The night was silent.
The sky was clear, with only the occasional cloud disrupting someone's view of the gorgeous night sky, if someone were to even care to look. The moon was shining as it hung in a sea of endless black, and the occasional star poking through the curtain of darkness twinkled, unobstructed by the sheer light pollution of Brockton Bay.
Everything was good.
Further down on the Earth, a shadow moved between the old buildings, using their already wrecked roofs as footholds to jump between them.
The wind whipped the long brown hair behind as Talia al Ghul shot across the rooftops, climbing and jumping as she parkoured her way towards her destination.
Vortex Solutions.
The name echoed through her head as she jumped high, clearing the alley between buildings with effortless grace, dropping into a smooth over-the-shoulder roll to bleed off the energy. Without pausing for even a single instant, she went back on her feet and ran forward.
She crossed the entire rooftop in the blink of an eye and used the raised parapet to vault herself off and onto the top of the next building. She ducked into a crouch the moment her feet connected with the rooftop, and then pushed off with all she had. The muscles in her thick thighs trembled with power as she jumped off with explosive force, soaring over the entire rooftop and landing on the rooftop of the next building.
All the while, her mind was racing through, processing all the information about Vortex Solutions she'd read in that little docket Annette had sent over, making connections and noticing patterns that she hadn't as Daemon.
She threw herself off the edge of the building in a majestic and elegant front-flip, and the scene in front of her hazel eyes spun, and the city of steel and concrete turned into a sea of chaos before her feet struck the tar and gravel-filled rooftop of a building several stories shorter than the one she'd just jumped off of.
She chanced a glance at the height difference, and a momentary smirk flitted across her red lips at her accomplishment before it disappeared, and she continued on.
The next jump went wrong.
As if to punish her for her own hubris, she ended up miscalculating the amount of power she needed to make the jump, and she dropped lower than she intended.
Her heels met the narrow steel railing of an emergency fire escape, and the metal shrieked as she skidded down the handrail. At the last possible instant, she kicked backwards, collapsing the railing as she launched herself towards the outer wall of a building. She twisted in mid-air and slammed her foot onto the wall and shot upwards – The two raid steps carried her up the wall before she pushed herself away from it, catching the razor-thin edge of a rooftop with both feet.
She paused on the edge of the building and took a breather.
Just an inch backwards and she would have lost her balance, fallen backwards and gone splat.
Her chest moved, expanding and contracting as she took in a deep inhale and exhaled. She glanced back - at the initial ledge, the collapsed railing and the final wall that she had just walked upwards on before she'd jumped to where she was now. A sense of pride filled her at the parkour achievement. She never would have been able to do something like this in her normal form.
She'd already come to realize that her Metamorphosis power was turning out to be more useful than not, and had come to appreciate it, even with the curses she'd rolled - but it was in moments like these where true appreciation for the various skills her transformations, even those with no special powers and abilities, granted her appeared.
She took a moment to survey the upcoming terrain and planned the moves she'd need to make to parkour her way through.
It took less than a moment, and before long, she was sprinting across the roof. She slammed her feet on the edge and hurled herself off the building in a long jump. She soared through the sky in an arc as she crossed the entirety of a street.
Far below, headlights streamed through the street like rivers of light.
A small child on the sidewalk pointed upward. "Mama, lookie dere!"
The tiniest of smirks spread across her face as she heard that, before it vanished, and a serious look appeared as she locked in. Making minute adjustments, she landed on a horizontal steel pole jutting from the side of a building. The pole bent and warped under her weight, and she used this flex to launch herself towards another.
This time, she caught the second pole with her bare hands. Her flesh twisted against the metal as she used the sheer force she had been travelling with to spin her body around the pole in a tight, controlled spiral, with the same perfect posture as a trained gymnast.
Once.
Twice.
On the final rotation, she let go of the pole and used the force behind her swings to hurl herself forward. She flew through the air before crashing onto a flight of metal staircase bolted to a building's exterior.
She climbed.
She vaulted upwards at incredible speed. Grabbing the railings and landings in rapid succession as she jumped upwards, floor by floor - crossing entire floors in moments as the staircase rattled beneath her. Arriving near the top, she steadied herself for a moment and leapt upwards with all she had, catching onto an exposed I-beam.
For a heartbeat, she hung suspended on the side of the building hundreds of feet above the street.
Then every muscle in her body tightened, and with all her upper body strength, she pulled. The beam creaked audibly as Talia used it as a pivot and launched herself backwards in a powerful arc, soaring over the rooftop's edge.
A rush of cold air momentarily disoriented her as she flew in an arc, before landing on the center of the roof in a low crouch, bracing against the concrete with one hand to steady herself better.
She took in a deep breath before standing back up. She looked around before turning back to gaze at where she had just come from.
A smirk spread across her red lips.
Then her eyes narrowed for a brief moment before she leaped to the side, sliding behind a giant air conditioning unit – the kind that refrigerated the whole building - in record speeds, and just in time because the next moment the entire rooftop rumbled as if something heavy had just fallen on top of it.
No, not just something, several somethings.
She peeked out of the corner of the AC unit to see that three giant monsters had landed on top of the rooftop. They were large, bipedal monsters with rippling skin stretched thin over their muscles and uneven patches and segments of bone jutting out, shaped into armour and spiky protrusions that gave them a terrifying appearance.
Her eyes narrowed as she recalled reading about monsters like this when she had scoured the internet for everything about Villains and Heroes of Brockton Bay. Hellhound, she thought, before her eyes went towards the masked and armoured people sitting on top of the monsters. Then they must be the Undersiders.
A small-time criminal gang, the Undersiders were nothing but petty thieves that kept to their own and targeted soft targets. They had broken this pattern a few days ago by robbing a bank in broad daylight and, more impressively, escaping the Wards and two of the New Wave next gen. They had also revealed a new member during this bank robbery – an insect controller.
Her mind raced as she summarised everything she knew about this gang to herself, before her green eyes found the girl with long hair wearing a black armoured suit covered in what looked like insect chitin. That would be… you. Skitter if I'm remembering the moniker correctly.
She decided to listen in on what was being said.
"What the hell was that Bitch!" the man wearing a leather jacket and a biker's helmet – Grue, her mind supplied – whirled to yell at his teammate.
"They were hurting dogs," The butch girl wearing a thick jacket with a fur collar said, as if that would suffice as an explanation. And that is Hellhound of the Undersiders, she thought.
But Grue apparently didn't think so, because while she couldn't see his face, his body language had turned more aggressive and agitated. The words he then spoke confirmed her thoughts. "That's not the point! The mission was to go in, cause chaos, and get out! There was no point in the fucking plan that said to start a fight with half of Empire's fucking capes!"
Yeah, Purity, Alabaster, Victor, Othala, Stormtiger, Rune, and Krieg were all there," the only other boy on the team, the one dressed like someone who had come out right from a Renfaire, commented. Regent further continued, "I'm in for a good time, but that was too hot, even for moi~"
Talia blinked.
That was like, half the Empire 88 roster.
How did they even survive long enough to escape? And they didn't even look severely injured, just lightly scuffed.
She bit her lip, considering the options. Either the Empire was playing light with the Undersiders, which was unlikely given what she knew about the Empire. Or, the more reasonable answer was that they were just that much better at evading capture.
As she continued listening, she upped her evaluations of the Undersiders in her mind in real time.
Hellhound just grunted and crossed her arms as she turned her head to the side, not saying anything. Coincidentally, the direction she'd turned her head to was pointing right towards Talia, forcing her to duck behind cover to avoid being seen by the teenage villains.
The blonde girl in the purple and black catsuit sighed, and Tattletale pinched the bridge of her nose. "Take us back to the factory Bitch, we'll talk about this back at the base."
Hellhound let out a rough grunt before she let out a sharp whistle. The sharp sound echoed on the rooftops, and her monster beasts suddenly stirred into action. The beasts, which had been docile and waiting for the undersiders to finish their conversation, started growling and grunting. One of them took a small step forward, and the concrete under its monstrous paw cracked.
Then, out of nowhere, and without any kind of noticeable windup, the monster leaped up and away from the building and was swiftly followed by the other two demon dogs.
Talia waited a few moments to ensure that the gang of villains had truly disappeared before emerging from behind the A.C. unit. She had a contemplative look on her face as she digested the new pieces of knowledge she had just gleaned from them.
A moment later, she too leaped off the rooftop - albeit in a different direction than the one the Undersiders had disappeared into – and landed on the edge of a rooftop of another building as she continued her way towards her destination.
Vortex Solutions.
///
Fingers ran across a keyboard, pressing down in rapid succession as a clicking sound filled the office hall. The entire office was empty, owing to it being after eight in the evening, leaving a 26 year old Haley Clements sitting alone in her cubicle long after she should have left
She made some final presses on the keyboard before a click on the mouse sent the document to print. Haley let out a sigh of relief as she stood up. She straightened her Prada mini-skirt before starting to make her way towards the printer room, cursing under her breath the entire time. "Stupid uncle Thomas," the brown-haired woman grumbled under her breath, "jus' because he got me the job… grrr."
The grumblings and mutterings continued as she walked away from the cubicle section of the office and made her way towards a smaller room at the end of the Hallway
Stepping in front of the Print room, she pulled out her access card and swiped it at the card reader next to the door handle. The digital lock blinked red once, before the small light on it turned green and it let out a small beep sound as it released the locks of the door.
She made her way into the Print room and approached one of the computer systems, intending to just send the transferred file to print. Then all she had to do was leave it at her Uncle's desk, and she could go home! She silently cheered in her mind as she booted up the computer.
The desktop flickered to life and bathed the small print room in pale blue light. Haley leaned forward slightly, one manicured finger tapping impatiently against the desk while the outdated office computer slowly loaded.
"Come on… come on…" she muttered. The dumbass PC still used Windows XP for god's sake, and for some fucking reason, no one in this company had ever thought of an upgrade to a newer version of Windows, or even better – a DragonOS.
Behind her, the door to the print room shut with a soft thud like sound.
Haley paid it no mind, her eyes stuck on the ancient loading screen on the computer screen, not even a quarter filled up.
It was loading up surprisingly fast today, she realized in pleasant surprise. Someone must have bothered to clean up the junk from the device's memory and cache.
A shadow detached itself from the darker corner of the room, out of Haley's line of sight.
It moved around.
Silent.
Controlled.
A hand suddenly clamped over Haley's mouth.
One arm wrapped around Haley's upper chest and pinned both of her arms to her sides before the office worker could even react. At the same instant, Talia's other hand clamped firmly over her mouth.
Haley's entire body jolted violently in shock.
"Mmph—?!"
"Quiet," Talia whispered calmly into her ear, her voice sending a shiver of terror down the other girl's spine – like she was hearing the chill of death itself.
The woman thrashed instinctively, panic flooding her body as she tried to scream into the hand covering her mouth. Her heels scraped uselessly against the tiled floor as she attempted to wrench herself free.
It accomplished nothing.
Talia held her effortlessly.
The assassin's body barely moved despite Haley struggling with everything she had. The difference in physical ability between them was almost laughable.
"Stop fighting," Talia said softly. "I'm not here to hurt you."
Haley froze slightly at that.
Just enough.
Talia immediately took advantage of the hesitation. She shifted her grip, locking Haley more securely while the hand over her mouth loosened very slightly, just enough to let her breathe. Then slender fingers reached down and smoothly pulled the access card from where it hung clipped to her skirt.
Haley's eyes widened further as she realized what was happening. "Mmmph!"
"Good girl," she murmured. Then, before Haley could resume struggling properly, Talia struck. Two fingers pressed sharply against a nerve cluster at the side of Haley's neck.
The woman's body instantly went limp.
Not unconscious.
Just temporarily unable to properly move or coordinate her muscles – nothing that would affect her body's involuntary, instinctive systems.
A frightened noise escaped Haley's throat as her knees buckled beneath her, and she went tumbling onto the marble floor.
Talia caught her easily before she could crash onto the ground and lowered her carefully into the office chair in front of the computer terminal. "There," she whispered calmly. "Much easier." Haley's chest rose and fell rapidly as panic filled her eyes. She tried to move her arms, but they responded sluggishly and weakly.
Temporary nerve disruption.
Effective.
And harmless, if done correctly.
She took a moment to ensure that the other woman would not fall off the office chair; the last thing she needed was to have her accidentally slip and crack her head open while being unable to move.
Talia looked around at her work, at how cleanly she had handled the entire thing here, and how neatly she had dealt with the woman without hurting her or killing her, and a smirk appeared on her face. With the smirk plastered on, she spared one brief glance at the immobilized employee and sashayed her way out of the Print Room, only to freeze.
She quickly ducked into a nearby shadow to hide herself in the darkness.
The office hall was silent, but full of noise.
Rows of empty cubicles stretched across the dimly lit floor beneath faint emergency lighting. CPU's hummed quietly in standby mode. Computer monitors glowed softly in sleep mode beside abandoned paperwork and half-empty coffee cups.
It was a normal office building.
Mostly.
A security camera hanging from the ceiling rotated away from her on the other side of the hallway. She frowned, but not because the camera was there, she'd expected that part.
Expected that there would be a security system in place.
But what surprised her was its make.
It was a sleek black camera, hiding almost perfectly in the shadows cast by the ceiling. It had a protruding lens, which adjusted automatically as it swept across the corridor, and was not a normal digital camera present in most common security systems. It also had a small red light right above the lens, and she quickly realized what it was - an infrared scanner array.
It was quite a robust security system, and was probably recording its footage and scans in HD or higher quality.
It was also expensive.
Really expensive.
Far more expensive than what a middling company like Vortex Solutions should reasonably be using.
Interesting.
She waited for the camera to rotate away before silently crossing beneath it. Her movements were smooth and efficient, each step carefully timed with the camera's blind spots. Looking ahead, she saw that another camera waited near the elevators. Then, another was near the stairwell. And another overlooking the intersection between office sections.
Her suspicions deepened with each passing minute. The camera placement was too efficient. Too complete.
There were no dead zones in its vision.
They had been strategically placed to cover the each and every spot.
Someone had designed this system properly.
Which made absolutely no sense.
Vortex Solutions wasn't some massive corporation handling classified government projects. They were a small tech and logistics firm operating out of Brockton Bay. Companies like them usually bought the cheapest security package possible and called it a day.
They didn't strategize about security camera placement; they just put the camera up and continued with their day. They certainly didn't use such expensive and powerful cameras for security purposes. It was an unnecessary waste of resources and funding that no board would ever approve.
But this… This was the kind of surveillance coverage she would expect from organizations actively afraid of infiltration.
A faint smirk tugged at her lips. Unfortunately for them, she was very good at infiltration.
She moved through the office, slipping between the shadows like flowing water, moving between the camera sweeps with practiced ease. Sometimes she crossed entire hallways in a single burst of motion. Other times, she flattened herself behind cubicle walls or crouched beneath glass office windows while the lenses swept overhead.
One camera forced her to climb.
She caught the top edge of a cubicle partition and silently pulled herself upward until she balanced atop the thin divider itself, body pressed low as the camera rotated beneath her. Her vision went black for a fraction of a second. No, it was longer than that. Her balance lurched violently as if time itself had skipped beneath her feet.
Talia nearly slipped from the divider.
A pulse of pressure hammered behind her eyes. Instinct screamed. Wrong. Something about this felt deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way she couldn't place.
Then it vanished.
She was still crouched atop the divider. The camera was still rotating beneath her.
Had she blacked out?
No. She couldn't have. She hadn't moved.
Her breathing steadied a moment later, and after one final glance down the hallway, she continued onward.
Another camera forced her to hang from the underside of a staircase landing for nearly twenty seconds while its lens repeatedly swept past.
This gymnastics of avoiding the camera's gaze quickly got annoying and irritating, but it was manageable in the end.
Annoying but manageable.
Eventually, she reached the lower floors, and the difference was quite stark. The carpeting disappeared, replaced by smooth tile flooring. The air became colder and drier. The low mechanical hum of cooling systems vibrated faintly through the walls.
There was a quiet vibration in the air, the humming of machines surrounding her. She knew what it was from the bottom of her bones.
Server infrastructure.
Talia stepped around another camera sweep before spotting the reinforced door at the end of the hallway.
SERVER ROOM.
A card reader blinked softly beside the handle.
She approached silently and pressed Haley's stolen access card against the scanner. The reader flashed green, and with a quiet click and a soft sound, the heavy door unlocked.
Cold air washed over Talia as she stepped into the server room. Rows upon rows of server racks stretched across the chamber beneath harsh white lighting. Tiny LEDs blinked endlessly in the darkness between the machines, while industrial cooling systems hummed loud enough to vibrate through the floor itself.
Talia stopped walking. Her eyes slowly swept across the room before they narrowed. This was excessive, way too excessive.
There was no reason a company this size needed this much infrastructure. The room alone occupied almost the entirety of the fourth floor. The server racks were enterprise-grade hardware worth millions collectively, complete with redundant cooling systems, backup power arrays, and isolated network clusters.
All of this, for the daily operations of Vortex Solutions?
Impossible.
Unless the company was doing something far more important than publicly advertised.
She moved deeper into the room, weaving between towering black server racks before arriving at one of the administrator terminals positioned near the center of the chamber.
The monitor was asleep, but a tap on the keyboard woke it up. The desktop flooded her face and the surroundings with cold blue light as a login screen appeared on the screen.
With her relatively new tinker powers, it only took a few minutes to break into the system.
She glanced once toward the nearby server arrays before crouching down beside the terminal and opening one of the maintenance compartments built into the desk. A tangled mess of cables, ports, and external drives sat inside. And, conveniently enough, several portable hard drives.
Someone really should have locked those up.
She grabbed one and connected it to the terminal before her fingers began flying across the keyboard.
The command interface opened moments later, and quickly enough, lines of code rapidly filled the screen.
Directories.
Network architecture.
Internal pathways.
Encryption layers.
She moved through them with startling speed, hazel eyes scanning information almost faster than the monitor could display it. As the understanding dawned upon her, she decided to build a WebCrawler, only this one was meant for the entire server infrastructure of Vortex Solutions, and any external connections in extended to.
The Webcrawler had one purpose: to transfer all files containing certain themes into the attached Hard drive. And the theme she had selected – Capes.
The program spread through the company network like a virus, digging through archived databases, employee records, hidden partitions, secured folders, and isolated storage clusters. Every file containing references to superheroes, parahumans, villains, capes, Endbringers, or anything adjacent was marked for extraction.
The transfer started soon after, and a progress bar appeared on the screen before starting to climb upwards.
Talia leaned back slightly in her chair as the crawler continued its work automatically.
Good.
Now for the second task.
Her fingers returned to the keyboard. This system had far deeper access than she initially expected. Security controls were integrated directly into the internal network architecture, likely to allow remote maintenance and monitoring.
It was also very convenient.
For her, that is.
She opened the camera network, and every feed in the building immediately appeared across multiple windows on the monitor.
Talia calmly began deleting footage.
Not everything.
Just enough.
The last several hours vanished piece by piece as she scrubbed camera archives clean, paying especially close attention to every hallway she had crossed and, most importantly, the print room itself. Haley Clements disappeared from the footage entirely after entering the room.
Talia's own presence never appeared at all.
Just like she wanted to keep it as.
She disabled several camera loops afterward for good measure before quietly covering her tracks inside the system logs. Whoever reviewed the network later would likely assume the cameras had simply bugged out temporarily. Or blame outdated firmware.
Corporate incompetence was a wonderful shield.
Minutes passed quietly, and the only sounds in the room were the constant hum of cooling fans and the rhythmic clicking of keys beneath Talia's fingers as she continued exploring deeper portions of the server infrastructure.
The further she dug, the stranger things became. There were encrypted partitions hidden beneath ordinary company directories.
Off-site routing systems.
Dead-drop servers.
Financial records that didn't match the declared revenue, or even reported revenue to the Board or the CEO of the company.
And the deeper she dived into this rabbit hole, the weirder and more suspicious things became. All in all, one thing was clear - Vortex Solutions was absolutely not a normal company. The question was what exactly they really were.
Eventually, nearly twenty minutes passed.
A soft notification sound pulled her attention back toward the crawler.
TRANSFER COMPLETE — STORAGE FULL.
Talia glanced at the hard drive in surprise. She didn't know what storage capacity it had, but being full. And from what she could see, there was still a lot more information that was queued up for download. That was… a lot of information.
Much more than she had expected.
She stood smoothly from the chair and turned toward the storage cabinet where the remaining hard drives sat stacked neatly inside foam containers.
Then, the world exploded.
"What the…?" she said in surprise as the entire building violently trembled as a deafening explosion thundered across Brockton Bay. The lights above her flickered as the vibrations from the explosion rattled the server stacks hard enough for the metal to screech against metal as dust drifted from the ceiling tiles above.
Was that a Nuke?!
There was another explosion, and Talia instantly dropped into a low stance, every muscle tightening as her eyes snapped upward.
Another distant shockwave rolled through the city moments later, this one much farther away.
Then another came, even farther away.
The fourth one she heard was so soft that if it weren't for the sudden still silence after the previous blast, she wouldn't have even caught it.
"What the hell is going on?"