InsaneJournal

If anyone had asked Pippa Carson twenty years ago where she saw her life going, she never would have said she would be spending the next few decades coordinating pick up schedules and children’s activities for most of her days. She would have talked about earning her MBA and moving to New York to ultimately become CEO of some fabulous company, where she went to happy hours with The Who’s Who of Manhattan and sat in the front row for New York Fashion Week like it was no big deal. She wasn’t ungrateful for the curves her life had taken the moment Calder appeared at her winery - far from it - but the path she had taken wasn’t the one she had planned.

Anyone who knew the petite woman knew she was a planner. She had her routines, and Hell hard no fury like a Pippa unwillingly forced from what was written in pen in her schedule. Unless otherwise noted, Tuesday mornings were hers. Now that Genevieve was at the Academy, Isaac carpooled to school with their neighbors, and Calder had drop off duty with Lydia, Pippa had the morning free to drink her coffee in peace as she headed to teach her morning spin class. Therefore, it didn’t take her too long to easily maneuver her SUV into a parking spot at the back of the lot without any assistance from a backseat drive.

She loved her children, but they all took after their father when it came to driving habits.

A quick text later letting her husband know that she was at the studio and she was locking up, blond ponytail swinging as she marched towards the entrance.

She had been assured that Mrs Fullerton would be a safe bet (She has no powers that would aid her in an apprehension, the Hero had informed her), but she hadn’t been told just how… rigid Mrs Fullerton was in keeping her schedule. The girl was sure she could set her watch by the older woman’s comings and goings.

There were other things, too: Mrs Fullerton was nice; she cared about her friends and often took time to send them food (or drop them off - she’d watched as Mrs Fullerton had nearly cornered a red head at Underdog to force feed him). She was methodical and analytical, and didn’t jump to conclusions without some sort of basis.

All things that boded well for her to make her move.

Yet, despite a week of watching from the shadows, she still hadn’t approached. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, was keeping her from revealing herself, from infodumping all of the information the Hero had wanted Mrs Fullerton to know and running far away.

The girl sighed and followed behind her, intending to slip into the studio behind her.

Pippa’s grip tightened on her keys when she paused at the door, her head tilted slightly to the side as she thought she heard something behind her. Call it a mother’s intuition borne from constantly having a toddler in the house for thirteen years, but a little voice in the back of her head told her she wasn’t alone.

A quick glance in the door’s reflection showed that the dark parking lot behind her was empty. It was too soon for even her earliest clients to arrive to stake out their bikes in the front row, causing her to relax as she turned her attention back to her task at hand.

“Nothing is going to pop out of the ground and eat you, Pippa Carson Fullerton,” she scolded herself, squaring her shoulders as she slid the key in the lock. If something did, though, she had a can of pepper spray dangling from her keychain ready to be directed in its eyes in a moment’s notice.

The girl barely managed to slip through before the door was shut behind her. But as soon as she made it in, she’d realized her mistake: the floor was polished wood - the kind that made it easy for bikes to stay in place without worry about balance.

Polished wood, and she was wearing sneakers.

Sneakers that squeaked.

And it was just her and Mrs Fullerton.

Oh no, she thought, holding still. Maybe if she was very careful…. She took one step, and then another. She was almost to the back corner when she nearly slipped and the telltale squeak of sneakers on wood filled the room.

Pippa moved quickly, the cap of the pepper spray flying across the room before her heart could start accelerating. Good to know I’ve still got it, she thought to herself as she braced herself and extended her arm, finger on the nozzle.

“Who’s there?” she called out, her ‘scary Mom voice’ leaving little room for argument. She waited, eyes squinting into the dim glow the security lights threw off, and wished she hadn’t dropped her phone back in her bag.

There was the squeaking sound of scurrying feet as the girl got out of the spray radius, but then she stepped from the shadows, hands held in front of her. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you!”

“Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s not nice to sneak up on people?” Pippa scolded, keeping her arm level and finger poised as she studied the girl. She appeared young, not that much older than she herself had been during her brief stint as a hero, but Pippa had never been the trusting sort to automatically drop her weapon when hands came up - especially not after what had happened on Hollywood Boulevard.

The girl’s throat moved as she swallowed hard, but it was the only thing that moved. “Sorry! Truly!” Oh, how was she supposed to start this conversation? That wasn’t something the Hero had advised on. “I need to talk to you and I didn’t really know how to do that so I just sort of started following you, thinking that maybe I’d figure it out, except I didn’t and now we’re here.”

“You want to talk to me.” Pippa gave her a flat look, her foot tapping impatiently against the wooden floor, but lowered her pepper spray an inch so she could better see the woman. She wasn’t dumb - she had heard the implication that she had been followed for a bit of time and has been apparently singled out - but the girl looked more likely to have an accident on the floor than attack her.

“Normally people introduce themselves when they need to talk to someone they don’t know,” she helpfully pointed out. She squinted in the dim light; the girl looked vaguely familiar, but not enough for her to bet money on correctly identifying her.

“I know,” the girl replied, shrinking back. Breathe in and stand straight, she heard the Hero say in her head. “I have information that might help. About the attack last month. It was caused by a group that was part of the group I’m - I was - in,” she corrected herself. “The Hero’s Hand.”

From her pocket, she withdrew a medallion and held it out to Pippa, who hesitated only slightly before crossing the room to retrieve it. On it were two runes that Pippa recognized from Breezy’s highly publicized run-in. “It means man’s gift, I think? But we call ourselves the Hero’s Hand because we’re… well. We’re supposed to be helping the heroes. Except now there’s a splinter group, and they’re doing things that created the… the thing that attacked on Hollywood Blvd. I only know a little bit about it - they don’t really tell the rank and file things. We were just told that a group called the Organization was behind it, and that six of the higher ups left.”

It hadn’t been hard to put two and two together, especially not after the rumors. Rumors that her handler and trainers had denied. She didn’t know if they just weren’t high enough up to know, or if they’d been lying.

She guessed it didn’t matter now. She knew the truth, and not just because the Hero had told her; umbrakinesis had always been well suited to the girl who had blended in with the shadows.

“What about it?” The older woman prompted, eyebrows raised as the wheels in her head began to turn. Somewhere, if this girl was to be believed, there was a group of villains helping heroes, and a part of them had turned into Dr. Frankenstein and had gone rogue. She frowned, trying to puzzle things out. Surely, she couldn’t mean there were more of those creatures.

“It used to be human, you know? She was a volunteer. The Organization thought -- well, they thought they could give her powers. She was a null. They thought they figured out how to strip power from genetics or something. I’m not really sure about the science? But they thought they could do it, and so they tried, and then it went really, really bad.”

Her body started to shake; she’d seen the footage of what had become of the woman. And she’d seen the pictures that the Organization had left behind - not everything had been left to burn. The reports they’d given the Hero’s Hand leaders were still around.

Pippa swallowed hard, aghast, and sat the medallion down on the bike closest to her. Her hand lifted slightly as she saw the way the girl shook, but she was careful to keep her distance. Instead, she turned so her back was to the windows, using her petite frame to block anyone’s view into the studio.

“What’s happening now?” she asked, keeping her voice low so as not to spook the girl or cause her to melt away before her story was complete.

“So now the Hero’s Hand is trying to find them, but I don’t know what they’re going to do. So I thought I’d let someone know who could…” She faltered. So that the heroes could be put in harm’s way? But she didn’t trust that the Hand would dispose of the Organization like they said they would.

After all, they’d greenlit the project in the first place, hadn’t they?

“Find them to prevent this from happening again?” Pippa prompted, wishing she had a piece of paper to write everything down. Go back to the root cause, Pippa Carson Fullerton. She thought back to Breezy’s encounter and mention of the medallion, followed shortly by the first attack on Hollywood Boulevard by the same group. The run-ins hadn’t seemed particularly unusual - general showboating and disruption - but they were a far cry from the converted null monster who had erupted from underground.

She hoped she wouldn’t lose her breakfast as she forcefully changed her train of thought.

All things considered, this was interesting timing. She felt like there were so many news stories lately that painted the heroes in a negative light - from villains walking out of jail to powers failing - it seemed like the Heroes weren’t catching a break.

“The Hero’s Hand was supposed to help the Heroes have something to do?” she hedged, careful to keep her eyes trained on the girl. Why would villains do that? “But a part of the group took it too far. Do you know why they wanted to see if powers could be injected?” Her lips turned white at the edges as she pressed them together. The possibility that there might be more Nulls subjected to experimentation made her alarmingly stomach churn again in warning.

There was silence as the girl thought Mrs Fullerton’s summary over. She hadn’t directly said what the Hand’s directive was - and, truthfully, it was more than giving the heroes something to do, but what little loyalty she had to them held out. “More or less, yes.”

The second part of the question didn’t have any easier of an answer. “I’m not sure. I think- I think it was because there are Nulls who want powers? That don’t think it’s fair that they’re in the minority. They’ll never have the opportunities that powered people will, and they’re always going to be one step behind. It’s like falling for a get rich quick scheme, you know?” Wanting something so desperately you’d take a terrible risk for the slightest possibility of reward.

Pippa snorted at that response, shaking her head. “What will you do now?” she asked, eyes running over the girl’s features as if trying to memorize them. “You implied you left them, but it doesn't sound like this ‘Hero’s Hand’ likes when people break away.”

She didn't say that she was so low it didn't matter, or that people left all the time - it was part of how the Hand worked. Unless you got higher up, no one bothered much with the villains going out in the field.

"I'll be leaving town," she said. "I've never really liked LA." The girl reached into her pocket and pulled out something else, handing it to Mrs Fullerton. "This is a list of where the Organization has been known to recruit. I don't know how helpful it will be, and I'm sure those aren't their real names, but it could help."

The former hero took the list, blue eyes quickly skimming over a listing of what appeared to be bars and sports fields. Villain or Benedict Arnold nonwithstanding, Pippa could tell that the girl was scared enough from what she had seen that the likelihood of an outright lie was low. She had a younger brother and three children, so she had a good sense of what tattletelling looked like, but she believed what she had heard. However, she had no means of verifying what she was hearing right now - the Hero’s Hand wasn’t on her speed dial or favorites tab of her browser - so a layer of skepticism settled over her.

“Stay out of trouble,” she lectured, a finger lifting off the page as she brought her attention back to the girl in front of her. “I don’t want to see your face splashed across the news. Do you understand?” She held her gaze for a moment, before adding, “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

The girl shifted from foot to foot. “Could you please tell Breezy and Thermia I’m sorry? We don’t want to hurt anyone. Honestly, we don’t even really do anything, you know? We just kind of show up, make a scene, and engage. But they weren’t supposed to get hurt.”

“I’ll tell them,” Pippa acknowledged, glancing down at her watch. She didn’t know those particular heroes well, but she knew enough to know that Mike’s younger sister wouldn’t have been very generous if she had been at the receiving end of that apology. She was about to ask for one about the others - for Tremor and her ribs, for Aegis and his identity, for Pulse and the tense set of his shoulders, for Taiyang for having to carry Tremor away, for the innocents who lost those lives - but stopped herself.

That was the Organization’s fault, not these kids’.

She carefully folded the note and slipped it in her pocket with another nod, reminding herself to put it somewhere safe before her early morning class started to show up. She studied the girl for a final time, her features carefully arranged in mild concern to mask the anger building inside, and turned back to her task at hand. People would start appearing soon for their early morning workout, and Pippa had to figure out how she was going to focus on hill climbs with all of this information swirling around her head and the uneasy feeling that had settled in her stomach.

“I’m going to turn on the lights now,” she said, reaching for the panel. Hero’s Hand whistleblower or not, she had a job to do.

The girl nodded. "Thank you." Without a word, she melted back into the shadows and slipped out onto the street.

Pippa flipped on the lights, a sigh of relief escaping unchecked as light banished any traces of shadows in the room. She closed her eyes, allowing herself a moment to collect herself, before walking over to lock the door.

She’d process all of this later; she had an important phone call to make without anyone else eavesdropping on her.

A few taps later and a sleepy, lyrical voice answered the phone.

“Lawrence, wake up. I have something you need to hear right this instant...”