“Oh who’s a special widdle baby? Oh yes, you is! Iddn’t oo sweet?” Ladybird cooed and nuzzled at the baby in the stroller. The pudgy-cheeked infant crowed and kicked its bootied feet in glee.
Her mother laughed. “You do have a way with children, Ladybird,” she said.
“Looking like a living plush toy helps,” Ladybird chuckled. “Oop, and she’s got my visor,” she said as a chubby fist gripped her headband. “Oh nooo, I shall be unmasked and the whole world will know my secret identityyy, what shall I doooo...”
The laughing mother helped pry Ladybird’s visor and no few locks of mane out of her baby’s grasp. “You two have a nice day,” she said to Ladybird and Vista. The two nodded and waved and walked on.
“You do that with every baby or little kid you see,” Vista teased.
“Best part of the job so far,” Ladybird said cheerfully. “If we’re gonna be the P.R. division, we might as well enjoy it. Besides,” she said slyly, “I don’t see you turning down those free ice cream cones the pushcart vendors give us whenever we do this patrol.”
“Darn right. I’m going to utterly exploit your marketable cuteness for all it’s worth,” Vista said, rubbing her hands together. “Mwahahaha.”
The two were on their regular Saturday foot patrol, tooling about through one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Brockton Bay. The confluence of circumstances that led to that arrangement gave Taylor a headache to think about. The PRT had (predictably) decided that they needed to play up the Public Relations angle of their cute, cuddly newest member as much as possible. This had (also predictably) led to Ladybird being teamed with Vista, the other “small and cute” member of the Wards, as much as possible. It also led to their patrols mysteriously all taking place in the ‘gated community’ end of the city, where the rich and yupwardly mobile all resided… much to Vista’s disgruntlement.
“You know this is obviously payback for us getting the PR hacks over a legal barrel,” Vista said as they ambled through the park. She smirked. “And for making Glenn Chambers have to change his pants.”
“No doubt,” Ladybird said sheepishly. “Sorry about that… I guess I did go a little overboard.”
Vista shrugged. “Not really your fault,” she said. “Glenn Chambers is hardly the only dork working in the PRT.” She looked down at herself. “At least I got a new costume out of it.” The cute-little-girl skirt was gone, replaced with a padded and armored full body suit and a proper utility belt. Her visor was now a full helmet, protecting her ears and the top of her head while letting her ponytail hang down the back. “I can live with a little punishment detail for that, at least.”
“Looks good on you,” Ladybird said. “And about this being ‘punishment detail--’” She stopped and tapped her chin with one hoof. “Iiiiii’m not so sure.”
Vista rolled her eyes. “They got us on a ‘kiddy patrol,’ Ladybird,” she said. “Glenn Chambers is trying to rub it in our faces how they’re never going to let us do anything USEFUL.”
“He’d LIKE to rub that in, yeah,” Ladybird agreed. “But I think Armsmaster and Miss Militia are just letting him think he got what he wants.”
“How do you figure that?” Vista said, puzzled.
“Well, if Armsmaster or Miss Militia or Aegis or Piggot were actually punishing us for upsetting Glenn Chambers, they would have us doing nothing but running the comms and doing public appearances or kludging paperwork, junk like that,” Ladybird pointed out. “Instead we got the gear we wanted, the costumes we wanted, we’re out doing patrols without the ‘big kids’ playing babysitter on us--”
Vista grudgingly nodded. That had been one of her pet peeves. She had been on the team longer than anyone; she had more training and experience than any two of the current wards combined. Yet even on patrols she was expected to tag along with two other “more mature” wards “due to regulations” (aka “you’re a little girl and can’t take care of yourself.”) “Only because you’re nearly old enough to drive,” she pointed out. “You’re still expected to be my babysitter--”
“And you’re kind of expected to be mine. Actually, we’d probably end up partnered anyway, the PR divisions’ “team kid and pet” obsession or not,” Ladybird brooded. “You’re the youngest member and I’m the least experienced-- but at the same time, you’re the most experienced, I’m the most versatile--” it was too true; Ladybird’s powers seemed to have more utility every time she was tested. The power testing wonks were joking that she had so many different power ratings she just needed one more to win a free toaster. “--And maybe you didn’t notice but we’re also the two most powerful Capes on the Wards.
“We’re also already crazy popular, if PHO is anything to go by, we’re non-threatening but we have enough power between us to take care of ourselves….and we’re here in the fancy neighborhoods, making good with the rich and famous of Brockton Bay.” She gave Vista’s leg a comradely hip bump. “They made that big baby Glenn think he got his way, but Armsmaster and Miss Militia set things up so we got the perfect team-up.”
“Well yeah, that is one way of looking at it, I guess,” Vista said reluctantly.
“Trust me,” Ladybird said as confidently as she could. “We’re just getting our feet... er, hooves… wet on these little cake patrols. Sooner or later though we’ll show ‘em what we’ve got, and we’ll really wow ‘em.” Ladybird hoped she sounded more certain of that than she felt. The law in the form of Carol Dallon and the PRT regulations might be on her side, but one thing she’d learned from her long painful experience at Winslow was that people who had it in for you might not obey the rules themselves but they certainly knew how to use them against you. She’d maybe gone a liiiiiittle overboard with Glenn, and she should’ve remembered that walking ego-trips like that could be incredibly petulant.
Glenn might be doing his level best to sabotage them from behind the scenes, but there was no need for her to let her cynicism rub off on the younger Ward.
Of course Vista was enough of a Protectorate veteran that she had more than enough cynicism all her own. “We’re hardly going to wow anyone tooling around the one-percenter neighborhoods,” she grumbled.
There was a scream.
Taylor’s ears pricked up. “Did you hear that??” she said, alarmed.
Vista was immediately alert. “What?” She scanned in the opposite direction Taylor was looking.
Taylor kept looking, her hypersensitive ears swiveling. “I heard someone scream! A little girl, from the sound of it--”
The park had simple, single-lane streets on three sides and a two-lane on the fourth. She turned just in time to see an unmarked black van turning onto the two-lane. Then she heard the scream again, it was coming from the van, she knew it! “It’s a kidnapping!” she yelled. “Black van, nine o’clock!” She took off in a gallop. “Bring up Comms--”
“This is Comms,” Triumph’s voice said in her ear. The voice command option for her stuff was on the job. “What’s up, Ladybird?”
“We’ve got a possible kidnapping, black van--” a tilt of her head and she got a zoom-in view on her HUD. “Obscured license plate. Heading North on Greenview two-lane, we’re in pursooOOOPP!” In the excitement she’d forgotten the talents of the girl running along beside her. With a gesture Vista had shrunk the distance to the intersection and to the van. But the driver was already accelerating--
When the van had pulled over in front of her as she walked home from school, Dinah Alcott knew this was it.
All precognitive capes got, as part of their power, a unique list of predictions and forecasts, usually ones exclusive to or particularly about themselves. They were rarely happy predictions.
Almost from the day she had Triggered as a precog, Dinah Alcott had been saddled with a veritable card catalog of horrible predictions. The length of time till the next Endbringer attack (It was impossible to get a precog fix directly on the terrible monsters, but if you got a prediction that the city you lived in was going to be smashed into ruin sometime in the near future, it wasn’t too hard to connect the dots yourself.) The deaths of countless people she knew.
Her kidnapping by a monster named Coil.
The only thing that made it bearable was that her forecasts came in the form of statistics. Probabilities, from almost zero percent to almost one hundred percent. Nothing was set in stone; little things could change the posssible outcome. She’d seen it happen several times. She could even figure out what those little things were, if she asked her Power just the right question.
That was the hard part. When the van pulled to a halt right next to her and the men dressed all in black and wearing ski masks got out, she was too terrified to ask her power how to save herself. They moved in a brisk, no-nonsense fashion like they were businessmen on their way to work, not thugs about to kidnap a nine year old girl. She clutched her bookbag to her chest and stumbled back.
The one closest to her actually stopped for a second. “Don’t try anything stupid, kid,” he said as the other two grabbed her by the arms. “What’re the odds anyone’s gonna hear ya?”
He said the magic words.
Dinah blinked, her heart surging with hope. The moment he asked the question, her power activated and gave her the answer. Ninety-eight percent, her power said. She didn’t hesitate, screaming at the top of her lungs.
The three men didn’t even pause. The van doors opened and she was shoved inside, rapidly restrained with plastic straps around her wrists and ankles. The doors slammed shut and the van took off. “Hey, slow it down up there!” the lead guy shouted. “We go roaring off we’ll attract all sorts of attention!”
Dinah forced herself to ignore the mumbled half-apologies, the smell of sweat and too many bodies crammed in too small a vehicle and the sight of large dangerous looking guns everywhere, and began frantically asking her Power the one question that she could think of:
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
If I scream now, what are the chances someone who can save me will hear?
15%
If I scream now, what are the chances?
25%
How about now?
45%
How about now?
78%
How about now?
75%
The odds were dropping again! Any second now they were going to gag her, or they would be out of range... She leaned towards the back doors as far as she could, hoping that the blacked-out glass would mean more sound got out that way, and shrieked her lungs out.
It was the last sound she would be allowed to make. The men swore as the sound pierced their eardrums; rough hands grabbed her and slapped tape over her mouth, silencing her. She was shoved back into her seat. From her angle she could just see out the front windshield between the two front seats.
Chances that someone who could save me heard that?
Suddenly the tree-lined boulevard down which they were traveling stretched out, as if they were driving straight into an impossibly long dolly zoom. The driver swore like mad as the traffic sign a block away suddenly retreated by almost a mile. “Cape! It’s gotta be a Cape!”
Dinah’s power gave her the answer at the exact same moment.
100%
Vista fell to her knees, her kneepads crunching in the sidewalk gravel. Both her hands were outstretched as she simultaneously shrank the distance to the back of the van and elongated the space ahead of it with everything she had. For a brief moment the getaway van actually seemed to be going backwards. But the driver stomped on the gas and the van began… slowly, at first… to pull away. “Get ‘em!” she said, her teeth gritting.
Ladybird ran flat out in a full gallop. The van’s rear bumper was mere feet from her, but it was slowly pulling away as the driver gunned the motor for all it was worth. Maybe she could summon a cloud of butterflies to block the windshield-- but wouldn’t the Manton effect interfere with Vista’s space-warping??
The van suddenly surged ahead. Either Vista had reached the limits of her endurance or the van had reached the edge of her warp-zone. In moments the van was nearly a hundred yards down the road. Ladybird let out a little cry of despair-- but in a twinkling that despair flipped into outrage. Just the taste of that old emotion she’d been tormented with so long was enough to light her anger. These pukes kidnapped a little kid! They were probably LAUGHING while the little kid cried! They were GLOATING about how they got away from the Wards, she knew it!
Power crackled through her, making her horn light up bright as a road flare. She didn’t know what she was going to do to those kidnappers but by golly she was gonna DO it!
There was a brilliant flash of lavender-white… everywhere. When the flash cleared away she was no longer running down a boulevard in pursuit of a black van. She was lying on her back in the floor of what had to be the interior of that selfsame van, surrounded by one tied-up, frightened looking little girl and three astonished looking gun-wielding men in black suits and ski masks.
Holy craptarts.
Well, time for reflection later. First things first. She looked up at the nearest of the three and gave him a smirk. “Hello, buttmunch,” she said-- and kicked him with all her might with both back hooves right in the crotch.
Vista strained as hard as she could, but she finally had to give up. She’d had to have stretched that few feet of road ahead of the van by like, a mile, but she couldn’t keep it up. The van roared off. In moments it would reach a major intersection and disappear into the mess of Brockton Bay traffic…
There was a brilliant flash of lavender light. When Vista blinked the spots out of her eyes, Ladybird had vanished.
Then the van started swerving. Then something, four yellowish something zipped out of nowhere and all four tires blew. The van actually hopped into the air several feet before landing and coming to a skidding halt.
The crowd of people waiting at the crosswalk backed up hastily as the van began to rock violently. They started running when several bulletholes appeared in the roof. Vista, her breath caught, quickly warp-hopped down the street to the fracas, careful to take cover behind a lightpost.
Several large, disturbingly human-sized dents bulged out in the roof and sides; the windshield and windows shattered, scattering bits of tinted glass all over the intersection.
Finally the doors burst open and several men dressed in black tumbled out onto the pavement. They were screaming and flailing about, weapons strapped over their shoulders forgotten as they tried to flee the bumblebees that were attacking them.
Vista blinked. Yes, bumblebees. She had to blink again, and cringe more than a bit, as she realized that the reason she could identify them despite being over thirty feet away was because the fat bumbly bugs were each the size of tennis balls.
The next thing to appear in the back door of the van was a tiny, lavender ball of rage. “You use MACHINE GUNS to kidnap a little girl? YOU COWARDS! COME BACK HERE!” Ladybird shouted. Everyone present watched in astonishment as the cutest little unicorn in Brockton Bay seized the nearest of the fleeing kidnappers (who had made the unfortunate mistake of going for his gun) in her telekinesis and began slamming him quite firmly against the asphalt. “I’ll… teach… YOU… to kidnap… little girls… in...MY… town...” The machine gun went to pieces, and it looked like the kidnapper was in danger of doing the same.
The bumblebees were beginning to disperse, disappearing like popping soap bubbles in little bursts of light. The other, somewhat lumpy kidnappers were apparently willing to work through the pain; they started getting to their feet and grappling for their weapons. It was hard to tell the way their faces were swollen but Vista could guess they were glaring pure hate and death at Ladybird.
Vista quickly rubberbanded space and stepped up to the first goon. She tapped him on the shoulder with the collapsible baton she’d grabbed from Ladybird’s saddlebag. He was still on one knee; he whipped his head around, startled. “Hello,” Vista said-- and cracked him across the base of his neck with her baton. He dropped like a sack of laundry.
She quickly rubberbanded her way around the crime scene, dropping two more. The third though was a touch faster on the uptake; he had his uzi up and ready when Vista snapped over to him.
Fortunately Ladybird wasn’t as singleminded as she seemed. The last mook made a grab for Vista, threatening with his gun and obviously intent on taking a hostage-- but the moment he did he was cast in shadow. He looked up in time to see an enormous butterfly shaped out of the van doors hovering over him just before it slammed him between its wings with a tremendous bang. He slumped to the ground, thoroughly unconscious and rather deformed from original factory standards.
Vista quickly rubberbanded her way from kidnapper to kidnapper, zip tying them and relieving them of all their weapons. Soon they had a pile of guns, knives and other implements of harm on one side of the ruptured van, and a pile of hogtied would-be kidnappers on the other. Vista was rattling off info via the commlink to a flabbergasted Triumph, while Ladybird untied the girl and was helping her down out of the van. “Are you okay, sweetie?” Ladybird asked her gently, letting the girl lean her shaky weight on Taylor’s withers. “What’s your name?”
“Dinah Alcott,” the girl said, her voice trembling only a little.
“The girl says her name is Dinah Alcott--” Vista relayed to Triumph. She then winced and clutched at her earpiece; it was a bad idea to startle a voice-blaster. A great deal of loud sounds were coming through her commlink. “What do you--” she throttled herself. “What do you mean ‘your cousin?’” she whispered, covering her mouth with one glove. She dropped the pretense of a whisper at the next round of comm-chatter. “THE MAYOR’S NIECE??” she squawked.
Ladybird heard that much. “What?” She looked at Dinah. “You’re the Mayor’s niece?” Dinah nodded. Ladybird looked at Vista in confusion. “Who could possibly have a reason for kidnapping the Mayor’s niece?” The Mayor was only moderately well to do; there were plenty of other people in Brockton Bay with more money. And as an attempt to extort cooperation out of the Mayor, kidnapping was a really lousy plan.
But apparently Dinah’s power thought that the lavender unicorn had asked the question in the right way. “15% chance currently of the E88 taking interest in kidnapping me,” she said.
“22% chance of the Teeth or the S9.
“35% chance of Skidmark and the Merchants.
“43% chance of the ABB deciding to kidnap me.
“78% chance of the YangBan deciding they want to kidnap me.
“95.3% chance of the parties involved THIS time working for Coil, with a 50% probability he will make another attempt later.
“And the reason why, it’s because… because I’m a Cape. A Precog.” Her chin crumpled and tears began rolling down her cheeks. “And the numbers keep going up..” the girl broke down. Bawling, she flung her arms around Ladybird’s neck and sobbed her heart out as the police sirens swelled in the distance.
Then the police and the PRT arrived and it was noise, noise, noise. There were sirens everywhere. There was a great deal of yelling and shouting as the six would-be kidnappers were stuffed into various squad cars. Then they found out that the kidnappers were in the employ of a known supervillain-- Coil-- and had furthermore been attempting to kidnap a new Trigger right out of her neighborhood, and then the BBPD and the PRT were arguing over who had custody of them due to that. So Vista and Ladybird ended up giving their statements twice, once for each group, and passing out USB sticks of their helmet-cam footage like candy.
The girls’ parents had shown up and there had been a tremendous fuss. Then they had been informed that their little girl was actually a Cape and a Precog, and the fuss had REALLY taken off. Powers testing appointments nothing; little Dinah Alcott was going straight to the safety of the Wards and the protection of some of the best security forces on Earth.
In the middle of all this, Vista and Ladybird found out that the rest of the Wards had been tangled up in a bank robbery, of all things, by the Undersiders-- and apparently it had gone completely FUBAR. The bank was half-wrecked, a few tens of thousands of dollars were scattered in the streets, several of the Wards had been pretty roughed up, and somehow Glory Girl and Panacea had been in the middle of it and there was something about an entire dairy truck of cottage cheese…
Vista and Ladybird stood next to each other on the roof of the devastated van. (To the PRT’s and the BBPD’s bemusement, Ladybird had claimed the thing as legal Cape salvage, and she was now waiting for her father to show up with the tow-truck company.) It was still an hour going and it didn’t look like anything was calming down; the TV vans had shown up and were sticking microphones in everyone’s faces, rubberneckers of all stripe were crowding the street corners and slowing traffic to a crawl…
Vista looked over at Ladybird. The unicorn girl was all but vibrating with excitement. “What’s wrong with you?” Vista asked.
“Me? What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you excited?” Ladybird said. “We did it!” At Vista’s uncomprehending stare, Ladybird rolled her eyes. “Oh come ON, what were we talking about just a while ago? Showing our stuff, proving our chops, however they put it-- and we just did it. We did it!
“We-- not Armsmaster, not Miss Militia, not the Protectorate, not the other Wards-- us! You and me! WE stopped them from kidnapping the Mayor’s niece! We stopped the Bad Guys, we rescued the kid from the kidnappers… us! All on our own! We proved we can be heroes, and the whole world saw it!” She started dancing in a circle, hooves prancing as she spun around. “We did it, we did it, we said that we would do it, and indeed we did--” she sang.
Vista laughed at the looney unicorn. “I guess we did, didn’t we?”
“Yeah! Victory dance! Uh huh, sisters are doin’ it for themselves--” Ladybird shook a tailfeather, Vista finally joining in and doing the Running Man next to her. Laughing like loons the two stood atop the half-destroyed van and boogied down.
It was all over Youtube within half an hour.
Coil sat in his vault-like lair and seethed as he watched the newsfeeds. Fool, fool, impatient fool! The plan had been perfect, would have been perfect. And with his powers, more importantly it would have been re-usable.
That was one of the greatest advantages of his time-splitting power, he’d realized over the years. By splitting time into two paths, Schroedinger’s-Cat style, then executing a plan in one timeline while nixing it in the other, he could not only erase failed endeavours but preserve the plan for a retry later. It was invaluable when you had a perfect plan that only flubbed due to one error at the last moment-- most villains would simply have to ash-can the plan and start over from scratch, never daring to use the same plan ever again. But if a plan failed due to some tiny chance mistake, he, Coil, could erase it, salvage it and try it over again.
But only if he saw them through to the end. If he mistook a success for a failure, or worse a failure for a success, then not only was he stuck with the mistake but an otherwise pristine plan would have to go into the circular file for good. Usually he would take out his rage at the failure on whoever was responsible… sometimes several times, shooting, stabbing, or strangling them over and over again till his mood improved.
This time however he was thwarted in seeking out catharsis in his typical way, because the fault was entirely his own. A quick peek at PRT files had shown that the Protectorate was busy elsewhere in the State today. A word to the Undersiders had them going out to rob one of the city’s banks, tying up the police, the PRT and the Wards.
Then he had given the go sign to the mercenaries he’d employed for the kidnapping.
Finding the Alcott girl in the first place had been a stroke of luck. He’d been attending one of the countless soirees that seemed to come with politicking, no matter the scale, and the Mayor’s extended family had been in attendance, including his rather precocious niece. A few words of idle conversation with her parents and herself and he had recognized the signs of a precog-- the odd phrasing she used when replying to a question when she wasn’t paying attention, the description of her ongoing problems with headaches…. He’d actually split the timeline, cornered her in a back room and squeezed her for several questions, confirming his suspicions before letting the timeline collapse. He later confirmed her predictions at his leisure-- to his shock she had been stunningly accurate.
Since that day he’d plotted out her kidnapping with methodical care.
But when the opportunity came, he blew it. Irretrievably. He’d given the go-ahead to the mercenaries. The leader of the group had called him back, confirming the capture as calmly as a man describing a boring day of fishing. In a foolish moment of optimism, Coil had collapsed the timeline presuming victory-- and not ten seconds after, it had all gone South.
Not ten seconds after he had collapsed the other timeline, permanently committing himself to the outcome in this one, two wards… two wards who weren’t even supposed to be on patrol alone!… Caught the team of grossly overpaid professional mercenaries and thrashed the living hide off them. Now a team of his mercenaries were in PRT custody ripe and ready to be interrogated, and the girl was now a Ward and working for the PRT-- instead of for him as she ought to be.
No matter how he wished it otherwise, it was luck. Pure dumb luck. That, and his own over confidence. From here on out he would know better than to count his chickens before they were hatched.
He regarded the video clips of the two Wards who had handed him this defeat. He considered the preliminary reports and the rather tattered state of both the vehicle and the men being hauled away. People had obviously been seriously underestimating these two. Perhaps keeping a closer eye on these two-- especially this “Ladybird”-- would be a wise idea.
