The Grimoire’s Chosen (Worm AU/Celestial Grimoire)

A/N: Here's the new Chapter! Which also means the next four chapters are up on my Patreon for early access as well as the chance to vote on the direction of the story!

Jason's first patrol doesn't quite go according to plan.

-x-X-x-

Ultimately, Jason decides he’s feeling confident… but not THAT confident. Pissing off any of the gangs on his very first night out sounds like a bad idea. Even a group like the Merchants has multiple capes, and while Jason’s power has seemingly limitless potential so far, it’s still just that for the time being… potential.

Still, he wanted to make an effort at the very least. With as much power as he already had, with as much power as he was going to have going forward, Jason felt like he needed to find a way to start supporting his city. Maybe one day, he would even be so strong that he could take down the gangs and free Brockton Bay from the ever-present miasma that lay over it.

For now though, he needed to at least establish himself. To be ‘seen’ out and about in a cape identity, so that when that hopeful, optimistic day came in the far flung future, he wasn’t stymied by a total lack of recognition.

In the end, staying close to Vicky’s place (though not so close that he’d run into her of course) was Jason’s best bet for his first night out. Fortunately the possibility of him actually running into Glory Girl was low… he’d left Vicky pretty tired out after their ‘tutoring session’ so she probably wasn’t going to stay up much longer.

This also wasn’t gang territory, which wasn’t that surprising given Jason didn’t think Carol would ever let her daughter rent an apartment IN gang territory in the first place. Not when Vicky was an out cape, someone who didn’t have a secret identity of any sort. Having Glory Girl living in the middle of their territory openly would have been a provocation too far for any of the gangs.

Ultimately, it was the perfect area for him to try and make his debut. The only real issue Jason had as he used Flash Air to transport himself up to a nearby rooftop so he could get a bird’s eye view… was his own look. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything close to a ‘real’ costume yet. He had a ski mask, some dark clothes, and the Staff of Magnus.

After a moment of considering his predicament, he fishes the Transformation Pendant out from under his top and lets it lay proudly out on his chest. By itself, the pendant was a bit gaudy, and rather large. It certainly stood out as ‘odd’, but Jason doubted most would think ‘cape’ if they saw it in a vacuum. However, when combined with the Staff of Magnus that Jason was wielding, he felt like it gave the appropriate ‘vibe’ he was going for.

There was no denying the unnaturalness of the Staff of Magnus. People would definitely consider it tinkertech of some sort if they saw it. Maybe that would be what Jason would pass it off as, simple tinkertech that-

“G-Get… off me!”

“Don’t be like that, bitch. Stop fighting!”

Jason freezes, derailed mid-thought as the sound of two distinct voices suddenly reach him from down below. He’d been using Flash Air to bounce between rooftops while considering his attire, keeping an ear out for any crimes that might be taking place. He was, after all, trying to patrol. But part of him can’t help but be surprised to have actually found one.

He immediately switches gears, his jaw clenching as he moves towards the sound of the voice. Looking over the edge of the roof down into the alley below, he sees two figures, a man and a woman based on the body shapes and what he’d heard before, tussling in the dark.

For a moment, he considers how best to approach the situation. But when the sound of clothing ripping fills the air and the woman screams, Jason stops hesitating and leaps into action.

The Staff of Magnus glows as he taps into its immense power to cast a Necromantic Spell. Contrary to popular belief, not every part of Necromancy was focused on undead. Necromancy was not, as many assumed, all about zombies and what not. Rather, Necromancy, at it’s purest form, was Death Magic. And Life and Death were just two sides of the same coin.

The spell he casts on the man and woman down below is called Vitality Transfer, to be exact. In truth, it’s most common use WAS to transfer ‘life’ from a living thing to an undead thrall, increasing the strength of the undead construct and making it in turn seem more living and… well, vital.

However, the spell doesn’t necessarily need to be cast upon an undead construct. It works just as well when cast between two living things as well.

Suddenly, the man down below finds himself weaker, and the woman finds herself stronger. As the former’s vitality is transferred to the latter, the commonly understood wisdom of your average man being capable of overpowering your average woman becomes… inverted.

“What the-“

“FUCK YOU!”

With the tables turned, the woman is able to push the man off of her and knee him in the gut. He doubles over for a moment, which puts him right in line with a haymaker, right to the face, that sends him spinning away.

Grinning at the turnaround, Jason uses Flash Air to create a portal for himself from the roof to the ground, stepping through with the Staff of Magnus held in his grasp. He makes sure to do so a dozen feet away from the ongoing tussle of course, not wanting to be caught up in the melee after all that.

That proves to be a wise move, because the woman almost instinctively swings around in his direction, before her eyes widen in shock at the sight of him. Or maybe its at the sight of his portal, who can say.

“C-Cape!”

Jason tries to smile through the ski mask, only belatedly realizing that they can’t see that.

“It’s alright. I’m-!”

Before he can finish that sentence, the woman turns and bolts out of the alley, fleeing from him with all of her newfound speed. Jason blinks for a moment, before looking to the man she’s left behind. Her assailant is laid out on the ground and groaning through what’s probably a broken jaw, all things considered.

For a brief second, Jason doesn’t understand what’s happening. Then, he finds himself replaying the few instants in time where he got a good look at the woman after stepping through the portal. Up on the roof, he couldn’t see either woman or man all that well, but thanks to the glow of his Staff, he’d gotten a better look once he was on the ground with them.

… The woman was a whore. That wasn’t a disparagement, but rather just an astute observation. She’d been wearing the attire of a stereotypical ‘lady of the night’, complete with high heels, jean shorts, and a tube top. Said tube top had been torn open by the man before Jason cast his vitality spell, leaving one of her tits (pierced, he absently notes) jiggling and bouncing in the wind.

Now maybe on the face of it, one might assume she was just some girl out for a night on the town, hitting up the clubs. But there were multiple reasons that Jason knew that wasn’t the case. For one, she hadn’t been that young. Easily twice his age, he felt. For two, she would have had no reason to run from him if she wasn’t doing something illegal herself.

Well, that second one might not be entirely true, but combined with everything else he’d observed through Keen Eye and processed with Alchemical Prodigy, the proof was in the pudding, so to speak.

That recontextualized things a bit, Jason supposed, but he still couldn’t bring himself to regret intervening. Even if the woman he’d helped had been a prostitute, the guy currently on the ground before him definitely wasn’t a john. From the sound of things, he had decided because of her vocation that he didn’t have to pay for it and tried to take advantage of her without her permission.

Just because she was a whore didn’t make it any better to treat her like less of a person. That said… it did leave Jason in a bit of a moral conundrum. The woman was gone, and he wasn’t really inclined to chase after her just to explain himself. Meanwhile, the man at his feet needed medical attention, and it didn’t really feel right to leave him laying on the ground, groaning and whimpering in pain.

At the same time, Jason really didn’t want to wait around for emergency services to show up. Especially when he didn’t have any way of proving that the man had been in the process of committing a crime.

… In the end, Jason steps forward and uses the Staff to pin the man down on his back while searching his pockets for a phone. Fortunately, he wore gloves tonight, so he doesn’t need to worry about fingerprints.

Placing a call to 911 and explaining the situation briefly without giving too much about himself away takes a couple minutes, and then Jason goes ahead and drops the phone back onto the groaning man’s chest. Flash Airing back up to the rooftop, he waits just long enough to hear the sirens approaching in the distance, and then takes his leave, washing his hands of the situation.

He should… probably head home now, right? Especially since those sirens might wake up Vicky, and knowing her, she would one hundred percent come out to investigate as Glory Girl. Shaking his head, Jason turns in the direction of his apartment. Tucking the Transformation Pendant back under his top, he switches out his clothes for more normal attire and stores the Staff of Magnus safely away in the Pendant.

Jumping rooftops until he’s close to his own building, Jason portals down to the ground and walks the rest of the way after making sure there are no eyes on him. Only once he’s safely ensconced in his apartment does he breathe a little easier. Honestly, he’s not sure how to feel about what happened though. He’d helped that woman, so that was good, but at the same time… it wasn’t exactly what he was expecting from his first patrol if he was being honest.

Truthfully, he was starting to think that he’d jumped the gun a little bit when it came to this heroing business. Like, what was even the point? He’d decided to do it because it was something everyone did, and part of him felt like he had a responsibility to improve the state of things in Brockton Bay, now that he had the power to actually make a change in his city.

And yet, was he really cut out for all of this? Was he really made for the cape life? Maybe he didn’t have to go out in a costume and fight crime. Maybe it wasn’t his responsibility to deal with the gangs or clean up Brockton Bay. They had the Protectorate and the PRT for that, after all. So really, it wasn’t like he had to-

Ding!

Feat Achieved: Complete your first Patrol as a Cape! 100 Points Earned!

You now have 100 Points saved up!

Wait, wha-

Feat Achieved: Become ‘known’ as a Cape by other Capes! 100 Points Earned!

You now have 200 Points saved up!

WHAT?!

-x-X-x-

“Tch, so there was a new cape around here then? Hero or Villain? Ugh, you’d think they’d know to stay away…”

Vicky knows she’s probably sounding pouty, and that she shouldn’t be so huffy… especially in front of the man currently stood across from her. But she can’t help it. She’d had a pretty good evening. Tutoring was tutoring, but it was what had happened after the tutoring that was fun. Even if Jason hadn’t brought his friend Taylor around again, Vicky had still ‘earned’ her ‘reward’ and Jason had delivered it to her with gusto.

She’d been dozing in bed, half-asleep, when she heard the sirens in the distance. And while part of her had wanted to just let it go, she knew she couldn’t. People knew she lived here, and of course, they also knew she was Glory Girl. While no one had been dumb enough to attack her in her home, on account of her powers always being ‘on’, it still wasn’t good form to let any sort of emergency near her residence go by without at least checking up on it.

And if it had been something like a fire or something, well, she never would have forgiven herself if she just went back to sleep while some of her neighbors were suffocating or burning alive in their homes.

Alas, it hadn’t been about that. It hadn’t been about that at all. No, this was something both far stupider… and all the more concerning at the same time.

Stood across from her as she hovers about a foot across the ground, Armsmaster, leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate, frowns and shakes his head.

“It’s unclear at this time whether they were a hero or a villain. Based on their actions so far, they seem to be leaning towards hero, but we won’t know for sure until we have more sightings to correlate things.”

Looking off to the side, in the direction the police and paramedics had already taken the man with a broken jaw away several minutes ago, the Protectorate Hero hums.

“On the call with the operator, this new cape was apparently cagey and cautious. They didn’t give a name to call them by. The situation, as they described it, was that they came upon that man trying to assault a prostitute and when they went to intervene, the prostitute used the moment of distraction to hit the man hard enough to break his jaw before fleeing the scene.”

Vicky hums, nodding along. She could kind of believe it. After all, if that wasn’t what happened, why would the cape call 911 in the first place? It wasn’t exactly the actions of a villain, calling emergency services for a downed man.

“The police will try to track down the prostitute for questioning, but for the time being, there isn’t much to go on here. Keep an eye out alright, Glory Girl. If this new cape decided to patrol here, they either knew they were avoiding potential gang territory, or they lived around here in the first place. You might be the next to run into them.”

Armsmaster gives her a look then.

“… If that happens, please exercise caution and restraint when dealing with them. And if they do in fact have heroic tendencies, please at least mention the Protectorate as an option. You and I both know most can’t hope to last long as independents.”

Vicky grimaces at that, but reluctantly nods. One might assume she would be against the thought of pushing independent heroes into the Protectorate’s arms, given she was independent herself, but Vicky knew full well that she was the exception that proved the rule. Most capes didn’t have powers as strong as hers.

“I’ll mention you guys if that happens, yeah.”

Armsmaster inclines his head in wordless acknowledgment, and that seems to be the end of their conversation. As he returns to his motorcycle and Vicky floats up into the air, she finds herself pondering the situation. Who the hell was this new cape, exactly? Could they live nearby like Armsmaster had suggested?

… She would have to up her patrols going forward. And maybe even, ugh, go so far as to curtail her nighttime ‘rewards’ with Jason so she could go out and patrol after their tutoring sessions every once in a while.

Blah. Sometimes Vicky really hated being responsible.

-x-X-x-

A/N: Will try to keep this up to date at the end of every chapter, get on me if I forget please. Though if it gets too out of hand, might have to change it at some point.

Jason's current banked points:

200 Celestial Points

Jason's current banked power:

• Don't Give Up! (400 Points)

Jason's current powers:

• Flash Air (Gained in Chapter 1)

• Transformation Pendant (Gained in Chapter 4)

• Keen Eye (Gained in Chapter 4)

• Blood, Death, and Demons (Gained in Chapter 6)

• Alchemical Prodigy (Gained in Chapter 8)

• Staff of Magnus (Gained in Chapter 13)