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Lisa logged in two minutes late to her own meeting, just because she knew it would drive Krouse up the wall. The world rendered in with a wave of light, wireframe outlines filled in by a 360-degree ripple of color and texture turning the void into walls, floor, furniture, and four figures lounging around a table. The edge of Brockton Bay’s skyline sprawled across the horizon through behind them.
“You’re late,” Krouse groused, the cigar dangling from his lips valiantly struggling to add gravitas to the dismal scruff he liked to call a beard. She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Am I?”
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “You are.” Scoffing, she flopped down on an unclaimed section of sofa and flicked her fingers generously at him. He clapped his hands together with a glower, trying and mostly succeeding to get everyone’s attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen… we have an opportunity,” she announced with a flourish. A tower of paper flashed into existence in the middle of the table and promptly toppled over under its own weight, sending individual sheets sliding in every direction. Krouse pushed a clump of them away with the tip of his cigar and a disgusted look.
“I know everyone’s been getting ready for the tournament this weekend. A shame that matchups aren’t released until the day before—sure would be unfair if one team had several extra days to work on team counters. Really take the time to get to know the opposition, you know?”
“Are you having fun?” Even Krouse’s usual assholery wasn’t enough to ruin the moment. She grinned.
“I am, actually. Read ’em and weep.” Five costumed faces hovered in the air to a chorus of groans. Lisa caught a confused glance.
“I’m not familiar?” Kian rarely raised his voice above a whisper.
“Hotswap is a local team that loves their fuckin’ tinkers,” Krouse grumbled. “I guess we haven’t actually gone up against them since Marissa left. Lisa?”
“Wynnman and Light Wait are local stars,” she explained. “A multi-functional tinker and a full-specced crowd controller. Our age, but they’ve been on the Brockton servers for a while, made a name for themselves. Chariot is another tinker, focused on mobility, and Pavise keeps the rest of them alive. Ground Zero is new, though. Nobody has any information on her.” Not yet, that was. She always enjoyed a challenge.
“And they don’t know we know,” Krouse concluded. This was the part where they lavished her with praise for her unparalleled genius, except she was on a team with a bunch of ingrates.
Alec gave her a single thumbs-up.
“Alright, people.” Krouse stood, cigar vanishing in a fizzle of light. “This isn’t our first rodeo. Everyone knows what to do, so let’s not fuck up and waste our head-start. Regular practice tonight, and then we’re going to sit down, pick apart their builds, and hammer out strategy.”
Lisa took one final look at the line of faces. She was going to dig up the secrets of every single one of them before the match rolled around, and there was nobody in this entire server that could stop her.
The Summer Games were in full swing, and Brockton Bay was packed to the gills. Downtown was crowded—the Boardwalk was mobbed. Players piled up around marketboards and ferry terminals like a tide of spandex-clad sea foam. It was all Lisa, Alec, and Kian could do to push through the mob. Next time she came this way, she was absolutely hopping on an alt that could fly. This was downright suffocating.
“You know, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to be at practice right now,” Alec huffed, squeezing through a vanishing gap between two armored figures covered in way too many spiky bits. She scoffed. Alec, being responsible? Yeah, okay.
“You aren’t getting out of this that easily. Besides, this is more important.” Clawing their way out of the crowd, they all staggered to a halt. Alec scanned the incredibly gaudy storefront up and down.
“Ah, of course. I was just thinking that Kian needed a new… battleaxe.” The team Sniper glanced back and forth between the two of them.
“I… do not know if this would be the most efficient secondary weapon, but I am certainly willing to try—”
“Kian, we’re not here to buy you an axe,” she interrupted. “Anyone an axe,” she preempted Alec’s next comment. “We’re here for information.”
“A spy?” Kian looked apprehensive.
“Better. According to just about everyone who’s been here, the woman who owns the shop is a horrible gossip.
“Here’s the thing about Wynnman and Light Wait,” Lisa explained. “They’ve been around for a few years now, which means both have played with a lot of other raiders. Sure, I could spend six hours pulling footage off the internet… or we stroll in here, you two meander around and look like you’re thinking about buying things, and I squeeze all the good details out of the owner.”
“And she’s just going to tell you all about some randos she used to raid with?”
“Oh my god just walk around for fifteen minutes without looking like you’re going to rob the place!” Did she have to do everything herself? Shaking her head, she strode through the doors.
Alec sent Kian off to browse and ambled over towards a display case halfway across the room as Lisa made a beeline for the counter in the back, lingering just within earshot. He was never one to miss an unfolding disaster, and this already looked like it was going to be hilarious based off of the decor alone. The entire shop looked like it had been lifted out of an entirely different game, carved wood and fantasy motifs wildly out of place in the middle of Brockton Bay. Lining up with one of the mirrors on the wall, he watched the red-haired proprietress in the back glance up with a bored expression as Lisa approached.
“Sylvana is very busy right now,” the woman behind the counter drawled. A sort of morbid anticipation rose in his chest, confirmed with a silent character inspection. He saw Lisa imperceptibly twitch the moment she realized it too.
“Oh my god, aren’t you Sylvana the Hatchet!” The saccharine excitement in Lisa’s voice almost made him mute the game then and there. In the corner of the room he caught Kian staring at him, wide-eyed.
“Well, I suppose Sylvana is never too busy for a fan,” the woman herself preened. Alec dropped all pretense of poking at the weapon on display and jabbed for the in-game recording controls. This was going to be art.
Twenty minutes later Lisa all but skipped out of the store and instantaneously transformed. Eye twitching, she clenched her fists so hard she imagined she could feel the strain in real life. Alec and Kian stared at her, the latter in absolute confusion and the former like he had just discovered some kind of fascinating new deep-sea creature.
“Two down,” she ground out. “If I ever, ever suggest something like that again, please just fucking shoot me.”
Tying off the last strand and backing away towards the middle of the room, Lisa let out a satisfied breath. She nodded to herself—sometimes the classics were classics for a reason.
The mad culmination of an amateur crocheting club made up entirely of cultists trying to summon some kind of eldritch slime mold stretched across a full wall of her office, having long since escaped its original corkboard confines and graduated to lay claim to the very room itself. Red threads looped around a forest of pins skewering character sheets, player logs, and still-moving videos to the wall like so many insects. It might have been the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“Hey, Lisa, I need you to go—” Krouse wandered through the open door behind her, glancing up from his interface, and froze. She rounded eagerly on her first victim.
“Hey Krouse, perfect timing.”
“Nope. No way, absolutely not, fuck that.” Krouse took a step backwards and flinched as she twitched towards him, holding herself in place with sheer willpower.
“Lisa. Lisa it's been maybe twelve hours.” He straightened and tried to pretend like he hadn't been about to literally make a run for it; it wasn't very effective.
“I’m sorry, you have a problem with results?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. “Look, you've got your thing and I've got mine. And I've already got three members of Hotswap on the board, so I’d say now is a perfect time to go over what we know.” And now he was looking towards the exit again, the flake.
“Yeah, Alec told me about—wait, three?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She had yet to tell anyone about that. “Got Pavise as well.” Curiosity warred with the horror at the thought of an actual conversation with his teammates behind Krouse’s eyes, not that he would ever admit to either. He finally settled on a noncommittal grunt.
“Oh?”
“…Actually not much of a story,” she admitted. “His whole former team was absolutely crazy about posting public logs. Was one of their schticks, apparently. Easy way to get useful feedback, but it also means all of his weaknesses are right out there.”
“Huh.” Krouse looked pensive. “Anything we can use?”
“Probably some kind of inferiority complex, based on rankings within his previous team—”
“I mean like, in-game,” Krouse interrupted, to her not-insignificant annoyance. “Mechanically.”
An inferiority complex was exactly the kind of thing she could make use of in-game, but sure. Fine.
“Not really,” she said. “At the end of the day he puts a big shield between his teammates and incoming attacks.” Sometimes, it really was just that simple. “Apparently he used to be a bit slower responding to attacks on his non-dominant side. Jury is still out if he's fixed it.” Krouse tilted his head to the side.
“Well. Good to know, I guess.” He started for the door.
“Hey! I didn't make this just for myself”—she absolutely had—“so somebody is going to stand here and learn something for once in their life!” Krouse scoffed, shaking his head.
“Hey Kian, Lisa wants to talk to you!” Throwing their fellow teammate under the bus, he bailed in a flash of light.
“Oh, come on!” With an exasperated gesture from her spot curled up on the clocktower sofa, Lisa yelled out across the room. “Hey Krouse, Jess, you aren’t going to believe this!” Scrolling through her interface she tabbed back and forth between a handful of windows and started banging out a message in the group chat. Her teammates materialized in a burst of light, aborting the summons. She set her interface to project and flipped it around instead.
“What’s got you pissed off? Find something?” Krouse eyed her screen. “Is that Chariot? Sorry, do we care about Chariot?”
“It is, actually. Surprised me too.” So maybe she had been a little stuck investigating Ground Zero. Apparently, the universe decided to dangle a consolation prize right over her head. She tapped the screen for emphasis.
“Not about his build, actually. It’s complicated, but I’m ninety percent sure he’s a plant.”
“A what?” Lisa leaned back and turned to face Jess.
“I think he’s someone’s alt account. Probably buried him in a hero feeder team a few years back and let him float to the top by just sticking around and being vaguely active. Make friends, get access to the corp wallets, and then loot everything in the vault and dip. You know, standard supervillain stuff.”
“Wait, people actually do that?” Jess asked, as Krouse gave Lisa a look. And then Jess caught it. And then they were both looking at her funny.
“What?” she asked. “Come on, we’re supervillains. It’s literally a game.”
Krouse rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Lisa. Real reassuring to hear that our teammate loves backstabbing her own teammates.”
She scoffed. “Guys, relax. You have actually been to my apartment. In real life. This spy stuff is for the huge public teams. Besides, information is kinda my whole thing.”
“You know what, nevermind.” Krouse shook his head. “So, Chariot is a spy, probably. Isn’t this a good thing?”
“Well it certainly would have been,” she grumbled. “I was going to drop it on their whole team right as the match started. Talk about an easy win. But no, god forbid I have any fun.
“He gone native!” she exclaimed to their continued stares. Krouse rubbed his temples.
“So Chariot maybe possibly was a spy, but now definitely isn’t because he’s double-crossed—I’m sorry, so does this have any effect whatsoever on the actual match coming up? In two days?”
Wow, rude. Fine, make it like that.
“Nope,” she said, crossing her arms. “Really, I just wanted to share.”
Four down, for better or worse. Ground Zero had better not be this much of a wash, or she was going to start getting mean.
Lisa strode through University Hill with an invisible weight on her shoulders, eyes slipping once more to the clock ticking away in the corner of her vision. Time was almost up, and one infuriating foe remained as elusive as ever. She had lost count of how many player logs and guild records she’d combed through searching for a mystery tinker that seemed to have sprung fully-formed out of thin air.
She laughed angrily. Her, poking through a Hazard Zone? Talk about desperate times.
The laundromat tucked away between a convenience store and hair salon didn’t exactly scream ‘tinker lab,’ but she was hardly in-touch with the current PvP architectural trends. It was no clocktower, that was for sure.
Gritting her teeth, she fired off half a dozen skills simultaneously. A flood of information poured across her screen, data compounding upon data in multiplicative synergy. She forced herself to take in as much as she could before it dissolved into the ether.
The padlock on the front door floated in her mind’s eye, a digital construct rendered out with more detail than perhaps even the real thing. She could see the very stress lines in the metal, the way its own internal tension pulled the silver skin. She pointed an empty hand at it, fingers curled in the parody of a gun.
One moment it was untouched, the next the shackle split it two, bisected by a perfect circle of missing metal. The only sound was the clink and rattle of the newly-freed chain succumbing to gravity.
As daylight returned to the dusty laundromat interior, she pushed her skills again. Auras of overlapping color filled her view—red, red, red. One single path shone clear: straight forwards. Despite the danger, despite the clock ticking down, she grinned. Pressure? This was her element. This was where she thrived.
Winning wasn’t about skills and abilities—winning was about the players. Parahumans Online might have been detailed enough to practically blur the line between reality and game, but she didn’t drag out real victories by timing cooldowns on a pesky interface. She was going to pick apart this lab, drag out every secret item and leftover piece of tinker tech, and figure out exactly what made this ‘Ground Zero’ woman tick.
One, two, three steps forwards and the back rack of washing machines rumbled into the ground, revealing tall pillars and a brick archway looming over steps leading down into the stygian dark. Only the faintest glint of light in the depths broken the feeling of a portal to another world.
Even in the middle of breaking into the place, Lisa had to give credit to presentation. A foyer filled with deadly traps, a proper lair? This mystery hero might be a total asshole, but she knew how to make an entrance.
At the bottom of the stairs, a titanic vault door completely blocked the way forward. She could practically hear the secrets whispering behind it, clawing at the steel to get out. Leaning down towards the keypad, she called on her skills once more.
The keys swam in a sea of probabilities. It was up to her to put it together. Information beget information.
New to the scene, bombastic entrance. Egotistical. Secured a spot on a professional team; qualified. No public accounts; something to hide? Out-of-game—
She shook her head away from the tangents. No matter how much it sometimes felt like it, her class abilities were part of the game. They could only ever give information inside the game—anything else was generative nonsense. Even if it didn’t always feel like it.
Focus. A combination.
Egotistical. Numbers not random; a reference. No. A statement. The possibility cloud shrank, shifting towards certain keys. She was on the right track. What else did she know?
Tinkers. Math- and science-types, usually. Not a rule, but a trend. A mathematically significant number. A popular one, enough that a layman would recognize it. The recognition is important. More than the security. The options coalesced, three keys shining in her sight. She scoffed and pressed them one by one.
1 6 1 8
A light blinked green.
The vault door swung open inch by inch, silence belying the sheer size of metal in motion. After the first ten seconds, Lisa started tapping her foot. Just when she was starting to like the design of the place, too. Fun architecture was one thing, but this was a downright time sink. Not exactly in-character—
She leapt forward, hands slapping into a vault door far lighter than all the evidence in front of her eyes suggested. The realization arrived a second too late. Her passives screamed at her as she bolted into the vault, barely a split-second to take in stone tables covered in lab equipment and rows of safes mounted cabinet-like to the walls before the room turned blinding red. Heart pounding she sprinted for a floor-to-ceiling display of glass and shining silver at the very back of the room—
The entire world seemed to fracture, twisting and stretching like taffy in a sensory overload made a hundred times worse by the enhanced perception pouring in from her skill feedback. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and frantically activated what few defensive skills she possessed, hunkering down behind a lab bench as the entire room came apart at the seams. Waves of fire and ice washed over her, wing and gravity and a dozen other increasingly-esoteric effects besides. She grit her teeth and watched her healthbar plummet.
Slowly, she opened her eyes to a scene of utter devastation. The more she looked, the further her heart sank.
Glassware and broken metal covered the floor, slowly dissolving into motes of light at the edges now that they were well and truly destroyed. Solid safe doors hung limply from twisted hinges, one slab of metal blown clear across the room and embedded into the far wall not two feet above her head. The display case at the back of the room was gone, a spherical section of the room outright gone like it had been erased directly from the game.
Bitter frustration pricked her throat as she fumbled through the scraps that remained of the lab.
“Goddamn it! Fuck!”
Slumping against one of the soot-blackened lab tables, she kicked the broken remains of some kind of high-tech soldering station across the ground. The clock in the corner of her vision blinked, a dispassionate reminder. Was that it, then? Twelve hours left until the match and her last remaining competitor would remain unknown, just because some tinker apparently beggared herself buying enough explosives to melt her old laboratory into so much slag? Parts of the room were still red—that hadn’t even been all the actual traps, just the safes’ self-destruct sequences!
Two minutes later, her heartbeat was finally back under control. She took a deep breath.
Finding any leftover tinker tech in the lab was clearly a lost cause. All that remained were scorch-marks and whatever defenses hadn’t gone off the first time around, which meant that it was time for her to get back to their hideout. Maybe she could find something online that she’d missed the first go-around. Something to get Krouse off of her back when he inevitably showed up to talk shit.
At least she hadn’t outright died. It wouldn’t have cost her anything—she’d left all of her good equipment back at base just in case—but Alec would have been unbearable. Squatting down by one of the remaining red zones on the floor, she let her skills pick apart the stones. Once she built an image of the entire contraption, a pencil-sized hole snapped into existence through the ground. She pried the block up and flipped it over.
Wired to the underside of the stone, a silver bomb shone in the light. Lisa frowned. In the background, her heart started to beat a little bit faster.
Three low-level investigative skills returned nothing, sliding off of the bomb like it wasn’t even there. She straightened, eyes narrowing. Cooldowns activated. Pressure squeezed her head like a vice. She strained, pushing her skills as far as they could go. Harder. Harder.
Everything snapped into place. A digital display unfolded in the air, lines of text scrawling down the screen. Damage numbers, immunities, status effects. One entry sat at the very bottom.
‘Creator: Ground Zero’
Of course. She threw her head back and laughed as the pieces came together. She wasn’t out of samples; she was surrounded by them! This was it—everything she could have asked for. Combined with all the other traps still scattered around the lab, she would dissect every single one of the tinker’s gimmicks before the match ever started. Victory was all but guaranteed.
[DEFEAT]
The word hung motionlessly in the air as Lisa stared into space, barely even noticing the lobby fading back in from the post-match void. On the other side of the room Team Hotswap traded high-fives and muted fist-pumps. Her own team could have been chiseled out of granite.
It was bullshit. She had done everything right. She was the one who came in knowing the other team inside and out and it just didn't matter because they were just better.
Finishing up with his team, Wynnman wandered over.
“Hey! Good game, guys—was a close one!” An easy smile shone beneath his red visor, plates still scuffed and smoking from the end of the fight. If he kept it up, she was going to try her luck strangling him with her bare hands.
“—ould be great if I could actually play the game again yeah that'd be fucking awesome than—” Alec stumbled a half-step forwards and back onto comms as Light Wait’s debuffs finally ran out. Wynnman’s smile twitched as Alec cut himself off, glaring at the opposing team.
“Thank you. You were all very skilled.” Kian was the only one to speak up. Krouse was probably off in another room breaking things.
“Ah, it's just a little extra experience, really. Im sure you guys will be just as good in no time.” Attention sliding off Wynnman’s platitudes, Lisa stared at her very own personal headache swaggering up.
“Hah! You're going to have to go better than whatever that was,” Ground Zero scoffed. Wynnman elbowed her in the side.
“Alright Alice, be nice.” Ground Zero glanced across Lisa's team and met her own burning gaze.
“What?” Ground Zero asked, never breaking eye contact. “We won, didn't we?” She smirked. “It's called planning. Maybe next time you all can try putting in a bit of prep.”
Street trash crunched under the tires as Lisa pulled to a stop. She glared up through the windshield, burning a hole in an innocuous set of wrought-iron numbers mounted to the front stoop of a plain brick low-rise. With the sun long down and the headlights off her car was just another shadow on the side of the darkened street.
In the passenger seat, Alec glanced up from his phone. She snapped her fingers until he popped the glove box and passed her the pry bar.
“Nice apartment, Alice,” she hissed. “Real cute old building. Recently renovated. I hear they even redid the plumbing.
“Alec? Get the cement.”