Turn 9

--- Maya ---

(Why am I subjecting myself to this?) She couldn’t help but wonder.

(Because you’re a good big sister?)

(Fuck being a good big sister, do feel the way our lungs are burning?!)

She did, hence why she slowed down to a stop, painfully gasping for air.

“You okay?” Izzy asked, having run back for her after realizing she wasn’t following anymore.

“Just… dying.” She admitted, with a look to her perfectly steady younger sister. “Which, you know… Is what we’re all doing every day when you think about it…”

Izzy just stared at her for a moment, before shaking her head. “Is your head always that messed up?”

“You know it hermanita!” She told her with a cheerful thumbs up.

That was about as much talking as she could manage, as she spent the next few minutes desperately trying to take as much air into her lungs as she could.

“You’re breathing wrong.” Izzy eventually commented.

“What?” She gasped.

“You need to breathe through your nose and mouth.” Izzy explained.

“I- What?” She repeated.

Izzy rolled her eye before beginning to audibly breathe. “Try breathing in through the nose, and out through the mouth.”

“And that’s supposed to help?” She asked.

“It improves your oxygen intake, which… does a bunch of stuff for your biology?” The twelve-year-old offered a little unsurely before shrugging. “Okay, I don’t really know, I looked it up on this runner’s site and I think it helps.”

She watched her younger sister for a moment before nodding. “Alright, if you say it’ll help, then… it’ll help. Hopefully…”

Izzy smiled and nodded back. “Ready for round two then?”

She moaned in despair. “No…”

---

“Alright, so if we’re going to be fighting against other Masks than we should probably figure out what kind of powers other Deviants are packing.”

(Please tell me we aren’t trying to hack Sanctuary again…) Her inner survival instincts begged.

“What? No, we’re just hacking the police today.” She assured herself in a way that did nothing to reassure her. “And maybe the hero’s guild.”

(Why?!)

(Because we need information, duh.)

(But do we really need to get it by hacking the government?!)

“No, we don’t.” She admitted a little surprised. “Apparently, Sanctuary and the Hero’s Guild both give out free pamphlets… though some of the Sanctuary one’s look a little racist against Slashers, Deadmen and the Malcontent…”

(Well they are the people eaters.)

She rolled her eyes. “That’s a myth.”

In actuality it was not a myth, at least in the cases of Deadmen. Something she found out only after clicking accidently clicking a video that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Romero flick, if it wasn’t for all of the glowing green blood coming from the zombies. Or the zombies walking through walls and turning invisible and shooting beams of energy…

(Told you so!)

“Okay, so Deadmen are basically ghost zombies!” She declared closing out any more tabs related to that after seeing a man have his throat ripped out.

(I feel we aren’t going to sleep for a few weeks.)

(Ooh! I call dibs on first traumatic nightmares!)

“Alright, um, why don’t we just check out the Deviancies in the local gangs and heroes?” She asked, completely unwilling to check the validity of the rumors revolving around Slashers and the Malcontent. Especially since the former was literally named after a type of horror film.

(Mm, the Covenant is largely made of Arcane correct?)

“Yeah, so…” She moved through a few pages before pulling up the webpage for the Arcane Association of America’s college page, the American base of the most well known Arcane group in the world.

(Huh, this is a surprisingly good college even if we don’t practice magic.) Her inner logic realized with some surprise.

“It kind of is…” She admitted with her own surprise, before frowning. “Too bad it’s also like a twelve-hour drive from home…”

She wasn’t willing to go that far from her family, even if it was a good school.

(Uh, weren’t we supposed to be looking up magic dakka? Or is that the WAAAGH?!)

Shaking her head at her wilder self’s yelling, she moved through the site until she found an overview on the basics of Arcane for newer magic users.

From what she could gather, each Arcane had a set of ‘affinities’ based on their psychology and the events they’d been through in their life. These affinities represented the different things that said Arcane was capable of manipulating with their magic, with stronger affinities representing greater power with a given attribute.

“Meaning it’s luck of the draw on what kind of powers each Arcane has…”

(And which powers we have to deal with.)

Sighing she moved through a few other pages, trying to find the part of magic that made her willing to accept it as an esoteric field of study, even if she despised the LARPers responsible for naming it ‘magic’.

Eventually she found what she was looking for in a page explaining the difference between the Arcane and Practitioners. While the former was born with a well of power they could draw on, the later studied the way magic interacted with the world around them to figure out the ‘rules’ behind magic, revealing it as more of an esoteric field of science and engineering than actual magical bullshit.

“I’m guessing this is the non-M.A.D. version of my hacking… just a lot less controlled, defined, understood, and inferior in general to what I’m doing.”

(Sounds about right.)

Deciding that meant, she had a decent enough understanding of what the Covenant could throw at her, namely bootlegged versions of her own future projects held together by duct tape and prayers.

(Wait, isn’t that what we’re doing right now…) Her inner simpleton pointed out.

“No, I understand exactly what I’m doing.” She disagreed.

(Or the whispers do anyway.)

“And the whispers are me, so there’s no difference there.” She reminded herself. “Besides I’d rather have better control and variety than the misunderstood power these guys are throwing around.”

(Don’t forget we still need to look up Wonderlanders.)

“Oh, right!” This one she’d actually kept open the web pamphlets Sanctuary and the hero’s guild had on their sites. “Though for some reason these seemed more oriented towards family rather than actual Wonderlanders themselves.”

The reason for this was that most Wonderlanders suffered from a disconnection to reality, often rejecting it as it is, and literally projecting their own reality onto the world around them.

“Wait. How the fuck do they do that?”

(Mm, it looks like Wonderlanders have a personal pocket dimension, -which they commonly call their wonderland- that’s based on their psyche. They also seem to have the ability to drag pieces of that dimension into reality, allowing them to slowly submit the world around them to their own.)

(But how does that tie into the Poser’s Guild gaining powers?)

“Um, maybe they’re slowly getting dragged deeper and deeper into the Wonderlander’s dimension… In which case, eventually they’d be unable to leave it at all.”

(That’s an unpleasant thought. Is there anything on how to combat them?)

She read through everything the pamphlets had before shaking her head. “No, this just says family of Wonderlanders should try and help them find anchors to reality, to keep them from losing control to their ‘wonderland.’”

(Which is likely too late, given how widely the Gamer’s Guild’s influence has spread.)

“Right…” Sighing, since there wasn’t much else she could do on this front, she closed out all of the pages dedicated to Wonderlanders, before leaning back in her chair.

“So, what Deviancies does that leave?”

(Well, if we want to avoid any more nightmares… That leaves psychics and M.A.D.s.)

“Uh-huh, and everyone knows what a psychic is. Telepathy, precognition, and moving shit with their mind.” She listed. “Honestly, the only major threat there is if they’re a strong enough telepath to start mind controlling people.”

(Mm-hmm, and what about M.A.D.s then?)

(We already know how awesome they are!)

“The whispers, the four specialties, being able to make punks, and being able to build things from the other specialties if a fair bit weaker than an actual specialist.” She nodded. “Which doesn’t matter since we got the coolest of the specialties.”

(Because we are the coolest!)

“Damn straight.”

---

“Well, we know about the gangs and the kind of Deviants they’ve probably got on call, but we don’t really know anything about where they each hang out.” She told her inner selves as she began writing out a new program. “If we’re going to be doing this whole hero thing we really should know where all of the bad guys are.”

(And the places to avoid until we’re ready.) Her inner survival instincts agreed.

(Boo! I just want to know where the assholes I can zap are!) Her inner passion whined.

“It’ll do that too.” She promised, going through her files as she began to piece together a program that would passively filter through the police department’s records while avoiding any security programs.

Admittedly given her tendency to hack into the police department every single time she was in need of information, this was significantly easier for her than it would be for most.

“What’s more, since I’ll have a permanent backdoor into their system I’ll be able to go through their stuff whenever I want, rather than having to hack back in every time.”

(We probably should’ve done this sooner all things considered.)

(What?! No! We shouldn’t be trying to annoy the law at all!)

She blew a raspberry. “I’ve fought the law and I won.”

(Hacking their systems does not count as fighting them!) Her inner logic warned. (What’s more we should avoid doing so if we want to remain heroes!)

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, I won’t go pissing off the cops, but I’m keeping the backdoor, in case we need to investigate future criminals and stuff.”

(Fine…) Her inner reason eventually conceded.

Getting back to work, she continued working on her program for the rest of the day.

By itself the program would allow her to know whatever the police knew about the gang’s various activities, as well as any ongoing investigations, and nearby crime alerts. When combined with her MAP () program however this meant she had a city-wide crime map, actively keeping track of everything going on in the city that the police knew about.

And not just what one department knew either, but rather what all of the police in the city knew. Arguably making her own map superior to anything they had solely due to the lack of jurisdictional impediment, and inter-department dick measuring.