You have time to cool off a bit on the way home. Lisa was just trying to help, you realize. You should probably apologize for biting her head off like that. It's what a good person would do. Yet, it seems that you really don't want to. Guess you're not a good person.
Even that aside, alienating someone so resourceful and potentially helpful - who appears to be loyal even without soul's price shenanigans - is just stupid. A simple text message saying 'sorry' would do it. Five letters and you're done. Hell, three letters would do.
Your new cellphone remains in your pocket. Guess you're not a smart person either.
Another worrying thought hits you as you enter your house. You haven't been to school in a week. You didn't even consider it an option, not when you could be getting a new power instead. Now that you have it... you're not regretting your choices, not for a moment. It's just that you've started to consider consequences again.
Your dad hasn't said anything. Surely he must know. The school must have called. You barely even talk to each other anymore, but he's still very protective. He'd especially want to protect you from yourself. Probably because he's learned firsthand how bad things can get when you just stop caring about things, you think sourly.
Yet this evening passes like any other, in that familiar uncomfortable silence, broken only by token queries and formulaic answers.
Maybe... maybe there's been a mixup at school. You only went back very briefly last Monday. There was that one roll call, yes, but maybe they think you were marked as present by mistake. After all, you didn't show up for any other classes that day. Or that week. They might think that you're still in the hospital.
If so, that's... nice, but it's going to blow up in your face any day now. But you're not going to let that bother you now. You have a brand new power itching to be used. Tomorrow is the first day of your new career.
---
A fresh new day, and you already have a plan. It's simple really, it goes something like this:
1. Find parahuman, know soul's price
2. Do huge favor, gain loyalty
3. Request favor in return: Let me study your power
You don't worry about the tiny bit of mind control that's going to help said loyalty along. Gratitude is good! The world could use more of it. Sure, someone who really wanted to could paint what you're setting out to do in a negative light, with cackling and world domination and 'all shall love me and despair'. But that's not what you're about. Yes, you're going to discover people's deepest secrets and use your knowledge to control their behavior. That sounds bad. But you're going to do it by helping them get the thing they desperately want. It's like the opposite of blackmail.
Yes, you're going to be a hero. Or, an anti-villain at worst. Slightly Morally Ambiguous Santa Claus. Though you're going to need a better cape name than that. Or, ideally, you wouldn't need one, because if everything goes perfectly no one will even realize that you're using a power on them. Hah. Yeah, you're not going to rely on everything going perfectly.
But if it does... why, everything is just going to get easier and easier as you go along. Pretend for a moment that the random dude from yesterday had been a cape. Then as soon as you helped Miss Militia, you could simply ask her to go an a date with him. Boom, two powers for the price of one.
Which is not to say that there won't be challenges to this, uh, reverse blackmail scheme. First problem: Actually interacting with people to learn their secrets. You're hardly about to walk into ABB territory and announce "hi, I'd like to have a brief conversation with Lung," you're not sui- you're not stupid.
Even heroes present a problem. You're not going to be joining the Wards (fuck the Wards), so you'd have to find some other way to get to them. You could try walking around alone in the bad parts of town at night, and hope that someone shows up to save you when you inevitably get robbed and/or raped. This is clearly a terrible idea. You could also try robbing people yourself, and then banter with the heroes when they show up to stop you. Also a terrible idea.
No, you're going to have to catch them in their civilian identity. Which in and of itself is not hard, everyone knows the Wards all go to school at Arcadia. You know better of course, but most of them probably go there. All you have to do is hang around outside Arcadia with sorcerer's sight on and you'll pick them out in no time at all. You're even too young and female to be arrested for creepily lurking outside a school all day.
But that still leaves the issue of the approach. You're going to need some extremely plausible deniability each time you do it. If they just tell to fuck off, they're busy people, that's a best case scenario. Worst case they begin to wonder why you're accosting them specifically - didn't their teammate mention that they were also being stalked by an ugly brunette the other day? - and then you wake up in an interrogation room surrounded by angry people with superpowers.
---
You spent most of high school being flat broke. Because literally everything that you brought to school would eventually end up either stolen or destroyed. Including clothes and school books. So you had to keep buying replacements. But since the... the...
The locker. You don't have to be afraid of the word any more. The locker was good. The locker gave you powers. Good powers. Deep breaths.
Since the locker plan involved several months of not ruining your shit, you were able to accumulate some modest savings. Of course nothing you stored in the locker was salvageable, but since you're not going back to school you don't need to worry about replacing it either.
First up, contact lenses. Who has ever seen a cape with glasses? You get a month's supply of disposable one-day lenses to start with.
Next, weapons. Until you get real combat powers, you'll just have to shore up your Brute 0 durability with ordinary weapons. No guns, though. Even disregarding the issues of finding someone willing to sell to a gun to a fifteen-year-old, you noticed that capes don't tend use guns. Even though cops have them and - this is the really strange part, now that you think about it - a regular handgun is actually better than the powers of several successful heroes. Another unwritten rules thing? You'll have to ask Lisa.
Instead, you end up settling for a small canister of pepper spray. You should probably get a knife as well. Problem is you don't know anything about knives.
You size up the guy manning the register. Exactly the kind of man you'd expect to see running a survival/sporting goods/self-defense store. He clearly loves the constitution, especially the second amendment. Maybe not so much thirteen through fifteen. You figure a direct approach would be best.
"Perhaps you can recommend me a good knife," you say.
"What would you be using it for?"
"If the pepper spray doesn't work, I'd like to be able to stab my attacker in the dick."
He nods approvingly at your attitude, but seems concerned about your competence. "Do you know how to use a knife?" he asks.
Turns out that 'pointy end goes in the bad guy?' is not considered sufficient expertise. So you get a lecture on the history, philosophy and morality of self defense and the act of carrying a deadly weapon. Also a brief digression on the unbearable embarrassment inherent in being stabbed to death with your own knife after the bad guy wrestles it away from you, and a scrawled note with the phone number of a guy who gives lessons in knife fighting.
Those formalities out of the way, he shows you several combat knives, discussing their relative merits at length. You end up just picking the cheapest one, though. Good knives are more expensive than you thought! You're pretty much broke again.
No matter. Perhaps you'll- holy shit is that who you think it is? It is! What are the odds? You're not even using sorcerer's sight to scan the crowd for random capes, because you thought it was too unlikely to succeed. You're not going to question it, though. You figure the universe owes you a few hundred lucky breaks.
Don't stop, don't stare. Pretend you didn't notice, circle around. You need a plan. You can't just approach directly, because a) it won't work, celebrities don't just stop and chat like that, and b) you can't be seen deliberately approaching any cape, even one with a public identity. You must avoid that pattern of behavior entirely.
Okay, you've got this. You have a plan.
---
Oh god, this is the worst plan. You can't believe you thought this was a good plan. But you have to keep going. There's your target, and there's a car, right on cue. You'll never have a better chance.
You step into the street. For a brief moment your world is full of car horn and screeching tires, then it's full of pain and you're flying through the air. You have to protect your head, she can't heal brains, you have to protect your head but you have no idea which way is up and you can't seem to move your arms properly.
By pure luck you land mostly on your butt. Your new purchases dig into your back as your backpack 'cushions' the impact, and your head hits the pavement relatively gently. The more impressionable bystanders have started screaming. You just lie there with your eyes closed, waiting for the pain to go away. Someone gently touches your neck, and it does. See, perfect plan. You don't know what you were fretting about earlier.
"Oh god, is she going to be all right?"
Your eyes snap open and fasten on an old man standing next to you, wringing his hands and generally looking terrified and miserable. Oh wait, you recognize him. It's the driver, you caught a brief glimpse of him before you became airborne.
"She just appeared right in front of me, there was nothing I could do. Please tell me she's going to be all right."
All of a sudden you're filled with guilt and shame. This wasn't part of the plan. You never considered to feelings of the driver of the car you were going to use as a prop. Or to be more precise, it didn't even occur to you that you might encounter a non-asshole who wouldn't just yell at you for denting his car with your clumsy body.
"Please-" There's a lump in our throat. "Please forgive me."
He seems taken aback. "Young lady, I-"
"It was entirely my fault," you interrupt him. "I did not watch where I was going. I deeply regret subjecting you to such a traumatic experience. Please, may I have your forgiveness?"
"She's going to be all right," Panacea interjects. "She was hurt pretty badly, but it's nothing that I can't fix."
"Was you car damaged?" you ask. "I, I can help pay for repairs." 'You totally can't, you're broke!', a small voice inside your head screams.
"No, no! There's just a bit of, uh- it wasn't damaged."
"Then please, don't let me take up any more of your time. I'm fine. I'm being tended to by the greatest healer in the world-" You break off as you realize one element that you had forgotten to account for in your plans. Panacea can only fix people. But a quick check reveals that your glasses are still on your face, still intact.
"-and I didn't even break my glasses," you finish. "If you could put this shameful incident entirely from your mind, nothing could make me happier."
Did you really just say that? Perhaps you scrambled your brains a little bit after all, because apparently your speech patterns regressed several centuries in an attempt to convey the intensity of your feelings. At least the driver seems to take it at face value. He nods awkwardly to you before returning to his vehicle.
Panacea, on the other hand, is giving you a somewhat skeptical look. "All done," she announces. She grabs your hand to help you stand up. "On your feet, victim girl."
Well, at least the unexpected genuine guilt was good practice for the next step of the plan.
"I'm so terribly sorry," you tell her. "I know you work so hard to help those in need, and here I go wasting what little free time you have with more work." Panacea still looks skeptical, but maybe a little pleased, too.
"It's no trouble", she says, "I could hardly have left you dying in the street."
"Still, I feel terrible about it." You don't actually feel terrible about it. Panacea is a second-generation cape, she can deal. "Can I make it up to you somehow? Buy you dinner?"
She shakes her head.
"A coffee, at least?" you try.
"Thanks, but I really have to go. Just try to be more careful in the future."
Panacea wants her sister to reciprocate her romantic feelings
Wow. That's, uh. Wow. Luckily, no one will think it odd if you just stand there for a while, staring after your savior like an idiot. Because that's what you're going to do.
That, that sure is a can of worms. No, you're not going to mindrape Glory Girl, that's not the issue. But if you someday got a power that could, the most ethical thing might actually be to mindrape Panacea into being less of a deranged pervert (and then reapply soul's price for a second try). After all, if there is such a power out there Panacea could try to get it from the original source, and that is Not OK.
Irregardless (you feel a need to compensate for your earlier overly formal language), that's a problem for another day. You turn away and lose yourself in the crowd.
You regret that you didn't catch her healing you with sorcerer's sight, but you couldn't risk turning it on. With every function of your body laid out for her inspection, the very last thing you wanted to hear from her was "what's going on with your optic nerve? Are you a cape?" You had to gamble on her not noticing your Brute 0 powers as it was.
You seem to have dodged that particular bullet, but you have to face the really glaringly obvious flaw in your plan that you really should have seen coming: These are people with superhuman powers you're targeting. Whatever it is that they want, that they don't already have, is going to be fucking difficult to acquire.
Especially since you entirely lack powers to help with step 2. You, uh, you should probably call up Lisa, apologize to her and ask her to hook you up with that friend she mentioned.
No! You can't just let a single setback demoralize you like that. If reverse blackmail isn't working, what else can you do? How about, reverse vigilantism? Where you patrol the streets at night, trying to not stop crime. Where instead of hunting criminals, you hunt heroes hunting criminals, and secretly study them with sorcerer's sight.
Ok, so what are the glaringly obvious flaws that you really should have seen coming with this plan?
1. Dangerous. Without combat powers, it's basically a thinly disguised version of your rejected "get mugged, hope for heroes" plan.
2. Fights don't last very long. A few minutes at most. It took you something like 50 hours to copy Lisa's power. Maybe it will be easier next time, but not that much easier.
3. Capes with Mover powers will use them for the entire duration of their patrol. But the whole point of Mover powers is that you, the (mostly) baseline human, can't keep up with them.
Yeah, you sure are glad you saw those glaringly obvious flaws in advance. So what else can you do? Why, you could infiltrate one of the existing cape groups in the city. Then you could hang out with them, and spar with them, and challenge them to power using contests. All the while, unbeknownst to them, using sorcerer's sight!
Yes, this seems like an excellent plan. Now, how to go about it?
Spoiler: Taylor's infiltration plans
God dammit, more glaringly obvious flaws! Fine, you'll bloody well call Lisa and apologize and ask for her help like a goddamn adult. You get your phone out, but hesitate with your finger over the call button. You still really don't want to do this. You'll text her like goddamn teenager, you decide.
> Sorry about blowing up on you yesterday. I'd like you to introduce me to your friend.
< k, will get bck 2 u w/ deets
Clearly you have some things to learn about texting like a goddamn teenager.
Still, it's done. You've got a line on a new power to help with step 2, or infiltration, or whatever it turns out to be. Yes, you're back on the pity train, but at least you didn't buy a first class ticket. All it cost you was a piece of your soul- ok, fine your actual soul has golden stars in it. A piece of your self-respect. You weren't using it anyway.
=====