Summus Proelium

So, as planned (and wasn't that just a hilarious term to use right now), Peyton and I went back into the simulation. I was posing as Sierra, which was a couple layers of ironic. Together, we worked to force the smug man to write down everything he knew about Cup. Not just where her labs could be and what sort of defenses we could expect, but also how they had met, how long they had been working together, and so on. We made him write down the answers to everything we could think of. And more questions that were sent in by the others as they observed from the outside.

Of course, as soon as he realized that Paige wasn't inside with us and that the others were listening in, Pittman tried sending a verbal command that way. But we were ready for that. Everything he said was being both delayed so it could be filtered, and was being displayed in text on a screen rather than actual audio. A screen that the others saw before Paige. Time delay and text rather than audio. We weren’t that stupid. Which we made clear to the bastard as soon as he started trying that shit. Not that we told him how we were filtering it, just that Paige still wasn’t hearing him. We didn’t need to give him the full details just so he could try to find a way to work around them.

I spent the time pretending to be Sierra. Which meant acting like I couldn't hear his verbal answers, and needing Peyton to translate. And also meant I couldn't visibly react whenever he said anything that made me want to punch him. At least until it was ‘translated.’ Which, considering he was still trying to convince Peyton that Sierra and Paige weren’t real people, was fairly often. But I kept it together, helped by the fact that Sierra’s body language would have been hostile and defensive regardless, so I just stuck with that throughout all of it.

Pittman had a lot to say--or write--on the Cup subject. We tried not to be too overwhelmed by the revelations until we could get out of there and talk to the others about it, but that was difficult considering the subject. The very idea that Pittman and Cup had been working together at all, let alone for years, was staggering. It felt like something that he’d just made up to give us the runaround, but no, it had to be true. That was the only way Pittman being able to avoid making the cure for Sleeptalk made sense. Which, naturally we checked the exact details of what he had put into that thing he drank just to make sure he wasn’t bluffing. Paige and Sierra went over the whole thing with the aid of an internet search and, sure enough, it was a strong congestion medication.

So, he was telling the truth on that at least. And probably about Amanda too. Which, now that I thought about it, made Cup’s ability to somehow ‘accidentally’ trip over one of the prototype versions, not to mention come up with a cure for that, make even more sense. We’d thought it was just because the prototype was easier to cure, but hell if she made the stuff to begin with, of course she’d know how to cure it.

Had Pencil known about her interactions with Pittman? I wasn’t sure, but something made me doubt that. He’d seemed like the jealous type, to be honest. And he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as surprised about her betrayal if he knew about that part.

Of course, I verified that with several pointed questions about Pencil’s involvement in their little enterprise, and Pittman’s writing confirmed that the man had been completely in the dark. Amanda had been lying to him from the beginning. Which, considering she’d ended up killing him in cold blood, shouldn’t have been at all surprising. And yet, I couldn’t help but be almost impressed by the sheer length and depth of her treachery against the guy who had clearly believed she worshiped him.

It made me wonder if she was manipulating and using Pittman as well, to be honest.

In any case, once we had everything we thought we could get out of the man for the moment, we left him in there once more. Keeping him locked up in virtual reality where he couldn’t actually affect anything in the real world was still the best way of preventing him from causing any trouble for us while we were dealing with other things. Which actually briefly made me wonder how well that would work as a way of containing other Fell-Touched rather than a huge murder island. But I didn’t have time to dwell on that too much. We already had more than enough to deal with as it was without me spending time trying to work out the best way to fix the entire superhuman prison issue.

With Pittman locked in the VR machine, the rest of us gathered to talk about what we had just found out. This time, we stayed in the same room so everyone could participate. He couldn’t hear us anyway, trapped in that artificial world as he was, and we had already performed a very thorough search to make certain he didn’t have any extra tech on him that could record or broadcast what we said. Well, to be clear, he had had those things, but they were disabled and removed. As were all his secret little weapons, bombs, and other things he had been loaded down with. The man had been a walking arsenal, with a mix of hidden technology and biological weapons that he had clearly put together himself. Now all of it was secure in a safe deep underground where Wren had teleported it using a system similar to the one the special bag for my costume used. It would be safe enough over down there until we could deal with it.

Now, we were all standing around looking at one another, clearly reeling from that whole revelation and everything connected to it. Finally, I found my voice. “Okay, so let’s go over it from the beginning. Pittman was arrested almost five years ago, after Paige sent Bobby information about what he was up to and Bobby managed to expose some of that stuff to the authorities without revealing details about the Ministry or anything like that. Pittman probably could have escaped all on his own, but Bobby made sure he was basically gift-wrapped for the cops to take in.”

An annoyed, heavy grunt escaped Paige before she nodded. “Which should have been the end of it. But it takes time to sentence someone to Breakwater, during which Pittman was sitting in a regular prison cell. Well, not regular, he was definitely more secure than some random drunk driver or B&E guy.” She looked over as Qwerty’s paw shot into the air and clarified. “Breaking and entering guy, a burglar. Still, he was sitting in a cell for almost a year, just waiting to be sentenced and sent to Breakwater. Which was inevitable considering the bioweapons the authorities found. And the fact that they found all that stuff is why his actual case was kept so quiet. They didn’t want the public to start panicking about any dangerous shit they didn’t find that could end up going off later.”

Murphy gave a soft little snort at that, her gaze turning to give a hard stare at the man in the tube. “Of course not. And now look at what we’re dealing with. Maybe if the cocksuckers had made it a wider search and involved more people, his shit would've been found before now.”

Perched on a nearby table with the surprisingly-detailed recreation of that turtle member of the Cuddle Corps in her lap, Wren tentatively spoke up. “He said this was just a little after Cup--I mean Amanda got her powers, right? So she was--um, still exploring what she could do and how she could get different tech ideas by using her crazy question trick on different people. Especially smart people.” She absently rubbed her hand over the stuffed turtle’s shell.

“Which made her want to try it on a Tech-Touched,” Roald put in. “So when she found out from one of the cops she was… interrogating that they had one locked up in solitary, she found a way to sneak in and get a face to face meeting with Pittman himself. Which is how they started talking for the first time. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t get him out of the cell, but she could pose as a guard to sneak in and chat.”

“I really shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of proper oversight in our prisons,” Fred muttered mostly under his breath from where he was standing near the door, “but here we are. This guy is a dangerous biology-focused Tech-Touched and someone was able to just pose as a guard and go have long chats with him? Sure, she’s Touched too, but come on. The kid has a better security set-up just for the shop.”

Wren, for her part, blushed a little before shaking her head. “They probably do have a lot of security. But like you said, she’s Tech-Touched, so she can break it. Plus she has that other power. Any time anyone finds her, she could just distract them and probably drug them or something. It umm…” She squirmed a bit uncomfortably. “When we put our minds to it, there’s a lot of dangerous stuff we can make.”

“Yeah,” I pointed out, “and it’s not like she had a lot of morals holding her back. She was pretty motivated to get in there and talk to him, apparently. And once she managed it, he was able to give her tips and point her to his own supplies.”

Sierra was pacing back and forth, clearly as agitated as the rest of us. “That’s how Cup got such a boost early on, enough to outfit Pencil as well as she did. Fuck, it should’ve been obvious. I mean, come on, Daddy Dearest’s whole thing is biotech, and so much of Pencil’s gear was built into his body. That was the whole reason it was so impossible to catch him, cuz he had teleportation tech installed inside himself!”

In a voice that sounded just as self-recriminating as her sister’s, Paige nodded. “Sure, it makes perfect sense now. Everyone always just thought they stole the tech from other Touched and people they killed. Which, you know, they did in some cases. Probably just to keep up the illusion. No idea what she told Pencil about where most of the stuff came from. Maybe he really thought she came up with it completely by herself.”

“Whatever she told him,” Peyton noted, “the point is he didn’t know she was working with Pittman. And Pittman kept giving Cup everything she needed to help the Scions get off the ground. It was his idea to start the whole ‘pretend to be Abyssal worshippers and recruit people that way’ thing. Pittman was like her mentor.”

“Not that he did that for free,” I pointed out. “She helped him set up his entire escape plan. Multiple plans, actually. She's the one who made sure his labs stayed secret. Enough of them, anyway. She moved most of his supplies, helped get his Biolem soldiers out of sight, even tuned them up under his instructions. She's the whole reason he was able to do so much even after being sent to Breakwater. We thought he was working through his Biolems or something, but he had a whole other Tech-Touched working for him the entire time.”

Paige punched a wall before giving Wren an apologetic look for the outburst. Wren, for her part, seemed more than willing to forgive it. But Paige still seemed abashed as she gave a long, heavy sigh. “I always wondered how he was able to do so much. I thought he was just that prepared, that I didn't take him by surprise with my betrayal after all. Now it turns out it would've been fine, or at least better, if it wasn't for Amanda Fucking Sanvers going to the bastard for tutoring on how to be a better monster.”

We all fell silent for a moment, pondering what life would've been like if that never happened. But it wasn't worth dwelling on for long. This was the world we were living in and we had to deal with it. Straightening up, I cleared my throat. “Anyway, so she helped him set up everything, all of it. Including making sure he had a way to contact people off the island. She used her own powers to come up with a way of sending technology straight to him. That's how he had a phone that he could call off the island with. Which means that teleporter right there is based on her tech. And yeah, that shouldn’t surprise us, I guess, because his whole thing is biology. She's the one who made the teleporter. And that's why it wasn't hard to program the thing to target his DNA. That's what the damn thing was meant to do in the first place.”

Roald raised a hand before adding, “He knew they were going to make sure he went to Breakwater, so they put all that together as a long term plan. He was ready to wait it out until Paige got old enough for that whole killing Cassidy and being sent to Breakwater herself so they could break out together thing. Hell, he was probably using that time to enhance people over there, the ones he could convince to work with him. Then, when they did get out, he'd have an army of enhanced superpowered Fell-Touched killers alongside his Biolems.”

“But,” Murphy put in, “while he was doing his thing on murder island, Amanda found out the safe with Overseer’s dolls wouldn't open for them. Not without the biological relative of the people who locked it.”

My face twisted a bit, as I clenched a fist. “Or a Biolem copy of that person. Who better to make a perfect identical clone that could fool that safe than someone like Pittman. His whole thing is making biological copies.” My hand gestured back and forth between Sierra and myself pointedly. “So Amanda needed him to get off that island even more. She needed him here so he could build the Biolem as soon as they identified who the kid was. Or, hell, maybe he could just make a Biolem out of one of his parents, the ones who locked the safe in the first place. There's no reason a clone of one of them couldn't get in, assuming Cup could get a hold of usable DNA. I don't know, maybe the Ministry made sure the bodies were thoroughly burned, but she might have kept a trophy from when they killed them in the first place.”

Pacing right alongside her sister, Paige growled. “That's why she created the Sleeptalk stuff in the first place. They needed a plague that he could be blamed for so they'd take him off Breakwater. Once it was obvious the plan to get me sent there wasn't going to work, they must have moved on to that one. They just needed the authorities to think he was the one who could cure the plague. Then they could break him out of whatever secure area they put him in to make the cure, and the two of them could work together to build the Biolem they need to open the safe. Which would have given him the ability to control a whole bunch of people, including a lot of the Touched who were around back when Overseer was planning to move here.”

We all considered that for a minute before Qwerty piped up. “But why would she offer to surrender and give the safe to the Ministry if they were so close to faking a way into it? Wasn't the plan working?” He was nervously chewing on more popcorn out of his paws, his fluffy tail touching back-and-forth while he looked between all of us.

Fred offered a hesitant, “Maybe they decided to change the plan once it was obvious that you guys weren't going to tell the authorities he was the one behind it? He did make his involvement pretty clear when he called you before. He wanted you to panic and tell them so they'd yank him off the island themselves. When you didn't, maybe Amanda decided to go rogue and do something else. Or maybe this is still part of their plan and we just don't know where it's going yet.”

Personally, I was planning on assuming that all of this was part of Pitman's plan so I could be pleasantly surprised if it turned out he wasn't actually in control. As far as I was concerned, we had no reason to believe that what Cup was doing was against Pittman's wishes. Now that we knew the two of them had been working together, I was pretty sure they were going to keep doing so.

Still, I told myself to focus on what we could deal with right now. “We still need to prove Amanda is the one who is working with him. Without exposing what we've been doing. So, we have the list of her labs, or at least the ones that Pittman knows about. I say we start there and search those labs for the proof we need. We can worry about the other stuff later. That should be our next--wait, our next move after one more thing.”

I told the others what I was planning. There was some discussion and debate about it, but in the end, they agreed it was the best thing to do. So, I took my phone and called the Ministry, identifying myself (as Paintball, of course) before asking to speak to Ministers Gray or someone with equal authority.

About two minutes passed before I heard the raccoon’s voice. “If this is about wanting a hug, I swear kid--”

“Don’t make the deal with Amanda Sanvers,” I interrupted. “We know she’s offering to give you something very important. Don’t accept it yet. Don’t do anything she wants. She’s the one behind Sleeptalk. We can’t tell you how we know that yet, or prove it, but we’re working on it. I give you my word, it’s the truth. Just hold off on doing anything with her until we can prove she made this stuff. If you work with her, you’ll regret it.”

There was a brief pause before the raccoon’s voice came back once more, a bit harder. “Exactly how certain are you?”

“One hundred percent,” I replied simply. “We’re working on proof, and anything else we can find that might help. Just don’t do anything drastic like break her out or anything. Stall her while we’re looking. You’ll know when we find something.”

With that, I disconnected, letting out a long breath. “Okay, that should buy us some time, at least. Now I guess we need to back up what I said and find that proof.”

The other started to agree, before Roald abruptly cursed and jumped up from his seat. His phone was in his hand as he stared down at it. Realizing we were all looking at him, he grimaced and exchanged a brief glance with Murphy, who seemed just as confused as the rest of us. “Uh, we might have a more immediate problem. I just got a text from Rubi. They were transferring Amanda to some other facility.”

Sierra groaned. “Do not tell me she already escaped. I mean, I knew it was bound to happen at some point, but that's a little bad even for them.”

Roald shook his head. “Nope. Turns out Cuélebre and his people found out about the transfer, so they attacked the convoy. The authorities don't exactly have a lot of manpower, so they can't hold out for long. Not against Cuélebre’s entire army. It sounds like they're really intent on killing Amanda themselves.”

He didn't have to say anything else. We were already starting to move. Yes, we needed to find the proof of Cup’s involvement in her labs, but first we had to make sure she didn't die. We had to get out there and save her life.

Or there would be no one left who could cure Sleeptalk and save all those people.