Chapter Text
18.02. Hoyden charged. She was furious. She felt the responsibility for what had happened start to weigh down on her. She was the leader of the Austin wards. She was their brute. She was supposed to get between her team and serious injuries, but her team was in tatters and covering their retreat was all that was left for her to do here.
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The PRT had traced a shipment of unidentified drugs from the biotinker Blasto in Boston. One of the last before Bonesaw got hold of him. The drugs had come to this unfurnished third floor apartment in Austin. The client was none of the established gangs in the city. It was someone new. The PRT had consulted a thinker to determine the threat level of whoever it was, and discovered they weren’t a killer. So, the local Protectorate sent in their Wards for an after school raid.
At 17.59, 3 minutes ago, Hoyden’s team had burst in, hard and fast. Boxes had been stacked in the living room. For all the world, it looked like someone was moving in or out. When her team had rushed in, they found four big guys, with no obvious aesthetic theme or costume elements. Her team had planned to take any and all henchmen out of the fight fast, before they could grab any weapons or use any powers. Luckily, these henchmen were unpowered. They were easy pickings. A few quick hits and they were out of the fight.
Then it turned out that the henchmen were really more of a distraction.
While the Wards were mopping up the henchmen in the front room of this apartment, the door to the kitchen opened. A swarm of ravens, or crows maybe, poured out to harass the Wards. The beaten and bloodied thugs limped and crawled back behind boxes, out of the way. Hoyden lost track of her team in the jumble of feathers and screeches that surrounded her. She heard one of her teammates collapse onto the floor before she worked out what had caused it. She looked closer, trying to focus on a single bird in the roiling mass of black.
Some of the birds had contraptions attached to their feet with tiny syringes at the end of each claw. Then she saw a glint flash past her face and felt a raven attempt to inject something into her neck. Her brute power saved her. The bird couldn’t get the syringes through her skin. The bird that attacked her was then knocked out of the air when her power sent out a retaliatory burst of force and light in its direction. Hoyden heard another of her teammates drop in the chaos.
Hoyden called a retreat. Her team weren't prepared for this. They were a striker/brute, a precision blaster, an emotion effecting shaker, and a trump. The team was built for taking on heavy-hitting capes and hitting back harder. They were good at it. They weren't built for...armed birds. This was ridiculous.
18.01. As her team began to retreat, suddenly the birds fell silent and retreated too. They moved to perch on boxes, windowsills, and the floor around her. The birds all went still and watched her. A stillness descended over the room. Hoyden looked around. Now, with the fight nearly over, there were boxes strewn across the living room. Some were buckled or broken. Some were spewing pills and clear gunk onto the floor. Her teammates must have done that damage in the confusion. The four henchmen were still here, but they had retreated behind fallen boxes; with one starting to bandage all the other's wound. She heard the sound of her team dragging away their poisoned casualties, talking, coordinating, reassuring each other. She heard their voices faintly echo as they made it onto the apartment block stairwell. All she had to do was make sure her team made it out.
Hoyden assessed the situation and she made her decision. Some master-cape had to be lurking nearby and controlling these birds. Whoever it was must have hired the goons and bought the drugs. And that person was letting them go. Or that person was toying with them. She refused to gamble her teams safety by trusting the mercy of a villain. She would make herself worthy of this villain's whole focus so that her team could reach the PRT van outside. So, Hoyden charged.
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18.02. She punched box after box of drugs, and her power infused each impact with explosive force. Her punches detonated boxes, which spewed pills and shattered glass bottles as shrapnel. The move scattered the birds. The birds started to swarm her again and she punched at them, resulting in a few gory, feathery explosions. A stray thought spoiled her ‘heroic last stand’ moment. Coming out of this place covered in birds entrails would get her another PR lesson from Glenn. Then, all at once, the mass of birds parted and she saw several birds coordinating to lift a device she didn’t recognize. A blinding flash from the device engulfed her before she could react. She gasped in surprise and in that brief moment, some kind of liquid was squirted into her mouth. Right after that, the room started to spin.
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She woke, blurry eyed. Her first thought was the urgency of the fight. She tried to take in her surroundings as fast as possible. She had been moved. She was in a different room, on a table. Possibly in a different building. She felt restraints on her wrists and ankles. She tried to move and found that her limbs weren’t responding right. What had they dosed her with?!! She moved her face and head and found everything was working properly there. She strained her neck and saw large machines in the corners of the room and a light above her. An operating theater, she realized.
Movement in the corner of her eye made her turn, as best she could, to look. She saw a figure dressed like a medieval plague doctor, all in black. On either side of the figure was a large crow, or maybe raven. They turned their heads in perfect unison with the masked figure's cloth beak. Hoyden smiled and tried to feel confidence. Confidence made your opponent hesitate. Now it was time for a very different kind of battle. Time to buy time and look for a chance to escape. She’d also try to get some information about this mystery cape. It might be the only silver lining of the whole operation.
"Who the fuck are you!?" she said.
The figure turned, as did the birds. A man's voice came from behind the mask. "I am the Rook King. Your teammates are fine, by the way, just a bit of muscle relaxant". He said. A British man's voice. “I’ll be letting you go as soon we’ve had a little talk. You won’t be harmed I promise.” said the ‘Rook King’. Interesting, he started by giving her reassurance. No gloating, no demands.
"And what brings you to Austin, your majesty?!" She said as unscathingly as she could manage. Capes are theatrical by nature, by playing along, she might get him to play along too.
"The heroes drove me out of Boston. I am hoping to get set up here. And I wanted to talk to you because I don't think we need to fight, and frankly I don't want to." said the Rook King. Hoyden didn't pay that much attention to all the local villains in other cities. But he said he'd been beaten before, driven out of a city. Admitting weakness straight away, no bravado and straight to negotiation. This was...off-script for villains.
"If you don't want to fight, then kidnapping a Ward is a bad start pal!" said Hoyden.
"The Austin protectorate is quite hard-line. No lines of communication between heroes and villains. Then, this evening, you arrive in my apartment and attack. I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to talk. If you can think of a better way to arrange a meeting with the heroes, I am genuinely interested.” The guy in the plague doctor costume sagged a little. He looked tired.
“Your majesty” Hoyden sneered, “You can’t seriously be playing the victim when we found a huge stash of drugs in your apartment.”
The Rook King shook his head. So did the birds on his shoulders. “Not drugs, medicine." He said.
Hoyden paused. She looked around the makeshift operating theater and vaguely remembered something about a villain somewhere with an illegal medical practice, unlicensed foreign doctors, or bootlegged pills, treating villains or something like that. She remembered because it was a weird business for a cape to get into.
"I am the answer to a very specific problem." he said.
Here comes the monologue, Hoyden thought.
“Your private healthcare is extortionate, and people die because of it. A lot of basic medicine isn't particularly expensive to make. Its drug and insurance companies profiteering. Medicine doesn't have to be this way. Where I come from, have a National Health Service and it works!" he finished, voice raised in anger, sitting with clenched fists.
"So you’re a humanitarian, and we are your charity case?" scoffed Hoyden.
"Yes, you deserve that much." he said. That made her anger so much worse.
But Rook King continued. "I was a vet you know. I graduated just before Scion turned up and the world went insane. But the strangest thing is how little has changed. With all these tinkers around, people still can't afford to be sick or injured!" said the Rook King. He was shouting now, but still sitting quite still.
"I can't change the law, I can't change the system. Fuck it, if there isn't a sane solution then I just have to provide an insane solution. Dressing up as a sodding bird running a cheap hospital with cheap medical insurance." He sounded...embarrassed?
This is not how Hoyden imagined being kidnapped would go. "You expect me to believe you attacked my team with birds, out of the goodness of your heart?" she said.
"I know how ridiculous that sounds, I think about it every day. But when you put it that way, you Hoyden magically make things and body parts explode, out of a sense of heroism or civic duty. We are in wonderland! The old rules about what makes sense don't apply. If there were a better way to stop poor people from dying stupid deaths in a fucked up system, that didn't involve dress up and pretend, then I would do that!" he shouted.
He stood as he finished the last sentence. He sounded so genuinely frustrated that she almost felt like believing him. Giving him a sympathetic looking expression might buy her some time.
"Don't patronize me." said the Rook King. Or maybe not. Maybe Hoyden was still too dazed from the anesthetic for subtlety.
"You destroyed a few crates of insulin and cancer drugs. Now I have to find a supplier who can cook up some more. More importantly I have patients who have to wait." he said.
He was messing with her. This was ridiculous.
He produced a pipette from his sleeve.
"I'm going to let you go now. I really hope you can get your team to let me treat people. I take care. You can talk to witnesses in Boston. My doctors are good, my medicines are well made. I'd even let you inspect my facilities and vet my staff if you can do it without arresting anyone." he said.
He squirted the pipette up her nose. She coughed and struggled against the restraints glaring at ‘The Rook King’.
"Sorry about all this. Pass on my message to your team." said the Rook King.
Hoyden started to feel her head swimming again. There was something nagging at the edge of her consciousness. ‘Dress up and pretend’ he’d said, and ‘I used to be a vet’. Ravens are supposed to be very clever birds, trainable. She'd heard they could use tools once. She hadn't seen any individual raven do anything that complex. She tried to connect the thoughts, but the realization was lost as she drifted into sleep.