Uncovers Coil's conspiracy

I froze as I saw the heading of one post.

Anyone have an Insight into the Fall of the Empire?

Well, that was blatant as hell.

That single capital as much as declared to the world that the writer knew what had happened and knew who had done it. The only way that they would have any idea would be if they had contacts in either the Empire or the PRT, or potentially both. It had occurred to me that a smart villain would let his moles think that they were working for someone else. That way, when they broke, they'd deliver the wrong information to the enemy.

An even smarter villain would simply have their moles in a fellow villain group work their way up to a position where they were the ones that villain group's moles responded to. Not only would they have the same information their enemies had, they'd even be able to filter it, making sure that their enemies didn't hear certain information until it was too late.

This person had added an extra F to make it seem as though they just had a weird capitalization fetish. The message was meant for me, or at least the PRT.

Clicking on the message, I read it quickly.

I'm a Reporter looking for verifiable information on the events a few days ago. I'm on a Deadline, so I'm Hoping to get some responses over the next few days. My Boss is on my Case so I'm anxious to get some information.

There had been a few responses, but TheAllSeeingEye hadn't replied to them.

I quickly began to look for other posts by her. She'd made a lot of them. I was looking for patterns to make sure that I wasn't just getting paranoid. It was possible that a mis-used capital was just a mis-used capital. There was no reason to believe that the other person was targeting me unless I had other information.

By the end of class I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

The AllSeeingEye was a Thinker. If it had just been one of two posts, I could have believed that I was just reading posts from a bright, if overly sarcastic poster. However, there was a definite pattern.

I wouldn't make the mistake of assuming that just because the Empire didn't have a public thinker that they didn't have one. It would be a weird mistake for me to make. However, they tended to loudly announce every new Cape that they had in an effort to make themselves seem even more dominant and powerful. Sometimes appearing the strongest was all that was needed to be the strongest.

It could be a new presence in the Bay, which was always possible.

None of the Thinkers in the Bay fit the profile of someone who would write and think like this, with the possible exception of Tattletale. The PRT really knew very little about her, although her name was fairly indicative of her powerset. Normally I'd have thought that it was more strategic to use a name that didn't shout to the world what your powers were, but after the first few encounters, it tended to be broadcast to the entire world anyway. Heroes and villains were internet sensations after all.

Tattletale and the Undersiders had managed to beat the odds, and there wasn't a lot known about them other than the bare basics of their powers.

Assuming that it was Tattletale, and not someone from outside the Bay, what was she trying to say anyway?

She was a reporter... did that mean her secret identity was that of a mole? It was likely that that at least wasn't true; as far as anyone knew, the Undersiders were teenagers. She could be saying that she was a mole in her own gang, but her gang was small enough that nobody would need to have a mole.

She mentioned a boss, though, and it didn't seem likely that she meant Grue. As another teenager, he wouldn't have the sheer weight of authority for her to consider him her boss, certainly not if she was in a gang that small. Boss tended to connote someone who had a lot of authority. If she was in an abusive relationship with him, but she had Internet access, it would be easy enough to make a cry for help, especially since she was a Thinker and he, presumably was not.

Was someone else running their group?

It would be a clever scheme. Pretend to be running one group when you were really running two. You could let the other team take the heat while you stayed under the radar, and they could do things that wouldn't raise any red flags because they had no obvious interests in the consequences of their actions. If those consequences happened to benefit you, well, sometimes there were lucky breaks. Your real organization could work behind the scenes while the other one took the heat.

It didn't fit the model of the Merchants; they were too flamboyant and they bragged too much. The Empire wanted everyone to know about their successes as a recruiting tool so they could get more members. The ABB was somewhat quieter, and they might certainly hide their involvement with a group of primarily Caucasian teenagers just as a matter of principal. But the Undersiders were petty thieves. They'd be best used as distractions from activities to draw the Protectorate and the Wards away from your real activities.

Lung didn't seem that clever, and while some of his normal subordinates might be, I suspected that Lung would see a normal employee gathering a group of parahumans together as a threat to his power, even though the Undersiders weren't in his weight class.

Faultline's crew were mercenaries and most of their activities were done outside the Bay; it was one of the ways that they'd managed to stay neutral. They might be a good candidate to have a second group doing their bidding in the Bay, but the amounts of money the Undersiders stole were small potatoes compared to Faultline's reputed fees and a quick Internet check showed that Faultline's crew had been out of town three quarters of the time the Undertakers were known to have been active.

While it might be a good idea to throw randomness into the events to obscure patterns, every time you put a unit out in the field you risked disaster. All it would take was one bad day for half the Undersiders to either end up arrested or dead.

It was possible that an outside organization was intervening in the Bay, but it was impossible to know who that might be; there were too many candidates, and I was working on thin information as it was. I'd have to simply watch and wait to see if that was true. I'd been looking through PRT reports during the time I'd been benched, and I hadn't noticed any unusual patterns that would indicate outside involvement, though. If someone was operating from the shadows, they were doing such a good job that it wasn't making the police reports.

That left a single remaining candidate.

Coil's organization was supposedly the only one that didn't have any parahumans. It didn't have parahuman leaders, and it didn't have parahuman mercenaries. What it did have was crews of professionals who used Tinkertech, presumably purchased from Toybox. That meant that whoever the organization's backer was, it was somebody with deep pockets.

Tech billionaires didn't fund supervillain groups. They had too much to lose if they were found out. Anybody with the kind of money needed to support a criminal organization probably didn't need to, at least for money.

Coil's group had a small territory and they dealt a limited amount of drugs, but overall, they were a nonentity in the Bay as far as the PRT was concerned. They barely maintained enough of a presence to keep any other group from just moving in, but they didn't seem to do much more than that. Yet they'd spent a lot of money in hiring trained men and giving them tinkertech weapons. You didn't spend that kind of money unless you expected a substantial return, the kind that small time drug dealing just wouldn't cover.

This seemed like the exact kind of organization that would use proxies to avoid attention. Hire somebody to rob a bank when the point was really to upload a virus to a server that wasn't connected to the Internet. Use a professional assassin to kill a member of another group, and make it look like the attack had been perpetrated by a different group, setting them against each other.

***

Defect