Orb Weaver: Consequences, 4

Dad stayed with me for a while, once I was taken back to the hospital room. I’d be staying at the PRT HQ, in their infirmary.

I didn’t take much imagination to realize I was also under protective custody, in case Orb Weaver showed up.

Which drastically reduced what I could do. It was irritating, that people trying to help me were actually hindering me.

But…

I didn’t need my bugs with Leviathan. Sure, they would be convenient, but… I shouldn’t get to where they’re a crutch.

So I had asked for and been given four tablets, that I set up to use simultaneously. One covered the public fallout from the E88’s end. Some comments about me on PHO, and a lot of… wary optimism. The Empire was gone, and people cheered that, but others wondered what would be next. Another screen showed my 500,000 dollar bounty, which was tax free. I would only have access to 50,000 as a minor, with the rest held in trust, given the documented history of minors and their parents blowing through impressive sums with little to show for it.

A reasonable consideration.

The problem was that it sounded like a lot of money, and it was. For a person. But for some of the goals I had? It wasn’t.  500,000 sounded like a lot, but a small mansion could run into the millions. Rebuilding a street, or politically pushing policies to help a city could run into the tens or even hundreds of millions, because it wasn’t enough to just have a single cash infusion, you had to be able to sustain it. Not to mention just having money didn’t give you the unofficial connections that were so important in pushing political agendas. 

It was also always under observation, and by extension I’d have to be careful with my unofficial funds from Orb Weaver and The Exterminator’s activities.

I shouldn’t have lost my temper.  The Empire quietly wiped away, Theo in charge of Medhall and willing to work… The ideal outcome.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen now. Kaiser had been clever in arranging things, and the government had every reason to not destroy Medhall, which meant that Theo would, on paper, retain some influence…

But he would also be under observation.

Which meant that I would have to be very careful about talking to Theo or making any suggestions, either as Orb Weaver or The Investigator.

On the bright side, the authorities clearly understood how important Medhall was and weren’t going to simply destroy it.

The last two screens however, were for my main goal.

Orb Weaver had spoken to Armsmaster.

And yet…

I had been unconscious.

Orb Weaver had spoken. And yet I was unconscious. And there were almost no examples of a direct power projection that continued after the user was unconscious. Bitch's Dogs, Blasto's creations, those were all living beings on their own accord.
And yet... OW, or Buzz, as I coined it in my head, spoke of things that were related to me.
It seemed to like me and yet... I played the recoding again.

"Yyyouou woULD remmiinD HER offv Herrr lIMItsss..." Orb Weaver stridulated warningly. "She WilL rankKle at ThE thougHt. ssSHe will fEEL CoNfineD. TraPPED."

That was true. That was... my origin. So either a parahuman following me, that didn't talk until now... that knew everything about me and yet had evaded me...

Or... my power?

It had even referred to Frankenstein. But it claimed to have difficulties speaking. "Set her on this path..."

But I had set the "Little Detective" on this path. Or maybe a bigger path? What if it was referring to me in general...

I closed my eyes. Think, Taylor. Powers don't talk, powers just let us safely use them...
Then I stopped. The Manton limit.

Something that worked differently for nearly every cape, with the sole unifying factor that it seemed to be oriented at keeping them from hurting themselves at least by the direct use of their power. Vista couldn't accidentally turn herself inside out. Weld, the Case 53, lived even though he had no internal organs. Every person had powers, and every persons' powers somehow (save for a few, lethal cases) worked in such a way that they didn't immediately hurt them. It had taken billions of years of evolution for the cells in a body to work well with each other, forming a balance, and something achieved that in less than 40 years?

Everyone would say, that was just how powers worked. But...

Don't just go 'just powers.' How complex would a system have to be to protect people ranging from Weld, to Bulwark and Vista? Back when you were making drones, remember that project you thought about, how much it took for human science to mimic a single cockroach drone?
And you control billions or even more. From a pair of little buds in your head.

Of course you do. Everyone does, why think about it...

Because everybody knows that's how powers work...

And yet, it's possible that your power spoke, Exhibited concern. Had its own goals.
Was its own person.

I let my head fall back onto the soft pillow. Closed my eyes. I reached out, nearly 7 blocks, feeling the bugs. That was another thing. My range was wider, my control finer.

But why?

If my power is actually a person what--I shook my head and dragged myself back. I didn't have proof, or a theory; I barely had a hypothesis. Maybe what Armsmaster had heard was my subconscious. It was close enough to some of my thoughts. Maybe it was more, but not a true intelligence. I needed more than thinking about things. I needed...

To research this.

But carefully. I couldn't risk a panic, or hell just seeming stupid...

But it was important to remember that powers didn't care whether they were given to a saint or sinner, and always came at a point when the beneficiary would be happy to accept any Faustian bargain. I know I had been.

Was that the point? 

Hypothesis: Powers have some form of self-directing ability.

Fact: Trigger events always come at points of great stress—a breaking point. Even if there is no physical stress, there are often emotional or intellectual sources of stress. More than a few “easy” triggers I had researched had been the end product of years of isolation or low-level stress.

My trigger event included both.

But they are almost never—I qualified the ‘never’ since I didn’t know the circumstances of every trigger—positive sources of stress.  

Second hypothesis: If powers can direct themselves, have some ability to ‘choose’, they must be able to observe their targets, waiting for the right moment. Or possibly, targets call out to them?

But if that was the case…

Why bugs? Why multi-tasking? As much as it turned my stomach to think, I just wanted to be left alone. Why not a Brute power to break out of the locker, a Stranger power so Emma wouldn’t bother me…

Or a power like Heartbreaker’s to make her like me?

Bugs?  Multi-tasking. I’d made it solve my problem, but it had no… direct tie.

On the other hand, some individuals did have a direct tie. It was known that Amy had triggered when Glory Girl had been injured. So, a simple solution to a simple problem.

Or is it?  I put a pin in that.

Then there was Bulwark—buried, he’d once told me, in garbage before he triggered. A power, yes, but a power that would help a skinny, short drug addict with the problems he’d had? No.

On the other hand, if powers could choose… Maybe they didn’t simply choose. Maybe they arranged things. We had one example of that, after all.

The Simurgh.

I shook my head. No, that was taking things far beyond what any vague suspicions I had could justify. There was a reason Ziz was nicknamed the “mother of paranoia.” You could easily fall into a trap of assuming everything was part of a Simurgh plot.

Maybe powers really were random, and I was seeing a pattern where there was none. That was always a danger for scientists and PI’s alike. Humans loved to create patterns, to see order in even the most chaotic situation and book after book I’d read warned against the temptation. I would have to research this. Not make assumptions until I had some proof for or against my hypotheses.

Granted, if powers they did have some form of autonomy... they might not be very happy with those exploring their secrets.

Well. That's just too bad. For them. I would get to the bottom of this.

And as I lay back... I had a strange sense of... satisfaction?

I turned off the tablets and closed my eyes. I needed to get some sleep. My rehab would start tomorrow.