Road to the interstate. If you were a bomb Tinker, you'd know that too." Aegis writes something. You've just been told the one thing in this room that matters.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
At five-forty the red board goes white.
It isn't one call. It's all of them. //Lord Street, bus, device. Boardwalk, arcade, device. Fourth and Lord, device.// Vista says "Oh," in a voice that isn't twelve, and starts talking, and doesn't stop for three hours.
<<if ($wardsConsole4 is true)>>\
You're on the second headset, and the second headset is the Lord Street bus. A city bus, forty people, and something under the back seat that went off and turned the back third of the bus and everyone in it into glass. Not killed. Glass. Aegis is on scene saying the word //Panacea// into his radio every thirty seconds.
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#Stay on the headset. Be the voice that keeps Aegis counting.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You count for him. Twelve in the glass, twenty-eight out, Panacea's ETA, Panacea's arrival, Panacea saying, on an open channel, "I can't do glass. I can't. Get them to the hospital and don't let anyone touch them." You're going to keep hearing her say it.
#Hand the headset to Kid Win and go. The bus is nine blocks.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
<<set $wentToBus to true>>\
Vista says "You can't" and "Go" in the same breath, the way she did on Thursday. The bus is on its side on Lord Street with its back third shining, and inside the shine there are people, and Aegis is standing in front of it with his hands open saying "Don't touch them" to everyone who comes near, and you help him say it until the ambulances come.
<</choose>>\
<<elseif ($wardsStalker is true)>>\
You're on the Boardwalk with Shadow Stalker when the arcade goes. There's no bang, only a sound like a held breath, and the arcade's front wall is the color of old photographs, and the people inside the color are standing very still, and will be, for a while.
Shadow Stalker looks at it for one second. "That's not a fight," she says. "That's a Tinker and a timer. We can't do anything here." She's already moving, north, away from it. "The timer's on a schedule. The schedule's a person. Come on."
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#Go with her. She's right about the schedule.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 10>>\
<<set $stalkerHunt to true>>\
You run the Boardwalk with Sophia Hess, past two more held breaths, and at the north end she puts a bolt through the thigh of an ABB kid with a phone who was filming, and takes the phone, and the phone has a list on it. Six addresses. "That's six," she says, and for the first time since you've known her she looks at you like you might be worth something. "Keep up."
#Stay. There are people inside that color and they need someone outside it.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stay. She goes. You stand in front of the arcade for an hour telling people not to touch the wall, and Panacea comes, and looks at it, and says, "I can't do time," and sits down on the planks, and you sit down next to her, because nobody else will.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
You're in the van with Aegis and Browbeat heading for Lord Street when the bus goes. There's no bang, only a sound like a held breath, and the back third of a city bus is glass, and everyone in it is still in it, and Browbeat, who is brave, is out of the van before it stops.
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#Get in front of Browbeat. Nobody touches the glass until Panacea says.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You get a hand on his shoulder a foot from the shine and he stops, and he looks at you, and then he looks at the woman inside it with her hand up at the window, and he doesn't touch her, and nobody on Lord Street does anything harder tonight.
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($power is "thinker") or ($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) The glass is a shell. Shells have seams.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $bombSeam to true>>\
<<if ($power is "shatterpoint")>>You put a hand on the glass and it tells you where it's weakest, and it's weakest at the back, where it started, and you take one person out through that seam before Aegis stops you, and she's alive and screaming and alive.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>You put a pane against the glass and the glass takes the pane's color, and under the blue the effect is thinner, and Aegis gets one person out through it, and then it closes.<<else>>You see three seconds ahead and three seconds ahead the glass at the back is going to crack on its own, and you say so, and it does, and Browbeat gets one person out through it.<</if>> One. Panacea arrives and says you shouldn't have, and then says you should do it again, and then says she can't help either way.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>\
Kestrel is on the arcade roof with a paper bag the size of a toddler, and when you climb up she hands you half of what's in it and says, "Eat. We're going to need it," before you've sat down.
"Something went off in the Trainyard," she says. "You know that. What you don't know is what. I went and looked at six. There's two Merchants standing in it, in the middle of a bridge the color of a photograph, and they're not moving, and they're not dead, and a PRT guy with a clipboard told me not to touch them and then told me they'd be like that for eleven years." She eats. "Lung's tinker. She's testing on people. She's going to do it again."
<<if ($rafeKnown is true)>><<if ($rafeGone is true)>>"Rafe's in New York," she says, not looking at you. "You did that. I haven't decided how I feel about it."<<else>>"Rafe's on the Boardwalk somewhere with Skids' money," she says. "If she's testing on Merchants, she's testing on him."<</if>><</if>>
<<choose "ch4-i-bomb">>
#"Then we go where she'll test next. Where would you put a bomb if you wanted the city to watch?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $rom_kestrel + 5>>\
She thinks about it with her mouth full. "Boardwalk. Lord Street. Anywhere with a camera." She looks at the arcade below you, with its lights on and a hundred kids in it. "Here," she says, and stops eating.
#"The PRT has a convoy on Sunday. Lung. If I were her, I'd care about that more than the city."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $indConvoyGuess to true>>\
Kestrel nods slowly. "Then she's not testing. She's rehearsing." She puts the bag down. "I don't do convoys. I do the Boardwalk. But if you're going to be stupid on Sunday, tell me where, and I'll be stupid above you."
#show-if ($kestrelFlirt is true) [Charm] "You said chairs after you'd seen me fight. You've seen me fight."
<<var $rom_kestrel + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
She stops chewing, and for Kestrel that's blushing. "I said that." She looks at the water. "After this week. If there's a Boardwalk after this week, there's chairs. I'm not doing chairs in a city that's going the color of a photograph." It's a yes. It's the most Kestrel yes there is.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
<<if (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>Taylor's basement after school has the spiders working and Taylor not, sitting on the stairs with her coat on indoors, watching the news on a laptop that takes a minute to load every page. "Eleven years," she says. "They're going to stand there for eleven years." She closes the laptop. "She's going to do it again. Tonight, probably. She does things at night."<<else>>Your room after school, with the news on your phone, and the rail bridge the color of old photographs, and a reporter saying the two men inside it have been there since six and will be there, a PRT spokesperson estimates, for a little over a decade.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-i-bomb">>
#Go out. The Boardwalk, Lord Street, anywhere with a camera. That's where she'll want to be seen.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You go out in the costume at five, in daylight, because waiting for dark would be waiting for her.
#Stay in. You're one person and she has a hundred bombs. The PRT exists for this.
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You stay in until the first sound comes through the window, and then you're out the door before you've decided, because it was the Boardwalk, and you knew it would be.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
At five-forty the arcade goes.
There's no bang, only a sound like a held breath, and the arcade's front wall and the first ten feet inside it are the color of old photographs, and the kids at the machines nearest the door are stopped with their hands on the buttons, and will be for a while. The kids further back are screaming and climbing over each other to get away from the color, and the color isn't moving, and the back door is chained.
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel is off the roof before you are. She hits the back door with a fist of compressed air and the chain holds. "Chain's new," she says. "Somebody chained it today."<<set $kestrelHurt to true>><</if>>
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) The back door. Take it off.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 5>>\
The chain and the door and the frame all leave at once, and forty kids come through the hole, and the last one through is a girl of nine who isn't crying because she's past it, and you carry her to the planks. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel goes in for the ones at the back, and comes out with two, and goes in again, and the second time the color moves, an inch, and takes her left hand to the wrist. She looks at it. "Huh," she says, and sits down.<</if>>
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($power is "stranger") or ($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Inside. Past the color. Get them out one at a time.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You skip past the color and back with a kid each time, nine times, and the tenth time the nausea puts you on the planks and you stay there.<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>You go a second behind the world and walk through the color like it's weather, and bring them out one at a time, and each time you come back the color is an inch closer to where you were.<<else>>You stop being noticed, by the color too, apparently, and walk in and out with a kid each time until there's nobody at the back but the ones at the front, who aren't going anywhere.<</if>> <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel takes the back door off with her third try and comes in behind you, and the color moves, an inch, and takes her left hand to the wrist. She looks at it. "Huh," she says, and sits down on the planks.<</if>>
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($power is "master") or ($power is "blaster") or ($power is "thinker") or ($power is "jury") or ($power is "changer") or ($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte 20) Hold the crowd. Forty kids and a chained door is how people die without a bomb.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Stop," you say, to forty kids, and they stop, and "Back door, single file," and they go, and the ones who were going to be crushed against the chain aren't.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>You put a pane across the arcade between the color and the kids, and the color stops at the blue, and the kids stop pushing, and somebody outside gets the chain off with a bolt cutter from the bait shop.<<else>>You get in front of the crowd and you use the thing you do to be the loudest, biggest, most obvious thing in the room, and forty kids look at you instead of the color, and it's enough time to get the chain off from outside.<</if>> <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel goes in past you for the two at the front who could still be reached, and the color moves, an inch, and takes her left hand to the wrist. She looks at it. "Huh," she says, and sits down.<</if>>
#Call it in and keep people back. You're not a bomb squad.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($hasPhone is true)>>You call it in, and the voice on the line already knows, because it's the fourth one, and you keep the crowd off the color until the PRT comes forty minutes later.<<else>>You run to the bait shop and the man there calls, and you keep the crowd off the color until the PRT comes forty minutes later.<</if>> <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel doesn't wait forty minutes. She takes the chain off on her fourth try and goes in, and comes out with two, and goes in again, and the color moves, an inch, and takes her left hand to the wrist. "Huh," she says, and sits down on the planks.<</if>>
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $empireWar to true>>\
The Kessler yard at four has forty people in it, and none of them are grilling. Victor is on the porch with his folder. Rune is sitting on the hood of a car that hasn't moved in years. Krieg is there. Othala is there, in a cardigan, with a first aid kit. And standing in the middle of the yard with his shirt off, because that's how he stands, is a man you've seen on the news being described as a Brute and on the forums being described as a slaughterhouse.
Hookwolf.
"The chink tinker put two of ours in a bridge this morning," he says, to the yard. "Eleven years, the news says. I say we don't wait eleven years." Blades slide out of his forearms and back in, like a cat flexing. "Kaiser says we hold the line and let the heroes handle it. Kaiser's not here. I'm here."
Victor, from the porch, without looking up: "Kaiser says we hold the line, and Kaiser says it to you specifically, Brad."
"Kaiser can say it to my face Sunday." Hookwolf looks around the yard, and his eyes land on you, because you're new, and new is interesting. "<<if ($empireName isnot "")>>$empireName<<else>>You<</if>>. The one from Lord Street. You in?"
<<choose "ch4-e-strike">>
#"In what?"
<<var $control + 1>>\
"The ABB's got a noodle place on Fourth that pays her. Tonight it stops paying." He says it like a weather report. Victor says, "Brad," and Hookwolf says, "I heard you the first time," and the argument ends there.
#"Kaiser said hold the line. I'm with Kaiser."
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $empireHeldLine to true>>\
The yard goes quiet. Hookwolf smiles, and the smile is worse than the blades. "Kaiser's got a new pet," he says. "Fine. Pets stay home." Victor writes something in the folder, and later, on the porch, says, "That was the right answer. It's going to cost you with him. It was still the right answer."
#show-if ($body gte 4) [Body] Step up to him. Close enough to count the blades. Let the yard see you're not afraid of a Brute.
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<set $hookwolfRespect to true>>\
You walk up until there's a foot between you and a man who is a slaughterhouse, and you don't put your hands up, and you don't look at the blades, and Hookwolf looks down at you for a long count and then grins with all his teeth. "Okay," he says. "Okay. I like this one." Victor, on the porch, writes something, and underlines it.
#"In."
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<set $rodeWithHookwolf to true>>\
Hookwolf nods once, the whole of his welcome, and Rune slides off the car and says, "Great. Somebody new to watch him not die," and Victor doesn't look up from the folder, and you've just made a choice about who you are in this yard.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($rodeWithHookwolf is true)>>\
The noodle place on Fourth at six has its lights on and the owner at the counter and three ABB kids outside, and Hookwolf doesn't slow down. The kids go through the window. The owner goes behind the counter and stays there. Hookwolf stands in the middle of a restaurant with blades where his hands should be and says, "Tell her," to the owner, and the owner says yes, yes, to everything.
Then the arcade goes, four blocks south. A sound like a held breath. Hookwolf turns toward it with an expression you'll remember, and it's closer to appetite than to anger.
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#Go with him. Whatever's at the arcade, the Empire's going to be seen there first.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $empireAtArcade to true>>\
The arcade's front is the color of old photographs and forty kids are coming out the back where somebody's taken the door off, and Hookwolf walks up to the color and puts a blade into it, and the blade stops, and he leaves it there and grows another one. "Tell them who was here," he says, to the phones, and the phones were already filming.
#Stay. The owner's family is in the back and the kids are in the window and somebody has to not be him.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You get the kids out of the glass and the owner's wife out of the back and you leave the eagle on your sleeve unmentioned, and the owner looks at the eagle and at you and doesn't understand, and you don't either, yet.
<</choose>>\
<<else>>\
You're on the porch with Victor when the arcade goes, four blocks south of Fourth. A sound like a held breath. Victor closes the folder. "That's her," he says. "That's the schedule." He looks at you. "Kaiser will want to know who was first on the scene. It should be us. It shouldn't be Brad."
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#Go. Be the Empire cape who got the kids out, and let the phones see the eagle doing it.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $empireAtArcade to true>>\
The arcade's front is the color of old photographs and the back door is chained, and you take the chain off, and forty kids come through, and the phones get the eagle on your sleeve doing it, and tomorrow Kaiser will be pleased and you'll have to live with what that means.
#Go, and take the eagle off first. Kids first. The Empire can have the next one.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Victor watches you take the sleeve off and says nothing, and writes nothing, and you're not sure which is worse. The arcade's back door is chained and you take it off and forty kids come through, and nobody films an eagle, because there isn't one.
<</choose>>\
<</if>>\<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $abbWar to true>>\
Fourth and Lord at three-forty has forty people in it and nobody talking. Mai Vo is on the steps. Danny Trang is next to her with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. Oni Lee is on the roof of the pharmacy, a shape against the sky, and the shape has been there long enough that pigeons have landed near it.
She comes out of the pharmacy's back door in the lab coat and the goggles with the braid of wire over her shoulder, and she's carrying a clipboard, and she looks at the forty of you the way a teacher looks at a class that's going to be a long year.
"Here's the week," Bakuda says. "Sunday at six the PRT moves Lung to the airport. They go up Harbor Road. At six-fourteen they will not reach the interstate. Everyone in this lot has a job between now and then. Some of you will carry things. Some of you will stand where I tell you and be seen. One of you will drive." She looks at the clipboard. "Tonight is a demonstration. The city gets four of them. Nobody in this lot is in any of the four, because I like you all exactly as much as you're useful."
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>She looks at you. "And you. The insured one. You get to see the workshop. Congratulations. Don't touch anything, you're the one it would be a shame to lose."<<elseif ($abbHunted is true)>>She looks at you. "And you. The one who said no in front of six people. You get to see the workshop, because I'm curious what you'll say in front of one."<<else>>She looks at you. "New one. Workshop. Oni Lee says you're interesting. Oni Lee is wrong about most things."<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-a-workshop">>
#Go. Whatever the workshop is, knowing it is worth more than not.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Mai looks at you as you pass her on the steps, and Danny Trang says, under his breath, "Don't touch anything," like Bakuda didn't already.
#show-if ($bakudaBomb is false) "I'm not carrying her bombs. I stood with Lung. I didn't sign up for this."
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $abbRefused to true>>\
The lot goes quiet. Bakuda looks at you over the goggles, and then at Oni Lee on the roof, and then back. "Noted," she says, and writes something on the clipboard, and nothing else, and you've been moved from one list to another. "Workshop anyway. I want you to see what you're not carrying."
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "control">>\
<<set $sawWorkshop to true>>\
The workshop is the basement of a dry cleaner's on Fourth, and it is the most organized room you've ever been in. Shelves, labeled. Bins, labeled. A workbench with forty devices on it in a grid, each one with an index card. A whiteboard with a map of the Harbor Road and times on it to the second. A chair in the corner with restraints on it that she doesn't explain.
"Time dilation," Bakuda says, pointing. "Glass. Crystallization. Cold. Gravity, that one's not finished, don't stand near it. The one in the chair is for people who ask about the chair." She picks up a device the size of a thermos and turns it in her hands like a teacher with an apple. "Every one of these has a trigger. The trigger listens to this." She taps a thing on her belt that looks like a garage door opener. "If you've been paying attention, you've just learned the only thing in this room that matters, and so has the one on the roof, because he always listens."
<<if ($bakudaPart is true)>>On the bench, in the grid, there's a gap, and an index card with nothing on it but a question mark. You know what's missing. It's in a jacket under your bed.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#show-if (($tech gte 2) or ($capeLore gte 2) or ($power is "jury")) [Tech] Watch the belt, not the bombs. Learn the trigger.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $bakudaFreq to true>>\
You watch her hands when she sets a timer, and the thing on her belt has a dial, and the dial has eight positions, and she uses the third for the glass ones and the fifth for the cold, and she doesn't notice you noticing, or she does and doesn't care, because who would you tell. You'd tell someone. You've already decided who.
#Ask what the chair is for. She said not to.
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
She looks at you over the goggles. "The chair," she says, "is for people who ask about the chair." Oni Lee is behind you. You didn't hear him. His hand is on your shoulder, and then it's ash, and the real one is by the door, and she laughs, delighted. "Kidding. Mostly. Sit down anyway, I want to check your insurance." If you have one, she checks it. If you don't, she looks at the base of your skull with professional interest and says, "Later."
#show-if ($mind gte 4) [Mind] Correct her. The gravity one's wiring is wrong, and you can see why.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $bakudaRespect to true>>\
<<set $bakudaFreq to true>>\
She stops mid-sentence. She looks at the device, and at you, and at the device, and then she laughs, the real one, delighted. "Oh, you're //wasted// on him," she says, meaning Lung, and she shows you. The dial, the eight positions, the third for glass, the way the trigger listens. She shows you because nobody has ever been able to follow, and you can, and that's worth more to her than loyalty.
#Say nothing. Look at the forty devices in a grid and the chair and the index cards, and decide. This is insane, and you're getting out, and you're taking the ones with bombs in their necks with you.
<<set $abbDoubt to true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You don't say it. You look at the grid and think about the six kids against the wall on Monday and the bee sting, and you count. Danny Trang didn't want it. Mai didn't want it. Half the lot on Fourth didn't want it, and took it, because the chair was the other option. You walk out of the dry cleaner's basement having decided something, and Oni Lee on the stairs looks at you like he can see the shape of it.
#Say nothing. Memorize the map. Harbor Road, six-fourteen, the on-ramp.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $abbRouteKnown to true>>\
The whiteboard has the convoy route and the times and a circle around the on-ramp where Harbor Road meets the interstate, and under the circle, in her handwriting, //here//. You look at it long enough to have it and not long enough to be seen having it. When you leave, Oni Lee is on the stairs, and he looks at you, and then at the whiteboard, and then at you.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<set $metPanacea to true>>\
<<set $hospitalNight to true>>\
Brockton General at nine on Friday night is every chair full and a line out the ambulance bay and a girl in a white robe with a red cross on it moving down the line touching people, and every person she touches stands up straighter and looks at their own hands.
You're here because <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Brian needs eleven stitches in his side and refused to get them anywhere a Ward might be, and then Lisa pointed out that every Ward in the city is on Lord Street, and Brian said fine<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Aegis sent half the Wards here to hold the doors, because the people from the bus are in the basement in a room nobody's allowed into, and the families are in the lobby<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Victor said be seen helping, and the hospital is where the cameras are, and <<if ($rodeWithHookwolf is true)>>you needed to be somewhere Hookwolf wasn't<<else>>the noodle shop's kids came here in the back of an Empire car, and nobody in that car will repeat that sentence<</if>><<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>Mai's cousin was on the Lord Street bus, in the front third, the part that isn't glass, and Mai said come, and you came<<else>><<if ($kestrelHurt is true)>>Kestrel's left hand is the color of old photographs to the wrist and she walked here herself, carrying it like a parcel<<else>>you carried a nine-year-old here from the arcade and her mother hasn't let go of your sleeve since<</if>><</if>>.
<<if ($guardianName is "Mom")>>Your mother is on shift. She sees you across the lobby in the costume and her face does four things and settles on a fifth that's nothing, and she goes back to work, and you know you'll pay for that nothing at home.<</if>>
<<if ($gregTriggered is true)>><<if ($gregAlly is true)>>Greg Veder is in the waiting room in a hoodie with the hood up, and when he sees the mask he comes over fast and low and says, "I can't be in here. Every time I say something, people //do// it. I told a nurse to hurry and she ran." He's shaking. "Tell me what to do." He means it the old way, and it comes out the new way, and you feel yourself start to answer before you've decided to.<<else>>Greg Veder is at the lobby doors with his phone up, filming the line, and when a security guard tells him to stop he says, "Keep walking," and the guard keeps walking, and Greg watches him go with an expression you don't like.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>Greenlight is giving an interview by the ambulance bay, visor pushed up just enough to show a jaw, telling a camera about the arcade. $glHe wasn't at the arcade.<</if>>
Panacea reaches the end of the line and sees you. <<if ($panaceaHostage is true)>>She stops. She knows the mask. She knows the arm you held and the voice that told her not to. For a second the lobby is a bank. Then she says, flatly, "Are you hurt," and it's a question with nothing in it, and she'll heal you because that's what she does, and it would be the worst thing you've ever let someone do.<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>She knows the costume. She nods at it the way you'd nod at a colleague's car.<<else>>She doesn't know you. She looks at the mask with the expression of someone who's been looking at masks all night and would like to stop.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-hospital-2">>
#Ask her what she can do about the glass. Somebody has to ask.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Nothing," she says. "I do bodies. Those aren't bodies anymore, they're sculptures of bodies, and in eleven years they'll be bodies again and I'll do them then." She says it like she's said it forty times tonight. Then, quieter: "I tried. On the bus. I put my hand on the glass and there's nothing in it to talk to." She looks at her hand. "Don't tell anyone I tried."
#show-if ($injured is true) Ask her about the thing that didn't heal right. You've never asked anyone.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $injured to false>>\
<<set $maxStamina to $maxStamina + 20>>\
<<set $panaceaFavor to true>>\
She puts two fingers on your wrist without asking what it is, and her face goes still the way it does, and she says, "Scar tissue through the hip flexor. Who left this?" and you tell her nobody left it, it just didn't get looked at, and something in her jaw sets. "It's looked at," she says, and it is. You stand up and there's no catch in it. You've had the catch for months. You're not sure who you are without it.
#show-if ($deaf is true) Ask her about the ear. Quietly, so she can say no.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $deaf to false>>\
<<set $panaceaFavor to true>>\
She looks at the side of your head. "I don't do brains," she says. "Ears aren't brains." Two fingers under the mask's edge, behind the ear, and the room gets loud. Not louder. Loud, in a way it hasn't been since the worst day, with the line and the monitors and a child crying three rooms away, and you put a hand on the wall. "You'll hate it for a week," she says. "Then you won't."
#show-if ($panaceaHostage is true) "I'm not hurt. I wanted to say I'm sorry about the bank. That's all."
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $panaceaApology to true>>\
She looks at you. "You held my arm," she says. "You said nobody gets hurt." She looks down the line. "Nobody got hurt. In the bank." She goes to the next person. She doesn't say anything else. She's keeping it. Panacea keeps everything.
#show-if ($nerve gte 4) [Nerve] Go down to the basement room nobody's allowed into. Look at the glass.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $sawGlassRoom to true>>\
There's a trooper on the door and he lets you past because you walk like someone who's allowed, and inside there are twelve people on gurneys who are shining, and one of them is a woman with her hand up at a window that isn't there anymore, and you look at every face, because somebody should, and when you come up Panacea sees it on you and says, "Yeah," and nothing else.
#Leave her alone. She's done forty people and has forty to go.
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You step out of the line and she goes past you to the next one, and doesn't look back, and one of you has done the other a kindness, and you're not sure which.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
Brian comes out of the back with eleven stitches and a lollipop he didn't ask for, and Lisa is on the phone again by the vending machines, and when she hangs up she comes over with her face arranged.
"The boss has an offer," she says. "He has people. Professionals. He'll put them at our disposal Sunday morning, at the on-ramp, if we're there too. He'd like Lung on his way to the Birdcage and he'd like Bakuda not to have a Sunday." She looks at Brian's stitches. "Or we go to the parents' houses and sit on the porches with the dogs and wait for the bombs that may not be there. Or we leave town. I'm listing everything. I list everything when I'm scared."
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor says, "My dad's at the union hall tonight," and nothing else, and Rachel, who came, and nobody expected her to, says, "I'll put a dog on his street," and Taylor looks at her like she's never seen her before.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
Aegis finds you by the doors at eleven with his clipboard under his arm instead of in his hand, so something is wrong with the clipboard. "Convoy's confirmed," he says. "Six a.m., Harbor Road to the interstate. Protectorate escort, full. The Director wants the Wards nowhere near it." He looks at the line. "I've been a Ward four years. I've never been told nowhere near. It means they think it's going to go badly." <<if ($stalkerHunt is true)>>"Also, Shadow Stalker's not answering her phone, and she was with you. Where is she." You tell him about the six addresses. He gets the look he gets when something is going to be in a report.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
Victor finds you by the ambulance bay at eleven, and he's not writing anything, and that's how you know it's bad. "Hookwolf's going to the on-ramp Sunday," he says. "He wants Lung on the road, where the PRT can't protect him, and he doesn't care who's standing next to Lung when it happens. Kaiser has told him no. Kaiser is in a car on the way to tell him no again, in person." He looks at you. "Kaiser wants you on the hospital steps Sunday morning in colors. Visible, helping, nowhere near Harbor Road. That's an order, and it's also a kindness, and you should notice the second part."
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
Mai finds you by the vending machines at eleven with her cousin's blood on her sleeve and her face closed. "She gave out the jobs," she says. "You've got one." She hands you a folded index card. It says a time, and //Harbor Road, the on-ramp//, and one word in Bakuda's handwriting: //DRIVE//. "There's a truck," Mai says. "It'll be where she says. You get in it at five-forty and you drive it to where she says and you get out and walk away and you don't look back." She doesn't look at you. "That's the whole job. I asked her what's in the truck. She said that's the kind of question the chair is for."
<<else>>\
<<if ($kestrelHurt is true)>>Kestrel comes out of the back at eleven with her left hand in a sling and the color of old photographs to the wrist, and the doctor behind her saying something about eleven years, and she says, "I heard him," and sits down next to you with the hand in her lap. "I've got the other one," she says. "I do most things with the other one." It's a lie and you both let it be one.<<else>>The mother of the nine-year-old finally lets go of your sleeve at eleven, when the kid falls asleep across two chairs, and says, "What do I call you," and you tell her, and she says it back wrong, and you let her.<</if>>
<<if ($indConvoyGuess is true)>>You keep thinking about the convoy. Six a.m., Harbor Road, Lung in a truck and a tinker with a hundred and forty bombs who wants him out of it. Nobody's going to ask an independent to be there. That's not the same as nobody needing one.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>In the corner of the waiting room a clock on the wall says a time that's four minutes behind the one on your phone, and the woman under it, in a bathrobe, with her shoes in her hand, is watching you, and when you look back she isn't there, and nobody in the row of chairs moves to fill the space.<</if>>
<<page "Saturday" "ch4-saturday">><<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
<<if ($job isnot "")>><<set $money to $money + 60>><</if>>\
Saturday. Four places in the city are the color of old photographs and the news has stopped calling any of them a gas main. The PRT has a statement. The statement uses the word //contained// and nobody believes it, and the Mayor has asked people to stay home, and people are staying home, and the city is holding still.
<<if ($job isnot "")>>The sports store is open anyway, and you work the shift because the manager would notice if you didn't, and he pays you sixty dollars and says, "Stay off Harbor Road tomorrow," without looking up, and you don't ask how he knows to say it.<</if>>
<<if ($indebted is true)>>There's an envelope under the door with no stamp on it. Inside, a page from a ledger, your name, the number, and a date: //May 1//. Hollis doesn't take bomb weekends off.<</if>>
Lung's transfer is tomorrow at six. Everybody who matters in this city knows it, and everybody who matters has decided what to do about it, and now it's your turn.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
<<choose "ch4-sat-night">>
#Take the boss's offer. The on-ramp at six, with professionals, and put Bakuda in the ground before she puts the city there.
<<set $sundayPlan to "coil">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Lisa makes the call with her eyes shut. When she opens them she says, "Grey van, five-thirty, the loft. They'll have gear. Don't ask the man with the pen anything." <<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>You know which man she means.<</if>>
#Do what Bakuda said. Be at the on-ramp as hers. Get close enough to her to end it from the inside.
<<set $sundayPlan to "inside">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Lisa looks at you with her mouth open a little. "That's either the bravest thing I've heard this week or you're going to get us all killed, and my power says both, and it never says both." Brian says no. Rachel says the dogs don't work for the ABB. Alec says, "I mean, it's a plan," and the vote is taken.
#show-if ($tattletaleNumber is true or $metUndersiders is true) Call it in. Anonymously, with everything Lisa knows, to the PRT. Let the heroes have the on-ramp.
<<set $sundayPlan to "tip">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
Lisa makes the call from a payphone in a voice that isn't hers, and gives them the on-ramp and the time and the word //glass//, and hangs up, and says, "They'll believe about a third of it. A third might be enough." Brian says the boss is going to be unhappy. Lisa says the boss can be unhappy at a safe distance, for once.
#Sit it out. Porches, dogs, parents. Let Sunday be someone else's.
<<set $sundayPlan to "porch">>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $taylorTrust + 5>>\
<<var $rom_rachel + 5>>\
Rachel puts Brutus on Brian's sister's street and Judas on the Heberts' and sits on a stoop herself with Angelica, and nobody argues with her, and the Undersiders spend Saturday night being the most heavily guarded block in the Docks.
<</choose>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
<<choose "ch4-sat-night">>
#show-if (($wardsConvoyAsk is true) or ($heroRep gte 45)) Ask Armsmaster to put you on the convoy. The Director said nowhere near. He can say otherwise.
<<set $sundayPlan to "convoy">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He takes twelve seconds. "Rear vehicle. You don't leave it unless I say. If I say, you do what I say before you've finished hearing it." He goes. Aegis, who heard, says, "He's never done that," and doesn't say whether it's good.
#show-if ($stalkerHunt is true) Go with Shadow Stalker. Six addresses, and she's going to hit them with or without you.
<<set $sundayPlan to "stalker">>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 10>>\
She picks you up at midnight on the roof of the PRT garage, a roof she's not supposed to be able to get onto. "Four of the six are nothing," she says. "The fifth one's a dry cleaner on Fourth with a basement. That's her." She doesn't ask if you're coming, because you already are.
#Take the city. Paired patrol, the bombs that go off while everyone's looking at the convoy.
<<set $sundayPlan to "city">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Aegis pairs you with Browbeat, who is brave, and gives you the Boardwalk, and says, "If something goes the color of a photograph, you back up. That's the whole order."
#Console. Vista's going to need the second headset more tomorrow than any day in her life.
<<set $sundayPlan to "console">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Vista looks at you when you say it, and nods, and goes back to the board, and that nod is going to carry you through Sunday.
<</choose>>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
<<choose "ch4-sat-night">>
#Do what Kaiser said. The hospital steps at six, in colors, visible, helping.
<<set $sundayPlan to "steps">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Victor nods when you say it, and for once writes nothing. "Good," he says. "Be where the cameras are. Let Brad be where the blades are."
#Ride with Hookwolf. The on-ramp, Lung on the road, and whatever he's going to do to whoever's standing next to Lung.
<<set $sundayPlan to "hookwolf">>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Hookwolf laughs when you turn up at the yard at four in the morning. "Kaiser's pet," he says. "Okay. Stay behind me and don't get on the blades." Rune is there too, and she looks at you like she's rewriting something. Cricket is there. Stormtiger is there. Nobody says Kaiser's name.
#Tell Victor everything Hookwolf said, and where he'll be, and let Kaiser decide what the Empire does about its own.
<<set $sundayPlan to "warn">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $warnedKaiser to true>>\
Victor listens without writing, so it's going straight up. "Kaiser will be at the on-ramp," he says, at the end. "Not for Lung. For Brad." He looks at you. "You've just chosen a side inside the side. I hope you meant to."
#Go to the on-ramp yourself, with no colors on. Whatever happens there, somebody who isn't the Empire or the ABB should see it.
<<set $sundayPlan to "alone">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
You take the eagle off the sleeve with two snaps and leave it in the drawer, and tomorrow you'll find out whether anyone can tell the difference.
<</choose>>
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
<<choose "ch4-sat-night">>
#Drive the truck. Do the job. Find out what's in it when she's not looking.
<<set $sundayPlan to "drive">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The index card goes in your pocket. Mai says, "Five-forty," one more time, and then, lower, "Don't look in the back," which is the first time she's told you not to do something she wanted you to do.
#show-if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($abbRouteKnown is true)) Go to the PRT tonight. The route, the time, the trigger. Trade it for your family and whatever's in your skull.
<<set $sundayPlan to "defect">>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 20>>\
<<set $abbDefected to true>>\
The PRT building at midnight takes you in through a side door, and a woman who isn't a trooper listens to everything, and when you say //eight positions, the third for glass// she stops writing and picks up a phone. <<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>They put you in a room with a Tinker from Boston who looks at the base of your skull and says, "Not tonight. Tonight it stays in. Tomorrow we'll have her remote."<</if>>
#Drive the truck, and don't drive it where she says.
<<set $sundayPlan to "sabotage">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You spend Saturday night learning Harbor Road on foot, every turn before the on-ramp, and where a truck could go instead that nobody would be standing near, and whether a truck full of whatever it's full of would still be a truck when it got there.
#show-if (($abbDoubt is true) or ($abbRefused is true)) Walk away from her job. Spend Saturday finding out which of the forty are only here because of their necks.
<<set $sundayPlan to "count">>\
<<set $abbRoster to true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
You spend Saturday on Fourth Street with a notebook and no mask asking a question nobody's asked: did you want this. Thirty-one of forty say no, in the ways people say no when there's a bomb in the answer. Nine say yes and mean it. Mai watches you do it from the steps and says, at the end, "What are you going to do with that," and you say you don't know yet, and she says, "Know by Monday."
#show-if ($abbRefused is true) Run. Tonight. Whatever she does to the people who run, it's Sunday's problem.
<<set $sundayPlan to "run">>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You get as far as the Boardwalk with a bag before you turn around, because the people on the list after you are Mai and Danny, and you were never going to make it past the bus station, and you knew that when you packed.
<</choose>>
<<else>>\
<<choose "ch4-sat-night">>
#show-if (($ulFriend is true) or (($ulMember is true) and ($ulBakuda is false))) Get Uber and Leet out of the cannery before six. Bakuda has them, and Leet texted you not to come.
<<set $sundayPlan to "ul">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
The text said //the old cannery, 4th and the water. she's got us. don't come.// and then, forty seconds later, //(come)//. You're going.
#show-if (($ulMember is true) and ($ulBakuda is true)) Do her job with the team. The on-ramp at six, Leet's device, and whatever "work once" turns out to mean.
<<set $sundayPlan to "ulbakuda">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
Leet doesn't sleep. He builds the thing on the garage floor with his hands shaking, and Uber sits on the workbench and reads him the specs in a calm voice, and at four in the morning Uber looks at you and says, "If this goes wrong, you run. He won't. Somebody has to."
#Be at the on-ramp at six. Nobody asked. Nobody's going to.
<<set $sundayPlan to "onramp">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel says, "Above you," and the two words are more plan than you had.<<else>>You set an alarm for four-thirty and don't sleep anyway.<</if>>
#show-if ($connected is true or $indConvoyGuess is true) Warn the PRT. Tell them everything you've worked out and let them be the ones at the on-ramp.
<<set $sundayPlan to "warnprt">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($connected is true)>>The woman on the front desk who owes your family listens to all of it and says, "They know. They're going anyway. Thank you for the part they didn't know," and you don't know which part that was.<<else>>A tired voice logs it, and says it's noted, and you hear in the voice that it's been noted forty times today.<</if>>
#Stay with the people who need it. <<if ($kestrelHurt is true)>>Kestrel's got one hand.<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>Taylor's dad is at the union hall and the union hall has had three bricks.<<else>>The arcade kids' families are still at the hospital.<</if>> The convoy has the Protectorate.
<<set $sundayPlan to "stay">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($kestrelHurt is true)>><<var $rom_kestrel + 10>>Kestrel says you're an idiot and doesn't move her good hand away from yours on the roof, and that's Saturday night.<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>><<var $taylorTrust + 10>><<var $rom_taylor + 5>>You sit on the union hall's step with Taylor until two in the morning with a swarm in the street and nothing comes, and that's Saturday night.<<else>>You sit in a hospital lobby until two in the morning and nothing comes, and that's Saturday night.<</if>>
<</choose>>
<</if>>\<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
Saturday night. The city has decided what it's doing tomorrow and gone quiet about it. There's an hour of it left that's yours.
<<if (($ulFriend is true) or (($ulMember is true) and ($ulBakuda is false)))>>Your phone has two texts from Leet, forty seconds apart. //the old cannery, 4th and the water. she's got us. don't come.// And then: //(come)//<</if>>
<<if (($fan is true) and ($gregTriggered is false))>>Your phone has a text from a number you don't have saved. //it's greg. i know it's you. i won't say anything. are you going to be ok tomorrow. you don't have to answer.// You don't answer it, and you read it twice.<</if>>
<<page "Go out. One more walk before the city changes." "patrol-sat">>
<<page "Train" "ch4-train">>
<<page "Sleep, if you can" "ch4-sunday">><<set $trainReturn to "ch4-sunday">>\
<<set $trainPts to 1>>\
<<include "training">>/* Patrol entry point. Sets where "Head home" returns to (ch4-sat-night (Arc 4, Saturday)) and which night it is, then runs patrol-hub. */\
<<set $patrolReturn to "ch4-sunday">>\
<<set $patrolNight to "Saturday">>\
<<include "patrol-hub">>/* Sunday dispatcher. $sundayPlan was chosen on Saturday; it picks which Sunday passage is included here. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
<<if (($sundayPlan is "coil") or ($sundayPlan is "ulbakuda") or ($sundayPlan is "inside") or ($sundayPlan is "onramp") or ($sundayPlan is "convoy") or ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf") or ($sundayPlan is "warn") or ($sundayPlan is "alone") or ($sundayPlan is "drive") or ($sundayPlan is "sabotage"))>>\
<<include "ch4-onramp">>\
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "stalker")>>\
<<include "ch4-workshop-raid">>\
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "ul")>>\
<<include "ch4-ul-rescue">>\
<<else>>\
<<include "ch4-away">>\
<</if>>\/* Arc 4, Bakuda on the on-ramp. The options here redirect into ch4-bakuda-choice. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<set $atOnramp to true>>\
Sunday, five-fifty. Harbor Road runs along the water for two miles and then climbs to the interstate on a ramp with a concrete overpass across it, and at five-fifty the ramp is empty and the overpass is not.
<<if ($sundayPlan is "coil")>>You're in the back of a grey van two hundred yards short of the ramp with four men in grey armor who haven't said their names and Lisa, who hasn't stopped talking, and Brian, and Rachel with three dogs the size of cars. <<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>Ledger is in the passenger seat with his pen. "Good morning," he said, when you got in, and nothing since.<</if>> The man with the rifle says, "Overpass. Six. Two cars. One's hers."
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "inside")>>You're on the overpass with the ABB. Oni Lee is three feet to your left, and the pigeons have learned not to land near him. Bakuda is in a car at the far end with the window down and the garage-door opener in her hand, and she looked at you once when you arrived and said, "Interesting," and that was all. Thirty feet below, the ramp. Behind you, in the ABB's cars, forty people who'd rather be anywhere, and a truck with its engine running.
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "drive")>>You're in the truck. You got in it at five-forty where she said, and the keys were in it, and the back is sealed and humming in a way trucks don't, and the index card says to stop it across the ramp at six-eleven and walk away. The hum is the whole truck. You've worked out what the truck is. <<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>At the base of your skull, nothing happens, very carefully.<</if>>
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "sabotage")>>You're in the truck, and the truck is humming, and you've worked out what the truck is, and you've worked out where Harbor Road meets the water with nothing between the road and the harbor but a guardrail you measured last night. The index card says six-eleven. Your watch says six-nine.
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "ulbakuda")>>You're on the overpass with Uber and Leet and a thing the size of a washing machine that Leet built on a garage floor in thirty hours. Bakuda is in a car at the far end. Leet hasn't looked up from the thing since you arrived. Uber is standing between him and the ABB's forty people like a man who's decided where he's going to stand for the rest of his life, however long that is. "It works once," Leet says, to the thing, not to you. "It always works once."
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>>You're in the back of a pickup with Hookwolf standing in the bed like a figurehead and Cricket and Stormtiger and Rune, and Rune has four manhole covers floating around the truck like moons, and nobody has said Kaiser's name in two hours. Hookwolf is watching the overpass with his mouth open a little. "There," he says. "That's her. And the chink teleporter. And in that truck, the dragon." He grins. "Everybody I want in one place."
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "warn")>>You're standing on the shoulder of Harbor Road at five-fifty next to a man in a suit made of blades who arrived in a car with tinted windows and said, "You did the right thing. Now watch me do the necessary one," and has said nothing since. Kaiser. Krieg is behind him. Fenja and Menja are behind Krieg, and they are already twelve feet tall. A pickup is coming up Harbor Road from the south with a man standing in the bed.
<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "convoy")>>You're in the rear vehicle of the convoy, an armored PRT truck with four troopers and Dauntless, who has not spoken to you and is holding a spear that's humming. Ahead of you, three more trucks, and in the middle one, in a box that took six Tinkers to build, Lung. Armsmaster's voice on the radio says, "Overpass, two cars, confirm," and Miss Militia's says, "Confirmed," and the convoy doesn't slow down.
<<else>>You're on the roof of a bait shop at the bottom of the ramp, the only thing with a view of the overpass that isn't the overpass. <<if (($metKestrel is true) and ($sundayPlan is "onramp"))>>Kestrel is on the roof of the shop next door with one hand, because she said above you, and she meant it.<</if>> <<if ($sundayPlan is "alone")>>There's no eagle on your sleeve. You keep touching the place where it was.<</if>> Nobody asked you to be here, and nobody's going to.<</if>>
<<if (($ulEnemy is true) and ($sundayPlan isnot "ulbakuda"))>>There's a drone over the overpass with a camera on it, and under it, next to Bakuda's car, a man in a blue jumpsuit and a man in a green one. Uber and Leet are streaming this. They took her money after you took their stream apart on Tuesday, and they're looking at the ramp for you.
<</if>>\
At six-eleven a truck comes up Harbor Road and stops across the ramp. At six-twelve the convoy comes around the bend. At six-thirteen the truck's driver <<if (($sundayPlan is "drive") or ($sundayPlan is "sabotage"))>>is you<<else>>gets out and walks away, fast, and doesn't look back<</if>>.
At six-fourteen Bakuda presses the button, and the ramp holds its breath.
<<if ($relayDown is true)>>Nothing happens. She presses it again. Nothing happens again. On the overpass, through the goggles, she looks at the garage-door opener like it's lied to her.<<else>>The overpass goes first: the glass bombs under it, so that the convoy's path is a tunnel of the color of old photographs. Then the lead truck, which stops like it's hit a wall, because the air in front of it has. Then Oni Lee, in the air above the middle truck with a grenade in each hand, and then four of him.<</if>>
<<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>>Hookwolf goes over the side of the pickup before it stops, and he isn't a man by the time he lands.<</if>><<if ($sundayPlan is "warn")>>Kaiser says, "Now," and the road grows blades across the pickup's path, and Hookwolf goes over the side of it anyway.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-convoy-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and get to the middle truck. Whatever they do to it, be on the door.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truck">>\
You hit the ramp running and the middle truck's rear door at a run, and you put your back against it, and the first grenade goes off against your chest and does something cold, and the second does something that makes the world go the color of a photograph for ten feet around you, and you're inside it, dense, holding a door shut with a man on the other side of it who's starting to be a dragon.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The grenade's cold goes into the density and stops at the bone, and you have a lot of bone.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip to the overpass. Skip to her. Take the remote out of her hand. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
Three skips and you're in the car with her, and she looks at you over the goggles with more interest than fear, and you take the garage-door opener out of her hand, and Oni Lee is in the back seat with a knife. You skip again with the remote and leave the knife where it was, and the fourth skip puts you on your knees on the ramp, sick, with the only thing in the city that matters in your fist.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Three skips become two, and the nausea waits until after.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Panes. Over the convoy, between the trucks and the overpass, as many as you have.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You put the air over the convoy in blue, pane after pane, and the grenades go off against blue and make blue the color of a photograph, and under it the troopers get out of the lead truck alive, and Miss Militia, from the second truck, looks up at your panes and then at you on the roof, and nods, once, with a rifle she's changing into something bigger.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The panes go up in a row like a thought, and the grenades make them the color of old photographs, and they hold anyway.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Walk through the glass to the overpass. Be behind her when you come back. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
You go a second behind the world and walk up the ramp through the color like it's weather, and up the embankment, and along the overpass past four Oni Lees who don't see you, and when you come back you're in the back seat of her car with your hands on the headrest, and she says, without turning around, "Oh, that's unfair."
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You stay out through the whole walk and come back with your name, because you've done this with worse than glass around you.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop." To the overpass. To all of them. With everything you have.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "oni">>\
Four Oni Lees stop in the air, and fall, and three of them are ash before they land, and the fourth lands badly and doesn't get up fast, and Bakuda, in the car, presses the button again, and the button does what buttons do, and you've bought the convoy nine seconds, and nine seconds is what Armsmaster needed.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> Four Oni Lees stop, and so does the one in the car, for a breath, and the breath is enough.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The radio. You've been counting his clicks for two days. Give the count to Armsmaster. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "oni">>\
You get the PRT channel with the radio you built and say "Left, two, left, high" a quarter second before each Oni Lee, and after the third one Armsmaster's voice says, "Who is this," and after the fourth it says, "Keep going," and the halberd takes the fifth Oni Lee out of the air before he's finished being there.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The radio's count is a quarter second early now, because you tuned it on Saturday, and a quarter second is a halberd's width.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge everything in your pockets. The car on the overpass has a window down. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
Three coins through the open window, and the car's dashboard, and the hand holding the remote, and Bakuda screams, a sound you didn't know she had, and the remote goes out of the window and down onto the ramp, and Oni Lee goes for it, and so does everyone else.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> Three coins in the air at once, each charged to a different count, so they arrive together.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Three seconds ahead. Find where the glass isn't going to be, and put the convoy there.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You're on the PRT channel with a stolen handset saying "Reverse, left, stop, stop, now," and three trucks of the Protectorate do what a fifteen-year-old says because the fifteen-year-old is right every time, and the glass goes off in a tunnel of air with nobody in it, and Armsmaster says, "Who is this," and you tell him.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and the Protectorate's drivers start trusting the voice on the second word.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The overpass. Concrete has seams. Bring it down between her and the ramp. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
You get a hand on the overpass's pier and the pier remembers it was poured in 1971 by the lowest bidder, and the overpass comes down in the middle with her car on the wrong side of the gap and the ramp on the right one, and the remote's signal goes through forty tons of concrete worse than it went through air.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> You find the 1971 pour's worst seam with your eyes before your hand confirms it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. The other body can hold a truck door shut while a dragon pushes.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truck">>\
The grey body puts its shoulder against the middle truck's door and holds, and inside the box something is getting bigger and hotter and angrier, and the door gets hot, and the grey body doesn't care, and Armsmaster, on the other side of the glass, watches a thing with no face hold Lung in a box with its back.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is the size of the door now, and the dragon inside pushes and finds a wall.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on Oni Lee. Catch what he is, and go up the overpass as him. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
The fourth Oni Lee lands next to you and you touch him before he's ash, and the clock starts, and by the third minute there's a candle's worth of being somewhere else, and you spend it being in her car, and by the ninth you're leaving copies of yourself all over the overpass and she's shooting the wrong ones.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> The clock runs hot in you, and by the fourth minute you're as fast as he is.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Nobody's looking at the bait shop. Walk up the embankment and take the remote. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
You walk up the embankment while everyone in the city looks at Oni Lee, and open her car door, and she says, "What," and you take the garage-door opener out of her hand the way you'd take a phone from a kid, and walk away, and she's still saying "What" when Oni Lee realizes.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> She's looking straight at the door you came through and sees a car with nobody in it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "ulbakuda") Break Leet's thing before it works once. He'll hate you. He'll be alive to.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
<<set $ulSaved to true>>\
You put your hand through the thing's housing while Leet is looking at Bakuda, and whatever it was going to do once, it does nothing instead, and Leet makes a sound you'll remember. Bakuda looks at the dead machine and at you and says, "Well, that's a refund," and Uber picks Leet up under one arm and runs, and you run with them, and behind you the ramp goes the color of old photographs around a convoy that had thirty extra seconds because of a washing machine that didn't work.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "ulbakuda") Let it work once. See what Leet built.
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truck">>\
<<set $ulBakudaDone to true>>\
It works once. It's a teleporter, and it moves the middle truck of the convoy forty feet sideways into the harbor wall, and the truck opens like a can, and for one second Leet looks like a man who built something that worked. Then the thing catches fire, the way his things do, and Uber is already pulling him away from it, and what's in the truck is standing up.
#show-if (($ulEnemy is true) and ($sundayPlan isnot "ulbakuda")) Take the drone down. Uber and Leet are streaming a bombing, and the stream is how she's aiming.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You put the drone in the harbor with whatever you've got, and on the overpass Leet shouts something about a four-thousand-dollar gimbal, and Uber, who is a Thinker who's briefly expert at anything, looks at the ramp without the drone's eye and decides he isn't expert at this, and takes Leet by the collar, and they leave Bakuda with one fewer camera and no lock on the lead truck.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "inside") Push Oni Lee off the overpass. You're three feet away and he trusts the ABB.
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "oni">>\
<<set $abbBetrayed to true>>\
He goes over the rail because nobody has ever done that to him, and he's ash before he lands and the real one is behind you with a knife in your side, and you'll pay that, because the four of him that were going to be over the convoy aren't, and Bakuda is looking at you through the goggles like you've broken a rule she wrote.
#show-if (($sundayPlan is "inside") or ($sundayPlan is "drive")) Do the job. Open the truck. Let Lung out. -> "ch4-lung-choice"
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "free">>\
<<set $lungFree to true>>\
<<achieve "Lung Walks">>\
You get the middle truck's door open while the Protectorate is looking up at Oni Lee, and inside the box is a man who's already not a man, and he looks at you with eyes that are turning, and says your cape name, and you've never told it to him. Then he's through the roof.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "sabotage") Don't stop at the ramp. Floor it. Harbor Road, the guardrail, the water.
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 30>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truckbomb">>\
<<set $truckSunk to true>>\
<<achieve "Drive">>\
You go past the ramp at sixty with the hum building and the guardrail you measured coming up, and you open the door at the last second, and the truck goes through the rail and the harbor takes it, and the harbor goes the color of old photographs for a hundred yards, and you're in the gravel with your arm wrong, and that was the big one, and it's in the water.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf") Follow Hookwolf in. Lung's in a box, and Hookwolf's going to open it. -> "ch4-lung-choice"
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "hookwolf">>\
<<set $hookwolfFought to true>>\
Hookwolf goes through two troopers and a Protectorate hero to get to the box, and tears the door off it, and inside is a dragon, and the dragon stands up, and the two of them go through the side of the truck together, and the Protectorate stops fighting the ABB to fight that.
#show-if (($sundayPlan is "warn") or ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")) Stop Hookwolf. Whatever you've got, put it between him and the box.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $health - 30>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truck">>\
<<set $hookwolfFought to true>>\
You get between a thing made of blades and the truck, and the thing made of blades doesn't slow down, and you hold anyway, long enough for Kaiser's steel to come up through the ramp around him, and for Armsmaster to arrive, and for Hookwolf to decide that today isn't the day.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "coil") The men in grey have orders about the box. Let them carry them out. -> "ch4-lung-choice"
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "coil">>\
The man with the rifle says, "Box," into his collar, and the four of them move down the ramp in a line that doesn't care about the glass, and you move with them, and Lisa says your name once and then stops, because she's done the math and the math says they're going to open it either way.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "coil") Get between the men in grey and the box. Whatever the boss paid for, it wasn't that.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "truck">>\
<<set $coilCrossed to true>>\
You put yourself on the truck's door with the thing you do and the man with the rifle looks at you through a sight for one long second and then lowers it, because shooting the boss's new hire on an on-ramp in front of the Protectorate is a different kind of expensive. "Noted," he says, and it's the worst word anyone's said to you this week.
#Get to the people in the glass. The lead truck. The troopers. That's the job nobody up there is doing.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You get the lead truck's rear door open from the side the color hasn't reached, and three troopers come out of it, and the fourth is in the glass to the waist and looks at you and says, "Go," and you go, with the three, and you're going to keep seeing him.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. The lead truck's door, with your hands.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You tear the lead truck's rear door off its hinges from the side the color hasn't reached, and three troopers come out, and the fourth says go.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Up the overpass pier, hand over hand, to the car.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You're up the pier and over the rail while everyone watches the sky, and the remote is in her hand, and then it isn't.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The convoy's channel and the timing.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You've got the PRT's channel on a stolen handset and you've watched her timers for two days, and "Reverse now" is the right two words at the right second.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. The ABB's forty people on the overpass are kids. Talk to the kids.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You tell them what the chair in the workshop is for, in the words Mai would use, and six of them leave, and then twenty, and Bakuda has an overpass with nobody on it.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Walk into the glass for the trooper.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "people">>\
You walk into the color to the waist and get your hands under his arms and pull, and the color lets go of him an inch at a time, and you don't stop.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>Up the pier by hand, over the rail, into the car, and the door comes with you.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body goes up the embankment like weather and the ABB's forty people get out of its way.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>One skip, into her car, and the remote is yours before the seat has finished taking your weight.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>She's looking at you and doesn't see you, and the remote is in your hand before Oni Lee looks.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The rail, the car door, her grip: three seams, one touch each.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The radio jams her band for nine seconds, and you walk up the embankment in those nine.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>You know where every Oni Lee will be and are never there, all the way to her door.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A coin through the remote's antenna from the ramp, and then a second through the one in the back seat's hand.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Give it to me," and she does, from forty feet, and looks at her own hand afterward.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>Oni Lee's copies are yours now, four of you on the overpass, and she's shooting the wrong ones.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You walk up through the glass and into the car and come back solid with your hand on hers.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane under her car, and lift, and the car is twelve feet in the air with the door open.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Overlay and Skip. Five seconds ahead, and skip into her car before the thumb moves. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You see her thumb move five seconds before it moves and you're in the back seat of her car four seconds before it moves, and the remote is in your hand one second before, and Bakuda looks at her empty hand with the goggles up and says, "Oh, that's //rude//."
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Pane and Shatterpoint. Box her car, and crack the overpass under the box. -> "ch4-bakuda-choice"
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $convoyAct to "bakuda">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The car goes into a box of blue and the overpass under the box remembers 1971, and the box and the car and Bakuda inside it come down onto the ramp in a cube that doesn't break, and lands upright, and she's sitting in it with the remote looking at a kid through four walls she can't press a button through.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>><<set $health to 1>><</if>>\
<<set $sundayDone to true>>\
<<if ($convoyAct is "bakuda")>>\
<<if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true) or ($control gte 3))>>\
<<set $bakudaCaught to true>>\
<<achieve "The Remote">>\
You know the remote. You've held the heart of one of her bombs, or watched her hands on the dial, or you've simply spent enough nights learning your own power to know what a trigger looks like when it's in your fist. Third position, glass. You turn it to the eighth, the one that's nothing, and hold it there, and on the overpass Bakuda presses a button that no longer goes anywhere, and Oni Lee looks at her, and the Protectorate comes up the embankment.
She doesn't run. She stands by her car with the goggles up and says, to Armsmaster, "I want it on record that the fire escape was the real crime," and he puts her in restraints that took six Tinkers to build.
<<else>>\
<<set $remoteLost to true>>\
You've got the remote and no idea what it does, and she knows that, and she's gone before you've found the dial, down the far side of the overpass in a car with Oni Lee driving, and the Protectorate goes after the car and loses it on the interstate. But the remote is in your hand and not hers, and at six-twenty the four devices she'd set for the city don't go off, and the city doesn't know what it was spared, and you do.
<</if>>\
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "oni")>>\
<<set $oniLeeHurt to true>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
Oni Lee doesn't make it back to the car. Armsmaster's halberd finds the real one on the third try and he goes down on the ramp with a hole in his shoulder that bleeds like a person's, and Bakuda watches that from the overpass for one second and then drives. At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, and the PRT holds the convoy, and Lung goes to the airport in a box, and Oni Lee goes to the hospital in restraints, and you were the reason for one of those.
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "truck")>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
The truck holds. It holds because you were on it, and because Armsmaster was, and because whatever Lung had become inside the box ran out of air before it ran out of anger. Bakuda drives when she sees the door isn't going to open. At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, and Lung goes to the airport, and the Birdcage, and nobody in this city will ever see him again, and a man made of blades is standing on the overpass watching the convoy go with an expression you'll remember.
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "people")>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
<<achieve "Held Breath">>\
You get people out. That's the whole of what you do on the ramp, and it's eleven people, and three of them are Protectorate, and one of them is a trooper who was in the glass to the waist and isn't now because you found the seam. Bakuda drives when the convoy doesn't stop. At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, and Lung goes to the airport, and Miss Militia finds you on the ramp afterward and says your cape name like she's known it for years, and asks if you're hurt, twice.
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "free")>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
Lung comes through the roof of the truck as something with wings, and the Protectorate stops being a convoy and starts being six people fighting a dragon on an on-ramp, and in that, nobody is watching the ABB, and the ABB leaves. Bakuda drives past you with the window down and says, "Good job," like a teacher. Lung goes north over the water and doesn't look back, and by noon the news is saying the word //escaped//, and every gang in the city is recalculating, and so is the man who pays Lisa.
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "truckbomb")>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
The harbor is the color of old photographs for a hundred yards off Harbor Road, and will be for a while, and there's nothing in it but water. The convoy came around the bend to find the ramp clear and a kid in the gravel with a broken arm, and went through without stopping, because Armsmaster doesn't stop. Bakuda's demonstrations go off at six-twenty anyway, four of them, and the city holds its breath again, and Lung goes to the airport, and on the overpass a woman in goggles watches her best work sink and says something nobody hears.
<<elseif ($convoyAct is "hookwolf")>>\
<<set $lungFree to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
<<achieve "Lung Walks">>\
Hookwolf and Lung go through the side of the truck and down the embankment and into Harbor Road, and the Protectorate goes after them, and the ABB leaves, and the Empire leaves, and you leave, and twenty minutes later a thing with wings goes north over the water with a man made of blades hanging off its leg, and then the man made of blades falls into the harbor, and the thing with wings doesn't. Hookwolf walks out of the water at nine. Lung doesn't come back. By noon the news is saying //escaped//, and Kaiser has called a meeting.
<</if>>\
<<if ($sundayPlan is "coil")>>Lisa finds you afterward by the grey van. The men in grey are already gone. "He's pleased," she says, in the voice she uses for things she hates. "He says you did well. He says that like it's a receipt." <<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>Ledger, from the van's window, says, "Complete file," and the van goes.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($sundayPlan is "convoy")>>Dauntless, who hasn't spoken to you all morning, says, "Okay," afterward, and puts a hand on your shoulder, and the review ends there, and Armsmaster writes something that will be in a report, and you're fairly sure it's good.<</if>>
<<if ($abbBetrayed is true)>>Mai finds you at the bottom of the ramp with a knife wound in your side and looks at you across the ramp. "You pushed him," she says. "Off a bridge." She doesn't need to say anything else. You've just made the ABB a place you can't go back to, and she's the one who'll have to carry that message.<</if>>
<<if ($sundayPlan is "alone")>>Nobody at the ramp knew whose you were, and afterward Armsmaster asked, and you said nobody's, and he looked at the place on your sleeve where something had been and said, "Keep it that way," and you don't know if he meant the sleeve.<</if>>
<<page "Afterward" "ch4-territory">><<set $workshopRaided to true>>\
Sunday, five-fifty, and you're not on Harbor Road. You're in the alley behind a dry cleaner on Fourth with Shadow Stalker, who has been on the roof for an hour watching the basement window, and has decided.
"Two inside," she says. "No her. She's at the ramp with the remote. But the remote talks to something, and the something's in there, because I watched a van bring it in." She loads a bolt. A real one. <<if ($sawSophiaCross is true)>>She sees you see it. "Say something," she says, and you don't.<</if>>
The basement is the most organized room you've ever been in, and in the middle of it, on the workbench, is a box with an antenna, and a man with a rifle standing next to it, and a second man at the stairs, and Shadow Stalker goes through the wall as smoke and comes out solid behind the second man, and the first man turns, and you're the one he's turning toward.
<<choose "ch4-raid-2">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Hit the man with the rifle before he finishes turning. Whatever you are, be it fast.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
You're on him before the rifle's up, with the thing you do, and he goes down, and Shadow Stalker has the other one on the floor with a bolt in his thigh, and she looks at you across the basement with something that isn't contempt.
#The box. Get to the box. The men don't matter if the box stops talking.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<set $relayDown to true>>\
<<achieve "Relay">>\
You take a round in the shoulder getting to it, and you put the box on the floor and your foot through the antenna, and the box makes a sound like a held breath letting go, and three miles away on Harbor Road a woman presses a button that goes nowhere.
#show-if (($tech gte 2) or ($power is "jury")) [Tech] Don't break the box. Turn it. Make it tell her bombs to do nothing, forever.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $relayDown to true>>\
<<set $relayTurned to true>>\
<<achieve "Relay">>\
Shadow Stalker keeps the men on the floor while you find the dial on the box, and the dial has eight positions, and you put it on the eighth, the one that's nothing, and solder it there with the iron from her bench, and three miles away a woman presses a button that will never go anywhere again, and a hundred and forty devices in this city become paperweights, and nobody knows it but you and a girl with a crossbow.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $sundayDone to true>>\
<<if ($relayDown is true)>>\
On Harbor Road, at six-fourteen, nothing happens. Bakuda presses the button twice. Oni Lee looks at her. The convoy goes up the ramp past a parked truck and onto the interstate and to the airport, and Lung goes to the Birdcage without anyone touching the box, and on the overpass a woman in goggles throws a garage-door opener into the harbor and gets into a car.
<<if ($relayTurned is true)>>The four demonstrations she'd set for six-twenty don't go off either. They never will. The PRT will spend a month finding them, and every one will be a paperweight.<<else>><<set $bombsSunday to true>>At six-twenty, four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, because those were on timers, not the remote, and she'd planned for you.<</if>>
<<else>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
The box kept talking while you dealt with the man, and on Harbor Road the ramp went the color of old photographs on schedule, and Oni Lee went up, and the Protectorate held the truck anyway, because that's what the Protectorate is for, and Lung went to the airport in a box. At six-twenty four more places in the city went the color of old photographs. You put the box on the floor afterward and your foot through it, and it was too late to matter, and you did it anyway.
<</if>>\
Shadow Stalker ties the two men to the chair with the restraints on it that nobody explained, and looks at the workbench with its grid of forty devices and its index cards, and says, "Call it in. Your voice, not mine. I wasn't here." She goes up the stairs. At the top she stops. "You didn't say anything," she says. "About the bolt." She doesn't wait for an answer. From Sophia Hess that was a thank-you.
<<page "Afterward" "ch4-territory">><<set $sundayDone to true>>\
Sunday, six-fourteen, and you're not on Harbor Road. <<if ($sundayPlan is "console")>>You're on the second headset with Vista, and the red board is a wall of white, and Vista is saying the word //ramp// into the green board every ten seconds like a prayer.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "steps")>>You're on the hospital steps in the Empire's colors with Othala and two of Kaiser's people, visible, helping, and a news van is filming you helping, and three miles away something is happening that you can hear.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "porch")>>You're on a stoop in the Docks with Angelica's head on your foot and Rachel on the step above you not talking, and three miles away something is happening that you can hear.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "city")>>You're on the Boardwalk with Browbeat, who is brave, and at six-twenty the arcade's neighbor goes the color of old photographs and Browbeat backs up, because that was the whole order, and you back up with him, and you hate it.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "defect")>>You're in a room in the PRT building with a Tinker from Boston and a cup of coffee you haven't touched, and the Tinker is listening to a radio and nodding.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "count")>>You're on the pharmacy steps on Fourth with a notebook that has thirty-one names in it and nine others, and Mai next to you, and three miles away something is happening that you can hear, and every one of the thirty-one is on this block instead of there, because you spent Saturday asking.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "run")>>You're on the Boardwalk with a bag you didn't take anywhere, watching the sky over Harbor Road.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "stay")>>You're where the people are, where you said you'd be, and three miles away something is happening that you can hear.<<else>>You're at home with the scanner on, or the news, or your phone, and three miles away something is happening that you can hear.<</if>>
<<if (($sundayPlan is "defect") and ($bakudaFreq is true))>>\
<<set $bakudaCaught to true>>\
<<achieve "Defector">>\
On the radio, at six-fourteen, nothing happens. The Tinker from Boston says, "Third position," to someone, and then, "Confirmed, she's pressing it," and then, "Move," and the radio fills with the Protectorate going up an embankment. At six-twenty-two Armsmaster's voice says the word //custody//, and the Tinker from Boston puts down the coffee and looks at you and says, "That was you. Nobody's going to say so. I'm saying so."
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>At nine they bring the remote in from the ramp in a box, and the Tinker spends four hours with it and the base of your skull, and at one in the afternoon she says, "Out," and holds up something the size of a bee sting, and you're yours again.<<set $bakudaBomb to false>><</if>>
<<elseif (($sundayPlan is "tip") or ($sundayPlan is "warnprt") or ($sundayPlan is "defect"))>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
The PRT believed about a third of what you told them, and a third was enough to put a second convoy on a different road at five-forty, and the first convoy up the ramp at six-twelve was three empty trucks and the Protectorate. The ramp went the color of old photographs around nobody. Bakuda watched it from the overpass, and understood, and drove, and at six-twenty four more places in the city went the color of old photographs, because she's a person who keeps her appointments. Lung got on a plane at seven from an airport nobody was watching.
<<else>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
The ramp went the color of old photographs at six-fourteen with the convoy in it, and Oni Lee went up, and the Protectorate held the truck, because that's what the Protectorate is for, and it cost them. A trooper in the glass. Velocity's left hand. Armsmaster's halberd, which Oni Lee took with him when he went, which the forums will not stop discussing. Lung went to the airport in a box at seven with half the Protectorate around it. At six-twenty four more places in the city went the color of old photographs, and you heard every one of them from where you were, and you'll remember where you were.
<</if>>\
<<page "Afterward" "ch4-territory">>/* What happens to Bakuda. Exactly one of $bakudaCaught, $bakudaDead, $bakudaDeal, $bakudaEscaped ends up true; Arc 5 branches on them. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<set $sundayDone to true>>\
You've got the remote, and you've got her. Bakuda is against the door of her own car with the goggles pushed up, and without them she has the face of a graduate student who hasn't slept, and she's looking at the thing in your fist the way you'd look at your own hand on someone else.
Oni Lee is on the overpass rail, twenty feet away, and he hasn't moved, because he's waiting to see what she says, and she hasn't said it.
Below you the Protectorate is coming up the embankment. You've got maybe forty seconds that belong to you.
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>"You know I can't set it off without that," she says, and nods at your fist. "So we're having a conversation."<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-territory">>
#Hold her for Armsmaster. The remote too. This is what the PRT is for.
<<set $bakudaCaught to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true) or ($control gte 3))>><<achieve "The Remote">>You know the dial. Third position, glass. You turn it to the eighth, the one that's nothing, and hold it there, and the four devices she'd set for the city at six-twenty never go off.<<else>><<set $bombsSunday to true>>You don't know the dial, and you don't touch it, and at six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs on their timers, and she watches your face when they do.<</if>> Armsmaster puts her in restraints that took six Tinkers to build, and she says, to him, "I want it on record that the fire escape was the real crime," and Oni Lee is gone from the rail before anyone looks.
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Kill her. A hundred and forty devices, and she's the only one who knows where.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<set $bakudaDead to true>>\
<<var $heroRep - 25>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 25>>\
<<achieve "The Chair Is Empty">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You do it with your hands, dense, and it's fast, and it's the first time your hands have done that.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A coin, charged for three seconds, at the base of the skull, where she puts hers.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>A hand on her collarbone and the seam under it, and she doesn't finish the sentence she'd started about the fire escape.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You tell her to stop breathing, with everything you have, and she does, and her eyes stay on you while she does it, interested to the end.<<else>>You use the thing you do, and it's enough, and it's the first time it's been enough for that.<</if>> Oni Lee comes off the rail. He stands over her for a count of three. Then he looks at you, and the mask has an expression, and the expression is not grief, and he's ash. <<if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true) or ($control gte 3))>>You turn the remote to the eighth before the Protectorate reaches you. The four devices for six-twenty never go off.<<else>><<set $bombsSunday to true>>At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, on timers, because she planned for this too.<</if>> Armsmaster reaches the overpass and looks at what you did, and says nothing, and reaches for his radio, and you're a different file now.
#Let her go, for a price. She's a Tinker with a hundred and forty bombs. Tinkers deal.
<<set $bakudaDeal to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>><<set $bakudaBomb to false>>"The insurance," you say, and she laughs, delighted, and takes a thing like a dentist's tool out of her coat and puts two fingers at the base of your skull, and something the size of a bee sting comes out, and she drops it on the overpass and steps on it. "Paid in full," she says. "Third position is glass. Fifth is cold. Eighth is nothing. You'll want the eighth."<<else>>"The dial," you say. She looks at you with something close to respect. "Third is glass. Fifth is cold. Eighth is nothing." She gets into the car. "That's worth more than my life, by the way. I'm overpaying. Remember that I overpaid."<</if>> <<set $bakudaFreq to true>>Oni Lee drives. You turn the remote to the eighth before the Protectorate reaches the overpass, and the four devices for six-twenty never go off, and Bakuda is on the interstate, and she owes you, and she's the kind who pays and the kind who collects.
<</choose>>/* What happens to Lung. Sets one of $lungDead, $lungFree, or neither (recaptured), plus who did it ($hookwolfKilledLung, $coilDebt, $abbCoup). */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<set $sundayDone to true>>\
The box is open. Inside it, on a steel bench with restraints that took six Tinkers to design, there's a man and not a dragon, a man tattooed to the waist, drugged to the eyes, with a metal mask on the floor beside him and his skin just starting to go the wrong color at the shoulders. He's looking at you. He knows you. He says your cape name, slow, like he's reading it off something.
He has maybe a minute before the drugs lose the argument. After that he's a dragon, and nobody in this city has ever beaten the dragon.
<<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>>Hookwolf is behind you with blades where his hands should be, breathing hard, and he says, "Move," and means it.<<elseif ($convoyAct is "coil")>>The man with the rifle is behind you with the rifle up and the safety off, and he says, "Step aside," and means it.<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>Bakuda is watching from the overpass with the goggles up. She hasn't pressed anything. She's waiting to see what you are.<</if>>
<<choose "ch4-territory">>
#Let him go. That was the job, or the deal, or the only thing that ends this.
<<set $lungFree to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<achieve "Lung Walks">>\
You step back. He stands up, and keeps standing up, and goes through the roof of the truck as something with wings, and the Protectorate stops being a convoy and starts being six people fighting a dragon on an on-ramp, and in that, nobody is watching anyone else, and everyone else leaves. <<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>>Hookwolf goes after him anyway, and twenty minutes later falls out of the sky into the harbor, and walks out at nine.<</if>> By noon the news is saying //escaped//, and every gang in the city is recalculating.
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Kill him. Now, while he's a man.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 30>>\
<<set $lungDead to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 30>>\
<<var $heroRep - 30>>\
<<var $notoriety + 30>>\
<<achieve "Dragon Slayer">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You put your hands on the man in the box and go dense, and he burns you while you do it, and you don't let go.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>A hand on his chest, and the seam, and he looks surprised, and then he doesn't look like anything.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>Three coins, charged as long as you've ever charged anything, at a man who can't move his arms yet, and the box is a furnace for a second and then it's a box.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You tell him to stop, with everything, and he stops, and the drugs do the rest, and you stand there and feel what it is to have told Lung something.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A pane across his throat, and you hold it there while he tries to be a dragon and can't, and it takes longer than you'd thought anything could take.<<else>>You use the thing you do, with everything you have, on a man who can't lift his arms, and it works, and it's the worst thing you've ever done well.<</if>> The box is quiet. The man in it isn't going to be a dragon. <<if ($stance is "abb")>><<set $abbCoup to true>>On the overpass, Bakuda lowers the goggles and says, to nobody, "Interesting," and Oni Lee looks at you for a count of three, and the ABB has just found out what you are.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>>Hookwolf makes a sound you'll remember, and it's not grief, it's a man who's had a meal taken off his plate, and he's going to remember your mask for the rest of his life.<<elseif ($convoyAct is "coil")>>The man with the rifle lowers it and says, "That was ours," and then, into his collar, "Done. Not by us." Lisa, on the ramp, has both hands over her mouth.<<else>>The Protectorate comes up the ramp and stops, because Armsmaster has seen what's in the box, and he says your cape name into his radio, and then a word that isn't //custody//.<</if>>
#Hold him for the PRT. Thirty seconds, with everything you've got, and let the people with the box take him back.
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to true>>\
You hold a man who's becoming a dragon in a box for thirty seconds with the thing you do, and it costs you, and then Armsmaster is there with a halberd that does something to the restraints that makes them tighten, and Miss Militia has a rifle that's turned into something that fires sleep, and Lung goes back to being a man on a bench. <<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>><<set $hookwolfFought to true>>Hookwolf comes for the box through you, and you hold that too, until Kaiser's steel comes up through the ramp.<<elseif ($convoyAct is "coil")>><<set $coilCrossed to true>>The man with the rifle watches you do it and says "Noted," and it's the worst word anyone's said to you this week.<</if>> At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, and Lung goes to the airport, and you were the reason.
#show-if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf") Step aside. Let Hookwolf have him.
<<set $lungDead to true>>\
<<set $hookwolfKilledLung to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You step aside and Hookwolf goes into the box, and what happens in there takes eleven seconds and is the loudest thing you've ever heard a man do with no power of your own involved, and when he comes out he's a man again, and he's smiling, and the box is not something anyone should look into. "Tell the suit," he says, to you, "that I did what he wouldn't." Kaiser is going to hear it from you, and Hookwolf knows that, and said it for that reason.
#show-if ($convoyAct is "coil") Step aside. The men in grey were paid for this.
<<set $lungDead to true>>\
<<set $coilDebt to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
You step aside and the man with the rifle does it from four feet with two rounds that weren't made for people, and the box is quiet, and he says, "Thank you," to you, politely, and then, into his collar, "Done." Lisa, on the ramp, sits down. "He's wanted that for a year," she says, when you reach her. "You just watched him get it. He'll remember you were useful. That's the worst thing he can remember about anyone."
<</choose>>/* Claiming ground after the weekend. Sets $territory ("eastside", "boardwalk" or "fourth") and $warlordSeed; the Stats page and the tribute patrol special read these. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<set $sundayDone to true>>\
Sunday noon. The city is counting what it has left.
<<if ($lungDead is true)>>Lung is dead. The news hasn't said it yet, because the PRT hasn't said it, but Fourth and Lord knows, because the ABB's kids have been standing on the corner since nine with their bandanas in their pockets instead of on their arms.<<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>Lung is free, somewhere north, and every ABB kid on Fourth is wearing the bandana like a flag, and every Empire kid is indoors.<<else>>Lung is on a plane, for good, and Fourth and Lord has the feel of a house where the father has left.<</if>> <<if ($bakudaDead is true)>>Bakuda is dead on an overpass.<<elseif ($bakudaCaught is true)>>Bakuda is in a cell that took six Tinkers to build.<<elseif ($bakudaDeal is true)>>Bakuda is on the interstate, and she owes you, and she knows it.<<else>>Bakuda is somewhere in the city with whatever she has left.<</if>> <<if (($lungFree is false) and (($bakudaDead is true) or ($bakudaCaught is true)))>>The ABB is a body with no head, and six blocks of the east side are, as of this morning, nobody's.<<elseif ($lungFree is false)>>The ABB has Oni Lee, who doesn't lead, and whatever Bakuda can hold from wherever she is. The east side is loose.<<else>>The east side is the ABB's, and louder about it than it's been in a year.<</if>>
Everybody in this city who holds anything is looking at the east side this afternoon. Kaiser. The man who pays Lisa. Skidmark, in his way. The PRT, which will send patrols and call it a presence. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel, who has one hand now, and a Boardwalk.<</if>>
Nobody is looking at you, and you could use that.
<<choose "ch4-end">>
#show-if (($stance is "undersider") and ($streetRep gte 30)) Tell Lisa you want Fourth and Lord. Not for the boss. For you.
<<set $territory to "fourth">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "A Block of Your Own">>\
Lisa looks at you for long enough that Brian looks up from his stitches. "He'll say yes," she says. "That's the problem. He'll say yes and he'll call it a gift and in six months he'll call it a loan." She takes a chip. "I'm telling you that as a friend. Now tell me again, because I want to hear whether you mean it." You tell her again. She calls him. He says yes.
#show-if (($stance is "independent") and (($notoriety gte 20) or ($streetRep gte 25))) Walk Fourth and Lord in the costume, in daylight, slowly, and let the shops see who's walking.
<<set $territory to "fourth">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<achieve "A Block of Your Own">>\
You walk it twice. The noodle shop's owner comes to his door and watches you pass and doesn't go back in. An ABB kid on the corner takes the bandana out of his pocket, looks at it, and puts it back. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel, from a roof, says, "That's a thing you're doing now," and it isn't a question, and she doesn't leave.<</if>> By four o'clock a woman from the pharmacy has brought you a coffee you didn't ask for, and you understand what the coffee is.
#show-if (($stance is "independent") and ($metKestrel is true)) Go to Kestrel. The Boardwalk's hers. Ask her to split it.
<<set $territory to "boardwalk">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<var $rom_kestrel + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<achieve "A Block of Your Own">>\
She listens with her good hand around a coffee and her other one in her lap. "The Boardwalk's not mine," she says. "It's mine because nobody else wanted it. If you want the north end, it's yours, and if the Merchants come for it, that's yours too." She drinks. "Thursdays still stand. That's a condition."
#show-if (($stance is "empire") and (($warnedKaiser is true) or ($empireSeen is true) or ($empireAtArcade is true))) Ask Kaiser for the east-side blocks. He owes you, and he knows what owing costs.
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<set $empireBlocks to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Kaiser receives you in the warehouse where the walls grow blades, and listens, and says, "Six blocks. Held in my name, by you. The rent is loyalty, and the rent is due every day." He stands, and the blades stand with him. "Hookwolf asked for them an hour ago. I said no to him. Think about why I'm saying yes to you."
#show-if ($stance is "empire") Take the east-side blocks without asking. Kaiser can find out from the news.
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<set $empireSplit to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<achieve "A Block of Your Own">>\
You walk Fourth and Lord with the eagle on your sleeve and nobody's permission, and by evening there are six Empire kids on the corners who came because they heard, and Victor calls twice and you don't answer, and the third call is from a number you don't have, and the voice is Kaiser's, and it says, "Interesting," and hangs up. Hookwolf texts you a single word: //finally//.
#show-if (($stance is "abb") and (($lungDead is true) or ($lungFree is false)) and (($bakudaDead is true) or ($bakudaCaught is true) or ($bakudaDeal is true))) Tell Mai the ABB has a head. You. -> "ch4-crown"
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
You find Mai on the steps at Fourth and Lord, where she always is, with Danny Trang beside her and forty people pretending not to listen.
#show-if (($stance is "abb") and (($lungDead is true) or ($lungFree is false))) Give it to Mai. Stand behind her, and make sure everyone sees you standing there.
<<set $maiBoss to true>>\
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
Mai looks at you on the steps and says, "I'm seventeen," and you say so was Lung once, and she says that isn't true, and takes the steps anyway, and the forty people on the corner look at her and then at you, and understand the order of things, and it's an order you built.
#show-if ($stance is "ward") Territory isn't a word a Ward gets to use. File the report. Note who's looking at the east side.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You write it up: Kaiser, Coil's people, Skidmark, and the ABB's kids with the bandanas in their pockets. Aegis reads it and says, "This is good," and then, "Don't ever do anything about it yourself," and you understand that he's seen the look on your face, and that he's had it.
#Nothing's yours. Go home. The city will sort out the east side without you.
<<var $control + 1>>\
You go home. The east side sorts itself out, the way it does, with a week of broken windows and a man made of blades walking Fourth at night to see who flinches. You watched it from your window. You'll remember that you could have walked it instead.
<</choose>>/* Taking the ABB itself. $abbCrown plus east-side territory; one branch here is a death. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<if ($streetRep gte 40)>>\
<<set $abbCrown to true>>\
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 25>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<achieve "Red and Green">>\
"The ABB has a head," you say, loud enough for the corner. "It's me."
Mai doesn't move. Danny Trang takes a step back. On the pharmacy roof, Oni Lee is a shape against the sky, and the shape looks at you for a count of three, and then it's ash, and the real one is on the steps next to Mai with nothing in his hands.
He looks at you. Then he looks at the forty people on the corner, who have taken their bandanas out of their pockets and are waiting to see which way to tie them. <<if ($abbCoup is true)>>He saw what you did in the box. He's the only person alive who did.<</if>> <<if ($abbBetrayed is true)>>You pushed him off a bridge this morning. He hasn't forgotten.<</if>>
"Tomorrow," he says, and it's the second word you've ever heard him say, and it means the same thing it meant the first time, and the forty people on the corner tie their bandanas on, and Mai looks at you with an expression you'll spend the next arc learning to read.
<<page "Afterward" "ch4-end">>
<<else>>\
"The ABB has a head," you say, loud enough for the corner. "It's me."
Mai doesn't move. Danny Trang takes a step back. On the pharmacy roof, Oni Lee is a shape against the sky, and then he isn't, and the knife is under your ribs before you've finished the sentence, and the real one is behind you, and the one in front of you is ash, and the forty people on the corner watch you find out what the ABB thinks of fifteen-year-olds who haven't earned the word.
<<set $health to 0>>\
You die on the steps at Fourth and Lord with your own blood on a bandana, and Mai is the one who closes your eyes, and she does it gently, and she says, "Idiot," and means it as the nearest thing to grief she has.
<<page "Try the week again" "ch4-replay">>
<<page "Start over" "Start">>
<</if>>\<<var $tribute + 1>>\
A man is waiting for you on the corner of your block in a shopkeeper's apron, and he's been waiting a while, and when he sees the mask he comes over the way people come over to a landlord.
"Merchants," he says. "Three of them, the laundromat on the corner, every night this week. They say it's nobody's block now. I told them it was yours." He looks at you to see whether that was true. "I have this." An envelope. It's thick enough.
<<choose "patrol-after">>
#Take the envelope. That's what the block is.
<<var $money + 100>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
You take it. He looks relieved, and relief on him is worse than anger would have been. You deal with the three Merchants in twenty minutes, and the laundromat's lights come back on, and tomorrow there'll be another envelope, and the thing you've started has that shape.
#Refuse the envelope. Deal with the Merchants anyway. Let him owe you something that isn't money.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
He doesn't understand, and then he does, and he puts the envelope away carefully. The three Merchants take ten minutes. Tomorrow the pharmacy sends coffee, and the noodle shop sends soup, and nobody sends envelopes, and the block has decided what kind of thing you are.
#"It's not my block. Call the PRT."
<<set $territory to "">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to false>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
He looks at you the way you'd look at a landlord who's just said the roof isn't his problem. He calls the PRT. Nobody comes. The Merchants are in the laundromat the next night, and the night after that, and the block has decided what kind of thing you aren't.
<</choose>>/* Arc 4 wrap-up: looks checkpoint, achievement, per-team summary including the kill and territory outcomes. Leads to ch5-monday. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<achieve "Shell Complete">>\
''End of Arc 4: Shell''
Sunday afternoon. <<if ($lungFree is true)>>Lung is free. Something with wings went north over the water this morning and the news has been saying the word //escaped// for six hours, and every gang in the city has called a meeting, and the Protectorate has stopped answering questions.<<elseif ($bakudaCaught is true)>>Bakuda is in a cell that took six Tinkers to build, and Lung is on a plane to a mountain in British Columbia, and the ABB is a body with no head for the second time in a week.<<else>>Lung is on a plane to a mountain in British Columbia, and Bakuda is somewhere in this city with a hundred and forty devices, and the PRT has used the word //contained// again.<</if>> <<if ($bombsSunday is true)>>Eight places in Brockton Bay are the color of old photographs now, and the people inside them will be inside them for a while.<<elseif ($relayTurned is true)>>Four places in Brockton Bay are the color of old photographs, and there will not be a fifth, because a box in a dry cleaner's basement is soldered to nothing.<<else>>Four places in Brockton Bay are the color of old photographs, and the four she'd set for this morning never went off, and nobody knows why but you.<</if>>
Here's where things stand.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>\
''You're an Undersider, and the boss noticed.'' <<if ($sundayPlan is "coil")>>You stood on Harbor Road with his men in grey and did what he wanted done, and Lisa says he says you did well, in the voice she uses for things she hates.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "inside")>>You stood on the overpass with the ABB and <<if ($lungFree is true)>>opened the box, and Lung said your name, and you've never told it to him.<<elseif ($abbBetrayed is true)>>pushed Oni Lee off it, and Mai carried that message to people who will not forget it.<<else>>came back down.<</if>><<elseif ($sundayPlan is "tip")>>You called it in. The boss is unhappy at a safe distance, for once.<<else>>You sat on a porch with Rachel's dogs and let Sunday be someone else's, and the dogs didn't mind, and Rachel didn't either.<</if>> <<if ($undersidersRefuse is true)>>You told Bakuda no into a dead phone, and she heard.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
''You're a Ward, and the Director said nowhere near.'' <<if ($sundayPlan is "convoy")>>You were in the rear vehicle anyway, because Armsmaster said so, and Dauntless put a hand on your shoulder afterward.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "stalker")>>You were in a basement on Fourth with Shadow Stalker, who wasn't there, and <<if ($relayDown is true)>>you were the reason a button went nowhere.<<else>>you were too late to matter and did it anyway.<</if>><<elseif ($sundayPlan is "console")>>You were on the second headset for the worst three hours of Vista's life, and she nodded at you once, and that carried you.<<else>>You were on the Boardwalk with Browbeat backing up from the color, because that was the whole order.<</if>> <<if ($stalkerHunt is true)>>Shadow Stalker put a real bolt through a kid's thigh on Friday and you didn't say anything. That's in a file now, in your handwriting or hers.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>\
''You're the Empire's, and the Empire split on Harbor Road.'' <<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>><<if ($lungFree is true)>>You rode with Hookwolf and Hookwolf opened the box and Lung is free, and Kaiser has called a meeting that you are going to have to attend.<<else>>You rode with Hookwolf and then stood between him and the box, and he's going to remember that, and so is Kaiser.<</if>><<elseif ($sundayPlan is "warn")>>You told Victor, and Kaiser came to Harbor Road for Hookwolf, not for Lung, and you were standing next to him when he did it. You've chosen a side inside the side.<<elseif ($sundayPlan is "steps")>>You were on the hospital steps in colors while Hookwolf broke Kaiser's order three miles away, and the news van has footage of you helping, and Kaiser is pleased, and you have to live with that.<<else>>You went to Harbor Road with no eagle on your sleeve, and Armsmaster asked whose you were, and you said nobody's, and you keep touching the place where it was.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
<<if ($abbDefected is true)>>''You went to the PRT.'' <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>The third position, the eighth, a dial. Bakuda is in a cell because of what you watched her hands do, and a Tinker from Boston said so out loud.<<if ($bakudaBomb is false)>> The thing at the base of your skull is in a box on her bench.<</if>><<else>>They believed a third of it, and a third moved the convoy, and Bakuda drove, and the ABB knows someone talked, and Mai is going to work out who.<</if>><<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>''You opened the box.'' Lung said your cape name, and you've never told it to him, and he went north over the water, and Bakuda said good job like a teacher, and the ABB has its head back and a new lieutenant, and the lieutenant is you.<<elseif ($truckSunk is true)>>''You drove her best work into the harbor.'' The water off Harbor Road is the color of old photographs for a hundred yards and there's nothing in it, and your arm is in a cast, and Bakuda watched it sink. She has a chair for people like you.<<elseif ($abbBetrayed is true)>>''You pushed Oni Lee off a bridge.'' In front of forty of Lung's people. Mai carried the message. There is no ABB for you now, and the ABB knows where you live.<<else>>''You did the job.'' <<if ($sundayPlan is "drive")>>You drove the truck and walked away and didn't look back, and the truck did what trucks like that do, and you're still insured.<<else>>You were where she said, and Lung went to the airport anyway, and she's going to want to know why.<</if>><</if>>
<<else>>\
''You're nobody's, and you were on Harbor Road anyway.'' <<if ($sundayPlan is "onramp")>>Nobody asked you to be on the bait shop roof. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel was above you with one hand, because she said she would be.<</if>> <<if ($convoyAct is "people")>>Miss Militia said your cape name like she'd known it for years.<</if>><<elseif ($sundayPlan is "warnprt")>>You told the PRT what you'd worked out, and a third of it was the part they didn't know.<<else>>You stayed with the people who needed it, and the convoy had the Protectorate, and that was true, and it still cost something to be right.<</if>> <<if ($kestrelHurt is true)>>Kestrel's left hand is the color of old photographs to the wrist, and will be for eleven years, and she said she does most things with the other one.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($lungDead is true)>>''Lung is dead.'' <<if ($hookwolfKilledLung is true)>>Hookwolf did it in the box with you standing aside, and told you to tell the suit.<<elseif ($coilDebt is true)>>Coil's men did it from four feet with you standing aside, and the man with the rifle said thank you.<<else>>You did it, while he was a man, and it was the worst thing you've ever done well, and the whole city is going to find out who.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($bakudaDead is true)>>''Bakuda is dead.'' On an overpass, by your hand, with Oni Lee watching. The PRT has a different file on you now.
<</if>>\
<<if ($bakudaDeal is true)>>''Bakuda owes you.'' She gave you the dial for her life and said she was overpaying. She's the kind who pays and the kind who collects.
<</if>>\
<<if ($territory isnot "")>>''Territory.'' <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>You are the ABB. Oni Lee said tomorrow. Mai is learning to read you.<<elseif ($maiBoss is true)>>Mai Vo runs the ABB, and everyone on the corner knows who put her there.<<elseif ($empireBlocks is true)>>Six east-side blocks, held in Kaiser's name, rent due daily. Hookwolf asked first and was told no.<<elseif ($empireSplit is true)>>Six east-side blocks you took without asking. Kaiser said "Interesting." Hookwolf said "finally."<<elseif ($territory is "boardwalk")>>The north end of the Boardwalk, split with Kestrel. Thursdays still stand.<<else>>Fourth and Lord. A coffee from the pharmacy. The start of something the city will have a word for by summer.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($coilCrossed is true)>>''Coil's men said "Noted."'' You got between them and what they were paid for. He'll remember that you were in the way, and he has people for that.
<</if>>\
<<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>''Bakuda is in custody.'' That was you. Nobody's going to say so.<<if ($sundayPlan is "defect")>> Someone did, once, out loud.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($metPanacea is true)>>''Panacea.'' <<if ($injured is false and $panaceaFavor is true)>>She fixed the thing nobody looked at, and you don't know who you are without the catch in your step.<<elseif ($panaceaApology is true)>>You apologized for the bank. She's keeping it. Panacea keeps everything.<<else>>You asked her about the glass, and she told you not to tell anyone she tried.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($ulSaved is true)>>''Uber and Leet are alive.'' Leet said she's going to be so mad, and Uber laughed until he had to sit down.<<if ($leetInsured is true)>> The thing in Leet's neck is still there. He says they'll build something, once.<</if>>
<<elseif ($leetDead is true)>>''Leet is dead.'' His teleporter worked once, the wrong way, and Uber carried what came out, and didn't look up when the city went the color of old photographs.
<<elseif ($ulBakudaDone is true)>>''Leet's machine worked once.'' It moved a truck into a harbor wall. He looked, for one second, like a man who'd built something that worked.
<<elseif ($ulBetrayed is true)>>''You gave the PRT the garage.'' It was empty when they got there, and so was the place where two capes had been, and nobody has seen Uber and Leet since Friday.
<</if>>\
<<if ($hookwolfFought is true)>>''Hookwolf.'' You stood in front of a thing made of blades, or behind it. Either way he knows your mask now, and he's the kind who collects.
<</if>>\
<<if ($gregTriggered is true)>>''Broadcast.'' <<if ($gregAlly is true)>>Greg told a nurse to hurry and she ran. He's asked you what to do. You haven't decided what to tell him.<<else>>Greg told a security guard to keep walking and he kept walking. He's stopped asking you anything.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> to Royce Hollis by the first of May. He sent a page from the ledger under your door during a bomb weekend. He doesn't take weekends.
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>$glHe was at the hospital giving interviews about an arcade $glHe wasn't at. The threads believed $glHim.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' <<if ($gregTriggered is true)>>The account hasn't posted since the night of the phone. Someone else's has.<<else>>Greg posted a thread about the arcade with your mask in the corner of a photo. Notoriety up five.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' A clock in a hospital waiting room four minutes behind your phone, and a woman in a bathrobe under it who wasn't there when you looked again, and the harbor off Harbor Road, which was already the color of old photographs in your dream on Friday night.
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor's Trust" $taylorTrust>>\
<div>Power control: <<skill $control 5>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 5, Hive.'' <<if ($warlordSeed is true)>>You hold a piece of this city now, and in a city like this one, holding is a verb. Every gang at one table, and for the first time, you're not at the table because someone brought you.<<elseif ($lungDead is true)>>A dead dragon, a city that had divided him up before he was cold, and every gang at one table working out who gets the pieces.<<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>A dragon loose in a city that had just finished dividing him up. Every gang at one table, a truce nobody means, and a bomb Tinker who wants her war back.<<else>>Every gang in the city at one table in the back of a bar called Somer's Rock, a truce nobody means, and a bomb Tinker who hasn't finished.<</if>>
<<page "Continue to Arc 5" "ch5-monday">>
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay Friday" "ch4-replay">>/* Rewind to Friday with Arcs 1-3 intact: clears only the flags Arc 4 can set, including the kills and territory. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<set $sundayPlan to "">>\
<<set $convoyAct to "">>\
<<set $lungFree to false>>\
<<set $bakudaCaught to false>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to false>>\
<<set $bombsSunday to false>>\
<<set $relayDown to false>>\
<<set $relayTurned to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeHurt to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfFought to false>>\
<<set $abbBetrayed to false>>\
<<set $abbDefected to false>>\
<<set $truckSunk to false>>\
<<set $remoteLost to false>>\
<<set $kestrelHurt to false>>\
<<set $workshopRaided to false>>\
<<set $sundayDone to false>>\
<<set $atOnramp to false>>\
<<set $sawWorkshop to false>>\
<<set $bakudaFreq to false>>\
<<set $abbRouteKnown to false>>\
<<set $abbRefused to false>>\
<<set $hospitalNight to false>>\
<<set $panaceaFavor to false>>\
<<set $panaceaApology to false>>\
<<set $wardsConsole4 to false>>\
<<set $wardsStalker to false>>\
<<set $stalkerHunt to false>>\
<<set $wardsConvoyAsk to false>>\
<<set $rodeWithHookwolf to false>>\
<<set $empireHeldLine to false>>\
<<set $empireAtArcade to false>>\
<<set $warnedKaiser to false>>\
<<set $undersidersRefuse to false>>\
<<set $undersidersPlan to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeUltimatum to false>>\
<<set $indConvoyGuess to false>>\
<<set $lungDead to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDead to false>>\
<<set $bakudaDeal to false>>\
<<set $coilDebt to false>>\
<<set $coilCrossed to false>>\
<<set $abbCrown to false>>\
<<set $maiBoss to false>>\
<<set $warlordSeed to false>>\
<<set $empireBlocks to false>>\
<<set $empireSplit to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfKilledLung to false>>\
<<set $abbCoup to false>>\
<<set $territory to "">>\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
Same you. Same week. A different Friday.
<<page "Friday" "ch4-friday">><<set $ulMet to true>>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
Lord Street at nine-thirty on a Tuesday has a drone over it, and under the drone there are two men in jumpsuits, one blue and one green, in front of the pawn shop at the corner of Lord and Fourth, and the pawn shop's grate is open, and the men are not hurrying.
The one in green has a thing on his back that looks like a leaf blower that's been lied to. The one in blue is doing something to the pawn shop's register that involves a crowbar and a great deal of grace. There's a sign propped against the window, hand-lettered: //STREETS OF RAGE. LIVE. EP. 11.//
<<if ($gamer is true)>>You know them. You've watched every episode. Leet replied to your comment on episode six, and you screenshotted it, and you have never told anyone that.<<else>>You know who they are the way everyone in the city does: the two capes who commit crimes with a theme and a camera, and have never, as far as anyone can prove, hurt anyone on purpose.<</if>>
Uber looks up from the register and sees the mask and says, "Oh, hey. New one." He says it the way you'd greet a neighbor. "You want in on this or you want to be the boss fight? Leet, we've got a boss fight."
"We don't have a //boss fight//," Leet says, not turning around. "We have a thirty-second window before the silent alarm and a guy in a mask. Those aren't the same thing."
The drone turns to look at you. Nine hundred people are watching, give or take.
<<choose "ch2-uberleet-2">>
#Be the boss fight. Take the stream apart.
<<set $ulEnemy to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<achieve "Ragequit">>\
It isn't much of a fight. Uber is briefly an expert at something, and the something is whatever you do, and for forty seconds he's as good at not being hit by it as anyone you've met, and then the forty seconds end and he isn't. Leet's leaf blower works once, and what it does once is turn the pawn shop's window into something soft, and then it catches fire. You put them both on the sidewalk in front of the drone, and the chat, Leet says bitterly from the ground, is going to be //unbearable//.
#show-if (($gamer is true) or ($charm gte 3)) [Charm] Talk them out of it, on camera, in their own language.
<<set $ulFriend to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<achieve "Co-op">>\
<<if ($gamer is true)>>"Episode eleven's the one where you lose the pawn shop and gain a rival," you say, "and the rival is supposed to be sympathetic, so put the register down and let me walk you to the end of the level." Uber laughs. Leet turns around for the first time and looks at the mask and says, "Wait. Are you //$phoName//?"<<else>>You tell them the silent alarm went at the thirty-second mark, and it did, and that a stream of two capes being arrested by the Protectorate is content, and a stream of two capes walking away from a pawn shop with a new friend is better content, and Uber, who is briefly an expert at content, agrees.<</if>> They put the register back. Leet gives you a controller from his bag that doesn't work, and tells you it's a prop, and it's clearly not. "Episode twelve," Uber says. "Guest spot. Think about it."
#show-if (($joinedWards is false) and ($joinedUndersiders is false) and (($gamer is true) or ($tech gte 2) or ($power is "jury"))) Ask what episode twelve is. Mean it.
<<set $ulFriend to true>>\
<<set $ulMember to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Extra Life">>\
Uber puts the crowbar down and looks at you properly, the way he'd look at a new build. "You're independent," he says. "No team, no file, a power nobody's put a name to." He glances at Leet. "We've got a garage, a drone, nine hundred people who'd watch you eat a sandwich, and a theme a week. The pay is whatever's in the register. The costume has to match." Leet, without turning around: "It doesn't have to //match//. It has to be //referential//." You say yes before the silent alarm's thirty seconds are up, and the three of you leave the pawn shop with nothing, because Uber says a recruitment episode doesn't need a payout, and Leet says it absolutely does, and now you know what the team is.
#Walk past. Two idiots and a drone aren't your problem tonight.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
"Cool," Uber says, to your back. "Cool. Respect the hustle." Behind you the leaf blower works once, and then there's the smell of it catching fire, and Leet saying a word the stream will have to bleep.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($ulEnemy is true)>>\
The PRT van takes eleven minutes, slow for Lord Street on a Tuesday, and in those eleven minutes Leet tells you, from the sidewalk, in detail, what the chat is saying about you. Some of it is complimentary. Most of it is spelled wrong. Uber says nothing at all, and when the troopers come he goes into the van first and holds the door for Leet, and looks at you over the roof of it with an expression that isn't anger. He's putting you somewhere.
Tomorrow the thread will be called //NEW CAPE RUINS STREETS OF RAGE EP 11 (NOT CLICKBAIT)// and it will have your mask in the thumbnail.
<<elseif ($ulMember is true)>>\
The garage is in the Docks, a two-bay auto shop with the sign painted over and the bays full of things Leet has built once. A go-kart with a flamethrower. A suit of armor with a controller for a chest plate. A refrigerator that Uber says you shouldn't open and Leet says you //should//, once, for the stream.
Uber makes coffee. He makes it the way a barista would, because for two minutes he is one. "House rules," he says. "Nobody gets hurt on purpose. Nobody shows their face. Leet doesn't build the same thing twice, so if you see something you like, it's gone next week. And when the PRT comes, about monthly, we go quietly, because quietly is a tier of content too." He hands you the coffee. "Theme for episode twelve is your call. Pick something with a good boss."
<<if ($gamer is true)>>Leet, from under the go-kart, says the name of a game you've beaten four times, and you say the name of the level, and he slides out and looks at you and says, "Okay. Okay. Uber. We're keeping this one."<</if>>
<<elseif ($ulFriend is true)>>\
They walk you to the corner. Uber tells you where the garage is, and says he tells nobody, and Leet says he tells //everybody//, and Uber says that's why they move it. "If you're ever on a job that needs a thing that works once," Leet says, "I'm the only guy in the city who builds those." He means it as a boast. It isn't one, and he knows that too.
Tomorrow's thread will be called //Streets of Rage Ep 11: the one with the GOOD cape// and it will have a clip of you in it that Leet has slowed down for effect.
<<else>>\
Tomorrow's thread is called //Streets of Rage Ep 11 (pawn shop) (leaf blower incident)// and you're in it for four seconds, walking past, and someone in the comments asks who that was, and nobody knows.
<</if>>\
<<page "Night" "ch2-end">><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The garage at three-thirty has the drone on the workbench with its guts out and Leet inside them, and Uber at a whiteboard that says //EP 13: PAYDAY// in letters a foot high, and under it, in Leet's handwriting, //CENTRAL BANK, LORD ST, THURS 2PM, ACTUAL BANK, NOT A JOKE//.
"It's not a joke," Uber says, when you look at it. "It's a //heist stream//. Leet's building a thing that opens vaults once. We go in at two-fifteen in the masks from the game, we take the money in the bags from the game, we leave in the van from the game, and the van from the game is just a van. Nine hundred becomes nine thousand. Nobody gets hurt."
"The Undersiders are hitting it," you say, <<if ($tattletaleNumber is true)>>because Lisa's text said Thursday and Lord Street and nothing else, and you did the math.<<else>>because the whole city's capes have been circling that bank for a week and even you can feel it.<</if>>
Leet comes out of the drone. "They're //what//."
<<choose "ch3-wed-evening">>
#Talk them out of it. Two teams in one bank is a Protectorate response, not a stream.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
<<set $ulStream to false>>\
Uber thinks about it for exactly as long as it takes to be briefly an expert in bank robbery, about four seconds. "She's right," he says, to Leet. "We'd be the B-plot." Leet says the vault thing is already built and only works once and he is //not// wasting it, and Uber says they'll stream from the roof across the street instead and call it //Spectator Mode//, and Leet says that's actually kind of good, and you've just moved two capes out of a bank.
#Go along with it. It's a theme a week, and this is the theme.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $ulStream to true>>\
Leet shows you the vault thing. It's the size of a fire extinguisher and it hums, and he says it opens any door once by convincing the door it's already open, and you believe him, because nothing he's built has ever not worked once. Uber hands you a mask from the game. It fits. That's the worst part.
#show-if ($tattletaleNumber is true) Text Lisa. Tell her who else is coming.
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $rom_lisa + 5>>\
<<set $ulStream to false>>\
Lisa replies in nine seconds: //NO. absolutely not. tell them the roof. tell them SPECTATOR MODE. I will personally make it worth their while.// Uber reads it over your shoulder and says, "Who's that," and you say a friend, and he says, "She types like a Thinker," and he's right, and they take the roof.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $sawBank to true>>\
Two-twenty, on the roof of the building across from the Central Bank, with Leet's drone up and nine hundred people watching the front doors through it, and Uber narrating in the voice of a man who's briefly an expert at sportscasting.
<<if ($ulStream is true)>>The vault thing is in a bag at Leet's feet. The plan is to go in behind the Undersiders and take what they miss, and the plan is already wrong, because the Undersiders' darkness comes out of the front doors at two-twenty-two like something alive and the Wards' van comes around the corner from the wrong direction at two-twenty-four, and Leet says, "Okay, that's a lot of capes," and Uber says, "Spectator mode," and nobody picks up the bag.<<else>>You talked them onto the roof, and the roof is the best seat in the city. The darkness comes out of the front doors at two-twenty-two. The Wards' van comes around the corner at two-twenty-four. Leet says, "Okay, that's a lot of capes," and Uber says, "Told you," and the chat goes faster than the drone can read it.<</if>>
At two-thirty-one Leet, who's watching the drone's second camera, the one pointed the wrong way out of habit, says, "Hey. Uh. There's a grey van on Pearl Street with a kid in the back. Like, a kid kid."
<<set $dinahSeen to true>>\
<<choose "ch3-ul-after">>
#Go. The van. Leave them the bank. -> "ch3-dinah"
<<set $wentForDinah to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
"Keep the drone on it," you say, already on the fire escape. "Keep it on the van, not the bank, and if anyone asks, you were never streaming." Uber says, "We're always streaming," and then, "Go," and the drone turns to follow you, and nine hundred people watch a kid in a mask run eleven blocks.
#Stay. Stream it. The bank's the show, and the show's the point.
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<set $ulStream to true>>\
You stay. You watch Glory Girl go through the bank's ceiling from the best seat in the city, and Uber calls it, and the stream hits four thousand, and at two-fifty-eight the grey van on Pearl Street is gone from the second camera and nobody mentions it again. Leet cuts that part out of the VOD. You know he did because you asked him to.
#show-if ($ulStream is true) Take Leet's vault thing and go into the bank after all. Not for the money. To be in the room.
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<set $ulStream to true>>\
The vault thing opens the bank's side door by convincing it it's already open, and you're in the dark with the Undersiders and the Wards and a girl in white, and nobody in the room knows which side you're on, and for eleven minutes neither do you. You come out through the hole in the front with nothing and a bruise the shape of Browbeat, and Lisa, on the dog, sees you and says, "//Who//," and you'll have to answer that later.
<</choose>><<cap100 "notoriety">>\
The stream ends at three-ten. Uber turns the drone's camera to his own mask and says, "That's episode thirteen. Spectator mode. Nobody got hurt," and then, off camera, to you: "Somebody got hurt. We just didn't see it." Leet packs the vault thing back into the bag unused and says it's fine, it keeps, in the voice of a man whose thing doesn't keep.
<<if ($dinahSeen is true)>>On the way down the fire escape Leet says, "The kid in the van," and doesn't finish, and Uber says, "We'll post the footage to the PRT tip line," and Leet says the tip line doesn't take video, and Uber says, "Then we'll post it somewhere that does," and you've never heard them talk about anything that wasn't a theme before.<</if>>
<<page "Evening" "ch3-wed-evening">><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<set $sawBakuda to true>>\
The garage at three-thirty has the bay doors shut, and they're never shut, and the drone on the floor, where it never is, and Uber standing in the middle of the bay with his hands open and nothing in them, and that is how you know.
She's sitting on the workbench. Lab coat, goggles up, the braid of wire over one shoulder. Oni Lee is by the door you came in through, and he was there when you came through it, and you didn't see him.
"I need a Tinker who builds things that work once," Bakuda says. "I have a Sunday that needs one thing to work once. I'll pay in money, and in not putting a device at the base of anyone's skull. That's the offer. It's a generous offer. I don't make them twice."
Leet is behind the go-kart. He hasn't said anything. Leet has never in his life not said anything.
<<choose "ch4-hospital">>
#"We'll do it." Say it before Uber does, so it's on you.
<<set $ulBakuda to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
Bakuda smiles. "Good. A teleporter. Short range, one use, big enough for a truck. Specs on the bench. Sunday, five-thirty, the overpass on Harbor Road." She gets off the workbench. "And new one? I know what you did on Thursday. The roof. The kid in the van, or the stream, whichever it was. I know." Oni Lee is gone. She leaves through the bay door, which opens for her. Uber looks at you and says, "That was mine to say," and you say you know, and he nods.
#"No." For the team, because Uber's about to say yes to save Leet, and that's not his to give.
<<set $leetInsured to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
Bakuda's smile doesn't change. "Okay," she says, and Oni Lee is behind the go-kart, and Leet makes a sound, and then Oni Lee is by the door again, and Leet is holding the back of his neck. "That's the other kind of offer," Bakuda says. "Same Sunday. Same teleporter. Now you've got a reason." She leaves. Leet sits down on the floor with his hand on his neck and says, "It felt like a bee sting," in a small voice, and Uber looks at you like a man adding something up.
#show-if (($stealth gte 2) or ($power is "stranger") or ($power is "mover")) [Stealth] Out the back while she's talking, and call the PRT from the corner. Give them the garage.
<<set $ulBetrayed to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
You're gone before she's finished the word //generous//, and the PRT line takes the address and the word //Bakuda// and gets quiet and fast, and a van is at the garage in nine minutes, and Bakuda isn't, because Oni Lee heard the sirens before anyone, and neither are Uber and Leet, because she took them with her. You stand on the corner and watch troopers walk through an empty garage with a drone on the floor, and you've done the right thing, and it has a cost, and the cost has two names.
#Say nothing. Let Uber decide. It's his team.
<<set $ulBakuda to true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Uber says yes. He says it in the voice of a man who's briefly an expert at surrender, and Bakuda nods like a teacher whose student has finally got the easy one, and gives Leet the specs, and leaves. Afterward Uber sits on the workbench and says, "I've never said yes to anyone," and you believe him, and you don't know what to do with it.
<</choose>><<set $sundayDone to true>>\
Sunday, five-forty, and you're not on Harbor Road. You're on the roof of the old cannery at Fourth and the water, with the skylight under you, and under the skylight is Bakuda's second site: a cannery floor with a thing the size of a washing machine on it, and Leet inside the thing with his hands shaking, and Uber standing next to him, and four of the ABB's people with guns, and a device on the wall with a timer that's counting down from twenty-six minutes, because Bakuda doesn't leave sites unattended, she leaves them insured.
<<if ($leetInsured is true)>>Leet has a thing at the base of his skull. You know what it looks like. You know what the dial does to it.<</if>>
Uber looks up. He's briefly an expert at knowing when he's being looked at, and he sees the mask through the skylight, and he shakes his head, once, and then he nods, once, and the two things mean //don't// and //hurry//.
<<choose "ch4-ul-rescue-2">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Through the skylight. The four guns first, before they've looked up.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<set $rescueAct to "fight">>\
You come through the glass as the thing you are, and the four of them have looked up by the time you land, and three of them are on the floor by the time Uber has finished saying your name, and the fourth gets a shot off that goes into Leet's machine, and the machine starts to hum in a different key.
#show-if (($tech gte 2) or ($power is "jury") or ($capeLore gte 2)) [Tech] The device on the wall. Twenty-six minutes is enough if you start now.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $rescueAct to "defuse">>\
You come down the fire stairs instead of through the glass and the four guns are a problem Uber solves, briefly expert at four men with guns, while you put your hands on Bakuda's wall device and find the decoy timer and the real one under it, and the tilt switch, and the ugly connection, and cut the ugly one at nineteen minutes, and the cannery is a building again instead of a bomb.
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($power is "mover") or ($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) Don't fight. Get them out. Both of them, before anyone knows you're in the building.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $rescueAct to "extract">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Two skips: Leet to the roof, Uber to the roof, and the four guns are pointing at a machine with nobody in it.<<elseif ($power is "breaker")>>You take them out of the world one at a time, a second behind it, and the ABB's four are guarding an empty cannery.<<else>>You stop being noticed and walk Leet out by the elbow, and then Uber, and the four men with guns watch a machine with great attention.<</if>> The timer on the wall keeps counting.
#Talk to the four. They're kids with Bakuda's insurance in their necks. Tell them you can get it out.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $rescueAct to "talk">>\
<<if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true))>>You tell them the eighth position is nothing, and what that means, and one of them lowers the gun, and then two, and the fourth looks at the three and makes the arithmetic, and the cannery has four fewer guns in it and a machine with Leet in it and twenty minutes on the wall.<<else>>You tell them you can get it out, and you can't, and two of them believe you anyway, because they want to, and two of them don't, and the two who don't are the problem.<</if>>
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if (($rescueAct is "defuse") or ($rescueAct is "extract") or (($rescueAct is "talk") and (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true))))>>\
<<set $ulSaved to true>>\
<<achieve "Continue?">>\
Leet's machine never works once, because he never finishes it, because you're all on the roof of the cannery at five-fifty-eight with the device on the wall <<if ($rescueAct is "defuse")>>cut to nothing<<else>>still counting<</if>>, and at six-oh-six it <<if ($rescueAct is "defuse")>>doesn't go off, and the cannery stands there being a cannery<<else>>goes, and the cannery goes the color of old photographs from the inside, with nobody in it<</if>>. Leet watches it with his hand on the back of his neck. "She's going to be so mad," he says, and it's the first thing he's said since Friday, and Uber laughs so hard he has to sit down.
At six-fourteen, on Harbor Road, Bakuda presses a button that calls for a teleporter that doesn't exist, and the convoy goes up the ramp through glass with nothing to stop it, and Lung goes to the airport in a box. <<set $bombsSunday to true>>At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs, because she keeps her appointments, and you're on a cannery roof with two capes who are alive because a kid in a mask read a text that said don't come.
<<if ($leetInsured is true)>>The thing in Leet's neck is still there. "Later," he says, when you look at it. "We'll build something. Once."<</if>>
<<else>>\
<<set $leetDead to true>>\
<<set $uberHurt to true>>\
<<achieve "Game Over">>\
The fourth man's shot went into the machine, and the machine was most of the way to being a teleporter, and what a teleporter does when it works once with a bullet in it is work once, wrong. Leet is inside it when it does. The machine goes, with a sound like a held breath, and most of the cannery floor goes with it, and what comes out the other side of the once is not Leet. Uber carries it anyway. He carries it up the fire stairs and onto the roof and sits down with it, and he doesn't say anything, because he's briefly an expert at nothing at all, and you sit down next to him, because nobody else will.
At six-fourteen, on Harbor Road, Bakuda presses a button that calls for a teleporter that doesn't exist, and the convoy goes up the ramp through glass, and Lung goes to the airport in a box. <<set $bombsSunday to true>>At six-twenty four more places in the city go the color of old photographs. You hear them from the roof. Uber doesn't look up.
<</if>>\
<<page "Afterward" "ch4-territory">>''Uber and Leet.'' Two men in jumpsuits, a drone, and a theme a week.
Uber is a Thinker who is briefly an expert at anything: barista, sportscaster, bank robber, surrender. Calm, polite, the straight man, the one who says "nobody gets hurt" and means it as a house rule. Leet is a Tinker who can build anything once and never the same thing twice, and everything he builds catches fire afterward, and he is defensive about this in the way of a man who knows it's the whole joke. They've never hurt anyone on purpose, and the PRT rates them a nuisance, and in April of 2011 that stopped being true, because Bakuda needed a thing that works once.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($ulEnemy is true)>><div>• You took their stream apart on Lord Street in front of nine hundred people. Uber remembered it. <<if ($atOnramp is true)>>They streamed the on-ramp for Bakuda.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if (($ulFriend is true) and ($ulMember is false))>><div>• You talked them out of a pawn shop in their own language. Leet gave you a controller that doesn't work.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($ulMember is true)>><div>• You joined. Episode twelve was your theme. <<if ($ulStream is true)>>You streamed the bank from the roof across the street, or went in with the vault thing.<<else>>You talked them onto the roof for the bank and called it Spectator Mode.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($ulBakuda is true)>><div>• Bakuda sat on the workbench and the team said yes. <<if ($ulSaved is true)>>You put your hand through Leet's machine before it worked once.<<elseif ($ulBakudaDone is true)>>It worked once. It moved a truck into a harbor wall.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($leetInsured is true)>><div>• You said no for them, and Oni Lee put a bee sting at the base of Leet's skull.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($ulBetrayed is true)>><div>• You went out the back and called the PRT, and the garage was empty when the van came, and so was the place where two capes had been.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($ulSaved is true)>><div>• The cannery. Both of them out. "She's going to be so mad."</div><</if>>\
<<if ($leetDead is true)>><div>• The cannery. Leet's teleporter worked once, the wrong way. Uber carried what came out.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Panacea.'' Amy Dallon, if you read the right threads, though nobody says it in front of her.
A girl in a white robe with a red cross on it, moving down a hospital line touching people, with the face of someone who has been doing it since she was eleven and would like to stop. She heals anything with a body. She does not do brains, and she does not do glass, and she tried anyway, on the bus, and told you not to tell anyone. Glory Girl's sister. Nobody in this city has ever made her go white and still but <<if ($panaceaHostage is true)>>you<<else>>one person, in a bank<</if>>.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($panaceaHostage is true)>><div>• You held her arm in the bank and told her nobody gets hurt. She told you she could stop your heart. Neither of you did it.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($panaceaApology is true)>><div>• You apologized for the bank. She's keeping it.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($panaceaFavor is true) and ($injured is false))>><div>• She fixed the thing nobody had looked at. Two fingers on your wrist, and the catch in your step was gone.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($panaceaFavor is true) and ($deaf is false))>><div>• She gave you the ear back. You hated it for a week.</div><</if>>\
<<if (($metPanacea is true) and ($panaceaHostage is false) and ($panaceaFavor is false) and ($panaceaApology is false))>><div>• You asked her about the glass, or you left her alone. Either one was a kindness.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Hookwolf.'' Brad, to the people who've known him long enough to regret it.
The Empire's Brute, who isn't a Brute, who is a man-shaped place where blades happen. Shirtless in a yard full of people in jackets, because that's how he stands. Runs the Empire's fight pits and would run the Empire if Kaiser ever looked away. Hates the ABB the way he hates everything, with appetite. Calls Kaiser "Kaiser" to his face and "the suit" behind it. Decided on Friday that Lung dies on the road, and on Sunday found out what Kaiser does about decisions.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($rodeWithHookwolf is true)>><div>• You said "In" in the Kessler yard, and went to Fourth with him, and watched his face when the arcade went.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($empireHeldLine is true)>><div>• You said you were with Kaiser, in front of him. "Pets stay home." He meant it to cost you, and it did.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sundayPlan is "hookwolf")>><div>• You rode in the pickup to Harbor Road. <<if ($lungFree is true)>>He opened the box.<<else>>You stood between him and the box.<</if>></div><</if>>\
<<if ($warnedKaiser is true)>><div>• You told Victor where he'd be. Kaiser came for him, not for Lung. He'll find out who talked.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>><<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
<<set $arc to 5>>\
''Arc 5: Hive''
Monday, April eighteenth. <<if ($bombsSunday is true)>>Eight<<else>>Four<</if>> places in Brockton Bay are the color of old photographs and the Mayor has asked for the National Guard and been told the PRT has it, and the PRT has a statement, and the statement has the word //contained// in it for the third time.
<<if ($lungDead is true)>>Lung is dead, and the news said it this morning, and the ABB's kids came to school with their bandanas in their pockets and their eyes on the floor.<<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>Lung is loose somewhere north of the city, and every ABB kid at Winslow is wearing the bandana on the outside, and the Empire kids are in school in numbers, in groups, by the shop classes, not talking.<<else>>Lung is in a mountain in British Columbia, and the ABB's kids came to school anyway, because school is school.<</if>> <<if ($bakudaDead is true)>>Bakuda is dead on an overpass.<<elseif ($bakudaCaught is true)>>Bakuda is in a cell that took six Tinkers to build, and the thread about who put her there has four hundred replies and no answer.<<elseif ($bakudaDeal is true)>>Bakuda is somewhere, and owes you, and the city doesn't know either of those things.<<else>>Bakuda is somewhere in the city with whatever she has left, and what she has left is enough.<</if>>
<<if ($metSchool is true)>>Taylor is in her seat<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>, and she has a bruise on her jaw from Friday she's told Gladly was a door, and Gladly believed her, because Gladly believes doors<<elseif (($leftWithTaylor is true) or ($independents is true))>>, and she looks at you once, and the once says //later//<<else>>, with her hood up and her hands around a coffee she isn't drinking<</if>>. Madison has a new pin with a ribbon on it for the people in the glass, and shows it to everyone, and the showing is the worst part.<</if>>
<<if (($ulFriend is true) or ($ulMember is true))>>\
You know the walk before you know the face. Two seniors coming down the shop-class stairs, one in a blue hoodie who moves like a man who could do anything for two minutes, and one in green who is explaining to him, with his hands, why the 1991 version is the real one. Uber and Leet go to Winslow. They've gone to Winslow the whole time. The one in blue sees you see them, and doesn't break stride, and touches two fingers to his eyebrow, and now you know each other's school faces, and nobody can undo that.
<<set $ulSchool to true>>\
<</if>>\
<<if ($gregTriggered is true)>>Greg Veder is back in school, in the back row, not talking, and when Gladly asks him a question he shakes his head instead of answering, and Gladly moves on, and nobody in the room knows what Greg is afraid of saying.<</if>>
The city is going to do something about the ABB this week. Everybody who holds anything knows it. <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Lisa's text came at seven: //Somer's Rock, 9pm, all of us, wear the good mask. The grown-ups are having a meeting and we're invited. Don't ask who's paying for the drinks.//<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Victor's text came at seven: //Somer's Rock, 9pm. Kaiser wants you <<if ($empireSplit is true)>>there. Specifically. Don't be late and don't bring your blocks.<<else>>behind him. Colors under the coat.<</if>>//<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Aegis's text came at seven: //Console, 8:30. Armsmaster's doing something tonight he's not telling the Director about, and he wants a Ward on the headset who can keep a secret. He asked for you by name.//<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>><<if ($abbCrown is true)>>A note came under your door at six, in handwriting you've seen on a ledger, from a man who collects for whoever pays him: //Somer's Rock, 9pm. They'd like to speak to the ABB. That is, apparently, you. R.H.//<<elseif ($maiBoss is true)>>Mai found you at the bus stop. "Somer's Rock," she said. "Nine. They want to talk to the ABB and I'm not walking into a room with Kaiser in it. You are. You'll say what I tell you to say."<<else>>Oni Lee was on the pharmacy roof at six this morning, so something is coming, and Mai said, on the steps, "They're having a meeting about us. Tonight. We're not invited."<</if>><<else>><<if ($warlordSeed is true)>>A note came under your door at six, in handwriting you've seen on a ledger: //Somer's Rock, 9pm. You hold ground now. People who hold ground are expected. R.H.//<<elseif ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel's text came at seven: //Somer's Rock. 9. The villains are having a meeting. I'm going to be on the roof across the street watching who comes out. Come watch with me.//<<else>>The threads are all saying the same thing: Somer's Rock, tonight, every gang in the city at one table. You're not any gang. You could still go and look.<</if>><</if>>
<<page "Tonight" "ch5-rock">>/* Somer's Rock. $truce records how the meeting ended; ch5-rock-2 and the rest of the week branch on it. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $sawRock to true>>\
Somer's Rock is a bar on the east edge of downtown that has had the same four customers since 1994, and tonight it has them, and also every villain in Brockton Bay who matters, and a waitress who is deaf and can't read lips and has been chosen for that reason.
<<if (($stance is "undersider") or ($stance is "empire") or (($stance is "abb") and (($abbCrown is true) or ($maiBoss is true))) or (($stance is "independent") and ($warlordSeed is true)))>>\
You're inside.
Kaiser has the long table, with Fenja and Menja behind him at twelve feet and Hookwolf at his right, <<if ($hookwolfFought is true)>>and Hookwolf looks at your mask when you come in and his hands do the thing they do<<else>>not sitting, because he doesn't<</if>>. Faultline is at the bar with Newter on the rail above her and Gregor at the door, <<if ($metGregor is true)>>and Gregor lifts a thermos an inch at you, in a toast<<else>>and Gregor looks at you with the mild interest of a man you could see through<</if>>. Four people you don't know are in the corner in costumes that don't match: a top hat, a girl in a sun, a big man in a hood, a tall woman who doesn't move right. <<if ($sawTravelers is true)>>The top hat sees you and makes a face like he's been caught. Travelers.<<else>>Travelers, someone says, from out of town.<</if>> <<if ($ulSaved is true)>>Uber and Leet are at a table by themselves, in the jumpsuits, and Leet has his hand on the back of his neck and doesn't take it off all night.<</if>>
And at the head of the table, in a black bodysuit with a white snake down the front, a man who is thin and calm and has two soldiers in grey behind him who you've seen before, loading crates. <<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>Ledger is at a small table by the wall with his pen, and he nods to you, once, like a colleague.<</if>> Coil.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>The Undersiders have the table by the window: Grue with his helmet on, Tattletale with her chin on her hand, Regent<<if ($caughtRegent is true)>>'s chair, empty, because the PRT has him<<else>> playing with a coaster<</if>>, Bitch at the door with one dog, <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>and Skitter, in the grey costume, who has never been in a room like this and is sitting like it.<<else>>and an empty chair that's yours.<</if>> Coil doesn't look at Lisa once all night, and that's a man not looking at something he owns.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>><<if ($empireSplit is true)>>You come in and Kaiser looks at you, and the room looks at Kaiser looking at you, and Hookwolf grins, and Kaiser says, "Sit," and points at a chair that is not behind him. It's at the table. It's the worst honor you've ever been given.<<else>>You stand behind Kaiser's chair with Krieg and Victor, in colors under the coat, and Kaiser doesn't turn around, and that's correct.<</if>><<elseif ($stance is "abb")>><<if ($abbCrown is true)>>You come in alone, in the mask, with the bandana on your arm, and the room goes quiet the way rooms do for the person they're meeting about. Kaiser looks at you for a long count. "The ABB," he says. "I'd expected someone taller." Hookwolf laughs. Coil doesn't.<<else>>You come in with Mai's words in your head and the bandana in your pocket, and the room decides what you are in about a second, and the second is not kind.<</if>><<else>>You come in alone, in the mask, and nobody knows what you are, and Coil says, "Ah. The one from Fourth and Lord," to the room, and the room looks, and you have a chair now.<</if>>
Kaiser does the talking, because Kaiser always does. <<if ($lungFree is true)>>"Lung is loose. The tinker is <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>in a cell<<elseif ($bakudaDead is true)>>dead<<else>>loose<</if>>. The ABB has a dragon and no head, and a dragon with no head burns everything. We end it this week, together, and divide what's left."<<elseif ($lungDead is true)>>"Lung is dead. <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>The tinker is in a cell.<<elseif ($bakudaDead is true)>>The tinker is dead.<<else>>The tinker is loose and has a hundred devices.<</if>> The ABB is a body on the floor, and the question tonight is who gets which piece, and whether we let the Protectorate watch us carve."<<else>>"Lung is in a cage for good. <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>The tinker is in a cell.<<elseif ($bakudaDead is true)>>The tinker is dead.<<else>>The tinker is loose and has a hundred devices.<</if>> The ABB is finished, and it doesn't know it yet, and this week we tell it."<</if>> He lays out terms. No civilians. No unmasking. No one's families. Each group takes a piece of the east side and holds it. The truce lasts until <<if (($bakudaCaught is true) or ($bakudaDead is true))>>the last of Lung's lieutenants is gone<<else>>the tinker is dealt with<</if>>, and not an hour after.
Grue asks who decides the pieces. Kaiser says the map does. Tattletale says, lightly, that the map was drawn before anyone sat down, and Coil says nothing, and Faultline says her crew works for pay, not maps, and Kaiser says there will be pay.
<<if ($abbCrown is true)>>Then Kaiser looks at you. "And the ABB can surrender its tinker and its teleporter and keep two blocks. Or the ABB can be a story we tell."<</if>>
<<choose "ch5-rock-2">>
#show-if ($abbCrown is false) Say yes to the truce. Whatever you are, a week of nobody bombing anybody is worth a signature.
<<set $truce to "yes">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You say it, and Kaiser nods like a man who was always going to hear yes, and Coil writes nothing down, because Coil doesn't need to.
#show-if ($abbCrown is false) Say yes, and add a term. Your own. The Docks' shops don't pay anybody's rent this week.
<<set $truce to "terms">>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The room looks at you. Kaiser looks at you longest. "The shops," he says. Faultline says, "I'll take that term," and Grue says, "So will we," and Kaiser, who has never been outvoted at a table he called, says, "Fine," in a voice that files it.
#show-if (($stance is "undersider") and (($mind gte 3) or ($challengedLisa is true))) Say what Lisa won't. The map was drawn by the man at the head of the table, and half this room is working for him and doesn't know it.
<<set $truce to "exposed">>\
<<set $coilExposed to true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
The room stops. Lisa's chin comes off her hand. Kaiser looks at Coil for the first time all night, and Coil looks at you, and says, mildly, "Go on," and you do, and when you're done Faultline says, "Huh," and Hookwolf says, "The suit's working for //him//?" and Kaiser says nothing, which is the loudest thing Kaiser has ever done.
#show-if (($stance is "empire") and ($body gte 4)) Tell Kaiser you'll take the plant, not Hookwolf. Say it in front of Hookwolf.
<<set $truce to "challenge">>\
<<set $hookwolfChallenged to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
Hookwolf laughs. Kaiser doesn't. Kaiser looks at you for a long count and then at Hookwolf and then back, and says, "Done," and the steel on the table grows an inch toward Hookwolf's hand and stops, and Hookwolf stops laughing, and you've got the front of a war and a man made of blades who is going to be behind you in it.
#show-if ($abbCrown is false) Say no. You don't sign things with Kaiser.
<<set $truce to "no">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
The room gets quiet. Hookwolf says, "Then what are you doing at the table," and you say watching, and Coil says, mildly, "Let them watch. Watchers are useful later," and the worst person in the room has just taken a note of you.
#show-if ($abbCrown is true) Surrender Bakuda and Oni Lee. Keep the two blocks. Keep the forty kids alive.
<<set $truce to "surrender">>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
"Two blocks," you say, "and the kids on them don't get touched, by anyone, including you," and Kaiser says "Done" too fast, and you've just sold the two most dangerous people in the city for forty teenagers and a noodle shop, and you'd do it again.
#show-if ($abbCrown is true) Tell Kaiser the ABB doesn't surrender. Tell him in front of Hookwolf, so it's a promise.
<<set $truce to "war">>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
Hookwolf stands up, and Kaiser puts one finger on the table, and Hookwolf sits down, and Kaiser says, "Then we'll see you on Fourth," pleasantly, and you walk out of Somer's Rock with the whole room watching your back and nobody touching it, because of the truce, and the truce has four days left.
#show-if ($abbCrown is true) Ask Coil, not Kaiser, what the ABB is worth to him.
<<set $truce to "coil">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $coilAbbDeal to true>>\
The room stops. Coil turns his head, slowly, like a man who's been waiting for someone to ask the right question. "A great deal," he says. "Speak to my accountant." <<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>Ledger, by the wall, clicks his pen.<</if>> Kaiser's steel grows an inch out of the table and stops, and you've just made the worst enemy and the worst friend in the city in one sentence.
<</choose>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>\
You're on the second headset in the Wards' console room with Vista, and the headset is patched into something it shouldn't be: a microphone Armsmaster put in his gauntlet before he walked into a bar he isn't supposed to be in, to make a deal he isn't allowed to make.
You hear Kaiser lay out terms. You hear a thin calm voice that Vista identifies, in writing, on a pad, as //COIL (?)//. You hear Armsmaster, from the back of the room, say that the Protectorate will not interfere with action against the ABB for four days, provided no civilians, no unmasking, and that any cape who breaks that is his personally. You hear the room decide to believe him.
Vista writes //THIS IS SO ILLEGAL// on the pad and underlines it twice.
<<choose "ch5-rock-2">>
#Write it all down. Every voice, every term. Someone's going to need a record of this.
<<set $truce to "record">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $rockRecord to true>>\
You fill four pages. Vista reads them over your shoulder without a word, and at the end puts her initials next to yours, small, in the corner.
#Go. Walk in the front door of Somer's Rock in the costume, and let the deal get made with a Ward in the room.
<<set $truce to "crash">>\
<<set $wardCrashed to true>>\
<<var $heroRep - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
Vista says, "You //can't//," and you're already on the stairs. The bar goes quiet when you come in. Fourteen villains and a Protectorate leader look at a probationary Ward in the doorway, and Armsmaster's visor turns toward you with the slowness of a man deciding how much of his career you've just cost him, and Coil says, "Ah. A witness. Sit down," and you sit, and the deal gets made with you watching, and that's a different deal.
#Pull the patch. Armsmaster made his choice. You don't have to be in the room for it.
<<set $truce to "out">>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
You take the headset off and Vista looks at you and takes hers off too, and the two of you sit in a console room full of screens listening to nothing, and it's the most Ward thing either of you has done.
#show-if ($stalkerHunt is true) Go. Shadow Stalker's on the roof across from Somer's Rock. She told you where.
<<set $truce to "roof">>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
<<var $rom_sophia + 5>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
She's on the roof with a bolt loaded and the bar's back door in her sights. "I count fourteen capes," she says, without looking at you. "And our boss. If I were a different person this would be the night." She doesn't fire. You watch who comes out together, and she names the ones you don't know.
<</choose>>
<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>\
You're not inside. You're on the pharmacy roof with Mai and Danny Trang and Oni Lee, who has not moved in an hour, watching the city decide what to do with you.
Mai has a phone with the thread open where someone is live-posting the cars outside Somer's Rock. Kaiser's. Faultline's. A van with no plates. "They're dividing us," Mai says. "Like a pie." Danny says they should run. Mai says where. Oni Lee says nothing, and then, for the second time in your hearing, he says a word, and the word is "Tomorrow," and this time it means something else.
<<choose "ch5-rock-2">>
#Tell Mai the ABB should make its own deal before the pie is cut. Go to the bar. Tonight.
<<set $truce to "abbdeal">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Mai looks at you for a long count. "You'd walk in there," she says. "With the bandana." You say yes. She says, "Then I'm coming," and Oni Lee says nothing, and the two of you walk into Somer's Rock at ten-fifteen, and the room goes quiet, and Kaiser says, "Late," and you've bought the ABB a conversation.
#show-if (($abbDoubt is true) or ($abbRoster is true) or ($abbRefused is true)) Go to the bar yourself. Not to deal for the ABB. To tell them about the necks.
<<set $truce to "plead">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
Mai says, "They'll kill you in the doorway," and you say the truce has four days, and she says, "The truce is theirs," and you go anyway, down the steps and across the east side on foot, with the bandana in your pocket and <<if ($abbRoster is true)>>a notebook with thirty-one names in it<<else>>no plan but the sentence<</if>>.
#Stay. Whatever they decide, you'll be here when they come, and so will forty kids.
<<set $truce to "hold">>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You stay on the roof until two. Oni Lee is gone when you look again. Mai falls asleep against the stairwell door with the phone still open, and you watch the thread tell you how the week is going to go.
#show-if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($abbRouteKnown is true)) Go to the PRT tonight. The war's coming either way, and you can pick which side of it the forty kids are on.
<<set $truce to "defect">>\
<<set $abbDefected to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 20>>\
The PRT building takes you in through the side door again, and a woman who isn't a trooper listens, and when you say //forty kids with insurance in their necks// she stops writing and makes a call, and by midnight there's a plan with your name nowhere on it and the kids everywhere in it.
<</choose>>
<<else>>\
You're on the roof across from Somer's Rock<<if ($metKestrel is true)>> with Kestrel, who has a bag of food and one hand and a list<<else>> alone, with a view of the back door<</if>>, watching the cars. Kaiser's. Faultline's. A van with no plates that two men in grey get out of. Four people in costumes that don't match, from out of town. <<if ($ulSaved is true)>>Uber and Leet, who shouldn't be at a meeting like this, and go in anyway, Leet with his hand on his neck.<</if>>
<<if ($metKestrel is true)>>"Fourteen," Kestrel says. "Fifteen with the one in the bodysuit, and I've never seen him, and I know every cape in this city." She eats. "That's who's buying the drinks."<</if>>
At eleven they come out, and nobody is fighting, and the whole news is this: every villain in Brockton Bay has agreed on something, and the something is the ABB.
<<choose "ch5-rock-2">>
#Follow the man in the bodysuit. Nobody knows him. Somebody should.
<<set $truce to "coiltail">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 5>>\
<<set $coilNoticed to true>>\
You follow the van with no plates for eleven blocks before one of the men in grey gets out at a light and stands on the corner looking directly at the roof you're on, and lifts two fingers, and gets back in. You've been seen. You've been expected to be seen.
#Follow Kaiser's people. The Empire's going to move first.
<<set $truce to "empiretail">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 5>>\
Kaiser's cars go to the Kessler yard, and the yard has forty people in it at midnight and a map on the hood of a car, and you watch Hookwolf put his finger on Fourth and Lord, and you know where the war starts.
#Walk in and ask for a chair. Nobody's gang. Everyone's problem.
<<set $truce to "chair">>\
<<set $sawRock to true>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
You walk in at ten-forty and the room looks at a kid in a mask that belongs to nobody, and Kaiser says, "This isn't a public meeting," and Coil says, "Watchers are useful later. Give the child a chair," and you get a chair at the end of the table and hear the last twenty minutes of the week being decided, and Coil looks at you twice, and remembers you.
#Go home. Whatever they've agreed, it starts tomorrow, and tomorrow you'll need to have slept.
<<set $truce to "home">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You go home. <<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel stays. She says somebody has to count them out, and she's the only one in the city who does.<</if>>
<</choose>>
<</if>>\/* Somer's Rock, the second half. The ABB plea sets $abbAmnesty; surrender sets $abbSurrendered and $maiBoss. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<if ($truce is "abbdeal")>>\
Kaiser hears Mai out. He hears her because Coil says, "Let's hear it," and Kaiser does what Coil says in rooms like this, and everyone pretends not to notice. Mai's terms are simple: <<if (($bakudaCaught is true) or ($bakudaDead is true))>>the ABB gives up Oni Lee's location and keeps two blocks and forty kids.<<else>>the ABB gives up Bakuda's location and keeps two blocks and forty kids.<</if>> She says it in a voice that doesn't shake, and when she's done Kaiser says, "The ABB sends a girl," and Mai says, "The ABB sent what it had," and Faultline laughs, once, and says she'd hire her.
They give her the two blocks. They give her until Thursday. Walking out, Mai says, "I'm going to be sick," and isn't, and says, "You said walk in. You didn't say talk," and you say she did fine, and she says, "I know I did," and it's the first time you've heard her sound seventeen.
<<set $maiBoss to true>>\
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<elseif ($truce is "plead")>>\
<<set $abbAmnesty to true>>\
<<achieve "Thirty-One">>\
You come in at ten-fifteen alone and the room does what rooms do, and Kaiser says, "The ABB sends a child," and you say the ABB didn't send you.
Then you say it. The ABB fucked it up. Lung fucked it up, and Bakuda fucked it worse, and the forty kids on Fourth and Lord didn't vote on any of it. <<if ($abbRoster is true)>>You put the notebook on the table. Thirty-one names. "These ones have a bomb at the base of the skull that a woman put there in front of their friends. Nine wanted it. These thirty-one took it because the other option was a chair." <<else>>"Most of the forty on Fourth and Lord have a bomb at the base of the skull that a woman put there in front of their friends. They're not the ABB. They're her hostages, and so was I."<</if>> You tell them you had one too, or nearly, and what the chair is, and what the dial does, and that a truce that ends with forty kids in a basement at midnight isn't a truce, it's a demolition.
Hookwolf says, "So?" Faultline says, "So they're not combatants." Gregor, at the door, says, in his cold accent, "I did not choose my mark either," and the room looks at him, and he looks back. Coil says nothing for a long count, and then, "The PRT has a Tinker from Boston who removes those. I know this because I know things. If the ones with devices present themselves on Friday, they are not on the map. Agreed?" He says it to Kaiser. Kaiser says, "The Empire doesn't do amnesty," and Coil says, "The Empire does what the map says," and Kaiser's steel grows an inch and stops.
It's agreed. Thirty-one kids are off the map. The nine who wanted it are on it. You walk out of Somer's Rock with the bandana still in your pocket and Mai waiting at the corner, and she says, "Well?" and you tell her, and she doesn't say anything for a block, and then she says, "You're an idiot," in the voice she uses for the opposite.
<<elseif ($truce is "exposed")>>\
Lisa catches you on the sidewalk and takes your arm hard enough to bruise. "Do you know what you just did," she says, and it isn't a question, and then, "He's going to be //delighted//. That's the problem. You just made him the most important person in the room out loud, and now Kaiser has to do something about it, and Kaiser doing something about it is a war inside the war." She lets go. "Also I've never seen his face do that. Thank you. Don't ever do it again."
<<elseif ($truce is "crash")>>\
Armsmaster walks you back to the PRT building at eleven-forty without a word, and in the console room, in front of Vista, says, "You have made it impossible for me to deny that meeting took place," and then, after a long second, "Which may have been the right thing to do," and then, "You're on console for a month," and Vista, behind him, gives you a thumbs up so small nobody but you sees it.
<<elseif ($truce is "challenge")>>\
Victor finds you on the sidewalk and doesn't open the folder. "Kaiser gave you the front," he says. "In front of Brad. Do you understand what Brad is going to do about that tomorrow?" You say stand behind you. Victor says, "Yes. With blades. Watch the ones behind you, not the ones in front." It's the most useful thing anyone in the Empire has told you.
<<elseif ($truce is "chair")>>\
Coil's men in grey walk you to the corner afterward, politely, and one of them says, "He'd like your name. Your real one. He says you'll give it to him eventually and he'd prefer it were a gift." You don't give it. The man says, "Noted," and it's that word again.
<<elseif ($truce is "surrender")>>\
<<set $abbSurrendered to true>>\
You walk out of Somer's Rock having sold <<if ($bakudaDead is true)>>Oni Lee<<elseif ($bakudaCaught is true)>>Oni Lee<<else>>Bakuda and Oni Lee<</if>> to a room full of people who'll collect, and two blocks are yours by a truce you don't trust, and forty kids will be alive on Friday because of a sentence you said, and you don't feel anything about it yet. That's going to come later, and all at once.
<<elseif ($truce is "war")>>\
You walk back to Fourth and Lord with four days and forty kids and Oni Lee on the pharmacy roof, who looks at you when you come up the steps and says nothing, and nothing from him tonight is a kind of agreement.
<<elseif ($truce is "coil")>>\
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>>Ledger finds you on the sidewalk outside. "My employer would like to buy the ABB," he says. "Not the people. The paper. The shops, the blocks, the arrangements. He'd leave you in place to run it. The pay would be significant and the oversight would be total." He clicks the pen. "Think about it until Wednesday. He doesn't ask twice. He has me ask twice."<<else>>A man in a suit with a ruled mask finds you on the sidewalk and says his employer would like to buy the ABB, not the people, the paper, and would leave you in place to run it, and that the oversight would be total, and that you have until Wednesday.<</if>>
<<else>>\
The meeting ends at eleven. The truce holds for four days, by the clock on Kaiser's wrist. <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Lisa, on the sidewalk, says, "He's going to use this to take the Docks. All of it. He's going to let Kaiser do the fighting and then he's going to own the map." She doesn't say who //he// is. She doesn't need to.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Victor, on the sidewalk, says, "Kaiser's pleased. Hookwolf's pleased. That's never happened at the same time before, and it means tomorrow's going to be loud."<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Armsmaster comes back to the PRT building at eleven-forty and walks past the console room without looking in, and Vista says, "He knows we heard," and you say yes, and she says, "Good."<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>You come down off the roof at two with the shape of the week in your head, and it's a bad shape, and you're in the middle of it.<<else>>You've seen every villain in the city agree on something, and now you know what the week is, and nobody's asked you to be in it, and you're going to be anyway.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($ulSaved is true)>>Outside, Uber and Leet are standing by a van that is just a van. "They offered us the Boardwalk arcade," Leet says, bewildered. "As //territory//. Like we're a //gang//." Uber says, "We said we'd think about it," and looks at you, and he said it so they could leave the room.<</if>>
<<if (($leetDead is true) and ($ulMet is true))>>Uber is standing across the street from the bar when you come out, alone, in the jumpsuit, not streaming anything. He doesn't come over. He watches the people who made the truce come out one at a time, and when Kaiser's car passes him he doesn't move, and he's looking for one person, and that person isn't in the room, and he'll keep looking.<</if>>
<<page "Tuesday" "ch5-tuesday">><<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
Tuesday. The war starts at four in the afternoon, because Kaiser likes daylight, and by five the east side has three fires in it and the PRT has a statement that uses the word //monitoring//.
<<if (($stance is "abb") and ($abbAmnesty is true) and ($abbCrown is false) and ($maiBoss is false))>>\
Thirty-one kids are off the map, and the map doesn't know it yet, because Hookwolf didn't sign anything. The PRT's Tinker from Boston sets up at the hospital at noon and the first of the thirty-one go in with Mai, and come out with a bee sting on a tray. The nine who wanted it are at the fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water with Oni Lee, and so are eleven people who pack fish, and at six every gang in the city goes there.
You're going too. Not for the ABB. For the eleven, and for whichever of the nine changes their mind when the doors go.
<<page "Six o'clock" "ch5-raid">>
<<elseif (($stance is "abb") or ($abbCrown is true) or ($maiBoss is true))>>\
<<if ($truce is "surrender")>>You gave them what they asked for, and they're coming anyway, because Hookwolf didn't sign anything, and at four-ten there are Empire cars on Lord Street and a man made of blades walking up the middle of it toward the pharmacy.<<elseif ($truce is "abbdeal")>>Mai got the ABB until Thursday, and Hookwolf didn't sign anything, and at four-ten there are Empire cars on Lord Street and a man made of blades walking up the middle of it toward the pharmacy, and Mai says, "He's not supposed to," and you say he knows.<<else>>At four-ten there are Empire cars on Lord Street and a man made of blades walking up the middle of it toward the pharmacy, with Cricket and Stormtiger behind him and forty people behind them, and Fourth and Lord has you, and Mai, and Danny Trang, and forty kids with Bakuda's insurance in their necks, and Oni Lee on the roof, who has not said whether he's staying.<</if>>
<<page "Hold the corner" "ch5-hold">>
<<else>>\
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Lisa's map has the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water circled in red. "Oni Lee's armory," she says. "Every gun the ABB has that isn't in a hand. Coil wants it empty by tonight. Kaiser wants it on fire. We want to be the ones who were there first, so the map remembers us." Brian says the dogs go in the back. Rachel says the dogs go where she says. <<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor says she'll have the building full of bugs before anyone's inside it, and nobody argues.<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Victor's map has the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water circled in red. "Oni Lee's armory," he says. "Kaiser wants it burning by six and the Empire seen burning it. <<if ($hookwolfChallenged is true)>>You're taking the front. Kaiser said so at the table, and Hookwolf heard it, and Hookwolf will be behind you, and Victor said watch the ones behind you.<<else>>Hookwolf's taking the front. You and Rune have the roof.<</if>>" <<if ($empireSplit is true)>>"Kaiser says you'll want to be seen doing this. He says it like it's a kindness, and it is one, and it's also a leash."<</if>>
<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Aegis's briefing has the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water circled in red in Armsmaster's hand, so Armsmaster knows what's going to happen to it at six. "The Protectorate is monitoring," Aegis says, in a voice that has quotation marks in it. "The Wards are holding the perimeter at Lord Street. Nobody goes past the fish market." He looks at you. "If somebody went past the fish market, they'd see Oni Lee's armory get hit by three gangs at once, and they'd be able to pull civilians out of it before it burned, and they'd be disobeying a direct order." He goes. <<if ($rockRecord is true)>>Vista, behind you, says, "He wrote that circle after he read your pages."<</if>>
<<else>><<if ($warlordSeed is true)>>The map everyone drew at Somer's Rock has the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water circled, and the circle is three blocks from yours, and Coil's note this morning said //the plant is nobody's until six. After six it is whoever's standing in it.//<<elseif ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel's list from the roof had one address underlined: the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water. "Every gang in the city's going there at six," she says. "There are people who work there. Nobody at that table said the word //civilians// except Kaiser, and he said it like a term."<<else>>The threads all have the same address by noon: the ABB's fish-packing plant on Fourth and the water, Oni Lee's armory, six o'clock, three gangs. There are people who work in a fish-packing plant. Nobody on the threads is talking about them.<</if>><</if>>
<<page "Six o'clock" "ch5-raid">>
<</if>>\/* Arc 5, the raid on the pharmacy. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<set $raided to true>>\
The fish-packing plant at six is a long low building with its loading doors open and Oni Lee on the roof, and inside it there are forty crates of guns and eleven people who pack fish for a living and didn't go home at five because the ABB told them not to, and they're the human shield, the cheapest one in the city.
Hookwolf comes up Fourth from the south as a thing made of blades. Coil's men in grey come along the waterfront in a line. <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Grue's dark goes up over the loading doors and Rachel's dogs go in under it.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Rune puts you on the roof with four manhole covers and says, "Don't touch the teleporter. He's mine," and she means it the way she means everything, personally.<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>You're past the fish market, where you're not supposed to be, with the plant's side door in front of you and eleven people behind it.<<else>>You're at the side door nobody's watching, because every gang in the city is watching the front.<</if>>
Oni Lee comes off the roof in four pieces, and each of them has a grenade, and the grenades are Bakuda's, and the first one goes off at the loading doors and the doors go the color of old photographs with two of Coil's men in them.
<<if ($deaf is true)>>You don't hear the second pin. You see the second Oni Lee's hand.<</if>>
<<choose "ch5-raid-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and go in the side door. Get between the crates and the eleven people, and be the wall.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 5>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You go in heavy and the eleven of them are behind a conveyor belt with their hands over their heads, and you stand in front of the belt, and the second grenade goes off against your chest and does something cold, and the third does something that makes the floor glass, and you're standing in it, dense, with eleven people behind you who are going to walk out of this.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> The cold goes into the density and stops at the bone, and eleven people stand behind a wall that has a lot of bone.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip to the roof. Be where the real one is, and take the grenades off him one at a time.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
Three skips and three grenades in the harbor, and on the fourth he's waiting for you, with a knife, and the knife is real, and you skip with it in you, and on the roof of the plant you've got his wrist and he's got your blood, and for one second neither of you is anywhere else.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Three grenades in the harbor and the fourth skip lands with your stomach still yours.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Panes. Over the eleven people. Then over the crates, so nobody gets a gun out of this.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You put the eleven in a blue box and the forty crates in another, and the grenades go off against blue and make blue the color of old photographs, and inside the boxes nothing changes, and Hookwolf comes through the front wall and finds the guns he came for inside something he can't cut.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The two boxes go up in two breaths, and Hookwolf hits one of them and the blades stop, and he looks at his hands.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Walk the eleven people out through the glass, two at a time.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You go a second behind the world and take them two at a time through a loading door that's the color of old photographs, and each time you come back the glass is an inch closer, and on the sixth trip it has the sleeve of your costume, and you leave the sleeve.
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You take them three at a time, not two, and come back with your sleeve.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Stop." To the roof. To all of him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
Four Oni Lees stop in the air and three are ash before they land, and the fourth lands on the roof's edge and looks at you, and you say it again, and he stays stopped for a count of three, and three is what Hookwolf needed, and Hookwolf is on the roof.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> Four stop, and the fourth stays stopped for a count of five, which is two more than Hookwolf needed.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The radio. His click. Call it for whoever's listening, and somebody is. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
You call his clicks on the open channel, left, high, left, and on the third one a voice you know says, "Who is this," and on the fourth a halberd takes a copy out of the air from a roof two buildings over, because Armsmaster is monitoring, and monitoring has a halberd.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The radio's a quarter second early because you tuned it on Sunday, and Armsmaster says "Keep going" on the second click.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge everything. The crates. Forty crates of guns don't have to leave this building as guns.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "crates">>\
Three coins through three crates and the crates go up, and then the crates next to them, and the plant is a fireworks display for ninety seconds that nobody in the city will ever get a gun out of, and Hookwolf, in the doorway, watches the thing he came for burn and looks at you like you've eaten his dinner.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> Three crates at once, charged to three counts, so the fireworks start at the back and walk forward, away from the eleven.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Three seconds ahead. Eleven people, four Oni Lees, one door. Solve it.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You're on the floor with the eleven saying "Now, left, now, stop, now," and the grenades go off where they were, four times, and on the fifth you're all out the side door in a line and the plant goes the color of old photographs behind you with nobody in it but crates.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and the eleven are out the side door before the second grenade has a pin out of it.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The roof. He needs somewhere to stand. Take it away.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
You get a hand on the plant's corner post and the roof remembers it's been wet for forty years, and goes, and four Oni Lees ride it down into the building and three are ash and the fourth is under a beam with a grenade in his hand and a decision to make.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> The corner post, and then the beam you chose, so the roof comes down on the crates and not the belt.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Walk in the front, past Hookwolf, as the other thing.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
The grey body walks past a thing made of blades and the thing made of blades lets it, because it's the first thing in a year that Hookwolf hasn't been sure he could cut, and you take the eleven people out the front past him two under each arm, and he watches you do it with his mouth a little open.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is bigger than the loading door, and Hookwolf steps back, which he has never done for anything.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on a copy before it's ash. Take the trick. Use it on him.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
You touch the one that lands next to you and the clock starts, and by the third minute there are two of you, and by the sixth there are five, and Oni Lee, on the roof, watches copies of a kid he can't tell apart take his grenades out of the air one at a time, and for the first time in his life he's the one who doesn't know which one is real.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> Five of you by the fourth minute, and all five know which one is real, and he doesn't.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Nobody's looking at the side door. Walk the eleven out of it before anyone remembers it exists.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You stop being noticed and the side door stops being noticed with you, and eleven people who pack fish walk out of a war in a line with their hands on each other's shoulders, and not one cape in three gangs sees them go.
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> Eleven people walk out of a war, and the war looks straight through them, and through you, and through the door.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($metKestrel is true) Kestrel's above the plant with one hand. Whistle. Let her take the roof, and you take the door.
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $rom_kestrel + 5>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
She comes down on the roof like a thrown coat with one hand and a fist of air, and Oni Lee has never been hit by someone who only has one hand and doesn't care, and while he's finding out you get the side door open and eleven people through it.
#Stay outside. Three gangs and Oni Lee is a Protectorate problem, and the Protectorate is two roofs over, monitoring.
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $raidAct to "watch">>\
You watch. The plant burns. Nine of the eleven come out the back when the Empire breaches the front, and two don't, and nobody on the threads will ever know the number was eleven.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. The side door, and eleven people out of it on your back if you have to.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You take the side door off and go in and come out with a man over each shoulder and go back, five times, and the grenades go off behind you each time, and you're still standing on the sixth.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Up the drainpipe to the roof. Be where he lands.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You're on the roof before the second copy lands, and the second copy lands on you, and ash doesn't weigh anything, and the real one is three feet away looking at a kid who climbed a drainpipe faster than he teleports.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The plant's sprinkler main. Oni Lee's grenades don't like water.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You find the main and open it and the plant rains, and Bakuda's grenades go off in a downpour and do a quarter of what they should, and eleven wet people walk out the side door while three gangs stand in the rain.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Shout to the eleven in the voice you'd use for a fire drill.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You give them a fire drill: single file, hands on shoulders, the side door, and eleven people who've done fire drills do one, and walk out of a war the way they'd walk out of a Tuesday.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Stand in the loading door between the grenades and the belt, and don't move.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "people">>\
You stand there, and the second grenade goes off six feet short, and the third goes off four feet short, and you don't move, and the eleven behind the belt see you not move and go out the side door while Oni Lee works out what you are.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You go in dense and come out with eleven people and forty crates, the crates in your arms, and put them in the harbor one at a time while Hookwolf watches.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body walks through the plant's front wall, takes the eleven out two under each arm in three trips, and takes the roof off on the way back, with Oni Lee on it.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Twelve skips: eleven people and one teleporter, the teleporter to Armsmaster's roof with a bow on him.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>You walk the eleven out, and then walk back in and take the grenades out of four hands, and then the mask off the real one.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>The roof, the floor under the crates, and the beam over him, in that order, and the plant is a hole with eleven people standing beside it and Oni Lee under the beam.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The radio, the canister, and the thing on a stick that you built for exactly a man who's four men, and all four of him go off at once, harmlessly, in the harbor.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and you've walked eleven people out, called four grenades, and told Armsmaster where the real one lands before he lands.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>Forty crates in forty counts, a drumroll ending at the roof, and the roof's Oni Lee lands in the harbor with his grenades going off underwater.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Stop," to four of him, and "Walk," to eleven of them, and "Kneel," to the one that's real, and the plant is quiet.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>His trick by the first minute, and nine of you in the plant, and nine of you walk eleven people out, and the tenth sits down next to him on the roof.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You take the eleven out of the world in one trip, all of them holding hands, and come back standing on the roof with your hand on his shoulder.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>A box for the eleven, a box for the crates, and a box for him, with no door, on the roof, in blue.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Null and the Word. Take Oni Lee's trick, and say "Stop" as four of you.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<set $raidAct to "oni">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You take what he is from a copy and there are four of you, and four of you say "Stop" to four of him from four directions, and four Oni Lees stop in the air and three go to ash and the fourth lands on the roof in front of four of you, and sits down.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Charge and Shed. The grey body, throwing charged crates.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $raidAct to "crates">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
The grey body picks up a crate of guns and you charge it in the grey hands until it hums, and throw it, and it goes off in the air over Fourth Street like a firework the size of a car, and the second one does too, and Hookwolf stands in the doorway watching a thing with no face throw the ABB's armory into the sky one crate at a time.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $health to 0>>\
You don't see the grenade that gets you. That's how they work. One second there's a floor, and a door, and eleven people, and the next second the floor is the color of old photographs and you're in it to the chest and the cold is inside you where your breathing used to be, and the last thing you see is Oni Lee's mask looking down from the roof with no expression at all, and the last thing you hear is <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Lisa saying your name on the radio, over and over, like a count that won't finish.<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Aegis saying your cape name into a radio, and then saying it again, differently.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Rune saying "No, no, no" from the roof in a voice that's twelve.<<else>><<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel, from above, saying "Don't," to the glass.<<else>>the plant burning.<</if>><</if>>
The PRT will dig you out in eleven years. Nobody will remember the number was eleven.
<<page "Try the week again" "ch5-replay">>
<<page "Start over" "Start">>
<<else>>\
<<set $raidDone to true>>\
<<if ($raidAct is "people")>>\
<<achieve "Eleven">>\
Eleven people who pack fish are standing on Fourth Street at six-twenty with their hands on each other's shoulders, alive, while the building they worked in burns behind them with forty crates of guns going off inside it like a drum solo. Nobody on the threads will ever know the number was eleven. You know. <<if ($stance is "ward")>>Aegis finds you on Fourth with his clipboard and looks at the eleven and doesn't write anything, and says, "You were at the perimeter the whole time," and you say yes, and he says, "Good," and it's the first lie you've heard him tell.<</if>>
<<elseif ($raidAct is "oni")>>\
Oni Lee doesn't leave the plant the way he came. You've got him, or you've got the real one for the length of a breath, and that's longer than anyone has. <<if ($stance is "empire")>>Rune, on the roof, says, "He was //mine//," and puts a manhole cover through the space where he was.<</if>>
<<elseif ($raidAct is "crates")>>\
The ABB has no guns. Not in that building, not in any hand that was going to come to that building for one. Hookwolf came for forty crates and leaves with a face full of smoke and a grudge, and Coil's men came for forty crates and leave with nothing to report, and Lisa, if she's anywhere near a phone, is laughing.
<<else>>\
You stayed outside. Two people who packed fish are in the glass, and will be for a while, and you were two roofs over, monitoring.
<</if>>\
<<if (($raidAct is "oni") and ($oniLeeDead is false))>>\
<<page "Oni Lee" "ch5-oni-choice">>
<<else>>\
<<page "Wednesday" "ch5-wednesday">>
<</if>>\
<</if>>\/* Oni Lee's fate after the raid: $oniLeeCaught, $oniLeeDead or $oniLeeSpared. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
You've got him. The real one, on the plant's roof, with a beam across his legs or your hand on his wrist or your copies around him, and for the first time since anyone in this city has known him, Oni Lee isn't somewhere else.
He looks at you through the demon mask. He doesn't struggle. He says, "Tomorrow," because it's the only word he has, and this time it's a question.
<<choose "ch5-wednesday">>
#Hold him for the Protectorate. Armsmaster is two roofs over, monitoring. Let him monitor this.
<<set $oniLeeCaught to true>>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<achieve "Tomorrow, Never">>\
Armsmaster is on the roof in forty seconds with restraints that are mostly a bag, because a teleporter in a bag can't see where to go, and Oni Lee goes into it without a sound, and Armsmaster looks at you over it and says, "That was a Protectorate operation," and you say yes, and he says, "It will be in the report that way," and it's the kindest lie he's got.
#show-if ($stamina gte 10) Kill him. He has Bakuda's grenades and nothing else in his life, and he'll be somewhere else by morning.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<set $oniLeeDead to true>>\
<<var $streetRep + 25>>\
<<var $heroRep - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 25>>\
<<achieve "Ash">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You do it with your hands, and he lets you, and it's the letting that you'll remember.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>A coin, charged for the count he's given you, and he doesn't go to ash, because ash is for copies.<<elseif ($power is "master")>>You tell him to stop, with everything, and he does, all the way, and his eyes stay on you while he does it.<<else>>You use the thing you do, and he lets you, and it's the letting that you'll remember.<</if>> He doesn't go to ash. Ash is for the copies. He's just a man on a roof with a demon mask, and he's lighter than you'd think.
#Let him go. Tell him the ABB is finished and he doesn't have to be.
<<set $oniLeeSpared to true>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $heroRep - 5>>\
You let go of his wrist. He looks at his wrist, and at you, and for a long count he doesn't go anywhere, and you've never seen him do anything stranger. Then he says, "Tomorrow," and this time it means //thank you//, or //I'll remember//, or both, and he's ash, and the real one is on a roof three blocks away looking back.
<</choose>>/* Arc 5, holding Fourth and Lord. FIGHT. Options follow the house pattern (GameScript section 3): one option per power, visible to that power or to the Vial, enabled while $stamina covers setup.powerCost; [Stat] variants need the paired stat at 4 with control below 3; [Stat + Control] variants need stat 4 and control 4; [Vial] combinations need $vial, control 3 and 30 stamina; and plain options with no power. Bonus lines inside the bodies check setup.pstat("power") gte 4. */\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<set $heldFourth to true>>\
Fourth and Lord at four-fifteen has you on the pharmacy steps, Mai beside you with a phone and no plan, Danny Trang behind her, forty kids with bandanas on their arms and Bakuda's insurance in their necks on the corners, and Oni Lee on the roof, who has decided to stay, and hasn't said so.
Hookwolf walks up the middle of Lord Street as a man and stops forty feet off as something else. Cricket is on his left with her kamas. Stormtiger on his right with the air going wrong around his hands. Behind them, forty Empire kids with bats, and behind them, parked, with its engine running, a car with tinted windows that Kaiser doesn't get out of.
"The suit says four days," Hookwolf calls. "I say the suit's not here." The blades come out. "You kids want to go home, go home. The ones in the masks stay."
<<if ($deaf is true)>>You don't hear Oni Lee move. You see the pigeons go.<</if>>
<<choose "ch5-hold-2">>
#show-if (($power is "brute") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("brute")) Go dense and meet him in the street. A thing made of blades against a thing made of stone.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("brute")>>\
<<var $health - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
You walk down the steps and into him, and he goes through you like a woodchipper for the first second and like a woodchipper hitting rebar for the second, and by the third you've got your arms around a man-shaped place where blades happen and you're squeezing, and he's never been squeezed, and Cricket is screaming something and you can't hear it.
<<if (setup.pstat("brute") gte 4)>> He hits rebar on the first second, not the second, and the squeeze starts earlier than he's ready for.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "mover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("mover")) Skip. Cricket first, then Stormtiger. Leave Hookwolf alone in the street.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("mover")>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "flank">>\
Cricket's on the ground before her kamas are up, and Stormtiger's air hits the place you were, and the third skip puts you behind him with his own elbow in your hand, and Hookwolf turns around in the street to find he's the only Empire cape still standing, and forty kids with bats who've just done the math.
<<if (setup.pstat("mover") gte 4)>> Cricket, Stormtiger, and the third skip puts you on the hood of the car with tinted windows, looking in.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "cover") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("cover")) Panes across Lord Street. Make the corner a wall. Let him cut it and see what cutting costs.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("cover")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You put the whole width of Lord Street in blue, pane after pane, and Hookwolf hits it and the blades stop, and he grows more and they stop, and for four minutes the Empire stands in front of a wall that doesn't care, and Kaiser's car door opens.
<<if (setup.pstat("cover") gte 4)>> The wall goes up in three panes, not six, and the third one takes Hookwolf's full charge without a sound.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "breaker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("breaker")) Step out. Walk through him. Come back behind the car with the tinted windows.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("breaker")>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "kaiser">>\
You walk through a thing made of blades a second behind the world and down Lord Street past forty bats and come back solid with your hand on the handle of a car with tinted windows, and open it, and Kaiser looks at you from the back seat with no expression and says, "Well."
<<if (setup.pstat("breaker") gte 4)>> You walk through him and the forty bats and come back with Kaiser's door already open.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "master") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("master")) "Go home." To the forty with bats. In the voice.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("master")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "crowd">>\
Forty Empire kids go home. They go home in a body, bats dragging, and Hookwolf turns around to shout at them and shouts at an empty street, and the forty ABB kids on the corners watch forty Empire kids walk away from a fight because a voice said so, and look at you differently.
<<if (setup.pstat("master") gte 4)>> Forty go home, and so does Cricket, who didn't know she was listening.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if ($power is "jury") use-if (($stamina gte setup.powerCost("jury") / 2) and ($money gte 10)) The thing you built from Bakuda's dud, or from the radio, or from the pharmacy's back room. Whatever it is, it's for exactly this. [$10 in parts]
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("jury") / 2>>\
<<var $money - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
It's a magnet. It's a very large, very brief magnet, and a man made of blades finds out what that means with his whole body, and sticks to the side of a parked bus for nine seconds while Cricket tries to pull him off, and nine seconds is long enough for forty kids with bats to reconsider.
<<if (setup.pstat("jury") gte 4)>> The magnet holds for fourteen seconds, not nine, because you rewound the coil on Wednesday, and fourteen is a long time to be stuck to a bus.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "blaster") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("blaster")) Charge the whole handful. Not at him. At the street in front of him, so there's no street.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("blaster")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
Lord Street between you and the Empire becomes a trench four feet deep and forty wide, and Hookwolf, who can cut anything, finds he can't cut a hole, and stands at the edge of it growing blades at nothing.
<<if (setup.pstat("blaster") gte 4)>> The trench is six feet deep and the far side is crumbling, and Hookwolf backs up from the edge.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "thinker") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("thinker")) Three seconds ahead. Forty bats, two capes, one Hookwolf. Call it for the kids on the corners.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("thinker")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "flank">>\
You call it. Left corner forward, right corner back, now, and forty kids who've never been told anything useful by anyone do what the voice says, and Cricket walks into six of them, and Stormtiger's air hits a wall of kids who were somewhere else, and Hookwolf finds himself in a street that's moving around him like water.
<<if (setup.pstat("thinker") gte 4)>> Five seconds ahead, and forty kids who've never been told anything useful move like a drilled unit.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "shatterpoint") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")) The street. Lord Street was paved in 1988 by the lowest bidder. Find where it wants to open.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("shatterpoint")>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You put a hand on the asphalt and the asphalt remembers the sewer under it, and Lord Street opens between you and the Empire in a line, and Hookwolf stands on the far side of a hole he could jump and doesn't, because he's never seen a street do that and he's thinking about who did it.
<<if (setup.pstat("shatterpoint") gte 4)>> Lord Street opens in a line you chose, and the line runs under the car with tinted windows, and stops.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "changer") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("changer")) Shed. Let the Empire see what the ABB's got.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("changer")>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
The grey body comes down the pharmacy steps and Hookwolf, who has never once in his life slowed down, slows down, and the two of you meet in the middle of Lord Street as the only two things in the city that aren't shaped like people, and the sound of it is going to be on the threads for a year.
<<if (setup.pstat("changer") gte 4)>> The grey body is the size of him now, and the sound of the two of you is going to be on the threads for two years.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "echo") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("echo")) Get a hand on him. Take the blades. Be the second thing in the city made of them.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("echo")>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
You touch him and it costs you an arm's worth of skin, and the clock starts, and by the third minute your hands aren't hands, and by the sixth Hookwolf is fighting something that's doing what he does, worse, and getting better at it every second, and he's never had a mirror before.
<<if (setup.pstat("echo") gte 4)>> You have the blades by the second minute, and you're better at them than he is by the fourth, and he knows it by the fifth.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#show-if (($power is "stranger") or ($vial is true)) use-if ($stamina gte setup.powerCost("stranger")) Go still. Walk down Lord Street to the car with tinted windows and knock on the glass.
<<var $stamina - setup.powerCost("stranger")>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<set $holdAct to "kaiser">>\
You walk past Hookwolf and Cricket and Stormtiger and forty bats and nobody sees you, and you knock on the tinted glass, and it comes down an inch, and Kaiser looks at a kid in a mask that nobody in his army noticed, and says, "Well."
<<if (setup.pstat("stranger") gte 4)>> You knock on the tinted glass and nobody in an army of forty saw you cross the street, and Kaiser knows that too.<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 10)>><</if>>\
#Oni Lee's on the roof. Say his name. Let the Empire remember what the ABB still has.
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "oni">>\
You say it, loud, and the pigeons go, and four Oni Lees come off the pharmacy roof with Bakuda's grenades, and the first one goes off at Hookwolf's feet and the street goes the color of old photographs around his ankles, and he's stuck in it to the shin, growing blades at nothing, while Cricket and Stormtiger decide whether they love him.
#Send the kids home. All of them. Yours and his. Stand on the steps alone.
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep - 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<set $holdAct to "alone">>\
You tell the forty on the corners to go home, and some of them do, and you tell the forty with bats to go home, and some of them do, and Hookwolf stands in a street that's emptying on both sides and looks at a kid on a pharmacy step, alone, and the car with tinted windows opens.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) [Body] No power. Down the steps and into him with your hands, and let the forty see it.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You go down the steps and into a man made of blades with nothing but your hands, and it costs you both forearms, and he stops, not because it hurt him but because nobody has ever done that, and forty kids saw it.
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) [Agility] No power. Over the cars, through the forty, to the car with tinted windows.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You go over three cars and through forty bats and nobody gets a hand on you, and you're at the tinted window knocking before Hookwolf has turned around.
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) [Mind] No power. The fire hydrant on the corner and the wrench in the pharmacy's back room.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You open the hydrant and Lord Street is a river in forty seconds, and a man made of blades is a man made of rust in a river, and he knows it, and backs up.
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) [Charm] No power. Talk to the forty with bats. They're Winslow. You know their names.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You say six names, and six kids with bats look at you, and you say what Hookwolf's going to let happen to them, and six becomes twenty, and Hookwolf turns around to find half his army looking at their shoes.
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control lt 3) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) [Nerve] No power. Sit down on the pharmacy steps and wait for him.
<<var $health - 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<set $holdAct to "wall">>\
You sit down. Hookwolf walks up Lord Street to a kid sitting on a step, and stops, because a thing made of blades needs something to cut, and a kid sitting down isn't it, and the forty on the corners watch him stop, and that's the whole fight.
#show-if (($body gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "body")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Body + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "brute")>>You pick Hookwolf up. All of him, blades and all, and you hold him over your head in Lord Street until he's a man again, and put him down in front of Kaiser's car.<<elseif ($power is "changer")>>The grey body takes him apart the way he takes things apart, and puts him in the back of Cricket's car in pieces that will grow back, and Kaiser's door doesn't open.<</if>>
#show-if (($agility gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "agility")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Agility + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>Cricket, Stormtiger, the forty bats one at a time, and then Hookwolf's own blades, in the harbor, before he's noticed his hands are empty.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>Nobody sees you take Cricket's kamas, or Stormtiger's footing, or Hookwolf's attention, and he stands in Lord Street alone, and Kaiser's car leaves without him.<<elseif ($power is "shatterpoint")>>Lord Street, the bus, the car with tinted windows, and Hookwolf stands on an island of asphalt with the Empire on the far side of a hole, and Kaiser on foot.<</if>>
#show-if (($mind gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "mind")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Mind + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "jury")>>The magnet, and then the thing you built on top of the magnet, and Hookwolf is a man-shaped pile of blades on the side of a bus for a full minute, and the threads have it from four angles.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Eight seconds ahead, and forty kids and a street move around three Empire capes like water around rocks, and the rocks go home.<<elseif ($power is "blaster")>>The trench, and then the bus into the trench, and then the car with tinted windows has nowhere to go but back.<</if>>
#show-if (($charm gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "charm")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Charm + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "master")>>"Go home," to eighty people, and all eighty do, and Hookwolf stands in an empty street and you say, "You too," and he does.<<elseif ($power is "echo")>>You have his blades by the first minute and you're better by the third, and Hookwolf finds out what it's like to fight himself, and loses.<</if>>
#show-if (($nerve gte 4) and ($control gte 4) and (setup.powerPair[$power] is "nerve")) use-if ($stamina gte 10) [Nerve + Control] Everything you are, all at once.
<<var $stamina - 10>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Full Measure">>\
<<if ($power is "breaker")>>You walk through the Empire and into Kaiser's car and come back solid with the door open and your hand on the suit's collar, and the whole street sees it.<<elseif ($power is "cover")>>Lord Street in blue from building to building, and Hookwolf inside a box in the middle of it, and the box has a window so the forty can watch.<</if>>
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] Shed and Densify. The grey body, dense, down the steps at a thing made of blades.
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $health - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "fight">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
What comes down the pharmacy steps has no face and weighs what a truck weighs, and Hookwolf hits it and the blades skip off like hail off a roof, and for the first time in his life he's the one who gets picked up, and the forty on the corners make a sound you'll remember.
#show-if ($vial is true) use-if (($stamina gte 30) and ($control gte 3)) [Vial] The Word and Pane. Put the Word into a wall of panes, and let the wall say "Go home."
<<var $stamina - 30>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 20>>\
<<set $holdAct to "crowd">>\
<<achieve "Cocktail">>\
You put the panes across Lord Street and the Word into them, and the wall says "Go home" to everyone who touches it, in your voice, and forty kids with bats touch it and go home, and Hookwolf puts his blades into it and hears it and stands there with his hands in blue glass, listening.
<</choose>><<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $health to 0>>\
Hookwolf doesn't stop when you stop. That's the whole of him. You're on your back on Lord Street with the pharmacy steps behind your head and a man made of blades standing over you, and the blades are going back in, slowly, because he's done, and he says, to the street, "Tell them who," and the last thing you see is Mai on the steps with her hands over her mouth, and the last thing you hear is Oni Lee, from the roof, saying nothing at all.
The ABB's kids take the bandanas off one at a time. The Empire takes Fourth and Lord by five. The threads call it the end of the ABB, and nobody on them says your name right.
<<page "Try the week again" "ch5-replay">>
<<page "Start over" "Start">>
<<else>>\
<<set $holdDone to true>>\
<<if (($holdAct is "kaiser") or ($holdAct is "alone"))>>\
Kaiser gets out of the car. He walks up Lord Street through his own people in a suit that grows an inch of steel with every step, and stops in front of the pharmacy, and looks at you, and then at Hookwolf, and says, "Four days, Brad," and Hookwolf says, "The suit wasn't here," and Kaiser says, "The suit is here now," and the steel grows out of the asphalt around Hookwolf's feet and stops. "Go home." Hookwolf goes home. The Empire goes with him. Kaiser looks at you one more time and says, "Thursday," and gets back in the car.
<<set $kaiserSawYou to true>>\
<<elseif ($holdAct is "fight")>>\
<<achieve "Woodchipper">>\
It ends with both of you on the ground and neither of you able to finish it, and Cricket dragging him by one arm toward the cars, and him letting her, and the threads won't believe that part: that somebody made Hookwolf let himself be dragged. Mai gets you up the steps. You've lost blood you'll want later. Fourth and Lord is still yours at five.
<<elseif (($holdAct is "wall") or ($holdAct is "flank") or ($holdAct is "crowd"))>>\
The Empire goes home at five without the corner. They go home because a wall didn't care, or because the street moved around them, or because forty bats walked away when a voice said to, and Hookwolf goes last, walking backward, looking at you. Fourth and Lord is still yours at five, and forty kids on the corners are looking at you the way they looked at Lung.
<<else>>\
Oni Lee's grenades buy the corner. The Empire goes home at five with Hookwolf in the back of a car, in glass to the shin, and Kaiser's car goes first, and the threads say the ABB has a tinker's bombs and a teleporter and a new one, and Fourth and Lord is still yours.
<</if>>\
<<if ($abbCrown is true)>>Mai says, on the steps, after, "You're actually going to do this," and you say you already did, and she looks at the forty kids tying their bandanas tighter and says, "Yeah," in a voice that's decided something.<</if>>
<<page "Wednesday" "ch5-wednesday">>
<</if>>\<<set $health to Math.min($maxHealth, $health + 30)>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
Wednesday. The east side has been divided twice since Monday and both maps are already wrong. The fish-packing plant is a black rectangle on Fourth and the water. <<if ($oniLeeCaught is true)>>Oni Lee is in a bag in the PRT building, and the ABB's kids found out at breakfast, and some of them cried, and nobody expected that, least of all them.<<elseif ($oniLeeDead is true)>>Oni Lee is dead on a roof, and the thread about who did it has your mask in it by noon, and the ABB's kids look at you on the street like you're weather.<<elseif ($oniLeeSpared is true)>>Oni Lee hasn't been seen since the plant, and he's somewhere, and he said tomorrow.<</if>>
<<if (($ulSaved is true) and ($ulMet is true))>>Uber and Leet find you at lunch, at school, for the first time, in hoodies, with a tray between them they're not eating from. "We're out," Uber says, low. "The streaming. Leet's neck. All of it, for a while." Leet says, "I'm going to build one thing. Once. For the thing in my neck. And then I'm done building things." Uber looks at you. "If you need a thing that works once this week, it's the last one." <<set $ulLastBuild to true>><</if>>
<<if (($leetDead is true) and ($ulMet is true))>>Uber is at Winslow on Wednesday, in the blue hoodie, in the back of your World Issues class, where he's never been, and Gladly doesn't know who he is, and he sits through forty minutes of the Protectorate's deterrence doctrine without moving, and after the bell he says, to you, in the hall, "Where is she." He means Bakuda. <<if (($bakudaDead is true) or ($bakudaCaught is true))>>You tell him. He says, "Okay," and walks out of Winslow, and you don't know if he'll come back.<<else>>You don't know. He says, "Find out," and it isn't a request, and it's the first time Uber has ever not been polite.<</if>> <<set $uberHunting to true>><</if>>
<<if ($rival is true)>>Greenlight's thread this morning has the fish plant in it, from the water side, with a caption about eleven people $glHe got out, and the eleven people are real, and $glHe wasn't there. <<if ($raidAct is "people")>>You were, and the eleven know it, and the threads don't.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($gregAlly is true)>>Greg texts at noon: //there's going to be a thing on fourth tomorrow. the abb kids are saying it. the ones with the necks. i can hear it in how they say it. i'm not posting this.// He's learning what the power is for, and it isn't streams.<</if>>
<<if ($indebted is true)>>There's a page from a ledger under your door at home. <<print "$" + $debt>>. //May 1.// Eleven days. Hollis doesn't take wars off either.<</if>>
<<if ($territory isnot "")>>The pharmacy sends coffee. The noodle shop sends soup. A man in an apron brings you a problem about the Merchants and an envelope, and you handle the first, and the second is yours to decide again. <<var $tribute + 1>><</if>>
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>Lisa, at the loft, has a map of her own now, with the boss's pieces in black and everyone else's in red, and the black is most of the Docks. "He's going to own it by Friday," she says. "And then he's going to want to know why Dinah Alcott <<if ($dinahFree is true)>>went home<<else>>is still worth what he paid<</if>>, and then he's going to want to know what I know, and I know you." She looks at you. "Thursday's the last day of the truce. Thursday he'll want something from us. I don't know what yet. That's the first time I've said that in a year."<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>Armsmaster calls you into his office, a thing that has never happened, and the office is a workbench with a chair in front of it. "The truce ends Thursday," he says. "On Thursday the Protectorate stops monitoring and starts arresting. I need to know, before Thursday, whether anything a Ward did this week is going to be in a villain's mouth when the arrests start." He looks at you. "Anything." <<if ($rockRecord is true)>>"Your four pages are in my safe. They'll stay there unless I'm the one who needs them."<</if>><<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>Kaiser receives you in the warehouse at four. The blades on the walls are longer than they were. "Thursday the truce ends," he says. "Thursday Hookwolf will do something stupid, because he's been waiting four days to. I would like you where he is when he does it. Not to stop him. To be seen stopping him." <<if ($empireSplit is true)>>"And then we'll discuss your blocks."<</if>><<elseif (($stance is "abb") or ($abbCrown is true))>>The forty kids on the corners have stopped asking Mai what to do and started asking you, and Mai has noticed, and hasn't said anything about it yet. <<if ($bakudaDeal is true)>>Bakuda texts you from a number that only exists for one message: //Thursday. The pharmacy basement. Bring the remote. We'll talk about what the ABB is now.//<</if>><<else>><<if ($metKestrel is true)>>Kestrel, on the arcade roof, says the truce ends Thursday and the Protectorate starts arresting Friday, and that Thursday is when the people who can't be arrested do the thing they came to do. "Watch the pharmacy," she says. "Everything in this city ends up at that pharmacy."<<else>>The threads say the truce ends Thursday. The threads say the Protectorate starts arresting Friday. The threads don't say what happens on Thursday, because nobody who knows is posting.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($taylorJoined is true)>>Taylor, at the loft, is sewing something onto the grey costume that isn't a repair. "A hornet," she says, when you look. "Lisa said I should have a symbol. I said I didn't want one. She said everybody gets one whether they want it or not." She bites the thread. "I picked the hornet myself. That's the part that matters."<<if ($taylorCrush is true)>> She doesn't look up. "You can sit closer. If you want. I'm not going to stab you with it."<<var $rom_taylor + 5>><</if>><</if>>
<<page "Thursday" "ch5-thursday">>/* Thursday dispatcher: Bakuda if she is still loose, Lung if he is, otherwise a quiet day. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<include "refresh">>\
<<if (($bakudaCaught is false) and ($bakudaDead is false))>>\
<<include "ch5-bakuda">>\
<<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>\
<<include "ch5-lung">>\
<<else>>\
<<include "ch5-quiet">>\
<</if>>\<<set $bakudaFinal to true>>\
Thursday, the last day of the truce, and at three in the afternoon every phone on Fourth Street rings at once. It isn't a text. It's a call. Forty phones, one voice, the voice of a teacher reading from a card she wrote herself.
"Everyone with insurance," Bakuda says, "come to the pharmacy. You have ten minutes. Everyone without insurance, this is a demonstration."
<<if ($bakudaBomb is true)>>At the base of your skull, something happens, very carefully. It isn't a detonation, it's a hum. She's turned the dial to the first position, and the first position is //listen//.<</if>>
The pharmacy basement at three-fifteen has Bakuda at the workbench with the goggles down and the garage-door opener's twin in her hand, and forty kids on the floor with their hands behind their heads, and Mai against the wall with Danny Trang, and <<if ($oniLeeCaught is true)>>nobody on the stairs, because the man who'd be on the stairs is in a bag<<elseif ($oniLeeDead is true)>>nobody on the stairs, because the man who'd be on the stairs is dead<<elseif ($oniLeeSpared is true)>>nobody on the stairs, and she keeps looking at the stairs<<else>>Oni Lee on the stairs<</if>>. <<if ($bakudaDeal is true)>>She looks at you when you come in, and nods, like a colleague. "You brought it," she says, meaning the remote. "Good. Then we can be honest."<</if>>
"The truce ends at midnight," she says, to the room. "At midnight every gang in this city comes for what's left of the ABB, and what's left of the ABB is you. I built one hundred and forty devices for a man who's <<if ($lungDead is true)>>dead<<elseif ($lungFree is true)>>gone<<else>>in a cage<</if>>, and I'd like them to count for something. So. At eleven-fifty-nine, forty of you walk into forty places in this city, and at midnight the ABB is remembered."
<<if ($abbAmnesty is true)>>She's got nine, not forty. Nine on the floor and thirty-one who had their necks emptied on Tuesday and didn't come when the phones rang, and she knows it, and she looks at you when you come in like you're the one who emptied them, which you are.<</if>>
<<if ($uberHunting is true)>>Uber comes down the stairs behind you. He isn't wearing the jumpsuit. He's wearing the blue hoodie, and his face is his face, and he looks at Bakuda across forty kids and says, "You remember Leet," and she looks at him with no recognition at all, and nothing she's built has hurt him like that.<</if>>
<<choose "ch5-bakuda-2">>
#show-if (($bakudaFreq is true) or ($bakudaPart is true) or ($bakudaDeal is true)) You know the dial. Say the eighth position out loud, to the room, and watch her face.
<<set $bakudaAct to "dial">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $heroRep + 15>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
"Eighth position," you say. "Nothing. Every kid in this room could walk out of it right now and the only thing she could do about it is watch." Forty kids look at Bakuda. Bakuda looks at you. "That's true," she says, after a long second. "That's annoyingly true." Her thumb is on the dial. It doesn't move. "I'd like to know why you're telling them and not using it."
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Go for the remote. Whatever you are, be it faster than a thumb.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 25>>\
<<set $bakudaAct to "remote">>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<if ($power is "mover")>>You're at the bench before she's finished the word //remembered//, and the remote is in your hand, and so is the knife she had under it.<<elseif ($power is "stranger")>>She's looking at forty kids and not at you, and you take the remote the way you'd take a phone from a child, and she says, "What," to her own hand.<<elseif ($power is "thinker")>>Five seconds ahead her thumb moves, and five seconds ahead you've already got her wrist, and she looks at you like an equation.<<else>>You go for it with the thing you do and she's faster than you'd thought and slower than she needed to be, and the remote is on the floor between you, and forty kids are looking at it.<</if>>
#Talk to the forty. Not to her. To them. Tell them what a bomb Tinker's war is worth to the people in it.
<<set $bakudaAct to "kids">>\
<<var $heroRep + 10>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You tell them what the dial does, and what it doesn't, and that a hundred and forty devices for a man who isn't here is a woman's grief with a timer on it, and that none of them signed up to be remembered. Danny Trang stands up first. Then six. Then the room. Bakuda watches forty kids stand up in her basement and says, quietly, "Oh, that's not fair."
#show-if ($bakudaDeal is true) Give her the remote. She said you'd talk about what the ABB is now. Talk.
<<set $bakudaAct to "deal">>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $heroRep - 20>>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
You put the remote on the bench. She looks at it, and at you, and takes the goggles off. "The ABB is a tinker and forty kids and whoever's standing where you're standing," she says. "I don't want to run it. I want to build. You run it. I'll build. Kaiser can have the harbor." She holds out her hand. It's the first time anyone's offered you a city.
#show-if ($abbCrown is true) Tell her the ABB has a head, and it isn't her, and the forty go home.
<<set $bakudaAct to "crown">>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
"The ABB has a head," you say. "You're its tinker. Tinkers build. The forty go home." Bakuda looks at you over the goggles for a long count, and then at the forty, who are looking at you, and then at the remote, and her thumb moves a quarter turn and stops, and <<if (($oniLeeCaught is true) or ($oniLeeDead is true) or ($oniLeeSpared is true))>>there's nobody on the stairs to tell her what to do<<else>>Oni Lee, on the stairs, says nothing, and nothing is a vote<</if>>.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $health to 0>>\
She was faster than you thought. The knife under the remote was for this, and it's in you to the hilt, and the basement floor is cold, and Bakuda crouches next to you with the goggles up and the face of a graduate student who hasn't slept and says, "That was close. I want you to know that was close." The last thing you see is her thumb moving the dial, and the last thing you hear is forty phones ringing at once.
<<page "Try the week again" "ch5-replay">>
<<page "Start over" "Start">>
<<else>>\
<<if (($bakudaAct is "dial") or ($bakudaAct is "kids"))>>\
<<set $bakudaCaught to true>>\
<<achieve "Remembered">>\
It ends the way nobody on the threads will believe: with forty kids walking up the pharmacy stairs into daylight with their hands at their sides, and a woman in a lab coat sitting alone at a workbench with a remote that goes nowhere, and you in the doorway. She doesn't run. "Call them," she says. "The ones with the restraints. I'd like it to be the ones with the restraints." You call them. Armsmaster comes down the stairs at four with a bag and the face of a man who's been waiting a month, and she says, as he puts it over her head, "The fire escape. I want it in the record about the fire escape."
<<if ($uberHunting is true)>>Uber watches her go up the stairs in the bag. He doesn't touch her. He says, "That's not enough," to nobody, and goes up after her, and stands on the sidewalk while they put her in the van, and when it's gone he's still standing there, and you leave him to it, because there's nothing else to do with a man like that.<</if>>
<<elseif ($bakudaAct is "remote")>>\
<<achieve "Remembered">>\
You've got the remote and she's got a knife and forty kids have a choice, and they make it, and it's the stairs. By the time Armsmaster comes down them she's sitting at the bench with her hands flat on it and the knife in the sink, and she says, "I'd have done it. I want you to know I'd have done it," and you say you know, and she nods like a teacher whose student finally got the hard one. <<set $bakudaCaught to true>>
<<if ($uberHunting is true)>>Uber comes down the stairs as they take her up, and stops on the landing to let her pass, and she doesn't look at him, and his hand goes out, once, toward the bag, and stops an inch short, and comes back, and that inch is the whole of him.<</if>>
<<elseif ($bakudaAct is "deal")>>\
<<set $bakudaAlly to true>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
<<set $abbCrown to true>>\
<<set $territory to "eastside">>\
<<set $warlordSeed to true>>\
<<achieve "Red and Green">>\
You take her hand. It's the worst handshake of your life and the forty kids on the floor watch it happen and understand that they belong to someone new, and the someone is a fifteen-year-old in a mask who just made a deal with the woman who put bombs in their necks. "Eighth position," she says, and turns the dial, and the hum at the base of forty skulls stops, and forty kids breathe out. "Insurance expired. Welcome to management." At midnight the truce ends and nobody comes for Fourth and Lord, because Kaiser got a message at eleven from a tinker with a hundred devices and a new boss, and the message had a map in it.
<<if ($uberHunting is true)>>Uber watches you shake her hand from the stairs. He goes up the stairs and out without a word, and you've lost him, and you know what you traded him for.<</if>>
<<else>>\
<<set $bakudaEscaped to true>>\
<<set $abbCrown to true>>\
<<achieve "Red and Green">>\
She puts the remote down, not on the bench but on the floor, in front of you, like a dog dropping something. "Fine," she says. "Head. I'll build." She goes up the stairs past forty kids who are standing up, and out the back of the pharmacy, and the city will see her again, and when it does she'll be working for someone, and the someone is you, and you don't know yet what that costs.
<</if>>\
<<page "Midnight" "ch5-end">>
<</if>>\<<set $lungFinal to true>>\
Thursday, the last day of the truce, and at three in the afternoon something comes down Lord Street from the north that the city has spent a week pretending it wouldn't have to see again.
He's a man when he turns the corner. By the pharmacy he isn't. Lung walks up the middle of Lord Street at the pace of a man crossing a lobby, growing, and the Empire's cars at the south end turn around, and the forty kids on the corners take their bandanas out and don't know whether to put them on, and Mai, on the steps, says, "Oh, no," in a voice that's all the way seventeen.
<<if ($oniLeeSpared is true)>>Oni Lee comes off the pharmacy roof when Lung turns the corner. Not toward Lung. He lands on the steps next to you, three feet away, with nothing in his hands, and looks at the dragon coming up Lord Street, and says, "Tomorrow," and this time it means //no//. Lung stops. He has never been told no by that voice.<</if>>
<<if ($abbCrown is true)>>He's come for you. He said your cape name in the box, and he's saying it now, from the street, and the forty kids are looking at the steps to see who's going to answer.<<elseif ($stance is "abb")>>He's come for the ABB. He doesn't know there's a different head on it, or he does, and came because of it.<<else>>He's come for what was his, and everything in a six-block radius is about to be his or on fire.<</if>>
<<choose "ch5-lung-2">>
#show-if ($stamina gte 20) Fight him. He's a man for about ninety more seconds.
<<var $stamina - 20>>\
<<var $health - 40>>\
<<set $lungAct to "fight">>\
<<var $notoriety + 25>>\
<<var $streetRep + 20>>\
You go down the steps and into him while he's still mostly a man, with everything you are, and the first ten seconds go the way the first ten seconds of anything go with Lung: badly, and then worse, and then he's bigger, and then there's fire, and then you're on the asphalt finding out whether ninety seconds was enough.
#show-if (($abbCrown is true) or ($maiBoss is true)) Stand on the steps. Don't fight. Tell him the ABB is yours and the forty are yours and he can have the harbor.
<<set $lungAct to "talk">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 15>>\
<<var $notoriety + 15>>\
<<var $health - 20>>\
You stand on the steps and say it, and Lung stops in the middle of Lord Street, growing, and looks at a fifteen-year-old telling him what's his, and the fire comes up his arms, and you don't move, and the forty kids watch you not move, for a count of ten that's the longest of your life, and nothing else happens, and that is the fight.
#show-if (($bakudaAlly is true) or ($bakudaDeal is true)) Bakuda's in the basement with a hundred devices. Say her name, and let the tinker and the dragon talk about who's owed what.
<<set $lungAct to "bakuda">>\
<<var $control + 1>>\
<<var $streetRep + 10>>\
She comes up the pharmacy stairs with the remote and the goggles down and stands next to you, and Lung looks at the woman who built a hundred bombs to get him out and says her name, and she says, "Eighth position," and the forty kids breathe out, and Lung, who doesn't understand, understands that he's standing in a street full of people who don't belong to him anymore.
#Get the forty off the corners. He's not here for them, and he'll burn them anyway.
<<set $lungAct to "kids">>\
<<var $heroRep + 20>>\
<<var $health - 15>>\
You get them moving, down Fourth, away, and Lung comes up the street behind you as something with wings, and the pharmacy goes, and the noodle shop, and you've got forty kids three blocks away watching their corner burn, and every one of them is alive.
#Run. He's Lung. The Protectorate is coming, and they have a cage.
<<set $lungAct to "run">>\
<<var $heroRep - 10>>\
<<var $streetRep - 15>>\
You run, and so does everyone with sense, and Lung has Fourth and Lord by four and the Protectorate has Lung by six, with Armsmaster and Miss Militia and a Tinker from Boston with a dart the size of a baseball bat, and the pharmacy is gone, and you were somewhere else.
<</choose>><<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<if ($health lte 0)>>\
<<set $health to 0>>\
Ninety seconds wasn't enough. He's twelve feet tall when he picks you up and the fire is inside the grip, and the last thing you see is the forty kids on the corners with their bandanas in their hands, and the last thing you hear is Mai saying "Idiot," from the steps, the way she'd say it to someone she was going to miss. Lung has Fourth and Lord by four. He has it until the Protectorate takes it back, and your name is in the report as //unaffiliated, deceased//, and Mai corrects the first word, later, to someone who writes it down.
<<page "Try the week again" "ch5-replay">>
<<page "Start over" "Start">>
<<else>>\
<<if ($lungAct is "fight")>>\
<<achieve "Ninety Seconds">>\
<<set $lungRecaptured to true>>\
Ninety seconds was enough, barely. He's twelve feet tall and on fire when Miss Militia's rifle turns into something that fires sleep the size of a baseball bat, and he goes down in Lord Street with his hand around a kid in a mask who wouldn't let go, and the kid is you, and you've got burns you'll have for a year and the forty on the corners saw all of it. Armsmaster puts the restraints on and says your cape name into the radio, and then, to you, "That was stupid," and then, "Thank you," in that order.
<<elseif ($lungAct is "talk")>>\
<<achieve "The Steps">>\
<<set $lungGone to true>>\
He doesn't burn you. The forty will tell it for years: that Lung stood in Lord Street for a count of ten with the fire up his arms looking at a kid on the pharmacy steps who wouldn't move, and then he looked at the forty, who hadn't put their bandanas on, and then he turned around and walked back down Lord Street, shrinking, and the Protectorate found him at the harbor at six, a man again, sitting on a bollard looking at the water, and he went into the cage without a word. "He didn't want it," Mai says, after. "He wanted to know if anyone did."
<<elseif ($lungAct is "bakuda")>>\
<<set $lungGone to true>>\
<<achieve "The Steps">>\
Lung and Bakuda talk for four minutes in the middle of Lord Street, him growing and her not moving, and at the end of it he says something in a language you don't have and she says, "No," in one you do, and he looks at the forty kids, and at you, and at the remote in her hand, and understands that the ABB is a thing that's been handed on while he was in a box, and he goes north, on foot, as a man, and nobody follows him, and the Protectorate doesn't find him, and that's going to matter.
<<elseif ($lungAct is "kids")>>\
<<set $lungRecaptured to true>>\
Fourth and Lord burns for an hour and the Protectorate takes him at four-thirty in the middle of it, Armsmaster and Miss Militia and a Tinker from Boston with a dart the size of a bat, and the forty kids watch from three blocks away, alive, and the pharmacy is gone, and the noodle shop, and the steps, and Mai says, "He'd have burned them," and you say yes, and she says, "I know. I'm saying it so I can hear it."
<<else>>\
<<set $lungRecaptured to true>>\
Lung goes back into a cage at six and Fourth and Lord is a different shape afterward, and you weren't there for it, and the forty kids know you weren't.
<</if>>\
<<page "Midnight" "ch5-end">>
<</if>>\Thursday, the last day of the truce, and nothing comes down Lord Street. <<if ($bakudaDead is true)>>The tinker is dead.<<else>>The tinker is in a cell.<</if>> <<if ($lungDead is true)>>The dragon is dead.<<else>>The dragon is in a cage for good.<</if>> <<if ($oniLeeCaught is true)>>The teleporter is in a bag.<<elseif ($oniLeeDead is true)>>The teleporter is dead on a roof.<<elseif ($oniLeeSpared is true)>>The teleporter is somewhere, and said tomorrow, and hasn't come.<<else>>The teleporter is somewhere, and nobody has seen him since the plant.<</if>> The ABB is forty kids on four corners with bandanas in their pockets, and at midnight the truce ends, and the only question left is who walks up Lord Street at twelve-oh-one.
<<if (($abbCrown is true) or ($maiBoss is true))>>It's Kaiser. He comes on foot, with Krieg and Victor and nobody else, in the suit, and stops at the pharmacy steps, and looks at <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>you<<else>>Mai, and then at you<</if>>. "Two blocks," he says. "Held. Rent due in loyalty, to no one, and that is the most expensive rent there is." He looks at the forty. "They're yours. Keep them off my streets." He goes. Victor, last, says, "He means it. He's never meant it before."<<elseif ($territory isnot "")>>It's nobody. Nobody walks up Lord Street at twelve-oh-one, because the map that got drawn at Somer's Rock has your piece on it, and the city has decided, for now, to let the map be right. The pharmacy sends coffee at twelve-ten. You drink it on the steps.<<elseif ($stance is "undersider")>>It's Coil's men. Two of them, in grey, walking Fourth and Lord like surveyors, and Lisa, next to you on a roof, says, "That's the map. He owns the map now," and then, "He's going to call tomorrow. About Dinah. About what I know." She doesn't say what she's going to tell him. You don't ask.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>It's Hookwolf, and Kaiser's car behind him, and the forty kids take their bandanas off and go inside, and the Empire has the east side by one in the morning without a fight, and Kaiser says, to you, "This is what winning looks like. It's quieter than Brad wanted."<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>It's the PRT. Vans at twelve-oh-one, troopers in the doorways, and the forty kids with their hands up on the corners, and the Tinker from Boston going down the line with a thing like a dentist's tool, taking insurance out of forty necks one at a time, and Vista, on the headset, says, "That's the first good thing on this board all week."<<else>>It's the PRT, and then the Empire behind them, and the forty kids with their hands up, and you on a roof watching a corner change hands twice in an hour, and nobody asked you to be there, and you were.<</if>>
<<page "Midnight" "ch5-end">>/* Arc 5 wrap-up: looks checkpoint, achievement, per-team summary. The seeds for Arc 6 are the flags listed under Arc 5 in init-flags. */\
<<cap100 "heroRep">>\
<<cap100 "streetRep">>\
<<cap100 "notoriety">>\
<<cap100 "taylorTrust">>\
<<achieve "Hive Complete">>\
''End of Arc 5: Hive''
Friday, April twenty-second, one in the morning. The truce is over. The ABB is <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>yours<<elseif ($maiBoss is true)>>Mai Vo's, and everyone knows who put her there<<elseif (($lungDead is true) or ($lungRecaptured is true) or ($lungFree is false))>>over, or near enough that the threads have started arguing about what to call what's left<<else>>a dragon's, somewhere north, and a question<</if>>. <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>Bakuda is in a cell that took six Tinkers to build.<<elseif ($bakudaDead is true)>>Bakuda is dead.<<elseif ($bakudaAlly is true)>>Bakuda is yours, and builds, and you're going to have to live inside that sentence.<<else>>Bakuda is somewhere, and owes someone.<</if>> <<if ($oniLeeCaught is true)>>Oni Lee is in a bag.<<elseif ($oniLeeDead is true)>>Oni Lee is dead.<<elseif ($oniLeeSpared is true)>>Oni Lee said tomorrow and hasn't come.<</if>>
Here's where things stand.
<<if ($stance is "undersider")>>''You're an Undersider, and the boss owns the map.'' Lisa says he'll call about Dinah, and about what she knows, and what she knows is you.<<elseif ($stance is "ward")>>''You're a Ward, and you heard a deal get made.'' <<if ($rockRecord is true)>>Four pages in Armsmaster's safe with your initials and Vista's. <</if>>The arrests start Friday. Some of them will be people you've stood next to.<<elseif ($stance is "empire")>>''You're the Empire's, and the Empire won.'' <<if ($empireSplit is true)>>Kaiser wants to discuss your blocks. He uses the word discuss the way a man uses a knife to open a letter.<<elseif ($kaiserSawYou is true)>>Kaiser saw you on the pharmacy steps and said Thursday, and Thursday came, and he remembers.<<else>>Quieter than Brad wanted.<</if>><<elseif (($stance is "abb") or ($abbCrown is true))>><<if ($abbCrown is true)>>''You are the ABB.'' Forty kids, two blocks, a pharmacy<<if ($lungAct is "kids")>> that's gone<</if>>, and Mai, who has decided something and hasn't told you what.<<elseif ($maiBoss is true)>>''Mai Vo is the ABB.'' She walked into Somer's Rock and said the ABB sent what it had, and Faultline said she'd hire her.<<elseif ($abbDefected is true)>>''You went to the PRT.'' Forty kids had their necks emptied by a Tinker from Boston at midnight, and your name is nowhere in it, and you were.<<else>>''You held the corner.'' Or you didn't. Either way the ABB is a thing that's being written about in the past tense.<</if>><<else>>''You're nobody's, and you were in it anyway.'' <<if ($territory isnot "")>>The map has your piece on it. Nobody walked up Lord Street at twelve-oh-one. The pharmacy sent coffee.<<else>>Every gang in the city agreed on something, and you watched, and some of them noticed you watching.<</if>><</if>>
<<if ($abbAmnesty is true)>>''Thirty-one kids are off the map.'' You walked into Somer's Rock and said the ABB fucked it up and so did everyone who thought a bomb in a neck was a membership card. Gregor said he didn't choose his mark either. The Tinker from Boston emptied thirty-one necks at the hospital on Tuesday. Mai called you an idiot in the voice she uses for the opposite.
<</if>>\
<<if ($coilExposed is true)>>''You said Coil's name at the table.'' Lisa says he's delighted, and that's the problem, and Kaiser has to do something about it now, and that's a war inside the war.
<</if>>\
<<if ($wardCrashed is true)>>''A Ward was in the room when the deal was made.'' Armsmaster says you've made it impossible for him to deny the meeting, and that it may have been the right thing, and that you're on console for a month.
<</if>>\
<<if ($hookwolfChallenged is true)>>''You took the front from Hookwolf, in front of Hookwolf.'' Kaiser said done. Victor said watch the ones behind you.
<</if>>\
<<if ($raidAct is "people")>>''Eleven people who pack fish are alive.'' Nobody on the threads knows the number, and you do.
<</if>>\
<<if ($oniLeeDead is true)>>''You killed Oni Lee.'' He let you. You'll remember the letting.
<</if>>\
<<if ($lungAct is "talk")>>''Lung stood in Lord Street for a count of ten and turned around.'' He didn't want it. He wanted to know if anyone did.
<</if>>\
<<if ($lungAct is "fight")>>''You held Lung for ninety seconds.'' You have burns you'll have for a year and forty witnesses.
<</if>>\
<<if ($ulLastBuild is true)>>''Leet is building one last thing.'' For the thing in his neck. Then he says he's done. Uber says it's the last one if you need it.
<</if>>\
<<if ($uberHunting is true)>>''Uber.'' He sat through World Issues in the back row to ask you where she was. <<if ($bakudaCaught is true)>>He watched them put the bag on her and said it wasn't enough.<<elseif ($bakudaAlly is true)>>He watched you shake her hand, and you've lost him.<<else>>He hasn't stopped looking.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($coilAbbDeal is true)>>''Coil wants to buy the ABB.'' The paper, not the people. Oversight total. Wednesday came and went and you haven't answered, and he has Ledger ask twice.
<</if>>\
<<if ($indebted is true)>>''The paper.'' <<print "$" + $debt>> to Royce Hollis. Nine days.
<</if>>\
<<if ($territory isnot "")>>''Territory.'' <<if ($abbCrown is true)>>The ABB and the east side.<<elseif ($territory is "eastside")>>Six blocks of the east side.<<elseif ($territory is "boardwalk")>>The north end of the Boardwalk.<<else>>Fourth and Lord.<</if>> Envelopes offered so far: $tribute. Holding is a verb.
<</if>>\
<<if ($rival is true)>>''Greenlight.'' <<if ($rivalSeen is true)>>$glHe took the fish plant on the threads, from the water side. The eleven know. The threads don't.<<else>>Somewhere in this city a kid in green is reading the same threads you are, and taking notes.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($fan is true)>><<var $notoriety + 5>>''XxVoid_CowboyxX.'' <<if ($gregTriggered is true)>>Greg didn't post this week. He texted you instead, about what he could hear in how the ABB kids talked.<<else>>Greg posted a thread about Somer's Rock with a photo of the back door. Notoriety up five.<</if>>
<</if>>\
<<if ($dissonance is true)>>''The wrong things.'' The fog has come back in at Halifax, against the wind, and this time it hasn't gone out, and you knew that on Tuesday, before the thread, and the kitchen clock is nine minutes slow now.
<</if>>\
''Where you stand:''
<<standard-bar "Health" $health $maxHealth>>\
<<standard-bar "Stamina" $stamina $maxStamina>>\
<<standard-bar "Hero Standing" $heroRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Street Cred" $streetRep>>\
<<standard-bar "Notoriety" $notoriety>>\
<<standard-bar "Taylor's Trust" $taylorTrust>>\
<div>Power control: <<skill $control 5>></div>
<div>Cash: <<print "$" + $money>></div>
''Next: Arc 6, Tangle.'' <<if ($stance is "undersider")>>The boss calls. He'd like to meet the Undersiders in person, finally, and he'd like to talk about a girl who does math<<if ($dinahFree is true)>>, and why she's at home<</if>>.<<elseif ($warlordSeed is true)>>You hold ground, and the man who owns the map would like to discuss the rent. Also: the first of May.<<else>>The city has a hole where the ABB was, and a man with a snake on his chest who owns the map of it, and a girl who does math.<</if>> And in Halifax, the fog has come back in, against the wind, and this time it hasn't gone out.
<<page "Play again from the start" "Start">>
<<page "Replay Monday" "ch5-replay">>/* Rewind to Monday with Arcs 1-4 intact: clears only the flags Arc 5 can set. */\
<<set $health to $maxHealth>>\
<<set $stamina to $maxStamina>>\
<<set $truce to "">>\
<<set $raidAct to "">>\
<<set $holdAct to "">>\
<<set $bakudaAct to "">>\
<<set $lungAct to "">>\
<<set $sawRock to false>>\
<<set $raided to false>>\
<<set $raidDone to false>>\
<<set $heldFourth to false>>\
<<set $holdDone to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeCaught to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeDead to false>>\
<<set $oniLeeSpared to false>>\
<<set $bakudaFinal to false>>\
<<set $lungFinal to false>>\
<<set $bakudaAlly to false>>\
<<set $lungRecaptured to false>>\
<<set $lungGone to false>>\
<<set $kaiserSawYou to false>>\
<<set $rockRecord to false>>\
<<set $coilAbbDeal to false>>\
<<set $abbSurrendered to false>>\
<<set $ulLastBuild to false>>\
<<set $uberHunting to false>>\
<<set $ulSchool to false>>\
<<set $abbAmnesty to false>>\
<<set $coilExposed to false>>\
<<set $wardCrashed to false>>\
<<set $hookwolfChallenged to false>>\
Same you. Same week. A different Monday.
<<page "Monday" "ch5-monday">>''Coil.'' A thin calm man in a black bodysuit with a white snake down the front, and two soldiers in grey behind him, and a voice like a hand on the back of your neck.
He pays the Undersiders. He pays Ledger. He paid for a bank on a Thursday so every Ward in the city would be on Lord Street at two-thirty, and for a grey van on Pearl Street. He sat at the head of the table at Somer's Rock and let Kaiser talk, and when the week was over he owned the map. He has never raised his voice in your hearing. He has never needed to.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($dinahFree is true)>><div>• You took his van apart on Pearl Street. He doesn't know who yet. Lisa does.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($foughtLedger is true)>><div>• His accountant has your file, <<if ($ledgerWon is true)>>incomplete<<else>>complete<</if>>.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($coilNoticed is true)>><div>• His men have seen you watching. One of them lifted two fingers.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($sundayPlan is "coil")>><div>• You stood on Harbor Road with his men in grey. Lisa says he says you did well, in the voice she uses for things she hates.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($coilCrossed is true)>><div>• You got between his men and the box. The man with the rifle said "Noted."</div><</if>>\
<<if ($coilDebt is true)>><div>• You stepped aside and let his men do what they were paid for. He'll remember you were useful.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($coilAbbDeal is true)>><div>• You asked him, not Kaiser, what the ABB was worth. He said a great deal. Ledger has asked twice.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>>''Faultline's crew.'' Mercenaries, very professional, very expensive.
Faultline herself: a woman at the bar in a welder's mask who says her crew works for pay, not maps, and gets paid. Newter, orange, on the rail, don't touch him. Gregor, who you could see through, who poured you tea. Labyrinth and Spitfire, who weren't at Somer's Rock and are the reason the crew can afford to be polite. They run out of Palanquin. They were the only people at the table who said yes to your term about the shops without being asked.
''What you've done.''
<div class="cast-list">\
<<if ($metGregor is true)>><div>• Tea from a thermos behind Palanquin. Gregor thinks about Halifax more than most.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($truce is "terms")>><div>• Faultline took your term at Somer's Rock. "I'll take that term." Grue followed her.</div><</if>>\
<<if ($truce is "abbdeal")>><div>• Faultline laughed when Mai said the ABB sent what it had, and said she'd hire her.</div><</if>>\
</div>
<<choose "menu-cast">>
#Back to Cast. -> "menu-cast"
#Return to the game. -> $return
<</choose>><div class="achievement-score">Achievement Points: <<= setup.getTotalAchievementPoints()>></div>
<<if typeof setup.getCategorizedAchievements === 'function'>><<set _achData = setup.getCategorizedAchievements()>><<else>><<set _achData = {unlocked: [], locked: [], hiddenCount: 0}>><</if>>\
<<if _achData.unlocked.length > 0>><div class="achievement-section"><h3>🏆 Unlocked Achievements (<<= _achData.unlocked.length>>)</h3><ul class="achievement-list"><<for _i = 0; _i < _achData.unlocked.length; _i++>><<set _ach = _achData.unlocked[_i]>><li class="achievement-item unlocked"><div class="achievement-content"><div class="achievement-name"><<= _ach.name>></div><div class="achievement-desc"><<= _ach.description>></div></div><div class="achievement-points"><<= _ach.points>></div></li><</for>></ul></div><<else>><div class="achievement-section"><h3>🏆 Unlocked Achievements (0)</h3><p style="text-align: center; color: #666; font-style: italic; padding: 10px; margin: 0;">No achievements unlocked yet. Keep playing to earn your first achievement!</p></div><</if>>
<<if _achData.locked.length > 0>><div class="achievement-section"><h3>🔒 Locked Achievements (<<= _achData.locked.length>>)</h3><ul class="achievement-list"><<for _i = 0; _i < _achData.locked.length; _i++>><<set _ach = _achData.locked[_i]>><li class="achievement-item locked"><div class="achievement-content"><div class="achievement-name"><<= _ach.name>></div><div class="achievement-desc"><<= _ach.description>></div></div><div class="achievement-points"><<= _ach.points>></div></li><</for>></ul></div><</if>>
<<if _achData.hiddenCount > 0>><div class="achievement-section"><div class="hidden-counter">🔍 <<= _achData.hiddenCount>> Hidden Achievement<<if _achData.hiddenCount > 1>>s<</if>> Remaining</div></div><</if>>
<<button "Return to Game." $return>><</button>><div class="settings-page">
<div class="fightingfont">Settings</div>
<h3>Display Settings</h3>
<div class="settings-section">
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="dark-mode-toggle"> Dark Mode
<span class="setting-description">Night-reader friendly dark theme</span>
</label>
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="enlarge-text-toggle"> Enlarge Text
<span class="setting-description">Make game text larger</span>
</label>
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="shrink-text-toggle"> Shrink Text
<span class="setting-description">Make game text smaller</span>
</label>
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="fullscreen-toggle"> Full Screen
<span class="setting-description">Toggle fullscreen mode</span>
</label>
</div>\
<h3>Game Settings</h3>
<div class="settings-section">
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="disable-portraits-toggle"> Disable Portraits
<span class="setting-description">Hide character portrait images</span>
</label>
<label class="setting-item">
<input type="checkbox" id="reset-achievements-toggle"> Reset All Achievements
<span class="setting-description">Permanently delete all achievement progress</span>
</label>
</div>\
<div class="settings-buttons">\
<<button "Return to Game" $return>><</button>>
</div>\
</div>
<<script>>
setTimeout(function() {
initializeSettings();
// Also ensure fullscreen checkbox is properly bound
if (window.setupFullscreenCheckbox) {
window.setupFullscreenCheckbox();
}
}, 100);
<</script>>