OP: Benchmark - Garden of Dreams Chapter 12 (Patreon)

 A/N: Good afternoon! Yes yes Copacetic won the vote and its coming. But I was speaking with my friend Ravensdagger and we came up with an idea. We wanted to see how much of the SB Front page we could cover if we updated all our fics in one day. We decided to try to do so and that day is Halloween, October 31st. 

We got to thinking though. Why just us? Thus Operation: Benchmark formed. (AND ATTAINED SB MOD APPROVAL)

So... we went ahead and invited pretty much everyone on the notable authors page and most of them expressed interest in participating.

Ack, Lithos Maitreya, Chibipoe, DeviantD, UnwelcomeStorm, Seraviel, BeaconHill, Stewart92, JinglyJangles, Fantasy Ra, Ravensdagger, and certainly least of all myself, have all tentatively said they intend to update at least one fic that day! So expect Oct. 31 to be a great day for worm fics! My personal goal is five fics, and you, dear patrons, get them as the drafts are finished. So here's the first of a hopeful 5 (but a more probable 3) fic updates from me on Halloween! 

Copacetic is a beast to write you guys. Still, enjoy! I'll be posting my mostly completed next chapter of End Bringer tomorrow, and I'll hopefully get a Copacetic draft up by Friday of next week, in time for editing for Halloween.  

Now, for what you're really here for. Enjoy a Tattletale interlude!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

“Come in, Tattletale. Thank you for coming on such short notice,” my captor said with a smile.

I cringed. I hated meeting the boss in person. It always creeped me out. He always seemed to know more than me and my power couldn’t figure out his. There were no leaps in logic capable of telling me why he seemed to always be a step ahead. Just the sure and certain knowledge that his resources and power together trumped my own.

“As if I had a choice,” I muttered.

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk about. Your choices,” he said cryptically.

It was definitely Coil and not a body double. I inferred that immediately. The real Coil had more of a slump in his shoulders than his main body double. His second double had a verbal tick where he ended many of his sentences with a ‘tsk’ as if he’d just put on chapstick.

“My… choices?”

He was uncomfortable for some reason. Something about the costume? For a moment I thought that maybe this was yet another body double because Coil had always seemed to rather enjoy the skin-tight suit he wore. Apparently that was no longer true. Definitely Coil. Definitely not happy to be in costume at the moment.

“Yes. Your choices going forward. I’ll get right to the point. You’re fired, Tattlet– excuse me. Lisa,” he said plainly.

I stiffened. I couldn’t hold back the gulp from my throat. Could he have known I was plotting to betray him? Fuck, of course he knew I was plotting to betray him but I hadn’t actually come up with anything! Why would he suddenly decide to–!

“Enough of that. Don’t panic, I’m not planning to harm you. As a show of good faith, here,” he said, tossing me a small pamphlet. I realized quickly that it was a passport, a driver’s license, a social security card, a birth certificate, a debit card from Wells Fargo, and a… a bachelor’s degree in law? From fricking Harvard? 

“Wh–? What is this?” I asked, picking up the articles and examining them one at a time. They all looked legitimate. Each of them addressed to Lisa Wilbourn. My power didn’t find any flaws in them, though that wasn’t saying much. I didn’t exactly know much about forging fake IDs, so my power only had so much to infer before I started noticing things about how the plastic was melted to laminate the documents and 

“These are legitimate. They are a… peace offering of sorts. I’ve decided to retire my villain persona entirely, though you’ll understand if I don’t reveal my identity to you. I’m sure if you truly wanted to find out you could.”

I blinked. My jaw fell open a little.

My power happily informed me that Coil regretted his decision to kidnap me. Regretted forming the Undersiders at all. Regret was genuine. He was even distressed by my absolute disbelief.

“Y-You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you?” I said, clutching the items anyway. They were a lifeline. They were everything I could hope for. A way to be free of my family. Free of my old name.

“Of all people, I would’ve thought you would be the easiest to convince. The honest truth? I’ve likely been mastered. Regardless, I can’t find it in me to care about ruling the city’s villains and darker elements anymore. My intentions for Brockton were always altruistic but somehow the ends I was once willing to go to for my own little kingdom now seem… distasteful is too tame a word. I owe you an apology, Lisa,” said the imposter, for that was what he had to be.

“You just… you get this team together, buying villains like we’re candy and then you just drop us? What… mastered? By who!?”

“Are you complaining?”

“No! But I mean… you know you’ve been mastered and you’re just going to go along with it?” I asked, genuinely curious, and actually a tad fearful of even the existence of someone capable of turning Coil away from his megalomania. Come to think of it, I wasn’t getting any intuitive leaps alerting me to his need to own everything anymore. Before he’d been a sort of white collar kleptomaniac who took inordinate pride in the things he possessed.

She’d… been one of those things he’d possessed. Even prided himself in. Now, the feelings were completely the opposite.

“You have a few choices going forward, Lisa. You can of course, choose not to accept these. I have a few other options as well, though I thought the Bachelors in Law would appeal to you. You can also be added to the foster care system if you wish to keep your actual age, but the ones in your hand are for an eighteen year old. Don’t flash the Harvard degree for four years. No one would believe you, even with your power.”

“I… I…” I was kind of shellshocked. “How can I trust this? I mean… how can know that the master effect won’t wear off and suddenly you’ll be pissed off that I betrayed you?”

“I can’t promise I won’t just wake up tomorrow thinking this whole thing was a dream. I can say that for the past three weeks now my plans for Brockton Bay as Coil have done nothing but disgust me. I hope to never again feel like I did before.”

My power was blaring out to me that there was no master effect. Change of disposition genuine. As if he’d just happened to run across a passing Who from Whoville and his heart grew three sizes for no fucking reason.

“Brian? Alec?”

“Receiving similar offers. I bought out the judge on his custody hearing. He’ll be receiving a bank card like this one with two hundred thousand. Yours is only one hundred, he’s working for two after all. Alec has already accepted a ticket to Hawaii this Saturday. The destination surprised me. I always thought he would dislike a beach, but he insisted.” 

“Just… Who mastered you?”

Who do I need to freaking kiss?

Coil’s grin was visible through his costume. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. Go grab a vegetable from Harvest. She might do you as much good as she did me, Lisa.”

I vowed to never go near the fucking miracle farmer.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Standing right next to the miracle farmer, and cursing the curiosity that was bound to get me killed, I stared incredulously at the strawberry in my hands. My power allowed me to read the harvest girl like an open book and despite the fact that she had inadvertently fulfilled all my dreams without even knowing I existed, I was still unimpressed with her. She was… nothing. A freaking nobody. Not even a parahuman as far as I could tell.

Which made no damn sense.

My intuitive jumps weren’t like a voice in my head, or like some sort of instant-internet search filling me in on things I’d never known. No. Instead they were just leaps in logic. Incredible leaps, but it didn’t feel like a superhuman ability. It just felt like I was ridiculously smart.

To be honest, if I weren’t able to turn the effect on and off, and if it weren’t for the headaches, I wouldn’t even be certain I was a parahuman. I just noticed things. It was almost hard to believe just how much other people didn’t notice. It did great things for me ego, I knew. Great and terrible things. Still, hopefully no one would blame me for being a tad arrogant when I could just look at a person for a few seconds and figure out a solid chunk of their life story, their maximum likely net worth, their motivations, and how long it had been since they’d last thought about ice cream.

Very rarely longer than a day by the way, didn’t matter the person. 

Harvest wasn’t any different. Yet she was. Clearly she was. I could see it, but for the first time ever turning on my power was making me dumber.

The girl was terrified of people but she wore a smile as she handed out fruit after fruit. She was shy, traumatized by the betrayal of a close friend. She was driven, but her place in life as well as her fear of trust and distrust of authority would likely lead her either to an early grave, or a life of obscurity, if she was lucky enough to have a kid before she devoted herself to some sort of cause.

She was a good gardener. Plants growing in winter were a fluke. The strawberry was an exceptional strawberry. It would taste wonderful. It was not tinkertech. It was not magic. It was an ordinary, if elite, strawberry.

‘That’s fucking bullshit!’ I screamed in my mind.

Taylor Hebert had single handedly caused my fucking megalomaniacal boss to apologize to me and give me a pretty generous… uhm. Severance package. He’d made Lisa Wilbourn a real person, handed me a cool hundred thou, and set me free. If not for my power, I would’ve thought it was a trick. Even with my power, I thought it was a trick.

And yet, my power was telling me that there was absolutely nothing special about the girl in front of me. The only, obvious conclusion was that my power was broken, because nothing shy of an absolute Master 10 could’ve turned the villain I’d been forced to work for into that… that… abomination of joy that he had become.

“A-are you okay? If you… if you don’t want it that’s okay. I understand. The things they do can be kinda scary for some,” she said, shyly.

I blanched, caught off guard. “Oh. No, I uhm. Well. S-someone I know tried one of these and… and changed. A lot. I just wanted to… I don’t know,” I finished lamely. My power told me that acting flustered would endear her to me, and that seemed to work at least.

“Oh. It… can do that I think. Change people. Some people have reported that things they were ashamed about no longer bother them. Others told me that things they were guilty for they’d suddenly felt relieved. Released from the pressure. Like a weight had lifted from them that they didn’t even know they were carrying. Like they could look at things in the past with more clarity than before. Find peace with it.”

I gulped. My fingers trembled a little. My heart raced a little. My eyes watered. My… my brother.

How could she have known how guilty I…? Could she really have just said that, those exact words as a… Complete coincidence. Harvest mentioned guilt and release due to personal experience earlier today. Not power related. Harvest has no powers.

‘Stupid power! I… wait… what the fuck is that?’

“It’s caused a lot of people to worry about master effects already, actually. Of course, you don’t have to eat it if that worries you.” Oh, she was still talking.

I ignored the girl. Instead, all my attention was focused on the small blue cartoonish heart that was just sitting there beating in time with my own, and literally riding on my sleeve.

“What… what the fuck is this?” I interrupted her pointing to the heart, as I ignored my power’s insistence that it was a hallucination brought on by my apprehension and guilt.

Harvest’s eyes widened, and her wide mouth gaped like a fish.