And you’re getting distracted again. Shaking your head at your own silliness, you quickly pull your jacket on and head out towards the front door again, making sure everything is turned off behind you. No need to drive up the power bill unnecessarily.
Carol leads you over to her car, a sleek and slender vehicle that somehow looks even more expensive than Madison’s father’s car. It’s quieter than that one, too. You try to look around it as you climb in it, but you can’t see any distinctive markers that would tell you if this is a new model from your world, or a car imported from Earth Aleph. Amy has never told you much about her mother, but the impression you’ve always had from her is that her mother’s job is very profitable, so you could see her owning a car imported from another reality. Which just sounds ridiculous phrased like that.
Even the inside looks expensive, you discover as you open it up. There’s dozens of small lights on the dashboard, unlike Dad’s car, which only has a light that turns on when the car is low on gas or battery power. The seats are made of what you think might be genuine leather, and the whole car smells like pine, despite not having a little tree dangling from the mirror of the car.
Amy is sitting in the back seat as you climb in, the same as you, dressed in a light blue button-up shirt and dark, loose jeans. She gives you a wide smile, her cheeks reddening as she takes in your clothing, and you see her twitch slightly, an aborted hug. You give her a smile equally as wide as you climb in to the car, though you quickly give up on waving to her after you try to combine the action with climbing into the car when you slip and almost fall onto your face. Flushing, and hoping Carol didn’t notice your clumsiness, you just climb in and pout at Amy a little. Your girlfriend just chuckles silently to herself as she slides her hand over to the middle of the seat, running her fingers atop yours. “You look nice,” she whispers.
“So do you,” you whisper truthfully. You sneakily twist your hand around so you can grab hers in a surprise gesture as Carol climbs in, twisting the car’s key a little more. The smooth sound of jazz fills the car as the woman does up her seatbelt, then adjusts the rear-view mirror to check that both of you have your seatbelts on before she finally pulls out of the driveway.
The car is soon filled with the sounds of meaningless chatter between you and Amy. It always feels easy to talk to Amy, in a very similar way to how it always feels easy to talk to Madison. You’re not really talking about anything in particular, just drifting from topic to topic in the loose manner teenaged girls often do, when the dulcet tones of the radio announcer reach your ears.
“… and in other news, there was another skirmish between the forces of the Protectorate and the local group of villains, the Empire Eighty-Eight. The new body armour deployed by members of the Protectorate’s forces were put to commendable use as members of the organisation set about minimising collateral damage sustained through the attack.” Amy says something to you, her face turned to look out the window, but you can’t listen when a sudden burst of red-hot annoyance surges through Carol for just a moment, before she hurriedly fights it down, tamping it beneath her cool veneer of self-confidence. You stare at the woman, startled. “Unfortunately, the first respondents to the scene were unable to capture the aggressors. Members of the Parahuman Response Team reportedly suffered serious injuries, although our sources tell us that Velocity and Miss Militia are expected to make a full recovery soon.”
Your shock must show on your face, because when Amy turns after your short silence to look at you, she immediately sympathetically pats your hand. “Aww,” she coos. “What’s wrong, Taylor?”
“N-Nothing.” You stare at the radio, your thoughts whirling. “I was a little shocked by the news, I guess.” The thought of Miss Militia being injured is a sobering one. She’s a superhero, of course she’s been injured before, but not… not often. And Velocity, too? He’s a speedster—he shouldn’t be sustaining injuries.
(You’re glad you only heard about this on the radio. If you’d had to see the injuries on Miss Militia, well. You’re not sure what you would have felt, but it would have been significantly less pleasant than the overwhelmed shock you’re feeling right now.)
Amy hesitates for a long moment, then gives you a small glum nod. “Yeah, it’s… not great,” she says quietly. “Everyone’s supposed to recover soon, though. Don’t worry about it.”
“That’s not it.” You let out a little sigh. “I’m not worried. It’s just…” You grimace, trying to find the words to explain what you’re feeling. “They’re… They… I’m not used to seeing them get hurt, I guess. The heroes, I mean.” Which doesn’t really convey what you’re feeling. You have seen them injured before, you’ve even seen them get in some pretty big fights before—you vaguely recall watching a video of Armsmaster and Miss Militia fighting off a bunch of Teeth members that had tried to set up in Brockton Bay a few years back.
You just feel… you don’t blame yourself, or anything like that. There’s nothing you could have done. Your vague plans for setting up a hero team are still a ways from being complete enough to do anything about, and it’s not like you can be expected to topple the entire Empire alone. You hadn’t even known there was a cape fight.
It’s just a little odd to realise just how disassociated you are from the cape scene of Brockton Bay.
Amy pats your hand again, giving you a small, sympathetic grimace. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “It sucks seeing heroes getting hurt.”
There’s silence in the car for a moment, broken only by the soft sounds of jazz emanating from the radio. Then, an unexpected voice pipes up from the front, accompanied by the smooth, gentle feeling of reassurance emanating forth from Carol. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” the woman says, her voice stiff. “It’s just a power play.”
Hurriedly, Amy speaks up, her voice higher pitched than normal. “That’s— that’s— thanks, Mom.” She deflates some, as though anger had drained out of her like helium from a punctured balloon. Then she turns deliberately back to stare out the window. “Mom’s a bit of an expert on that kind of stuff,” she says. She’s clearly attempting to sound nonchalant, but her voice is still too high for her to sound normal. You give her a concerned look, but before you can do much more than just squeeze her hand, Carol pipes up again and your attention is dragged back to her.
“The Empire’s capes are just striking back,” Amy’s mother says steadily. “They saw that the Protectorate’s forces had been dispatched to deal with another robbery by the Undersiders, and struck while they had the opportunity. It’s nothing to worry about. This happens all the time.”
Your mouth turns downwards. “Yeah,” you say, a little frustrated. “But they’re not usually injured by it, are they?”
“Not all the time,” Carol concedes. “It does happen occasionally, though. It’s nothing serious—well,” she amends hastily at your look of confusion, “I suppose the injuries are quite serious, but the situation isn’t. Nobody was killed, and members of the New Wave movement will help to keep the city stable while they recover.”
Amy rolls her eyes. “Yeah, sure they will,” she mutters sullenly.
“Hm.” You deliberately don’t say anything else, just lean back into your seat and think a moment. Carol is just a lawyer, so you can’t place too much stock in what she says, but what she said does make a lot of sense. It just doesn’t ring quite true, for some reason.
It doesn’t take too long to connect the dots in your mind and realise what Carol has missed. From what you’ve gathered during your research on their members, the Protectorate is already severely understaffed compared to the villainous presence in town; between the Empire and the Brotherhood, the Protectorate has been struggling to keep their presence from expanding, and from what you’ve seen at Winslow, they’re failing at that. If the Empire managed to take out two of the limited number of heroes, that’s only going to give them more room to expand for a while, before Miss Militia and Velocity are ready to help stop them again.
You frown unhappily. Great. That means Winslow is going to be even less safe for you now.
You might have to step up your plans for dealing with Rune. That might counter the effect of their spreading, if only a little. Preventing them from gaining more influence in one school probably won’t help much, but as Mom used to say when you helped her around the house, every little bit helps.
But it’s no use thinking about it now. You shake your head a little, trying to dislodge the troublesome thoughts, then turn determinedly to Amy, hoping to distract yourself from that morbid train of thought again.
“So, Amy, have you ever read Interview With The Vampire? I haven’t, but I’ve heard good things about it…”
Brockton Bay isn’t all that far from Boston. North America is a very large country, but New Hampshire is right beside Massachusetts, and the town of Brockton Bay is close to the southern border of New Hampshire. As the crow flies, it’s a little under a hundred miles between the two cities. It should take less than an hour and a half to drive between the two cities, but factoring in traffic, it takes you a little over two hours before Carol finally pulls up in a small carpark.
You look around, feeling fairly underwhelmed. This place… doesn’t really look anything like you’d imagined Boston would look. It looks even less impressive than Brockton Bay, which is an impressive feat.
You mustn’t have disguised your lack of enthusiasm about the town very well, because Amy sounds amused when she first speaks. “I think we forgot to tell Taylor we were coming here first.”
“Oh.” You can see Carol’s reflection blink in the rear-view mirror as she looks back at you. “Sorry.”
Amy rolls her eyes, giving you an unimpressed look at her mother’s reticence to expound any further. “We’re in Newton Highlands,” she explains, somehow sounding both annoyed and amused at the same time. “The town with that really big bookstore in it. It’s not in Boston itself, but I think we’re going to be going there after we’re done here.”
Huh. You’re pretty sure it was in Boston, but you were a lot younger when you last came here, and you’d mostly been overwhelmed by the sheer number of books. “Okay.” It doesn’t take much to accept what she’s saying. “I wonder why they don’t just set themselves up in Boston itself, though. I think they’d get a lot more customers if they did.”
It’s Carol who answers that one. “Maybe they would,” she says laconically, then falls silent for a moment, deliberating on something. “Boston is a very big city, and it’s still growing. With the Protectorate presence there, and the relatively low crime rate, it’s a good tourist destination, but it’s also undergoing a housing crisis right now.” She pauses, looking at you to make sure you’re still listening. “After Leviathan attacked New Hampshire, a lot of people were left homeless and scared of the Endbringer’s return. Thousands of people wanted to move to a bigger city, and Concord could only house so many, so most of them ended up moving to Boston. Housing prices shot up as a result, and the prices still haven’t stabilized.”
Huh. You look over to Amy, but she’s only giving her mother’s back a stunned look, for some reason. She’s not being much help, so you just cross your arms and think about it for a moment. So… there are more people who want houses than there are houses to be sold. “So… the opposite problem of Brockton Bay?” you venture. Brockton Bay has the opposite problem, you’re pretty sure—a lot of people died in Leviathan’s attack, but the property damage was surprisingly light. There’s a lot of empty housing there now, housing that just sits there unsold unless the owner sells it for a pittance.
“Exactly.” Carol gives you a smile you could almost call warm. You smile widely back, feeling absurdly proud of yourself for guessing right. “A store this size can’t afford to set up in Boston, because they’d pay more in rent than they could make from selling their books.”
You hum. That makes sense. The store is big; even from here, you can see that. You’ve never actually been to a football field, but from what you’ve seen of them when Dad watches the football, it’s not much smaller than one of them. That’s… the size of a lot of houses. If you had to pay rent for that much space, you’d probably be paying tens of thousands a month. And if housing costs are high in Boston… yes, you can see why you wouldn’t to be paying that much.
You tuck that train of thought away in the corner of your mind so you can study it later. That’s actually very useful information. If housing costs are low in Brockton Bay, then it might be good to look into property there. You know, in case several hundred thousand dollars falls out of the sky and into your pockets.
Shaking your head at your own silliness, you unbuckle your seatbelt and get out of the car, Amy and Carol quickly following your example. You hurry over to stand beside Amy as she climbs to her feet, offering her a silly smile while her mother locks the car. Your hand twitches at your side, wanting to take her hand, until you finally stick it in your pocket. Not with her mother right there.
The bookstore really is enormous. That’s the first thing you notice when you step inside, and it seems to strike Amy as well by the way her steps falter for a moment. The store stretches ahead of you, almost as long as the entirety of the mall back home in Brockton Bay—although sadly, this bookstore is only a single story tall, compared to the three-storey mall there.
