[] Participate in Final Frontier as a social activity instead of a main activity.
Realign 14.10
Monday, August 13
"You want to what?"
You smile weakly at the incredulous expressions on Dragon and Tim's faces. "Like I said, I want to hit the Fallen. At least the Simurgh family. They're the one with all the Masters, which makes them the most dangerous. Take away the Fallen's ability to enslave heroes who go after him, and they're just a bunch of villains. The Protectorate can focus on breaking the other families over their knee. They aren't immune to Masters the way mages are, though, so it only makes sense for me to move first."
"So you think it's a good idea for you to attack a third of the Fallen?" Tim says in a voice of doubt. "All by yourself? Taylor, you're powerful, but nobody is that strong."
"Maybe… not technically alone. I'm thinking about offering Missy and Laura and Kayleigh the choice to come along. I'll probably be doing most of the actual attacking," you quickly add, "since I am the one with by far the most experience fighting with magic, but I won't say no to them watching my back.
"Besides, it isn't like I'm jumping in feet-first without doing at least some planning." A stack of what look like square white tiles appear in your hand, the semi-physical form of the data Perfect Storm pulled from the Protectorate's files. "Legend gave me this. It's basically all they know about the Fallen. Dragon, I was hoping you and Tim and Storm could go through it and see about narrowing down where they are most likely to be holed up."
"That shouldn't be a problem," she tells you before drifting over and touching the tiles. They immediately vanish into her fairy body's own databanks, and she rubs the side of her head. "Wow. That… is a lot of information."
"Sorry?"
She waves you off. "Don't worry about it. I'm already transferring it to my servers, and now I know downloading this much data at once will give me a headache. I'm sure it will pass once I delete it from my personal memory. My servers are where I keep most of the programs that will let me sort through the information, anyway." A thought crosses her mind, and she taps her chin. "This might be a good time to lean on some of my military contacts. There are a number of people in high places who owe me favors. It shouldn't be too hard to 'borrow' a satellite or two for a couple of hours once we have definite locations."
That is more than you expected, if you are honest with yourself. You thought she would take the information to make some kind of program or something that would scour the Internet for hints, not that she could casually ask the Army to move their satellites around! "That will be nice," you finally say.
Looking around, you jump in surprise when you see that Cassiel slipped around you to hover right behind you. "I assume you plan to ask me to help as well," she says with little preamble.
"I do." If she wants to get right down to business, you won't slow her down. "You told me that your precognition messes with theirs. Any chance you could create a precog smokescreen to keep them from seeing what we're planning?"
The winged fairy opens her mouth only to shut it. "I might. It is not something I have ever attempted, but it should be possible. I will think on the best way to put the interference into practical use."
"Awesome." You lick your lips when the other question you have for her comes back to mind, and she tilts her head. «One more thing. Back in Florida, you told me that you basically played the role of their benevolent goddess. It's why you know so much of their individual powers.»
«I do not believe I would be capable of misleading them in this form. Magical telepathy is different than the form I used before.»
You send her a wordless negation. «That's not what I wanted to ask. When I talked with Legend, he said there was no way to free their victims from their Masters. You probably know their powers better than anyone who isn't a member of their group. Was Legend right, or is there some way I can save them instead of killing them?»
"Ah," she says in a whisper. Her wings curl slightly around herself. «I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I am afraid Legend was correct. Purson was one of their most powerful Masters, but he was not the only one. They have several capes who can take permanent control of others. I will need to think on my memories, but no secret method to undo the effects of those powers is coming to mind at the moment.»
You sigh, but after a moment you give her a nod and reach out with one finger to rub her hair. It was a long shot, you knew that, but now the situation is as clear as it will ever be. If both the head of the Protectorate and the freaking Simurgh say you can't undo the Fallen's Masters' powers, then you can't undo them. No matter how much you wish that were the case.
"Mistress, time for meeting."
Is it that time already?
"You have a meeting scheduled?" Dragon asks with a smile that is only somewhat mocking.
"Yeah, I do," you admit. "Remember that underground base we explored on Earth Dalet where we found the vials made by Cauldron? I'm taking Legend there to look through it again. He and Alexandria were… interested in seeing if there were more vials to be salvaged."
"Not a great surprise," says Dragon after a moment's thought. "It would shock me more if the Protectorate were not interested. Superpowers in a can? They would be fools to pass up the opportunity to create more heroes essentially on demand." She waves a hand in a shooing motion. "You go take care of that. I have a video conference of my own to start in a few minutes anyway."
"And you make fun of me having a meeting," you mutter more than loudly enough for her to hear.
"It's what happens when you're in charge. In my case, it's with the programmers I hired to work on the operating system for my tablet project. Computer geeks, I swear," she adds with an exaggerated role of her eyes.
Leaving the Tinkers and Cassiel to work on their projects, you spin the proper code through your mind to send you teleporting to the very top of the Protectorate building in Manhattan. You expected to find Legend waiting for you, but his companion is a surprise. "Legend didn't say you were joining us," you tell the woman in the black costume and cape.
Alexandria props one hand on her hip. "For exploring Cauldron's base, I will make time. Not to mention, I'm curious about exactly how this works. Will it be like teleportation, instantaneously taking us from one world to another? Will you be opening a portal? Do we need to transfer first to your pocket dimension and use that as a transition point?" She shrugs one shoulder. "Both the journey and the destination have me intrigued."
"I have to disappoint you on that one. It's no different from teleportation around the world, just with a different destination. I wouldn't even know how to make a portal in the first place." Although you can certainly see the appeal of one. Rather than playing taxi yourself, just turn it on and let anyone who wants to walk through do so.
Tim would be the person to talk to about that. He already has teleporter pads, and if he can make them work interdimensionally, it shouldn't be that hard to go from pad to portal. Your mind goes back to the hassle of flying down to Florida in the first place, and you struggle to hold back your shudder. All he has to do is build portals that connect places on this world, and he and Dragon would be rolling in cash. Nobody sane likes flying on commercial airlines.
Your casting sigil appears beneath you, and you whisk the three of you away from Earth Bet to the ruins that are all that remains of Cauldron's base. Legend and Alexandria look around not just at the opening leading deeper underground but at the woods and cliff face beside the base. "For capes who got their powers from Cauldron, you don't seem to recognize where we are."
Legend whirls around in shock. "How… What are you talking about?"
You give him a crooked smile. "Alexandria already admitted to being a customer, though it sounds like she got hers for a song and dance. Your reaction when she said Balam got her powers here pretty much told me that you were one as well, and your slip of the tongue just now confirmed it. I'm guessing Cauldron was instrumental in putting you two, Eidolon, and Hero together in the first place?"
The head of the Protectorate stares at you for a long moment, then his eyes turn to Alexandra. She, to your surprise, is neither suspicious nor upset. She actually has a smirk on her face that looks almost smug. "I would recommend you find some guides on how to use cold reading and microexpressions, Calamity. It is harder without a perfect memory, but they are useful in ferreting out information to connect the dots the way you just have."
"No, don't do that!" Legend says, holding up his hand to you before pointing at Alexandria. "One of you is bad enough. We don't need more."
The black-clad heroine shrugs, her expression never changing.
Deciding to move on from that, you are the first to descend into the dark hallways. A Flare Shooter serves as your light source at first, but a few moments later your shadow is clearly cast on the wall in front of you surrounded by a multitude of colors. You glance over your shoulder to find that Legend as turned into a literal rainbow. "Neat trick."
The human-shaped mass of light shrugs. "It's more useful than you'd think, being a living nightlight."
The deeper you go into the base, the more your hopes of finding anything drop. First half an hour, then an hour passes. Even shifting pieces of rubble out of the way, you are unable to find any more briefcases like the one that was meant to be shipped to Accord or computers that would hold information about Balam. A few times Legend's light glints off glass, but the closest you get to what the three of you came here for is a vial that has been broken for years.
What you do eventually find, however, is a room full of cages. And inside each cage is a twisted, inhuman skeleton.
"What the hell is this?" you ask into the silence that follows your discovery.
A low, soft sigh comes from behind you, and you turn around to see Alexandria looking into the cages. She is not looking at the skeletons, however; if anything, she appears to be looking at what had been in them. "This, Calamity Witch, is the resting place of Cauldron's greatest sin."
"Of your greatest sin," you tell her. "You know too much about their inner workings not to have been hip deep in them."
Alexandria does not argue the point, merely nods.
"What actually happened here?"
"I told you about when Cauldron approached me and made their offer, do you remember?" You nod. "They could not guarantee my survival. The process was too new, too raw. Some people who drank the vials gained powers. Some died. And some…" She drifts over to one of the cages and lays her hand on the bars. "Some of them became monsters. Twisted in both body and mind."
"If you knew the process was that unpredictable, why didn't you do more research? Experiment on animals or something?" That was what Tim did when Dragon finally pushed him to experiment with the mutagens. He used animals, not people!
"That is the same question I asked when I saw this place for the first time. The answer is that the vials do not work on animals. They cannot gain powers. Not even when they experimented with gorillas and chimpanzees, humans' closest animal relatives. Agents only bond to humans, which meant it was human trials or nothing.
"I will not pretend we were saints. The first experiments, both before they gave me my vial and after, were monstrous. The only redeeming factor was that they – that we – did not pluck random people off the streets to be our lab rats. The people we gave vials to at first were in situations similar to my own, where they were already dying and a vial was essentially their only chance for survival. Some, like me, said yes. Others said no, and we did not force it upon them.
"Eventually we were able to refine the process, and it was only after that success that we started selling vials. The chances of mutation now were minuscule, but it did nothing for those we had already twisted."
"So you just kept them locked up in cages?" you demand.
"At first, we had no other option. They were dangers to themselves just as much as they were to other people. We could not set them free, but neither could we bring ourselves to kill them. They were still people at their core, and people we had made like this." Her hand leaves the cage, and she turns to face you. "Then we created another cape, this one with the power to erase memories. It was a windfall, especially as we found that by erasing their memories, the insanity that plagued them was removed as well.
"We could not justify keeping them in cages any longer, but nor could we undo what we had done. Instead the only option we could stomach was moving them to Earth Bet, where the Protectorate was already being established and could give them the support network they would need to try putting their lives back together."
Monstrous capes with no memories. You know what those are. Miss Militia asked Samantha about her origins back in Brockton Bay for that very reason. "You're the ones who created the Case 53s?!"
Alexandria just nods.
"That's… That's—!"
"Evil?" she whispers. Tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling, she sighs. "It is. I can't deny that. It wasn't something we did lightly. But it seemed like every time we turned around, we had another problem that had no good answers, just those that were bad and those that were worse. We weighed what options we had. We tried to make the decisions that would cause the least amount of harm to the smallest number of people. Yet no matter how much we balked at some of the decisions we had to make, we knew the alternative was the extinction of humanity and every other species on every world the Entities touched.
"On the face of it, it is hard to justify what we did. We inflicted pain and suffering on hundreds of people. Tens of thousands if we wish to think about every person every villain Cauldron gave powers to could have harmed. That is a terrible thing." She looks at you again. "Inaction would have made us complacent in the deaths of tens or hundreds of billions. No matter what choice we made, it would be our responsibility."
Your mind reels at everything Alexandria just revealed, and you do not know exactly how you feel about it. On the one hand, the crimes she has just confessed to committing are likely worse than those committed by any cape in the Birdcage. It paints her as black as her own costume. On the other hand, if she is also telling the truth about trying to find the least bad decisions, if it tore her up inside then as much as it seems to be doing now…
What really is the difference between what she did and killing a horde of villains to protect all the people they would enslave and torture in the future, expect in the question of scale?
"I think I found—" Legend flies around the corner and stops when he sees how you and Alexandria are standing, almost as though you are in opposite corners of a boxing ring. "Did I miss something?"
The other heroine's one eye slowly blinks at you, almost as if she is waiting for your response. Whether you will start hurling accusations at her or push things aside. "No," you say after what feels like far too long a pause, "you didn't miss anything. Alexandria was just telling me some stuff about the early Protectorate."
"I… see," he says, doubt obvious in his voice. "Anyway, I might have found something interesting if you two want to come see."
You float out the door, and Alexandria follows right behind you. Another question comes to mind, and you glance over your shoulder. «Does Legend know? About the Case 53s?»
She flies a little faster until you are shoulder to shoulder. "Do you mean 'Does he know now' or 'Did he know then'?" she whispers. "He wasn't in the know when all this was happening. He had enough trouble getting the Protectorate set up and working that we didn't feel he needed to be brought in for every dilemma we faced. He knows now. He and I had a long talk about everything shortly after Scion vanished." She looks at you out the corner of her eye. "He wasn't any happier about it than you are."
The 'something' that has Legend so excited is a large room at the very bottom of the base, octagonal in shape and longer than a football field. It was also obviously the epicenter of whatever happened. The metal catwalks and grates that must have made up the floor are twisted and torn, some of them even picked up and shoved through the steel walls. The shattered remains of doubtlessly expensive laboratory equipment litters the ground.
And in all the carnage, one wall panel was warped enough that it reveals shelving behind it.
"I think this might the dividing wall between the lab and one of the cold storage rooms," Alexandria says, trying to peer through the crack to get a better look at what lays behind. "Let's see if I can pull this just… right…"
The panel is torn apart in her grip, and while the crumbling ceiling threatens to collapse, after a few cracks and scrapes it calms back down.
She lets out a long breath and reaches into the hole she just made to pull out the shelf itself. Your eyes widen as you see what sits on it. Many, even most, of the glass cylinders are shattered and covered in dust, but a few look intact. Legend pulls one out of its holder and wipes the dust away to reveal thick, green sludge within. "How many look to be intact in total?" he asks with a widening smile.
"A dozen or so. Maybe more on the lower shelves, I can't see for sure," Alexandria replies.
"A dozen." He shakes his head and looks at you. "I don't know if you can understand just how fantastic a gift you have given us today. Each one of these vials is a hero in the making. We just need to find someone who wants powers and to do some good in the world to give them to."
Your mind calls forth images of Paul, dressing up as a cape to scare away muggers. Of Kayleigh, who before learning she had magic wanted to be able to teleport anywhere she wanted. Of Lacey and Maclibuin, both of whom want to help the world without having to hurt anybody. "I bet you'll have no shortage of volunteers."
"You're probably right," he says in a gentler voice, and you look over at him in concern and a little confusion. What is he thinking that has him talking like that?" He gives you a smile and waves at the shelf and the hole in the wall where more wait. "We wouldn't be here without you, and I expect you have people you know who feel the same way but don't have the advantage of magic that you do. Feel free to take a couple of them for your own use." His smile turns brighter and more genuine. "We'll call it a finder's fee."
Is this exactly what happened with Case 53s in canon? Honestly I don't fully remember as it's been a while since I read that part, but I do remember the whole "wipe their minds and drop them in a random city" aspect never really sat well with me. Since I'm giving Alexandria a bit of a redemption arc in this story, I might as well go whole hog and change things so that was felt to be a "least bad decision" rather than Saturday morning cartoon level villainy.
Anyway, Legend is offering you two vials to call your own. If you wish not to take them, you could use Cauldron's own strategy on them and ask for an equal number of favors in lieu of the vials themselves. Or you could split the difference and get one of each. I'll leave the breakdown to you.
[ ] Accept two vials and ask for no favors. Vote to pick the vials will follow.
[X] Accept one vial and trade the other for one favor. Vote to pick the vial will follow.
[ ] Trade both vials for two favors.
