Building


Jan 24, 2011

Taylor woke refreshed and happy. She had experienced a wonderful
flying dream with Lockheed, and this time she had recognized that it
both was and was not a dream, and had avoided the heroes, and avoided
the activity going out at the Protectorate Headquarters in the bay.

Flying out over the bay, seeing the light of the gibbous moon reflected
in the waters had been relaxing, even if the ships in the bay reminded
her of her dad's difficulties. It had been less relaxing, and more
ridiculous fun, when she had realized by accident of dream logic that
she could summon Zaravida Starfall to herself, and it came to her
there in the sky where only her dreams were. Lockheed could neither
grab it, nor hold it readily if he could have, and so the blade that
had appeared beside the giant insect fell from the sky and pierced
the water, living up in a curious way to its second name.

She had spent a while targeting arbitrary spots in the water before
gaining enough confidence to try sending it down close to anchored
vessels without hitting them.

Before she had gone home, she had spent a short time with Arachnae,
trying to get a handle on what that black rectangular slab was. It
was about four inches deep, seven and a bit wide, and almost a foot
tall. She could not cut it, Arachnae had tried but could not eat it,
hammering it did nothing at all.  She had given up on figuring it
out when she had noticed the time, and had slipped through one of
Lockheed's openings to get home.

Now it was once more time to prepare for school, but she had slept
so well that she had woken up early. Deciding it was best to begin
as she meant to go on, she grabbed the pepper spray her father had
purchased for her, and headed out to have a run. Her darling Arachnae
could do many things for her, including making her miserable school
days genuinely productive instead of a waste of her time, but there
was nothing Arachnae could do to improve Taylor's own fitness.

As she headed out the door and started picking up speed, Taylor
stretched her mind out, feeling for all the insects she could
reach. She did not think her range had grown any, but she hoped that
it would increase over time. As she ran, she made little adjustments
to the various insects around her, flushing termites out of houses
through Lockheed's openings to the wood piles in the warehouse's yard,
getting black widows away from houses and sheds. She left the ones that
were nesting away from humans, to keep up a supply in case she needed
it, trying to avoid completely stripping the insect life anywhere.

She knew there was an ecosystem balance, though it was a more
dynamic and reactive one than the carefully maintained scales many
people pictured.  Removing all the spiders could cause a surge in
the fly population, or removing all the flies could cut the spider
population. Cockroaches and ants competed for space, eating many
of the same things in houses, with cockroaches being vulnerable to
egg-theft from the ants. Ants competed with ants, with termites,
but were not much bothered by spiders, their numbers being too great
for spider-induced losses to matter much to most colonies, and their
replacement rate too fast.

So long as she left some of everything, they would probably
recover. Lockheed made it easy to collect the better ones, or to
relocate others in the same area.

A quick shower after she got back from her run, and she was on the way
to school. She would have to watch and get her bugs on her tormentors
again.  While they had not tried anything in class yet, though they had
sought her between classes three times that week, she suspected that
they might try to start things up again this week. Maybe not Monday,
but probably sometime soon. They had to be getting irritated at not
catching her between classes, and in class she was a sitting target.

She briefly entertained a vision of going to the Protectorate and
registering. They would push her to the Wards though, and that would be
just a different clique to deal with, one where her bug-power seemed
unlikely to make her any friends. Very few girls were interested in
how pretty or useful bugs could be, and most guys either captured
them only to mistreat them, such as pulling their wings off, or to
scare girls. She was not sure what was scary about them, but then,
she did not understand why they enjoyed continually belittling and
attacking someone who did not fight back, either.

As she stood waiting for the bus, she noticed an orange and white
tomcat watching the bus-stop from a nearby fence. It wandered off soon
after she noticed it, probably in search of a warm sunbeam to layabout
in, and she envied it. She and Arachnae were so busy constantly. She
had really been in no state to enjoy her enforced stay in the hospital
bed, and it was not actually so much the opportunity to laze that
she envied, as the cat's ability to enjoy being lazy.

This time, as she descended from the bus, Taylor was better prepared
to take advantage of her flying friends. Trios of flies set down
together on the fenceposts, tree branches along the walk in to the
school, and on thin ledges just inside the doors, giving her a much
better chance to find and tag her targets. Indeed, by the time she
got in the door, she had Sophia, Madison, and Emma all tagged.

In her homeroom, which was also the computer classroom, Taylor logged
on to PHO, scanning the recent comments looking for any mentions of
Lockheed or bugs in general, but saw nothing of interest. There was
a post claiming a military helicopter had flown over the town, and
that something super-secret was going on; the usual conspiracy fare,
in other words. Though she knew that part of it was true, there had
been a helicopter in town, it had gone to the Protectorate building.

What were they delivering? Doubtless the musings on the forum
about aliens, autopsies, or captured villains were ridiculous. The
Protectorate HQ was not a research center, nor a prison. If something
had been delivered, it was probably just an addition to the building,
or a large piece of lab equipment or something. Sure, it was delivered
at night, which was a little odd, but then, maybe that was to avoid
villains snatching it?

---

Jan 24, 2011

"Yes, I promise, Diana. No cape activities while I'm living here. It
should only be a few days to get my feet under me." Annette smiled
warmly at her friend. It had been ages since she had a chance to sit
and talk with her, and catch up on how she had been doing. She had been
anticipating Diana's request ever since she had met little Artemis,
a precious little four-year-old with shiny, slightly wavy black hair.

Diana had straighter hair than her child, but the same shiny black,
and a more statuesque figure that had garnered her rather a lot of
unwanted attention during their college days. She nodded, her mouth
curled in a little grin as she watched her little girl playing on
the living room floor with her husband's old G.I. Joe figures and
her newer Alexandria doll. "It's fine. I did not think you would,
but Stephen asked that I get that promise.  Personally, I'm still
not half over the shock of seeing you at the door."

"Imagine my surprise at walking in to my house and finding I had
been dead and buried for years, my family limping along without
me." Annette's voice was dry, but not bitter. She had slept long
and well, no memories of how she died had troubled her dreams, only
pleasant memories of her family. She might not be in a position to
mother her little owl anymore, at least not directly, but with cape
powers, she could watch over them. Her powers seemed ideally suited
to defense, though she had already figured out several ways to use
them offensively.

That was all for later, though. Now was for catching up with her
friend, for pampering and spoiling her sort-of-niece Artemis.

---

Good-self carefully hung the completed satin sheet with the other
two, and set the spiders that had rested during its production to
laying down new warp threads, then turned to Shelob. She had an
idea. She was reaching for the large spider when she stopped. No,
no, Scary-self said experiment on fresh subjects first.

Not wanting to mess with the black widows currently laying down lines,
or the other black widows being fed, pampered, and cleaned by ants,
she went poking through her other spiders for a large garden spider. A
bit different from many of the spiders in having two pairs of legs
pointing forwards, and two pointing back, and having a pretty yellow
pattern on the back, it had the advantage of being still a web-weaver
rather than a hunting spider, and of being fairly visually distinctive,
since she was not planning on making this one bigger.

Beyond the simple patterns of silk, twill, and plain weaves, there
were true patterned weaves, where pictures and words could be woven
in the rise of weft over warp, and those she could already do as they
were just built in the order of which warp threads you went over or
under. But there were also colored weaves, where the images were not
dyed into the cloth afterward, but woven in with different colors
of threads.

Scary-self had not paid much attention to these, but Good-self
remembered, and thought it might make a nice surprise for
Scary-self. So she took the yellow-backed garden spider in hand,
and sank mentally into it, examining its spinnerets. All dyes were,
she thought, were bits of colored stuff mixed in with the silk, caught
up on the thread. If she could mix them in while it was still fluid
coming out, the dye should stick even better than dipping satin in
dye afterwards could manage.

She was a bit hampered by not knowing what exactly the colored bits she
needed to add were. That was what experiments were for, after all. She
had the spider extrude a bit of silk, then built it a new organ for
chemical synthesis and linked it to the silk extrusion pathway and
drew out a bit more silk. It was a duller gray, and she tweaked the
pathway a bit, then drew out more silk until the color changed.

---

Taylor employed the same trick with the strategically placed flies
covering all approaches in the rest of her classes, including some
hidden in her hair, peering out between the strands. Just as she
had guessed, this was the week their courage returned fully, when no
retribution was forthcoming from their previous behavior.

They were careful to work at one remove at first, egging one of the
outer coterie of hangers-on to spill juice on her seat. She had spotted
it before she reached the room and had sent flies buzzing around the
fluid as she went for a different seat. It was Mr. Gladly's class,
one of the younger male teachers who tried to be the student's
friend. Well, the popular student's friend, really.

"Taylor, you should," he got out as he turned, but stopped short when
he saw the flies buzzing above the chair, and on the seat itself,
clustered around the juice.

"I'm fine here, thanks," Taylor responded agreeably, as if he had
been going to offer her a different seat rather than forcing her to
sit in the sabotaged seat as he had done previously. Even his general
willingness to go along with the popular kids and ignore the plight
of the bullied could not stomach the obvious parallel of ordering
Taylor to sit in a mess with insects already buzzing around it.

"Janie, go to the bathroom and get some paper towels to clean that
up, please?"

Janie, a normally pleasant and pretty blond with minor acne problems
and hair that was rather straighter than she would have liked,
pinched her face into a scowl. "Make Taylor do it, it's her seat,"
she protested.

Mr. Gladly frowned, irritated at having his authority questioned,
even by one of the popular set. "Well, it was not her juice," he
retorted. He had seen who had poured the juice, and his words let Janie
know it too, though he would have overlooked it. A class full of flies
for the rest of the day was not something he wanted to even imagine,
ugh, their constant buzzing, the complaints of the girls that would
have to sit close. Not worth it.

Janie left in a huff, and gained a secret companion of her own as
she stepped through the door. Taylor refrained from smirking or even
glancing at Madison, the instigator of this particular prank. She
kept her head down, and did her work.

She avoided several more traps that day with the help of her friends,
but near the end of the day, she was struck in the gut by a twisting,
knotting nausea. She had been focused on the fly on Sophia, assuming
correctly that the angry, abusive girl was probably frustrated at her
inability to corner Taylor, when something inexplicable had happened,
her vision and sense of where the fly was warped strangely. She stopped
in the hall, clutching her stomach, then panicked as she realized
that not only was she currently out of sight of other students and
teachers, somehow that fly on Sophia was coming right towards her,
practically ignoring the walls and doors between.

She stepped backwards through one of Lockheed's openings into her lair,
her last glimpse of the corridor one of a roiling cloud of blackness
appearing through a wall, a hungry shadow cast by nothing.

---

Jan 24, 2011

"That... that was Sophia!" Taylor cried out, her mind reeling even
as her stomach settled slightly. She was only nauseous now, instead
of feeling as though her guts had been spun in a blender. Her bag
fell unheeded to the ground as her fingers lost their grip. Sophia
was a cape? All this time, she had been holding back to avoid being
the cape bullying civilians, and Sophia had been exactly that?

Frantically she ran through the PHO reports on Brockton Bay capes,
trying to match Sophia up with one, any of the villainous capes, but
no, she could not make any of them fit with what she had seen. The
only one that fit, the only... she fell to her knees and vomited on
the floor. Arachnae sent in waves of cockroaches to clean it up even
as she embraced Taylor from her left side, her legs canted far to
either side to lower her torso enough to wrap her lower arms around
her other self, while her upper right arm kept Taylor's hair up and
out of her face as she eructed the last bits of her lunch.

Confirming that the house was empty with a quick Lockheed hole to
extend her senses, Arachnae pulled Taylor through the hole into the
bathroom at her house. It took but a moment to access Taylor's memories
of using the facilities there before she had water running, and Taylor
was quick to take advantage of it and wash her mouth it. Recovered,
she turned and hugged her other self tightly, tears of anger and
frustration leaking out, before she shut off the water and ushered
them both back through into the lair.

A skittering carpet of insects swept the discarded bookbag up and
through a new hole into Taylor's bedroom, and Taylor dragged out the
one lone stool that had survived in the shed and clumsily collapsed
on to it. "Sophia is Shadow Stalker. She's a fucking Ward! She's
supposed to be a hero!"

"Heroes don't bully," Arachnae said in her buzzing voice. Taylor
barely noted that it was almost understandable now even without the
mental component that made her other self's words always come through
clearly to her. "Not a hero."

"Right, she's not," Taylor said, "but the damned Protectorate says
she is, which means they'll go to bat for her. If I fight her without
proof that they can't deny or cover up, they'll call me a villain! Me!"

"Taylor scary, not bad." Arachnae commented, stroking Taylor's
arm. Taylor hiccoughed and laughed.

"'M scary, huh? I guess to a little spider I probably do look scary."

Arachnae shrugged. "Scary is inside. Look strange, insides on outside,
but scary is inside." It took Taylor a good minute to parse that,
which did push her angst over Sophia out of the way a bit.

"So, uh... because our flesh is not inside our bones, we are inside
out? I guess that makes some sense, from a spider view... ooh,
I wonder..." She turned to look Arachnae over, running her fingers
up and down her carapace.  "I wonder if you are going to shed like
a spider? Probably so, huh, if you grow? Though Shelob hasn't, and
she's gotten a lot bigger."

"Shelob get bigger because of bee-stuff," Arachnae pointed out,
then went for a change of subject "Made light for lair in dark,
want to see?"

Taylor glanced around, realizing for the first time that it was indeed
fairly dark in the lair. With no electricity, and no windows to let
in light, the only light that got in during the day was thin bands of
brightness along the roofline. She had never really noticed because
from day one she had filled the place with insects. Within the lair,
she could see everything as clearly as she could want, except, well,
colors. Everything was pretty much shades of gray.

"Sure, light it up, Arachnae." She grinned encouragingly at her
smaller self.  There was a buzzing of rapid flight as beetles swarmed
aloft, grasping legs and forming a sort of almost sphere, like a
large bell, open at the bottom, with their iridescent backs facing
inward. Light bloomed, filling the room, as a quartet of laser flies
fired uncollimated light into the sphere and the backs redirected it,
bouncing it around and spreading it, until it escaped out the bottom
as a gentler white light.

Arachnae had figured this out while Taylor was at school, when she
realized that all her attempts at color were gray because everything
was gray in the dimly reflected light from the roof strips.

Taylor gasped in surprise as for the first time, she saw the iridescent
green shimmering on Arachnae's chelicerae above her gleaming black
fangs, then again as she saw a mat of white silk hanging from the
rafters, with a border done in gold, and 'Taylor's Lair' picked out
in red with black bordering.

Arachnae buzzed happily, and held up the black and yellow garden spider
for Taylor to admire. It extruded a bit of silk, and catching it with
the silk claspers on the tip of her finger, Arachnae drew it out to
let Taylor watch the color change. She had ended up needing to add a
way for the spider to empty and recycle the prior color to get it to
where she could get the right color on demand, but she had figured out
six colors so far, gold, red, blue, yellow, black, and green, and or
course the spider's mostly could all produce white already. She would
figure out more over time, she was sure, but that was a good set to
start with, and more than enough to have made a sign for the lair.

"Oh, Arachnae, that's awesome! What are you naming it?" Taylor stroked
the back of the colorful spider even as she felt its ability, and
thought about what she could do with color on demand when weaving.

Arachnae stepped back, her upper hands worrying her fangs. "Me? Not
name, Scary-self names."

"Oh? Okay, I'll have to go back to my books, probably, but I'll think
of one."

"And wasps," Arachane pointed out, the wasps she had made flying
down to her hands. She held them out invitingly, and Taylor linked
with her and sank into them as she showed off what she had done, how
they could sting with either painful venom, or adrenaline to combat
anaphylactic shock, or a numbing agent that might cause someone's
grip to loosen in a fight, or ease pain after the fight.

"Wow, this is so perfect!" Taylor praised her little self, grabbing
her into a hug from the side so as to not squish the wasps, after
letting the spider climb onto the bench.

"Not all," she said, leaning into Taylor, happy at the praise and
encouragement, and wanting more. Her beautiful blue skimmer appeared
rather suddenly before them, having been out skimming the waves of
the bay, looking at the ships, with Arachnae watching through her
eyes and considering them as possible new lairs, or even second lairs.

Taylor smiled widely, leaning forward to stroke the long, bright
blue back, properly visible in the white radiance from above, and
squeezed her other self more tightly for a moment. "So wonderful,"
she praised, her own heart lighter for hearing praise, even if it
came from herself, and for knowing that she was one more step closer
to being a true hero, to being what the Wards weren't, if they could
accept a person like Sophia among them.

---

Jan 24, 2011

Knowing that when she left the temporary sanctuary of Diana's house,
privacy and safety might be hard to come by for a while, when Annette
had finished catching up with Diana, she retreated to the guest room
she had been offered.  There, she went back to work on understanding
her power and its limits.

Her skull cap had vanished in the night, but she was soon able to
recreate the mental state of concern about lasers from the sky and
regain it. She was a little surprised but pleased that her power had
apparently remembered her alterations from the day before, recreating
the golden skullcap without forcing her to recreate it from the
curved white-faced hexagons that seemed to be the default. Feeling
a sense of excitement as she found a new wrinkle to her power, she
visualized her mask from the previous day. It sprang easily into
existence, already tied to that invisible point in front of her nose,
as cocking her head revealed.

As she focused on the dark inner surface, she quite suddenly
realized something that she had missed during the entire period from
encountering the two Wards to finding Diana. The mask had no hole. No
eyeholes, no openings for breathing, nothing. Yet she had worn it,
and walked down the dark streets with no difficulty. She let her eyes
focus past the mask, and realized that she was instantly seeing the
room beyond, as if the mask had simply vanished.

She reached up and ran her fingers along the gilded front surface,
confirming physically that it was still present. She mentally flipped
the vector tied to the mask from passing through her head, to passing
through her palm back to front, still tied to the mask at the same
intersection point, then drew her hand away, the mask coming cleanly
with it.

As soon as the top edge passed out of her center of focus, the
mask suddenly appeared in her hand. She lifted her hand up, but
her eyes were focused on the mask again, and it stayed present. She
deliberately focused on her wrist, and ran her eyes up - to her bare
hand, cupped as if holding something. She could still feel it, but
there was almost no visual sign of it. Due to the curvature of it, with
the mask this far from her head, she could see that the edges of the
mask had not changed, and were still visible, but the back-plate was
somehow showing exactly what would have been seen if it was not there.

She settled in to play with the visual aspects of the plates,
an ideal subject to explore, since testing the plates strength or
speed or better means of controlling their movements were all more
likely to cause damage, and she wanted to avoid giving her friend
any difficulties.

---

"So, if you can make this little wonder produce colored silk, can
you make other spiders like this produce stronger silk? If we were
not limited to black widows, but could use all of our spiders, we
could really speed things up, huh?" Taylor was back to stroking and
playing with the yellow and black spider, her mind whirling as she
imagined the different things she could make.

"More room," Arachnae commented, gesturing around the lair. Taylor
looked around thoughtfully. Between the need to have room at the
bench to work there, the dressmaker's dummy in the center, the large
beehive taking up one corner, Arachnae's hammock-web in another, and
the boxes of black widows, now used to give them nesting space since
they were no longer weaving, or, well, felting in them, and the floor
taken up as space for actual weaving, space was at a bit of a premium.

The cockroaches had fit into the sump area, there was a termite
mound below the dummy, and she could feel a lot more in the woodpile
outside. The walls were full of random spider's webs, and wasp nests
and mud-dauber nests festooned the walls and ceiling.

There were several ant nests in the softer ground just beyond the edge
of the property, and one large group of them in another window-box
stuffed with dirt.

"Yeah, a larger space would be good. I was not expecting things to
grow so much, or so well, and certainly never this fast. We could
do with a place that had access to the ground, instead of a concrete
slab underneath."

"Cave?" Arachnae's buzzing voice improved day by day, but her
inflection was still fairly flat. Without the mental component, Taylor
would not have recognize that this was a question and not a statement.

"I'm not sure if there are any good caves around here," Taylor
pointed out.  "Or how to find them. Well... never mind, that was
stupid." She blushed. Of course it was obvious how she could find
them. She just needed to find insects that lived in caves.

"Fine, we can hunt for caves, but we need to find one that is not
easily accessible from the surface, and we'll need some searchers
that are less obvious than Lockheed and... uh... Martina, there." She
shrugged at a questioning noise from Arachnae. "Well, she's a girl, so
we can't just call her Martin... Alright, fine. Martin is is. Anyway,
they can't be seen until we're ready, or we'll have trouble with the
PRT and the Protectorate, so we need little bugs that can make the
openings. Is that, I mean, can you?"

Arachnae buzzed agreeably, another blue skimmer already in her hands
as she tinkered with it. It grew a little bit, but when she was done
it still just looked like an ordinary large dragonfly, nothing beyond
what nature could do.

"Perfect!" Taylor grinned happily and impulsively hugged her more
innocent half again. "Now, back to this stupid box." She sat back
at the bench, and dragged over the black rectangular prism she had
pulled out from beneath the Heromaker. Zaravida Starfall appeared
in her hand in the guise of a letter opener, and she began prying
at the prism. She had decided that it must be a box containing some
remarkable Tinker-tech. She had not been able to bash it open, or
even mar the surface the day before, now she was searching for a seam.

It was challenging because the box was so featureless - it was hard to
even tell where the edges were, but the improved light with Arachnae's
trick gave her hope she might manage to pry into a seam.

Good-self sighed as she watched Scary-self get absorbed in poking the
silly box, and grabbed a spider to try making its silk stronger. A
moment later, she went and grabbed a black widow, so she could compare
how they worked on the inside.

---

Jan 24, 2011

Shadow Stalker cursed as she ran across the rooftops. Technically,
she was not on patrol tonight. She had been sent home after enduring
another lecture from the Director. So what if she had pushed on too
fast for Gallant to get that stupid weakling's name? He should have
talked faster. Not like she mattered anyway.

She was spoiling for a fight, her crossbow was loaded with potentially
lethal broad-headed bolts from her secret stash, where she had also
hidden the Tinkertech receiver she had purloined. Its range was too
short to track something across the city, so she would make do with
weaker game tonight. She had made sure to check the patrol schedules
for the night before she left, so she knew where the Wards would be,
and where the Protectorate heroes were patrolling.

The Boat Graveyard and the Docks were clear of official presence
tonight, and New Wave didn't go too far outside of their own area,
usually. The Boat Graveyard would probably be dead, unless she got
lucky and that new bitch showed up there to practice. She been just
passing through, though, according to Gallant. Stupid prissy rich
boy, if he had just left her out of the report, they wouldn't have
had to listen to yet another lecture. God, but she was tired of all
the rules. Everyone knew there was really only one law, anyway. Be
predator... or be prey.

The Docks, though, that was Merchant territory, and they were the
lowest of the low, drug-peddling low-life cowards. Not as much of a
fight generally as she liked, but tonight she was hunting her some
druggie scum. If she found one on the right stuff, his paranoia would
see her power as something straight out of a horror show, should be
good for a laugh. And since they were druggies, no-one would take
any stories they might survive to tell as being the truth.

---

Good-self worked quickly, modifying one dragonfly, then one spider,
alternating between them. It took almost no bee-stuff to modify a
spider, as she was basically just rearranging a few physical details
and adding some new instincts so that they would spin a particular type
of webbing, their dragline, the bit of web that a spider would anchor
to something, spin to the ground, then crawl across and up something
else to provide an anchor for the rest of the web, in a certain way.

The dragonflies took more, as she had to give them the ability to
make tunnels, and to link back to her. She was linked to them, of
course, when they had a tunnel from the lair to where they were in
the field, but she lost three of them before she added this step,
when their tunnels closed. They had then been beyond her range, and
had not had even wit enough to open a tunnel, much less to open it
to the right place to get back under control.

Lockheed had recovered them for her, and she had fixed them, and
now they were all getting both modifications, and both took a bit of
bee-stuff. So she had to pause regularly, and evaluate her supply. It
was a tricky thing, since it was not like she could just know how
much she had in gallons or something, or see it on a gauge. It was
more like feeling how tired you were, and whether you could keep
running another mile or not.

As each dragonfly was finished, they were launched to search the city
for caves, specifically looking for crickets, worms, or beetles in
large open spaces well below the surface. Of course, they were not
the ones doing the searching - they were merely the conduit for her
to do the searching, and she had been forced to link Scary-self to
Martin and send her flying again to keep her from being adversely
affected by the steadily expanding regions being examined.

---

Danny stood at his daughter's door and looked in, feeling his tension
ease a bit when she was there in bed and fast asleep. Not tossing
or turning either, though he was a bit curious why all her school
things were scattered over the floor next to an empty bookbag. The
morning would be soon enough to ask about that. He eased the door
shut, and went back downstairs. He had taken his shoes off shortly
after getting home to keep from waking her up. She had been looking
better over the last week, more confident, happier.

Not that he had actually seen her smile, he mused, but still, there
was more light in her eyes, and more self-assurance in the way she
held herself. He only wished it had been something he had done that
had made the difference.  He felt so powerless to help her. He had
not even made it home in time to feed her, this time. Actually,
she had fed him, had left a plate out for him.

It had been a long day, but two more of his crew had work now, at least
for a while. It was actually easier for the few of his crew that had
experience operating the large cranes to get work when construction
was happening in town, though there was stiff competition for even
those jobs.

The rank and file, though. He sighed as he settled on to the couch
and turned the television on, lowering the volume from its already
low level. He did not want to see them working as henchmen for
villains, and it pained him to see it happen, but a man had to feed
his family. If that was the only work available, they would take it,
even at the risk of their lives and freedom, and the only thing he
could do about it was fight even harder to find better jobs, real
jobs for them. Jobs that did not come with a short life expectancy.

The news on the television was mostly ignored, just a background
rumble to his study of the papers as he searched for new projects
that he could try to get his men into. If he could only get City Hall
to actually make a move on reopening the ferry. The half dozen to a
dozen jobs he could get out of that were just the tip of the iceberg,
as it would also revitalize the neighborhoods that would regain the
business from the increased traffic. That it might result in more
pressure from the PRT on the gangs in the area was a minor but not
absent hope, as well.