Scale 5.6

Bryce Kiley
2010, December 10: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

The rest of the week came and went. Sabah texted me to say she'd been brainstorming a few ideas, but had yet to decide on just what she wanted to do with her cape life. I was fine with that. Hell, I'd be satisfied if she decided she didn't want a cape life at all.

Amy was busy with her own life but gave me a pack of lychee-flavored peanuts to show me that she was interested in the less harmful aspects of biotinkering. The flavor was good, nutty and sweet with that distinct, floral aftertaste, but she'd managed to infuse the peanuts with a higher water content from lychee, making them feel a little soggy in the mouth.

I also worked to expand my production capabilities, purchasing four more drones from Big Rig in exchange for four soda engines. Those new drones were immediately set to assemble more soda engines for Damascus. Strider knew to pick them up sometime this weekend.

As for me personally, I made sure to be visible near the docks, or more specifically, near Redmond Welding. I also trained, working to turn my Thunder Wave into a proper Thunderbolt. TMs weren't really on the table anymore, I still remembered how taxing it was on my brain after downloading Protect, Recover, Thunder Wave, and Psychic, but given that I had aura of my own, there wasn't really any reason I couldn't develop the move on my own. It was slow going, but I made some progress in increasing the amperage.

During the evenings, I mostly copied the notes on inorganic transmutation and materials science as Edward Elric, Alex Armstrong, and Roy Mustang knew them. Their expertise covered a huge breadth of topics, from gasses to minerals to the art of directly transmuting mechanical parts, but I considered this roundabout learning process more fruitful than simply copying transmutation circles.

It was the typical fishing analogy: If I copied a transmutation circle, I could use Roy's explosive alchemy immediately, but I would miss the underlying principles behind why it worked the way it did. On the other hand, if I copied their notes in totality, I would have a stockpile of literature to continue to teach me alchemy long after this specialization came and went. Rather than eat the fish now, I preferred to learn to fish.

That said, the notes were incredibly fun to read, unlike Marcoh and Tucker's. Each alchemist encrypted his notes with a cipher of his own devising. As I understood it, it was a right of passage, as well as a way for Amestris to guard what would be considered state secrets.

Edward kept his in the form of a travel log so complex that Alphonse, despite being his brother and traveling with him, couldn't read it. Alex, the Strong Arm Alchemist, encoded his notes in the form of a workout plan. "Pull the bus fifty times," could mean fifty tons of material was the limit for a particular transmutation formula. Or, it could mean that he literally dragged a bus across a city block fifty times to work out his back muscles; I wouldn't put it past the guy.

By far, Roy took the cake for the most amusing read. Roy's notes were all disguised in the form of a diary, which wasn't itself a bad thing, except that every goddamn entry was about some woman he'd presumably slept with. A sample read thusly:

"Jasmine always manages to find the most elegant perfume. Thyme and rosemary make her feel down to earth while a hint of lavender reminds me of the botanical garden where we first met. She truly is like a breath of fresh air on a warm, humid morning."

Names of herbs referred to different elements in the air, except when used as the name of a woman, such as Jasmine. A secondary passage which described Jasmine's other qualities, eyes, nose, lips, helped pin down the concentration of each. Other phrases had a great deal of meaning as well.

"Down to earth" literally meant the reaction would create a combustible gas that was heavier than atmospheric air, causing it to sink and cover the ground. A "breath of fresh air" was a reference to one of his past mission logs, in which he'd filled a rebel bunker with the gas before detonating it with everyone inside during the Ishval Civil War. Any weather described as "warm and humid" usually meant the gas could have a lingering effect that was bad for one's health.

"Wow, bro, I didn't know you were a writer," my sister said as she loomed behind me. "I mean, that's a lot of purple prose to say she smells nice, but you do you."

"Sierra, what the hell?" I yelped, face flushing. I hastily slammed my laptop shut. Clearly, locks were no fucking good when I forgot to use them. "Why are you in my room?"

"Mom made dinner and you wouldn't answer."

I looked at the clock. Six forty-five. SAINT should have stopped me fifteen minutes ago. Then I remembered that I'd sent him off on a scouting mission to Coil's base. We already had a good map of Coil's network and financial holdings, but those were all connected to the internet in some form or another, chiefly because even a Bond villain had to file papers.

If Coil was half as smart as he thought he was, he'd also keep a secondary network that was completely closed off from the internet, and thus SAINT. I suspected that most of his contingency plans, such as the bombs I knew he had in his base from canon, would be detailed in such servers.

Now that we'd mapped everything else in Coil's organization, I'd sent SAINT to hide inside the laptop of a mercenary captain. When said captain entered the base, SAINT was to leave the laptop and find one of their isolated servers.

I expected him back in a day or two, which meant he wasn't around to warn me of Sierra being Sierra.

I let out a sigh. "How much did you see?"

"From 'My fingertips ran over her curves, leaving smoldering trails that threatened to ignite the air,'" she said, grinning like a cat that caught the canary, fished out the goldfish, and got into the milk pail all at once. "Sooo, you're into writing lurid romance, huh?"

"I'm not," I protested. It didn't matter that I was mentally old enough to be her father. I couldn't stop my body from flushing beet-red in embarrassment. "It's not what it looks like!"

"Of course not. It's an English assignment, right, little bro?"

"Yes, that's it. It's for English."

"So you won't mind if I tell mom about your schoolwork? You know, maybe I can help?"

I sighed, defeated. Shit like this made me want a Men in Black specialization, just for that amnesia-pen. "What do you want, sis?"

She grinned victoriously. "Hmm, this is prime blackmail material."

"Forget you saw it. Please?"

"I don't know, Bryce? What do I get out of it?"

"I'll stop making fun of your hair."

"Nah, I'm used to you being a brat."

"A foot massage?"

"Not good enough. I'm curious now; I want to read it."

"Nope. No way."

"Come on, I wanna know what you think dating looks like. It's not like you've ever been on one."

I clutched my heart in pain. "Your words, they hurt me."

"Please? I promise I won't laugh?"

"We both know that's a lie." I placed my hands on her shoulders. "Sierra, look at me. What you saw me writing wasn't a trashy romance novel. It was the encrypted formula for various exothermic reactions. I was writing a how-to guide for making homemade explosives."

She snorted. "Sure, Bryce. What's more likely? That my baby brother is a genius who's also plotting to become a domestic terrorist, or that my baby brother is horny and thinks porn is too 'low brow' for him?"

I stood and made for the door, feeling rather dead inside. Being so much more mature than my peers, I'd almost forgotten what crippling embarrassment felt like. Leave it to my sister to prove that no amount of mental age would be enough to avoid sibling mockery.

"Nope. I'm done. It's dinnertime."

"Bryce, come on! What's your laptop password?" she sang.

"It's 'Sisi should eat a dick!'" I shot back as I retreated downstairs.

X

2010, December 11: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

When I awoke Saturday morning, it was to find SAINT digging through my bottom drawer for his crusted almond stash. He'd actually shrunk a bit with his evolution, rounding off the edges and losing about half a foot of height and nearly ten pounds of weight.

At two feet tall exactly, he was now just small enough to squirm his way into the bottom drawer of my desk. It wasn't a comfortable fit, but he could get his head in and judging by the crunching nuts and the wiggling of his red, rounded butt in the air, he was having the time of his life.

I shook my head in exasperation but left him to it. The little guy deserved the snacks after all the work he'd put in.

Now that he was back, I could move forward with the second phase of my "murder the snake without turning the city into an even bigger shithole than it already is" plan. It wasn't enough to just kill the guy. I knew where Calvert lived. Killing him wasn't the issue.

No, I wanted to take him off the board without the various dead man's switches he'd arranged. It wasn't just the bombs. His death would release the identity of every hero in Brockton and several more elsewhere. The same went for the identities of villains. While I didn't give a fuck about Max Anders, I didn't want to know what that egomaniac would do if he lost Medhall and the bulk of his power and prestige.

Sure, I could have SAINT block off all electronic transmissions, but the internet wasn't the only way to disseminate information, merely the fastest. I wouldn't put it past him to blackmail people in TV and radio stations to follow certain procedures. Or, if even one mercenary knew about those names and got away, they could cause problems down the line.

If I had my way, I would have Dragon here to assist. She would work with SAINT to control the digital fallout while I hit the base and handled the physical side of things. Unfortunately, given that SAINT was an AI and I had every intention of executing Coil extra-judicially, I deemed that involving her would only complicate matters.

I could go take care of the shittier Saint before hitting Coil, but I'd left the snake alive longer than I was entirely comfortable with already. Nor could I just leave the city for a week on a whim to go assassinate the Dragonslayers. Even if I knew where they were, I had commitments here.

So, the slightly less gratifying but steady route it was.

SAINT and I spent that morning parsing through Coil's data with a fine-toothed comb one last time. It was monumentally tedious work, even with an AI in my corner, but necessary for the narrative I wanted to craft.

We separated out his cape and civilian assets, then conspicuously removed all mentions of the Undersiders as assets. In fact, SAINT helped me falsify documents to imply that they were a minor enemy faction he intended to take over from within, not unlike the Merchants. Likewise, we scrubbed any evidence of him breaking the unwritten rules against the Empire or PRT as well as any hint at his base's location. I didn't want any ol' idiot to attack Coil before I was ready after all.

This final revision took us most of the day. Finally, we made multiple copies of the evidence covering his cape identity before forwarding it all to Watchdog's financial crimes hotline, the local PRT, PHO, and the Foghorn for good measure.

That was it; that was phase two. Coil was a precog, and when simply decapitating the snake wasn't an option worth considering, the ideal way to deal with one was to control the narrative, keep him from asking the right questions. Most importantly, I had to make him believe he still had options.

There were things I could do if Coil behaved outside my predictions, but if I had him pegged correctly, then he'd come to all the wrong conclusions on his own.

Now, all I had to do was wait.

"Come on, SAINT, let's head out to sea. I want to stretch my legs a bit," I said, clipping my pokenav to my belt. As fascinating as inorganic alchemy was, I couldn't afford to neglect my physical conditioning.

"Gon? Pory."

"You'll be in my pokenav anyway. You can monitor the fallout just as easily while training as you can from here."

"Porygon."

X

Thomas Calvert

I was under attack. None of my men had been killed, arrested, or even questioned. No one betrayed me, at least not knowingly. I confirmed it through hours of torture. And yet, there was no denying that The GOAT had turned their gaze towards me.

I suspected they'd been planning to move against me for a long time. This public vivisection of my criminal empire certainly implied such. No one, not even a thinker, could gather that much evidence on short notice, which meant I'd been blind to this threat for too long.

I shot a random mercenary in the kneecap to hear his screams. He had little else to do so he may as well make himself useful as my stress relief.

I'd told myself that Creed was too flamboyant, too good at what he did. I'd guessed that he had backers long before The GOAT made their organization known. Tattletale confirmed the presence of a thinker, of information that was impossible to acquire otherwise.

I'd guessed at what they were doing. And I'd still fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

Creed was a distraction. He'd always been a distraction. He acted the fool and occasionally dropped just enough nuggets of truth to attract attention. He made a nuisance of himself yet was helpful enough to force a more measured response from all sides. All the while, The GOAT worked from the shadows, slowly vivisecting my network until they were ready to strike.

It reminded me so much of myself that I almost wondered if they were truly as heroic as they claimed. Smoke and mirrors, applied to selectively blind the audience. It was a tactic I intended to use with the Undersiders. They would rise while I pulled their strings from the shadows.

It was simple, brilliant, and oh so infuriating. For once, I found myself on the other end of an assault from a mysterious thinker.

I took a deep breath. Lambasting myself over and over again served no purpose. I closed the timeline and opened another fork. In one, I offered my men platitudes. I set combatants on high alert and the techies working to save what we could before Watchdog really got moving. We would need to move more cautiously, maybe lay low in my cape identity for a few weeks, but my core network was salvageable.

In the other, I sat in my office and did nothing. It was important to give myself space to think. I could afford to make mistakes; I was a man built on mistakes, but that was no reason to be reckless. No, once I sat down to consider their actions, I realized that their attack was a small treasure trove of information.

To start, they were heroic, almost to the point of naivete. This attack was so measured that it almost didn't count. It was the equivalent of throwing a probing jab in boxing or firing a warning shot over someone's head.

They'd released the names of every mercenary under my command, the various crimes they'd committed, and evidence of my contracts with Toybox detailing precisely what I'd equipped them with. Details of my various shell companies and proxy entities I'd used to commit financial crimes were likewise released. The GOAT had also found out about my intervention on that male nurse, Pitter's, behalf.

That was fine. It was all salvageable. The men would need to remain inside for a while to let the heat die down now that their faces were plastered all over the net. The contracts with Toybox were hardly secret, though having law enforcement know how many shots each laser rifle could fire before overheating was annoying.

If anything, the most damage had been caused by the loss of Pitter before I could spirit him away. Competent medical professionals who could be manipulated so easily were hard to acquire. I'd likely owe Accord a favor to help me identify another such target.

That seemed to be a theme: Nothing The GOAT did here was permanent or truly crippling. It all seemed as if they were telling me, "I'm watching you," rather than trying for a decisive strike against my operations.

Conspicuously absent were the locations of my base, my own ties to the PRT, and the identities of the Undersdiers. The latter two were privileged information, even within my network, which told me that my network was not fully compromised.

They'd been hasty. Fool.

Keeping my base hidden was obvious. I was unsure how deeply they'd penetrated my network, but given they didn't seem to know my identity, they would want something in reserve to threaten me with at a later date.

Or maybe they wanted to keep me where they could see me for whenever they ordered Creed to take me in. They did seem to be cultivating Creed as a heroic figure after all. I could see how a solo victory against a gang, no matter how minor I was considered, would elevate his reputation in the city.

"But then why attack now at all?" I muttered in frustration.

They were heroic. If the ultimate goal was to arrest me and bring down my organization, this probing attack was less than useless to them. Were I in their place, I would have amassed an overwhelming force to take me out in one fell swoop, not warned me with this half-assed attempt.

Maybe they intended to absorb me into their organization? That might explain the gentler hand, but if this was their way of showing they were the superior thinker, it was a stupid way to go about it.

No. The GOAT wasn't stupid. I refused to underestimate my enemies. Assuming they wanted to forcibly absorb my organization, they would have remained silent until they had my civilian name before backing me into a corner and giving me "an offer I can't refuse," not unlike as I'd done with Tattletale.

Could it be that The GOAT had subordinate thinkers? Their own "Tattletale?" In which case, this premature nonsense might have been the actions of a rookie hero looking to impress their boss.

That… That still didn't fit exactly, but it wasn't as though I knew the inner workings of their organization. I looked over the damage reports again and did my best to ignore the mounting headache.

No, this wasn't the work of a novice. The section covering the Undersiders wasn't just incomplete, it was falsified, and so convincingly that no one who didn't already know otherwise would question it. Grue being the leader and him having never met me were true enough, but the file named Tattletale as my mole in the gang of teenage capes, someone whose goal it was to subvert them from the inside out.

Besides Tattletale herself, this version of our relationship put more distance between the Undersiders and myself. Which made me wonder: Was I really the recruitment target?

Was… Was The GOAT trying to redeem the Undersiders?

As laughable as that notion was, it fit with their known operations. They took Creed and turned a class clown villain into a hero even Legend acknowledged. That was a better redemption story than that joke, Shadow Stalker.

Truthfully, I had to admit that The GOAT chose their targets well. In another life, with someone else to pull their strings, I could see how each might have been willing to join the Wards or operate as an independent.

Brian loved his sister and would happily flip sides if he thought he could better provide for her. Jean-Paul was on the run. He would follow anyone so long as it kept him away from his father's clutches. Rachel was naturally combative, but her loyalty was to her dogs. So long as Creed could heal dogs as well as humans, that loyalty was an easy social lever. And Lisa, she didn't need a reason to jump ship.

That got me thinking. What if Lisa was already compromised? What if this was something she'd helped them prepare? She was the real prize in the Undersiders and The GOAT certainly expressed their interest. This could be their plan to isolate the Undersiders and prepare them for assimilation.

In which case…

I collapsed the timelines and ordered Lisa brought to me. It was time for a more thorough interrogation.

X

She knew nothing. I questioned her in both timelines, verifying her answer with gratuitous torture. I tore out her fingernails, slowly sawed off her legs, and had the broken girl bathed in salt. I had her drugged, beaten, and abused in every manner I could think of. I'd even allowed some of my more experienced men to get creative in their enhanced interrogation methods.

Still, even after hours and countless timelines, I was forced to conclude that Lisa truly had no contact with The GOAT.

I collapsed the timelines again and faced my least loyal subordinate. She sat on the hard, uncomfortable chair before me, visibly inpatient. She was nervous, as she always was, though she tried her best to put forth a brave front.

"Are you certain Creed and The GOAT are heroic?" I asked, more for the sake of it now.

"I told you, one hundred percent. Creed's looking for us, you know. He's been snooping around the neighborhood," she said, snorting derisively. I split the timelines so I could put a round into her head for her cheek.

"Does he know where your base is?"

"Oh, for sure," she said, oblivious to her countless horrible fates. Perhaps I would have her fed to Rachel's dogs next time. "He knows where we live but can't do anything because he's a good little hero and won't break the unwritten rules."

"Good. We can use his self-imposed limitations against him."

"Yup. He's been wasting time casing the area while we've just been hanging out. I figure we can relax for a week or two before our next job, pick our battles."

I nodded and dismissed her. She knew nothing more than I did about the cyberattack by now. As enjoyable as breaking her was, there was no longer any point. I had to accept that I'd gathered as much information as I could internally.

This wasn't ideal, I was still working with far less intel than I'd like, but I couldn't deny the shiver of excitement I felt. Finally, there was a worthy opponent, a rival thinker who could hold their own. The GOAT had struck the first blow, but their naivete and insistence on redeeming villains provided an opportunity for me to regroup.

They seemed fond of the Undersiders. If nothing else, they had plans for the group of misfits. In that case, why not use that? If I sent out the Undersiders, would they send Creed?

I doubted the exact nature of the job would matter, but there was no reason I couldn't build them a more tempting target.

How fascinating. Creed could easily dismantle my patsies, but much as his "spar" with Aegis and Shadow Stalker, their interaction itself might provide valuable information. And it wasn't as though I couldn't spring my team from lockup whenever I pleased.

Yes, the more I thought about it, the more sure I felt. The GOAT probably planned to make their pitch while my minions were in lockup. They were underestimating me, not realizing the depth and breadth of my reach.

I would lose nothing, test the team's loyalty, and probe The GOAT's long-term plans, all while getting a more in-depth look at Creed's capabilities.

Author's Note

Yes, Sierra now thinks her little brother writes terrible romance and smut. That idea is firmly in her head now. Even if/when Sierra finds out about his cape identity, she'll never believe that those were "research notes" of the SFW variety.

A porygon is 2' 7" and 80 pounds according to the pokedex. A porygon 2 is only 2' tall and 71 pounds. For whatever reason, it is one of the few pokemon that actually loses mass when it evolves.

Thank you to everyone who paid for my groceries. I have a Pat-re-on and Kofi with dozens of chapters written across my various stories. If you'd like to read ahead, I recommend Pat-re-on. If you're interested in commissioning me, instructions are on Kofi.