PROGENITOR: WORM (A Wormquest AU)

CONTENT WARNING: Oooh, they fuckin!

The roaring of the heavy duty machine gun mounted was oddly muted, mostly because Lily had made the air around it not actually transmit much in the way of noise. That was the only reason - but it did mean that neither she, Andy, nor Rachel needed to wear headphones. Next to them, Lisa was looking grumpy, her arms crossed over her chest, her scowl quite fierce.

"I could have fired it," she said as the armor plating slid along the arms that Andy had built into the roof and hung the glittering webwork of interlaced metamaterials before them. Andy leaned forward, examining the dozens of impact points.

"Yeah, and if you had fired it, the armor would be blown to pieces," Rachel said, her voice quiet. "We want to know if it works against, you know, the average machine gunner. Not you."

Lisa rolled her eyes, while Andy whistled.

"The kinetic impacts were mostly absorbed. There'd be some bruising - not bad for a fifty caliber bullet hitting you repeatedly in the sternum," he said, drawing back. "Think you can make this for everyone."

Lily rubbed her cheek.

"Not sure," she said. "I'm sustaining the metamaterials right now, they don't...exist in normal reality. Do you know how many laws of physics I need to break to disperse that kinetic energy?"

"Like, two," Lisa said, causing Lily to scowl at the fox girl.

A faint chirrup rang from Rachel's com, and she immediately took hold of Lily's hand, dragging her away.

"Huh? What's up?" Andy asked. "Where are you two going?"

"Out," Rachel said.

Lily explained as she allowed herself to be dragged back, waving as she did so. "Rachel doesn't want me overworking myself, like I did back last year, so, like, she has a timer, and you know, mandated breaks. Won't find us, for, uh...two days?" She hit the door. "Bye! Unless it's an emergency."

The CRACK sound of displaced air echoed from through the doorway, with the black flash of dissipating radiation as they teleported.

Lisa and Andy looked at the door. Then Lisa slowly turned to Andy.

She grinned.

"They fuckin," she said.

"Lisa!" Andy said, his cheeks heating. "Don't be crass."


There was sex, which needed being naked. Raw edged, limbs exposed, bodies trembling.

Then there was...

This.

Which just required being nude.

Lily's arms and her nose and her chest and her hips and her legs and her belly and her soul all seemed to be touching Rachel as the two of them lay in the glittering sunlight that dappled their bodies, shining through the leaves of the palm tree that swayed over head. They had moved up from the beach, manifested a towel from thin air, and were just enjoying the baking heat in a way that was only possible in a world where entropy shook out to prevent bugs from biting, and where sunburn was healed before it happened.

"I wanna be like this forever," Rachel said, her eyes half closed.

"Yeah?" Lily asked.

"Just 1970...forever," Rachel said, her eyes closed. "With...just...life ahead of us and nothing behind us but...the bad stuff." SHe rolled onto her back, so Lily could look down into her face.

"You don't wanna get to the 90s and all the Mars bases that Andy has planned?" Lily asked, tracing the line of Rachel's throat, where the collar had been, during their...

Play.

Rachel snorted. Her eyes opened to slits and she looked up at her lover. "The future's not going to be what we want it to be. It's gonna be what it is. And I like now better." She squirmed and settled back, her eyes closing as she murmured, softly. "S'not here yet, so I'm gonna enjoy the now."

Lily tried to figure out if that was the most depressing thing she had heard, or if she thought it was kind of sweet. She leaned down and kissed Rachel's forehead, then settled in. Their days away from people were precious, and she was going to enjoy herself.

The future, as Rachel had said, wasn't here yet.

Yggdrasil
Oort Cloud (Barely)
May 9th
1970


If there was any time for Camilo Vera, Jill Danning, and Cassandra Cowper to have their little polycul explode, now...was not the time you'd have picked.

And here? Two thousand six hundred and seventy nine AU from the Earth?

This was definitely not the place you'd have picked.

"Well, MAYBE, you should STICK YOUR DICK IN AN ELECTRICAL SOCKET, IF YOU PREFER HER SO FUCKING MUCH!"

You sighed and flipped the newspaper you'd been trying to read shut, and looked past the large, central plaza that was the generally agreed upon 'public' area of the Yiggy. There was a large fountain, lots of greenery, places for the kids and guests and science teams who were all part of this tiny bubble of human life that had been flung to the edge of the edge of the edge of the solar system to come, meet, mingle. Blow off steam. Or, as in this case, blow up at each other.

Camilo was a too handsome for his own good seventeen year old boy from Guadalajara who has been lucky enough to meet a woman who had met a woman who had been unlucky enough to meet Jarvis West. And, of the thousands of people who Jarvis West had mind controlled, tortured, or murdered, that woman had gotten powers, passed it to the other woman, and finally, that woman had passed it to Camilo when she had yanked him out of the way of a speeding truck. Now, Camilo was a Tier 6 with the ability to control electricity with his mind and just enough hyperbrains that he should really have known better. Jill was a Tier 7 who wasn't sure where her powers had come from: Just one day, she could fly and bring her stuffed animals to life, which had almost gotten her burned at the stake by her conservative parents. Finally, Cassie was the biggest of the bunch, a Tier 5 who had been whammied by Abbie Hoffman at one of his speeches.

She'd turned into an semi-coherent cloud of various electromagnetic energies - from infrared to hard gamma.

Andy had whipped her up an encounter suit, which she had requested look 'super fly.'

Because she was sixteen. And, technically, still was since you weren't sure if EM could age as most people saw it.

All three of the kids hadn't had homes, hadn't had prospects, hadn't been sure what to do with themselves, so they had come - like an increasing number of metahuman kids - to the Yiggy.

They'd all orbited around one another for a few months, then collapsed in a way teenagers (from your lofty perspective of being nineteen, which was basically twenty, as of last week, you could look down your nose at the kids, the tiny babies, the absolute children) always did, into a sweaty pile of hormones. Pretty much the instant Andy had made the encounter suit, you were pretty sure.

"I don't!" Camilo exclaimed, while Jill glared at him and her two favorite Teddy Bears started to shamble towards him, their paws lifted up. Since those bears were currently the size of actual bears, Camilo started to back upwards, towards the fountain, while the baseline astrophysicists who were taking a break from their deep space observations watched as if they had never seen anything funnier in their lives. You sighed and got your feet, then started to walk forward - but before you could, Cassie, her LED faceplate showing a > : (, stepped forward.

"Hey, Jill, back off!"

Oh good, Cassie was trying to-

"He's my boyfriend!"

-great.

"Ladies, please!" Camilo said, holding up his hands. "You can both be my girlfriend."

Jill and Cassie snapped their heads around. The Teddy Bears were at his sides now, and their large, soft paws were grabbing onto his arms.

"Wait, I thought you said you wanted me most," Cassie said, her hands going to her plastic hips.

"You WHAT!?" Jill growled. "He told me that you were just a sideshow."

Camilo stammered. "A-Ah, well, uh..." He turned into a crackling ball of lightning, then shot away, blowing off the hands of one of the teddy bears in his speed. Flames licked along the bear, while Jill cried out in alarm. "You DICK!"

Cassie's body slumped and, for a moment, you saw a buzzing electrical pattern emerging from her faceplate. Then the ball lightning that was Camilo - which had reached the walkway that surrounded the central living area - stopped and buzzed in place as glowing hands appeared around it. You shifted your vision and saw both of them were actually still humanoid, in certain EM spectrums, their arms wrapping around one another, Cassie's expression of anger shifting to one of embaressment as the two of them...ahem...

"What are they doing?" Jill whispered to you.

The two broke apart, Cassie shooting away, while Camilo buzzed in circles.

You sighed. "Men always have a hard time controlling that bit, even when they're bubbles of electricity..."

"What bit?" Jill's voice is like acid.

"Uh..." You pause, then...then you are saved. Your com chirrups.

"Hey, Morgana, we need to talk up in the lab," Beta says. "Andi's freaking out about an ethical quandary, can you help calm her down?" You liked how Beta was somehow able to change the pronunciation between Andy and Andi just enough that you could hear the I which meant Andi was currently girling it up. You looked at Jill, then back up at the Camilo and Cassie. Cassie was currently giving him the third degree using her body as a communication laser - pulsing him with a lot of angry words that you were pretty sure were mostly a way to hide the fact she was still really into him and wanted to fuck him.

You sighed.

Kids.

You were never this stupid.

---
What do you do before heading to Beta?
[ ] "Don't blow up the Yiggy." (Leave)
[ ] Try and give actual advice
-[ ] Write In Actual Advice

You sighed. "Okay, guys, guys!" You held up your hand, then shouted, louder. "GUYS!"

The shimmering electromagnetic pattern that was Cassie stopped strobing in ultraviolet light and sheepishly drifted down to hover before you. Camilo hit the ground like a lightning bolt and collapsed back into his human form, adjusting the collar on his shirt as he did so, flushing. "Sorry, Miss Le Fay."

You sighed. "Guys, you should all go and talk to Dr. Jessica Yarnmada. She's a counselor." You say, smiling slightly. "She can...mediate between you three. You all like eachother, you might get this to stick if you hash it out without killing eachother. Set boundaries, figure things out together, talk about your feelings." You punched Camilo gently on the shoulder. "Cam's a teenage boy. He's stupid about feelings, mostly. It might not work out, but, at least you guys can end it without blowing up each other. OR Yiggy."

The three teens looked sheepish. "Si, we'll do do that Miss Le Fay."

The girls nodded.

Well.

Cassie strobed in a way that meant she nodded.

"Okay," you say. "Now, I gotta talk to Andi about something that may threaten the fate of the free world."

YOu slapped Cam on the shoulder, squeezed Jen, then were off to the elevator.

The three exchanged a glance. Well, two glances and a sparkling shimmer.

You came to Andi's laboratory, where she was sitting, slouched in a chair, her hands over her face, while Beta was pacing back and forth. "What's up?" you ask - feeling a bit strange not having Amy Sykes around. The little exploder loved to hang around the lab - mostly because she hoped a repeat in the time Andy had test-fired a laser gun at her. But Amanda had been pretty firm about her daughter not going to the Oort Cloud, even if it was only for a few hours.

"Okay," Andi said, lowering her hands to her laps. "What is Buzzy?"

"A sentient thought that will exist in the gestalt consciousness of humanity - existing to provide extra willpower to resist memetic influences and hypercharm," you say, sighing slightly. "She's sentient so she can react to changing situations and keep up to date, and also so she can have ethics. We tried to program ethics into a non-sentient thing and it just started to become sentient, so it was either sentient and ethics or no ethics and no sentience, so..." You shrugged. "We talked about all of this."

"I just realized a big, obvious problem," Andi said, quietly.

"Spill!" You say. "Tell me before we make her- I don't wanna make someone just to have them fuck up."

"One," Andi said, holding up her hand, her finger extending. "What causes dark energy exposure to lead to a dark energy infection rather than nothing? And two-" Another finger. "-what is it that hypercommand and hypercharm abilities target?"

You're still for a bit.

"Oh," you say. "Wait, no, she...she won't have a body-"

"Cassie doesn't have a body!" Andi said. "She's just an electromagnetic pattern and she's lousy with Dark Energy."

"She had it when she got infected," you say, quickly.

"That's what I said," Beta said.

"There's no conclusive proof that not having a biological body won't mean that a sentient meme can't get infected with dark energy the instant it's exposed to some dark energy that's infectious. And those powers will be entirely unpredictable. Next, there's the issue that Buzzy is going to be exposed to every single metahuman on the planet. Every single hypercharmer and hypercommander out there is going to be able to talk to Buzzy. Once they know she's there - and Cam's going to notice really freaking quick - they'll be able to talk to her. And, like, I've run the numbers, a majority of even...Tier...5 charmers can talk ends around her! She's great for dealing with syntergenics...though...any syntergene that bypasses concious reaction, like the KYS pictures I theorized, those will go right through her defenses-"

You realized Andi was starting to breathe quickly now.

"Do we have the right to even try this? Like, what if she gets infected by a Tier 3 and becomes a Tier 4? Not only can she spore randomly, across the entire planet, to anyone, but her powers could be anything! Anything at all!" She put her hands on her head, tugging at her hair. "We could be making another Tchernobog!"

You put your hands on Andi's shoulders. "Whoa, Andi, calm down...calm down..." you say, frowning slightly.

The only problem is Andi has...a...very good point. And from Beta's expression, you can see that she's beginning to see the point too.

"Even if her powers are benign, what do we do if some hypercharmer...like Cam, for instance, convinces Buzzy to withhold her defenses from, say, the 'wrong' people." Andi shook her head. "Buzzy's going to be able to nosell a lot of casual persuasion. But the people we're most worried about don't do casual persuasion."

---
Oh. Huh.
[ ] Go ahead with Buzzy. The upsides outweigh the risks.
[ ] ...maybe we should put the Buzzing on the maybe pile?
[ ] Lets go back to the drawing board (spend more XP to make her more...dark energy proof - may cost lots of WP.)
[ ] Write In