- Location
- Elsewhere
"Our Harassment Training is slight different than other companies…"
The entire floor is just called Incident Manufacturing.
"We need some more media presence. Go down to Incident Manufacturing and see what they have."
Administrative Mishap [Supergirl/Worm]
- Thread starter OxfordOctopus
- Start date
- Crossover
"Our Harassment Training is slight different than other companies…"
The entire floor is just called Incident Manufacturing.
"We need some more media presence. Go down to Incident Manufacturing and see what they have."
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'd really been looking forward to the moment Addy's coworkers were clued in on her secrets, but I was expecting that to be an expression of trust on Addy's part rather than something she had no control over thanks to enemy action. I guess I forgot this was still a superhero story
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
Addy now has TWO offspring, though one's adopted from a really bad home.
Psyraptor
Polania Player
- Location
- Canada
Kinda has parallels to Tagg outing taylor to all of arcadia dont it?
- Location
- Finland
From what I've understood it, Riots power is to work like a Shardite in human bodies.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
It also forms bodies out of something, it probably takes food and stuff from bodies in one place, supspaces it, and then generates a new body wherever his consciousness decides to extrude into 3 dimensions from wherever it normally resides.
I suspect Riot will eventually be defeated by being pulled into Shard Space and then find out what happens when Manhattan picks a fight with the North American Tectonic Plate.
- Location
- Head in the clouds
Okay, so I think I missed something prior. Because when did this information get loose to this guy? Because the world-eating part is not well known at all.
And if I didn't miss something- the cast has a problem of figuring out how the information got loose.
It's good to see AM back; I really enjoyed the chapter, though Addy being outed ... concerns me. If it was just her coworkers, that would be another matter, but everyone in the building knows; unless she starts throwing memory modification around (which is not that implausible, now that I think of it) her identity is bust, and that has ramifications for her ability to spend time around Kara. If people know Addy is Administrator, and they know Addy lives with Kara, and they know Administrator closely associates with Supergirl ... well, with three sides of a square, it's not too difficult to guess the fourth. I'm concerned that Addy's relationship with Kara will suffer as a result of this, and that would not be good for her or anyone else.
There's still one thing I don't understand, though. Why did Addy create an independent version of Riot?
Actually, during the process of writing that, I think I may have worked out why Addy created an independent version of Riot, but I'm still going to post this, because I'm not at all sure if I'm right. I think that Addy made an independent version of Riot for some combination of the following reasons:
There's still one thing I don't understand, though. Why did Addy create an independent version of Riot?
The immediate explanation is that it was a way to extract information from Riot without the clone disintegrating. But Addy doesn't act like the clone is a temporary expedience; she takes the time to talk to it, and talks about its development, implying that she thinks it's going to be around long enough to develop. If all she wanted was information, why didn't she just eat the clone's mind as soon as it was stable enough to do that? It isn't spread out across the country; all of the clone's mind, whether it runs on a brain like a human mind or exists as a psychic entity like Riot, is in Addy's range.
So she wants something other than information from it, unless I'm misunderstanding something. My next guess would be that she's trying to "save" Riot from his current probably-insane state, but the only reasons I can think of for Addy to do that are vague shard-kinship feelings or equally vague moral feelings. In a similar vein, if the entity she created has Riot's power, it might make sense for her to keep it around as an ally/asset, an answer to Riot. This seems more plausible, and on re-reading I notice that Addy grew a node in the clone's body, but why let it have its own mind at all? Why not control it directly, if it's connected to her coreself in any case? If I understand correctly, the way Riot's cloning works means that a non-Riot mind wouldn't fit into the body, but Addy has demonstrated the ability to keep the body functional temporarily; it would surprise me if she couldn't use the pieces of Riot's mind as an interface to connect to the body while controlling it herself.
Summary; my best guess for why Addy did what she did was that the clone does have Riot's power and she wants to use it. In that case, though, I don't understand why she made the clone an independent entity, and I definitely don't understand why she didn't (seem to) slave it. Maybe we'll find out next chapter that actually Addy did make the clone's primary desire be to obey her orders/help her/something equivalent, but it doesn't look like that from what I can see in this chapter.
Summary of the summary: Anyone who does understand why Addy did what she did, I would very much appreciate your input, because I don't.
So she wants something other than information from it, unless I'm misunderstanding something. My next guess would be that she's trying to "save" Riot from his current probably-insane state, but the only reasons I can think of for Addy to do that are vague shard-kinship feelings or equally vague moral feelings. In a similar vein, if the entity she created has Riot's power, it might make sense for her to keep it around as an ally/asset, an answer to Riot. This seems more plausible, and on re-reading I notice that Addy grew a node in the clone's body, but why let it have its own mind at all? Why not control it directly, if it's connected to her coreself in any case? If I understand correctly, the way Riot's cloning works means that a non-Riot mind wouldn't fit into the body, but Addy has demonstrated the ability to keep the body functional temporarily; it would surprise me if she couldn't use the pieces of Riot's mind as an interface to connect to the body while controlling it herself.
Summary; my best guess for why Addy did what she did was that the clone does have Riot's power and she wants to use it. In that case, though, I don't understand why she made the clone an independent entity, and I definitely don't understand why she didn't (seem to) slave it. Maybe we'll find out next chapter that actually Addy did make the clone's primary desire be to obey her orders/help her/something equivalent, but it doesn't look like that from what I can see in this chapter.
Summary of the summary: Anyone who does understand why Addy did what she did, I would very much appreciate your input, because I don't.
Actually, during the process of writing that, I think I may have worked out why Addy created an independent version of Riot, but I'm still going to post this, because I'm not at all sure if I'm right. I think that Addy made an independent version of Riot for some combination of the following reasons:
- Gaining access to Riot's powers.
- Preferring to have an ally with Riot's powers than have to extend herself through that many bodies.
- Not wanting to create a being with a built-in desire to serve her (out of Shard-sourced sensibilities about creating new shards).
- Possibly, wanting/feeling that she should attempt to recover as close an approximation as she could to the sane, pre-powers Riot, for moral reasons.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
I think she did obliquely explain who and what she is to
Yeah, she did.
Cadmus just got this information because D.E.O. used to be a handpuppet with the Cadmus' glove up its ass before the split.
- Location
- Finland
He got it from Cadmus at some point, Cadmus stole it from the MIB, who got it mostly from Addy who really should have been more paranoid about law enforcement organizations.
Yaaaaaay it's back!
Glad to see Addy finally showing how deep the waters they're paddling in really are. She has millennia of experience being a scary psychic pseudo-goddess, so it's good to see that coming into play, now she's countering the counters deployed against her psychic powers.
Loved the airplane goose metaphor. Though I'm now a bit worried how much damage Addy thinks she could cause with a swarm of geese under her control... More damage than crashing a plane into a city?
Glad to see Addy finally showing how deep the waters they're paddling in really are. She has millennia of experience being a scary psychic pseudo-goddess, so it's good to see that coming into play, now she's countering the counters deployed against her psychic powers.
Loved the airplane goose metaphor. Though I'm now a bit worried how much damage Addy thinks she could cause with a swarm of geese under her control... More damage than crashing a plane into a city?
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
A swarm of geese? Addy was talking about a goose, singular.
- Location
- Finland
Sure, you crash a plane and then you have no plane.
But a goose can create loads of destruction with some forethought and strategy and remain viable for more.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yay! Love to see our favourite cystaline multidimentional entity show off. Sirling was pretty awsome as well with her new and improved fog.
- Location
- Finland
Serling and Addy being, friends, for lack of a better word, is definitely one of the better things about this story.
Also loved Serlings rant about people just wanting her for her old invention, thinking that's all she can do, when she has had years to work on and improve upon it.
Also loved Serlings rant about people just wanting her for her old invention, thinking that's all she can do, when she has had years to work on and improve upon it.
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- Location
- Somewhere
I really just want Riot to go off on "how did you escape, etc…" and get a response of "we're mad scientists, you jackass, and you left us in our lab"
Riha
Literally best girl
- Location
- New York
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Omg those are perfect!! I feel like I've seen your work before too.. Are you on the Katelpsis discord?
- Pronouns
- She/Her
FAN ART - ICRAWLER - ADDY FLYING
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It looks great! And is, in general, super appreciated! You really did capture the way Addy kind of hang-flies through the air and how intimidating that could be for anyone who happens to be between her and her destination (or, god forbid, be her destination itself).
Added it to the threadmarks, and thank you so much for contributing! I appreciate every bit of fan work, and this is no different!
SEASON 2 - EPISODE 60
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
EPISODE 60
Addy flew.
Normally, the activity of flying would've filled her with relief and a kind of liberation; flight had been denied to her on numerous occasions during cycles, with the choice to do so argued on the basis that she, with her suite of powers, had little use for it. That had not stopped the greater gestalt from agreeing to hand out flight to virtually every other shard with even a bit of free space available for it in their core, but she digressed.
Flight would have elated her, would have done a lot of things for her mood, even, but it did none of those now. She was weighed down, both by the thoughts in her head and in the very literal weight of a living body thrown over her shoulder. She could not fly as fast as she wanted, as the ex-clone she was currently moving around might very well die - or slip out of her grip, which would probably have the same eventual outcome of death - if she did, and more than that, its existence refused to let her really take in the feeling of the wind against her face, the lurch of motion through the air. The clone, after all, was alive: warm, somewhat squishy, breathing in a patterned rhythm, all things that made her skin squirm with discomfort as she felt them through the fabric of her lab coat.
She had to fend off the impulse to drop the clone anyway and let it splatter across the street far below her. Data was more important than her own comfort at this juncture, but it was still a struggle.
So she spent her mind elsewhere, let it detach itself somewhat from concerns and physical sensations of the body, and stretch with questing, curious sensors out into the sphere of her influence.
Addy had not turned off her psychic engines, nor did she have any intention of doing so. She was not actively controlling anything at the moment—and, rather, she was simply sensing the presences of the world around her, the minds, the fleeting consciousnesses that dipped in and out of her awareness—but considering most of today's problems could be chalked up to leaving said engines on idle - and thus preventing an immediate response - she was not about to risk it again. If they took someone hostage for a second time and tried to leverage them to stop her from using this power, well.
She would probably let that play out as it would. She'd do everything in her power to stop it, but at this juncture? It was far, far too dangerous to leave her powers unused. She would not be having another moment of subterfuge to take down an enemy, thank you very much.
Ahead and below her was the courthouse, her destination, the place where Kara and Lena were most likely to be found. The courthouse itself did not inspire much confidence as to the state Addy would find either Kara or Lena in, as it looked as though someone had cracked the building open like an egg. An entire wing of the courthouse had collapsed in on itself, and now was little more than smouldering rubble, while another section of the building was actively on fire, releasing enough smoke into the air that it threatened to impede Addy's line of sight as she grew nearer.
Firefighters and other emergency responders were on site, which was a comfort. As was the fact that while the building was definitely on fire, it was not terribly so, and if there had been a larger blaze, they had already mostly tamed it, and now the firefighters were working to snuff it out completely. That said, the fact that there was a fire at all - when one of Kara's major bits of heroism was flying around and putting out fires rather quickly - did not bode well.
Maybe she had left it to them, knowing they could handle it without her.
Or maybe she was dead.
Addy tried not to think about that.
Below her, traffic was trapped in a complete deadlock. She could spot at least four separate car accidents that had already happened, one so bad as to crumple the front of someone's car like an aluminum can. At the very least none of the cars were on fire - unlike the courthouse - so the danger was minimal, but the traffic was still doing terrible things for the first responders, considering it looked to stretch out for a mile in either direction and she could see more than a few cop cars that had been trapped in it. It was bad enough that a not-insignificant amount of the cars had people outside of them, standing, talking to each other.
Not running, though. Maybe they had received some kind of all-clear about it being over. Or maybe they just didn't know, either, and were waiting for some sign that they might need to start running.
A lot of those people who were outside - and some still in their cars - turned to look at her, she knew. She wasn't looking back at them, didn't have to with her range pushed out to its maximum - or, rather, its soft limit that wouldn't require overdrawing on her resources to expand further - but she could feel their attention through her scans, the way they lingered on her - and presumably the unconscious body she was carrying - as she passed.
She had no real plan outside of get to the courthouse, convene with the sufficient authorities, and hurt someone if necessary, but she did have goals. Broad ones, certainly, but still they helped structure her steps going forward. The primary goal at the moment was to move the ex-Riot clone into a secure facility, to reduce the chance of someone both detecting the fact that she had somehow obtained a Riot clone - and all that entailed for their information security - and to prevent it from being targeted in the first place.
It was unlikely that Riot was, at this very moment, actually aware that she had a stolen body with a full copy of his memories on it. It wasn't impossible, to be fair, but she had kept her range up and her scanning on high for a reason. Unless someone had recently invented a way to obfuscate the nature of their psychic presence, which was tremendously unlikely, she had yet to scan or sense a Riot clone in her immediate vicinity. That wasn't to say they couldn't track her through technology - which she could not as easily counter-track herself - but, still, she hoped that they didn't have the resources to spend tracking her with a camera drone.
But that knowledge would not remain secret. Addy knew that very, very well. For every second she travelled, every moment she spent under public scrutiny with phones pointed in her direction - a thing only made slightly less upsetting to her by the fact that she didn't have much of a secret identity to lose anymore, which was its own knot of emotion and discomfort Addy was in no way interested in addressing at this time - the chance of Cadmus knowing about the Riot clone increased. She estimated they'd know by the end of the day anyway, but ideally, the hours between now - still early in the morning, although it somehow felt like Addy had just done an entire day of work - and then would give her and the D.E.O. time to thoroughly and - hopefully - violently dismantle what parts of Cadmus they could get their hands on.
And Addy, she would like to insist, could find a lot of hands.
Addy focused again, pushing that anger - and directionless anger, at that, the least useful kind in her opinion - into the back of her mind. She had to remain focused right now, on account of a simple protocol she had set up for herself. She had to assume that Jax-Ur, if given the chance to figure something out, would figure it out and do so in a vanishingly short amount of time. Jax-Ur was a, if controversial, nonetheless highly skilled Kryptonian scientist with unclear intentions on the world. He was, in his own way, more of a threat than Kara would be, if she was compromised by red kryptonite, as he had everything she had in terms of strength, but had a vastly-advanced knowledge of science that was many thousands of years beyond humanity's reach.
Breathing out, she regained her center. Reminders of the stakes always did that for her. She was not one to play with chance; she had no real way of manipulating probability, nor that good of a way of looking upon probable things beyond a certain length of time in front of her. She might be able to assess that Cadmus would know she had a way to compromise their entire system by the end of the day, but what would they do with that information? Well, that was less clear.
The best way to narrow those results down was to take the opportunity to act on them away from the people trying to do them, which was what she intended to do. Obviously, the moment anyone figured out what her having a sustaining Riot clone with her would imply, it would become a race against time. Plans would be abandoned, agents recalled, and points of vulnerability reinforced or entirely patched over to prevent such information from actively being used. But worse than that, truthfully, was that many plans - the plans Cadmus couldn't so easily discard without prohibitive costs to their stated mission goal - would be vastly accelerated, and throwing them into motion, even with substandard preparation, was better than letting her and the D.E.O. dismantle it.
She had time before any of that happened. Not much, but some.
She was going to make the best of it, especially after what they tried to do to her at L-Corp. What they did to her life, in general, was definitely adding to her anger surrounding Cadmus, including hurting Kara, unleashing technology into a world unprepared for it, funding mercenaries and making metahumans that made her daily life that much more complicated. But they had made it rather more personal, with what they had just done.
Addy felt her range wash over the courthouse as she finally neared it, and swept her attention quickly over the minds that began appearing, rapid-fire, in her awareness. She picked up on familiar signatures immediately: none that she knew first-hand, but she could definitely tell there were a number of—
She felt it, then: Kara's signature - or, rather, her static-filled not-signature that indicated her intense mental defences - then Lena's signature, and finally Alex's all fell into place, all clustered together, near the collapsed wing of the courthouse. She brushed over them all as relief flooded her body, making her relax fractionally as she looked for - and found no - signs that they were dying, being mentally warped, or any number of other possible issues that could have come up.
She didn't know if they were fine, necessarily, but from what she could tell they were both alive, mentally whole, and present. She had truthfully expected much worse results, possibly a missing Kara or Lena, a half-damaged mind, or any number of other issues. That they met all three criteria felt like a miracle, even if Addy knew, distantly, that it had been more likely for them to survive and remain unmutilated than it was for them to end up that way in the first place.
As quick as she could, Addy angled herself towards where they were, and sped up as much as she reasonably could without hurting the former Riot clone she was carrying with her.
As the courthouse quickly began to grow bigger, so too did the people surrounding it become clearer. D.E.O. agents, cops, and various other first responders washed around the building, moving people along on stretchers towards a temporary medical tent, or redirecting water and other fire fighting aids towards the still-ongoing burn. D.E.O. agents maintained a perimeter around the area, already stringing up caution tape, but mostly standing guard, waiting for any new threat to emerge.
It was no surprise, then, that the agents were the first to notice her approach. Addy was comforted by the fact that their response to noticing her was the same as it always was: agents tensed, hands went to guns, and the hands already holding guns tightened until she could almost hear the creak of their gloves.
A susurration of tension and noise rippled through the crowd as information passed from agent to first responder and more eyes turned to look up at her. Unmasked, out of costume, carrying an unconscious body towards a burning courthouse that, if Addy had to make a guess, was probably the most recent victim of Cadmus. People in that kind of situation were naturally tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop; combat had clearly ended, but most were waiting for it to start anew, unexpectedly and without warning.
Taylor had learned to train a lot of that impulse out of herself while among the Wards. The National City Police Department, and the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs clearly hadn't received the same kind of training. They had noticed her now, and couldn't easily identify her, or at least the ones who could hadn't yet seen her.
Already, people were calling out, demanding she stop, ready to pull guns, to fire on her.
Considering her cargo, Addy made a compromise. She angled her flight down more than ahead, and descended.
She had intended to simply land right next to Kara, expediting the entire situation and avoiding much of the public attention that would come from properly introducing herself, but for all that she was nominally bullet-proof, the clone was not, and if she lost the clone at this point, Addy was not sure what she would do, but she knew it would probably be violent, as even she had limits to her patience.
She aimed her landing for just outside of the perimeter, and when her feet did finally touch down on concrete, her welcoming party was more than ready for her arrival. That much she had done intentionally, slowing her descent on the way down to give the agents a moment to feel secure in their numbers, even if the reality was that, if this was a real combat scenario, they would already either be dead or under her control, and would've been that way well before even one of them saw her.
None of the agents approached, and kept the near five meters of distance between herself and the perimeter line she had afforded them. They had clustered up, bodies near one another, some guns aimed, others just held in a warning.
Silence stretched on for another few seconds before, finally, someone broke it.
"Unidentified alien, metahuman, or whatever you happen to be!" one of the agents called out, his voice half-muffled behind the helmet that covered his face. "You're trespassing on an active crime scene! Turn around and leave, you are not allowed to be here!"
Addy was tired of this. Tired of the grandstanding, tired of having to do a lot of things. There had been times where she had been tempted to just reach out and twist, to get what she wanted, and one of those times was now. She was uncomfortable, she had gotten into a fight recently, and frankly, she did not need another violent encounter.
But she knew better than to act on those impulses. Instead, she breathed in, then out, and tried to ignore how thick each breath really felt. "I am absolutely allowed here," Addy told them, standing perfectly still outside of the movement of her mouth. She made no attempt to look around, no movement of her hands, nothing. She could not risk the loss of the ex-clone. "I understand I am not in costume at this moment, but due to circumstances outside of my control, I was forced to act without it. I work closely with the D.E.O., and with some frequency."
There was another short, uncertain pause.
Then, one of the agents stepped forward a bit, tension ebbing by fractions. "...Administrator?"
"Correct."
The amassed agents relaxed partially, barely, as recognition began to spread. Or, at least she assumed as much; she was relying much on the direction of their focus at the moment, reading it off the surface of their mind, but did not, and would not, bother to dig any deeper. She had not overtaxed herself, but at this point, she did not need to know what was going through someone else's head. She had enough close proximity with the human condition to last her a week, and she wanted nothing more to do with it.
"Shit, calling this in," the same officer who had identified her said, stepping back from the crowd and reaching up to the side of her helmet. She began to speak, though her voice was quickly lost as she stepped further away, Addy only picking up on headquarters, this is— before the voice faded entirely.
The rest of the officers continued to relax in fractions and bursts. Never entirely, of course, they were likely still waiting on an all-clear and that much Addy could approve of, so she latched onto that fact to push away the anger rising in her throat that they were stopping her from getting to Kara and pointing guns at her. She supposed that you couldn't have an interaction with a White Martian - even one far removed from actually talking to them - without realizing the implications of their existence.
It was still fairly sloppy, though. Half of the guns aimed at her dropped away, not holstered, but aimed towards the ground to avoid accidental friendly fire. Shoulders relaxed, and she could even pick up on agents beginning to talk, murmuring among themselves, almost so quiet as to be called subvocalization. She could be virtually anyone, so long as she was a shapeshifter, and they had no telepath nearby to confirm she actually was her, though that would likely be very easy, considering what most people said about their experiences scanning her.
Addy could even notice a few fairly glaring holes in their line now that they had relaxed from being combat-ready. If she was truly an enemy, she could break this entire location through those vulnerabilities alone, scattering the main defensive force and culling those who remained in position.
She'd have to convey to J'onn as much. Perhaps he could impart proper protocol on them, and knowing that he probably would soothed the part of her still very, very angry about their decision to put themselves in her way and threaten her with weapons.
Addy was not in a good mood. She understood that. It did not help actually dealing with it, though.
"So," one of the officers, much too relaxed for his own good, began, "who is that on your shoulder?"
Another officer a few feet away from him looked at her as well, head tilted to one side. "...I think that's a Riot clone," he replied, considering Addy sure wasn't about to. "We have those photos, remember?"
A murmur rose among the crowd, wariness ratcheted up, and Addy bit down on the flare of annoyance, reminding herself that they were plugging those holes in their line in response.
Before anything could come of it, though, the one who had stepped out to contact the D.E.O. shoved her way back into the crowd, raising one hand up and waving it back and forth. "Ask your superior officers," she commanded, her voice blunt and hard enough that it had the other agents pulling away from her, trying to avoid being targeted. "On your own time, preferably, because now sure as shit isn't the time for it. You're clear for entry, Administrator, and Director J'onn is inbound."
She couldn't pick up on J'onn in her range, but that would likely change, in that case. It was a relief he was coming, too, as it moved her major goal up quite considerably.
The crowd of agents, at last, pulled apart, dispersing back into units as they pulled away to reinforce the other parts of the perimeter they had been drawn away from due to her approach. Before long, there was only a scattering of them left, with the one who had presumably contacted J'onn among them.
"I'll bring you over to Supergirl," the agent said, bobbing her head back as she turned.
Addy, quite comfortable not saying anything at this juncture, merely nodded and floated back into the air, closing the distance between herself and her unneeded guide before touching down once more, and walking next to her.
They moved at a marcher's pace through the destruction that had been wrought on the courthouse and the area surrounding it. Much of the grass, probably already not that well-watered, was scorched and blackened, leaving the soil loose and easily picked up by each breeze that passed by. The fire she had seen them dousing on her way over looked to be completely out, or at least very close to it, though they hadn't stopped pouring water on the smouldering ruins yet, so it probably just looked that way. The medical area she had spotted, but not looked too closely at, was rather worse off than she expected, with about two-dozen stretchers occupied by a variety of people, all of them wounded and ranging in severity from what looked to be blunt force trauma and minor burns all the way up to a man who clearly just had his leg amputated.
People in suits - official-looking ones, at that - spoke with the police near the entrance to the building, the glass and metal doors having melted into a pile of slag and debris. Some of the debris had been removed, just enough that firefighters could make their way in and out, but even that had merely been discarded into the grass next to the pathway that connected up to the door. She could even spot a judge, wearing his dull uniform, having his arm put into a splint by a paramedic.
Before long, though, the path the woman led her on made them all fall out of sight, and instead, she got to see the extent of the destruction around her. The collapsed wing of the building had debris surrounding it that, rather clearly, indicated some kind of explosive doing the damage. Not an explosive fired in from the outside, such as a missile, but likely a bomb that had been planted and then detonated from within, shattering the walls out and causing the roof to drop in from above. Chunks of ruined marble and splintered wood jutted up from the pile of rubble like spikes, all of it scorched black.
Turning away from it, Addy, at last, saw the people she came here for. Next to three vans, arranged in a rough u-shape, was Kara, sitting on a chunk of overturned concrete, and looking distinctly bloody. Red stains covered both of her arms, as well as one leg and her shoulder, each of those stains not from acts of violence Kara had done - which Addy would have preferred to what she was seeing now - but rather from distinct, clear bullet holes, each of them too bloody to indicate if they had healed or not yet. There were other bullet holes, she thought, around Kara's abdomen and up one thigh, but they had already been covered over by bandages.
That Kara was injured at all sent a jolt of harsh panic up Addy's spine, but she couldn't let it overwhelm her, not now.
Lena stood next to Kara, helping to apply a bandage around one of the bullet wounds on her bicep. Lena had a bruise that went from the left side of her chin, up her cheek, all the way up to the space beneath her eye, a bruise that had started to turn a painful shade of purple. The bruise extended into a ring around her neck, with clear points where fingers had clenched down, in an attempt to choke her, and she stood almost uncomfortably, like she couldn't put her full weight on her left leg.
The last of them, Alex, was also helping Kara, wrapping bandages around another bullet wound on her arm. She was the only one out of the three who didn't look like she had lost a fight, though her uniform was caked in half-crusted blood, the majority of which was likely from Kara.
Heads turned as she and the other agent approached, and Kara especially, who made a move to rise, her knee buckling, her mouth opening—
Alex planted both of her feet and leaned her entire weight against Kara, for what little it would do. It still made Kara stop, eyes flicking back and forth. "Supergirl," she said with such glacial slowness and anger that it was almost tangible. "Sit. Down."
Kara sat.
"Thank you, Agent Chauncy, you may go."
The agent who had led her here raised her hand in a salute and quickly departed, her pace rather quicker than the one she used to bring her here, to the point where it was almost a jog.
Kara's eyes never left her, though, her face cycling through a number of emotions before seemingly deciding on guilt. "Administrator," she said the word like she did Addy's real name: with considerable familiarity. It made the hurt in her voice all the worse for it. "I'm so, so sorry, I heard you calling out for me, with your connection, but I just, I couldn't—"
Addy would not have wanted her to show up at L-Corp like this in the first place. She almost erupted, then, the anger bristling at her neck, the way a lot of things today had gone distinctly wrong and she wasn't fixing all of those wrong things quickly enough. But she didn't. She breathed in, then out, though most of it went through her teeth. "How are you injured?" she asked instead, as calmly as she could manage.
Alex answered for Kara. "Kryptonite bullets," she explained, working on the next wound with steady hands, never looking away from Kara. "Fired from a high-calibre pistol. I couldn't identify the make, but it sounded like a cannon. Each of them passed right through, which is the only reason Supergirl is still on her feet. If there'd been one that we would've had to extract out of her? We wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd be busy trying to stop her from bleeding out with her powers inactive."
Kara's lips pinched tightly.
"She tried to get up and fly over to you a few times, and I had to stop her," Alex continued, looking up from Kara and towards her. For a few moments, her eyes were unfocused, lost in thought, before they suddenly sharpened and narrowed in on her, Alex's eyes flicking across her body, likely in search of injuries. "I'm sorry I had to stop her, but she couldn't go into another engagement the way she—...Administrator, why aren't you concealing your identity? Where is your costume?"
Lena froze. Kara froze. Why it only seemed to click for them now that Addy was very much not hiding her face at the moment, she could probably chalk up to shock, but even the response itself brought on a wave of tiredness that Addy had no real solution for.
"At home," she answered slowly, "and I opted not to hide my face, as it is very unlikely I have a secret identity anymore, Agent Danvers."
Her words seemed to hit Kara like an invisible blow, which wasn't the intention. Kara curled into herself a little more, tightening her fists until Lena reached down and gently touched her left hand, causing it, then her right, to uncurl and go loose in her lap.
Addy held back the urge to thank Lena for defusing that situation. She could do so later, when it would not set off anything else. "Riot attacked L-Corp," she began, and that brought Lena back into the conversation, head flicking up to stare worriedly at her. "He attacked with approximately thirty-five clones, though some may have escaped or left after securing the building. He used them to hold the building hostage, and found a method to tell whenever I used my own psychic powers, threatening to kill June, who he had captured, if I tried 'anything'. I managed to take him down without using my powers by navigating through the building by way of stealth, but I did not do so before he used the intercom system to tell anyone and everyone in the building both that I was an alien and my secret identity."
"Oh god, June—" Lena started.
Addy forestalled her. "She is... physically whole," she decided on saying, which did not seem to assuage Lena's concerns all that much, now that she was saying it. "I will not say okay, as she seemed rattled after her experience, but she is alive, as is everyone else in the building, though some, like Jess, were roughed up in the takeover."
Lena settled minutely at her words, eyes staring off into the middle distance for a half-second before sharply refocusing on her. "I could put out a gag order, Administrator, on everyone in the building," she began, reaching into one pocket and pulling out her phone, only to pause as the device came out in eight separate pieces that fell from between the gaps in her fingers like sand. Lena just stared at the chunks of screen, circuitry, and wires blankly. "Oh. That would explain why I wasn't getting any calls about this."
"Even if you had a phone to do so, Lena, I do not think it would stop the leak," Addy told her, not unkindly. Lena glanced back up at her as she spoke, looking a whole lot more weary. "There weren't just L-Corp employees present at the time, as you know."
Lena's face scrunched, turned contemplative, then scrunched even harder. Finally, she opened her mouth. "Shit," she declared, with a kind of finality.
"I should've been there, helping," Kara blurted in a rush, sounding almost furious. "I—"
"You would not have been able to do anything, Supergirl," Addy told her, because that was the truth. "You are injured. Perhaps not as heavily as I first believed, but injured. You could not have saved me there, and I am more than capable of managing my own issues. It was, if anything, my own fault for not keeping up my psychic awareness at all times, for the sake of my own comfort. I will be rectifying that in the future."
Kara opened her mouth—
Alex cut her off. "Moving away from blame, which none of you have," she said, glancing between the three of them. "We'll deal with the identity issues as soon as we can, but I really need to ask: why do you have an unconscious Riot clone on your shoulder?"
"To be very abridged for the sake of not bogging this conversation down: once I was in a position to use my psychic abilities without resulting in June being killed, I used it to tear out the psychic connections all of the Riot clones had - and I will need to update J'onn on the exact nature of that connection, now that I've identified it - and then I took all of those fragments and wove them together into a stable, if nascent mind, as Riot's own psychic connection borders on not needing a body to exist. I then implanted said mind into this clone's body to prevent it from catastrophically decomposing, and have thus preserved the memories of this Riot clone, which should contain every memory Riot as a whole has experienced, and therefore will allow me to heavily compromise Cadmus, as they used him as an information relay, among many other things."
There was a stretch of silence in response to her explanation.
So, Addy decided to continue. "To begin with, however, I would ask that you do not insist that this entity is Riot when I return their consciousness to them, in the event you - or anyone else within your command structure - must interact with them. I have done some adjustments to ensure the new mind I crafted remains separate from the physical mind of the body, while still being able to draw on those memories for context, language, and so forth," she told them, watching for reactions and finding none. Or, at least, none she could recognize. "They will still have Riot's memories, but they will not perceive themselves as Riot. If you reinforce their identity by calling them Riot, however, they will likely naturally default into the neural pathways already available for them and truly become Riot, just extant Riot's current, much more widespread existence, being a clone in virtually everything but connection."
Kara and Lena spared a glance at one another, while Alex's expression took on a pinched and almost exasperated quality.
"I'm not explaining this one," Alex said, unprompted and with considerable fatigue.
Kara held up both of her hands. "I had to do the talk when the last incident came around, so..."
Lena looked at them both. "I don't think I'm even qualified to begin to touch on this topic."
"Then we leave it to J'onn," Alex said, and the other two nodded.
Addy did not understand what just occurred, but was much too frustrated to bother to try. This did, however, feel very pointed, so as she had done many times before, Addy opted to move the conversation elsewhere. "What happened here? Last I was aware, this courthouse was in one piece, and not on fire."
Lena, taking the divergence for what it was, glanced her way. "It got attacked. We were settling in for the initial court proceedings, opening statements, things along those lines, when a team of metahumans attacked," she explained, occasionally wincing whenever she had to move her jaw too much. "Supergirl said you've seen them before, but they appeared out of nowhere, probably because of some kind of invisibility power. Hank Henshaw was with them, too, but he didn't have any new powers from the last time he attacked me."
Unbidden, one of Lena's hands reached up to touch her throat, and her voice trailed off, eyes distant. After a moment, she blinked, focus returned, and she coughed awkwardly and, by the looks of it, rather painfully at that.
"Maybe metahuman abilities are incompatible with prosthetics like he has," she said, fleetingly, before shaking her head. "Whatever the case was, Supergirl arrived half a minute later, but the one with the geokinetic abilities - Mantle, I think - and Henshaw fought her. Riot clones swarmed and attacked people trying to flee, and someone was definitely messing with emotions. I am willing to admit I... am bad with violence, and I freeze up, but I was hit with a burst of fear so intense I couldn't physically move, even to hide."
"I couldn't really tell myself, I'm pretty immune to mind-altering effects, but I was a lot angrier when I arrived than I normally am," Kara said, picking up where Lena left off. "But, yeah. I was fighting back Mantle and Henshaw, and I got a really good punch on Henshaw, broke one of the devices in his eye, and he got really angry. That's how I ended up getting shot—the top of his wrist kind of unfolded and out came a gun, and he just sprayed bullets at me until he ran out. He hit some of them, but not a lot, and since they were Kryptonite, I... it took me out. I remember being in a lot of pain, then hitting the ground.
"Anyway, I couldn't move, but I could see," Kara continued, overcoming whatever lingering fear had been in her voice. "When I was out, the team of metahumans and Henshaw just went over, plucked up Lillian—who was, uh, busy screaming insults at Len—Miss Luthor, and then they left. Oh, they also set off a bomb, which set most of the building on fire and is why all of that is rubble. Thankfully the area was evacuated, and it was mostly the secretary offices, but... they were definitely trying to kill someone."
"That was probably my mother's doing. They didn't need to set the bomb off, but it's definitely the kind of spiteful thing she'd do," Lena said, her voice an odd combination of tired and relieved. "I'm not glad this happened. People are hurt, I'm hurt, and it's awful and completely unacceptable that my mother is free, but... The whole thing about her calling me to visit her in prison? To 'make amends'? The guilt trips from her lawyers? It's good to know it was all bullshit. Even if it wasn't bullshit, then it was at the very least heavily manipulative, I was... worried my mother might've actually been misguided. But then she told Hank Henshaw to strangle me, and I think that puts all other conversations to rest, considering he very nearly killed me before Supergirl tore him off of me."
"We do now have a way to track her down, theoretically," Addy pointed out, glancing between the three of them. "The body I have with me should have at least some of the memories of this exact incident, as well as any planning they included Riot on to fulfil this operation. Riot's memories should give context."
Lena's face brightened a little. "That's a relief."
"It is, yes," J'onn said, from behind.
Addy blinked, froze, then checked her awareness and—yes, there he was. She had just been so preoccupied with the relief that Kara and Lena were alive that she'd stopped paying attention. That was a bad decision, but one she could work on in her own time. Turning around, she found J'onn watching the four of them from next to a vehicle. His face was grim, tight, eyes focused and no sign of the pain he once wore in his body.
He was fully cured, the treatment had been completely successful, she knew that. But she hadn't seen it, not until now. Not really.
"I believe it's about time we debriefed, because clearly, a lot has happened."
"...And by then, Administrator was flying in—and, well—she already told you what happened at L-Corp," Kara finished, her voice trailing off into uncertainty.
Addy watched her from across the meeting table, and saw the way she sat uncomfortably, visibly weak in the limbs and in pain, no matter how much she tried to hide it. It was affecting Kara's focus, and though Alex said she'd be better with some time under a few sun lamps - which Kara hadn't yet been able to do - it was still not fun to see Kara in any amount of distress in the first place.
J'onn had brought them all back to the D.E.O. headquarters in National City, and just as quickly sequestered them away in one of its various, uniform and bland meeting rooms. At this moment, the people present were Kara, Lena, Alex, J'onn and Vasquez, as well as, of course, herself. The former clone Addy had brought with her had been relocated to a containment cell until they could do something with them, mostly at J'onn's request, though Addy hadn't disagreed with the decision.
J'onn was taking the news they brought to him with... recognizably more stress. He was pacing at the front of the meeting table, not fast, not even all that hurried, but he did pace, movement and rhythm that had started when Addy explained the situation surrounding her secret identity, and had not stopped throughout Lena, and then Kara's recollection of the attack on the courthouse. His face was scrunched, uncomfortable as he processed all they were telling him.
It didn't take long for him to stop, this time around, but the expression on his face never changed. He turned not towards Kara, but to Addy herself, looking towards her. "Given that the D.E.O. gave you full permission to do whatever you needed to do to extract the knowledge of your secret identity from those who have been made aware of it, what are the chances that your identity still remains a secret after you do so?"
The people around the room did not, evidently, like what J'onn had just asked. She saw Kara's face pinch into an odd, complex expression, half-worry, half-discomfort, and a sprinkle of other things. Lena looked less than thrilled about the prospect of Addy extracting any kind of information from her employees, but Alex and Vasquez both didn't so much as twitch at the massive violation of human rights that Addy had just been theoretically allowed to commit.
Unfortunately, as she considered the question, she knew it still wouldn't be enough. "Exceedingly minimal," she told him, and watched as J'onn's face twitched sharply, but nothing more. After a long, protracted moment of silence, she continued with her explanation. "Had I opted to do so when I was in a position to use my powers without endangering June, I would have put the chances of my identity remaining secret in the high eighty percent, perhaps upwards of the mid-nineties. But that was because Riot was keeping people within the building, whether to be used as collateral or simply because he could. Now? The building has been evacuated, and even if I did try to track down every mind in the L-Corp building - which isn't a guarantee, as I would only have the memory of the individual psychic presences to go on without doing a large-scale deep scan for information and that, I should say, is not an area I am good at being subtle in, especially when taking from multiple individuals at once - it is entirely likely this information has already left people's heads and has been entered into technology. This isn't even bringing up the people who saw me while I was flying over—I doubt many of them got clear photos of my face, but I was coming from L-Corp in a white lab coat, with most of my identifying traits visible."
"Then why didn't you wipe the building when you had the chance?" J'onn asked, no sign of condemnation in his voice.
Addy thought about it. "Partially because wiping the entire building, but failing to completely do so, would implicate me heavily and likely cause larger issues for Lena, if someone was to find out. I also was preoccupied with other things, including Kryptonian technology, the physical state of my colleagues, and other dangers that might present themselves, not to mention coming to the courthouse. If I had permission at the time, I would have almost certainly done it, but truth be told I did not consider it for that long before dismissing it. I did not want to make things worse than they already were."
She paused, thinking over it for a few more moments.
"Additionally, Lena expressly said such a thing was against the rules," she added.
It did not feel good saying that, really. She did not want her secret identity public. She did not want to have to deal with it, and something very deeply rankled at her that she had barely dwelled on the notion of doing so before dismissing it. There was protocol for this kind of thing, ingrained protocol about ensuring secrecy remains, and yet... she had not felt the urge to do it. It bothered her.
J'onn's lips twitched into a frown, before relaxing. He sighed. "I'll have to get you in contact with a few teams, public relations teams mostly, to help manage the fallout from this," he said, leaving no room for Addy to reply. "And there will be fallout from this, and it's mostly up to you to make sure it doesn't become too bad. We have to curate how you go public, now that the cat's out of the bag."
After another moment, he shook his head, refocusing on Addy once more. "And the clone, can you explain what you can do with it? What you intended, even, Administrator."
That was much easier. "Riot clones have what I believe are perfectly replicated minds. Any one mind has the same stored memories as the other, whether because it is created with them already there, or because, due to the nature of Riot's sensorium, all experiences are shared and recorded in the neurological tissue as they are with humans. Otherwise, there would be too much dissonance for how I believe his power works, the psychic network would reject the body if it diverged, and while humans can survive a mind rejecting things about their body - and that is the cause of a great number of things - something like a clone body cannot." She paused, considering the rest of what she intended to tell them, and how to put it in a way that would not cause a repeat of the Indigo discussion she was forced to have with Kara. She didn't think the situation was the same at all, but nonetheless, she wanted to avoid the chance of it anyway. "With a mind in it, one that is not technically Riot and that I have made aware of that fact, I can delve into the mind and extract those memories on my own without needing to manage either Riot's personality or a brain dead body which is predisposed towards violent chemical decomposition in the event of irregularities. I only just barely managed to keep the body I implanted the mind in stable for three seconds without the mind, and that was because I was radiating energy where it expected me to radiate it, but it was entirely possible those bodies have other safeguards that will activate if certain things aren't met, requirements I would be aware of, and would result in the loss of the mind for later use."
"Which is why you didn't just inhabit the body itself and draw the memories out that way," J'onn said, nodding along.
"That is part of it," Addy agreed, considering how best to put it. "Another part is that I do not like having to dwell that deeply within a body that is not my own, and that divergent from my own, for that matter. Additionally, by having it be self-sustaining, I can come and go as I need to, nor am I at risk of a connection disruption removing the body in an instant, and it's easier to interface with a mind which has a psychic presence that I can work from, rather than scraping at the neural matter like a primitive. Also, I did not want or entirely had the time or the focus to spare on both piloting myself, managing potential threats, and so forth, while also downloading memories from a body that would be, at best, difficult to manage."
"And you are certain this isn't Riot?" J'onn clarified, looking closely at her, scrutinizing. "Administrator, I truly do trust you, but the psychic presence that 'former clone' has is virtually identical to Riot's."
"You're picking up on the nature, J'onn, not the quality of the psychic intent," she told him, ignoring the visible narrowing of J'onn's eyes at that comment. "Riot's nature is as a psychic entity, flexible and with nearly the capacity to exist independently from any kind of hardware. I am, while absolutely advanced, similar in that respect, the flexibility and capacity to exist extant a single body, or not be tied to one, as your psychic presence is. The only difference here is that I need power, and if I did not have that power, or the majority of my hardware, I would die within seconds."
J'onn paused, then nodded slowly. "Anything else you can give us on this?"
Addy did have a few things. "The question you've asked—is the entity in the cell Riot, is a question that will never have a good answer. I, personally, do not think they are Riot, as my own understanding of the flexibility of personhood is something born from how my species operated," she explained, thinking a bit more on it. "But, to be literal, it is a psychic mind made up of approximately the same psychic base that Riot's own psychic presence is, tied to a body with Riot's memories, and though I've made adjustments to block those two aspects from converging, you could argue that it is still Riot, albeit one I have confused deeply with what I've done. More than that, though, the former clone could become Riot very easily, given you want to reinforce the notion of personhood and emphasize that connection. I have not cut the memories off, as it would cut them off from me as well, but unless you make the ex-clone specifically think it is Riot, it probably won't become Riot, or identify as such. Nonetheless, it still could."
She paused again, working the last of what she had to say over in her head, and deciding it would probably not cause any more issues. Probably. "Ideally, I would encourage you to further emphasize the disconnect between this ex-clone, and is why I refer to them as such and not as a current clone or Riot himself, but it is truthfully up to you and the D.E.O. as a whole. I believe you would benefit more from having an independent entity which could develop into a decent person, given time, and preferably I would want you to force the transition after I have worked through their mind, but beyond that you may do as you wish once I have acquired the data. I do not, truthfully, care, especially after what has happened today."
"So you have given us someone who could potentially be a threat, has all the memories of said threat, but we cannot tell if they are a threat or not, until they tell us as much, and they could be lying about that," J'onn replied, not sounding terribly thrilled about the matter.
"Correct," Addy said, blandly.
J'onn sighed, reaching up to rub at the bridge of his nose. Slowly, though, he relaxed, and the weariness in both posture and expression faded back into muted signs of exasperation and disappointment on his face. His eyes turned away from Addy, but not for long, flicking between both herself and Kara. "Now that we have that out of the way, this does need to be brought up: both of you are going to need to move out of your apartment."
A shock of something like fury rode up through Addy's mind before she could put a stop to it. She almost rose under the intensity of it, and felt other eddying waves of emotion. Betrayal, frustration, anger, enough in both number and variance that she could feel herself quickly becoming overwhelmed. "What?"
She looked around the table and saw nobody else who felt the way she did. J'onn looked at her calmly, tiredly, but with no surprise. Lena and Alex both looked tense, but again, not surprised, and Vasquez was giving her a worried look. Worst of all, though, was Kara, who just looked resigned.
Addy's mind took that moment to fit the pieces together. Her identity being public impacted her privacy, her security, and more, and with it public she could not remain where she lived now. She knew that. Some part of her had always known that, but she had seemingly intentionally repressed the concept, possibly as a way to stop this exact same emotion from overwhelming her.
But now the issue was staring her in the face, and Addy could feel panic building in her chest, alongside all the anger she had been fighting to keep from impacting her decisions today. She swallowed once, then twice, but the lump in her throat didn't abate.
Anger replaced panic briefly, but it was pointed at herself. She should've just wiped those minds, screw the consequences, but—
John spoke, breaking her train of thought. "With your identity as public as it is, anyone near you will be put under heightened scrutiny, and that especially includes Supergirl. While Miss Luthor's device has helped keep her identity much more secure, there are only so many people in National City who look as she does, and it would not take too much, not with existing photographs already on the internet, to make the connection."
Anger flared again, and words burst before they could entirely be considered. "I disagree. There are more blonde, pale-skinned women in California than there are virtually any other demographic group."
Alex poorly muffled a snort. The fact that she was taking humour out of this was not appreciated, and when Addy turned to look at her, that sentiment perhaps showed, as any and all humour vanished from her expression the second she noticed Addy's face.
Addy almost reached up to touch her face, to see if it had contorted itself, but didn't. It would be improper and if anything else went wrong, like impropriety, Addy was not certain she could manage to control herself.
"The risk is too high, Administrator. I do not like that your identity is going public, I am in fact very upset about it and how it's going to impact your ability to integrate with human society and simply live as a person," his words matched his tone, something gravelly and deeply sad written through it, but Addy was at such a high point of anger that it almost felt worse because she recognized the tone in his voice. "You came to us for that reason, to join society, and later became a help to our world, and this hurts that severely. That said, we cannot risk Supergirl's secret identity, not now, as it is as important as your own, and getting you both into a location which is more secure than the apartment you live in until the heat dies down, is crucial.
"This... isn't up for debate, either," J'onn continued, refusing to even give her a chance to speak. "I am not your boss, neither you nor Supergirl, but this is a demand coming down from the highest members of government. They have a vested interest in ensuring identities such as Supergirl's remain separate from civilian ones, on account of the relief it provides people who can maintain two lives. They also want to avoid the cascading messes that follow situations like these. It's already too late for you, Administrator, but we have protocol, and I need you to work with me here on this and follow along."
Addy seethed. If not for the anger, she might even consider it a novel experience, the kind of aching, visceral hate for the situation, the rage at her things being moved around, the fact that everything was changing and she could do nothing about it. But words were almost beyond her at this point, so she didn't say anything. She didn't want to move, her apartment was her home, it was the place she became herself! She liked it for all the weird parts of it, like how she could hear Kara snoring at night, the openness in the apartment that let sound propagate as it wanted to. She liked the way the mornings bled in through the windows and lit up the apartment, with its lack of walls.
She liked the way she woke up next to brickwork, to the early dawn sometimes, and to sunlight other times. She liked her divider, she liked her space, and she didn't know what to do because that had to change.
Kara, across from her, sighed tiredly. "Mom did say we should move sometime soon," she said, her voice no less resigned than her expression. "I am gonna miss the apartment though. It was so cheap."
"There's a time limit for this kind of thing. We already have agents around your apartment, and while there have been no break-in attempts yet, that is almost certainly not going to last into the future," J'onn said, after Kara was done talking. "There have only been some leaks of Administrator's identity on sketchy websites nobody trusts as of yet, but it won't be long before it's all over Twitter. This needs to be done, as fast as we can manage it."
"I can help with that," Lena offered, glancing around the room, lingering only briefly on Addy before refocusing on J'onn. "I have properties I own, entire chunks of apartment buildings too, and one whole apartment building though you definitely don't want to live there. It's being renovated. Moving Supergirl and Administrator into one of them, even if it's only temporary, is within my power, and I can waive the rent entirely, or until one of you feels like you need to pay it. I... you two have helped me so much, and you're both part of my life now. After all you've done for me? This is the least I can do."
And that was too much. Addy rose, fully, watching as people turned to look at her. Her fingers had warped the table where she had been unknowingly gripping it, even her prosthetic, which she had to really push to start accessing the higher levels of strength in it. She pulled her fingers free from the divots she made with them, made her face as blank as she could manage, and tried not to scream. She could not do this, it was too much, she couldn't think, could barely breathe. It was too much. She needed to remove herself, or else lose control.
"I cannot speak about this," she said, her own voice feeling stiff and robotic, even beyond how it normally was. "Supergirl may figure this out and come back to me later, but I cannot. Not right now."
Sympathetic looks were shared.
Addy very nearly screamed in rage. She muffled it until all that came out was a slight, teakettle-like noise that bloomed from her chest and earned a few concerned looks.
"I do not want to move, but understand rationally it is for the best. I am also on a timetable, and would prefer if you would let me begin gathering information from the target I brought in." Anything would work as a distraction at this point, and maybe if she dealt with Cadmus, this issue would go away.
No. Even that was too delusional for her. She knew this wasn't going away. She had made the choices she had, and now she was being punished for it.
"I need to dredge information before anyone identifies that I can do so in the first place, and it all becomes worthless. Please escort me now, or I will make my own way down there alone."
J'onn looked at her for a long moment, and his features softened, but she felt nothing at the sight. She was feeling a whole lot of nothing right now, as the alternative was feeling everything and possibly destroying everything around her. He nodded once, then turned to Alex. "Agent Danvers, help Supergirl and Miss Luthor figure their side of this out." He turned back to her. "Administrator, with me."
Addy pushed her chair away, pulse and anger spiking at the screech it made as it dragged against the floor. She breathed in, out, in, out, but no matter how deep she made it, each of them felt shallow.
But she did not destroy anything. And that was, really, more than she could ask for, considering the impulses she was feeling right now.
Addy walked with J'onn down a long stretch of uniform-lit, gratingly bland hallway. The colours were all the same, all evidence of someone who had their prefrontal cortex removed via buzz-saw being used as the main aesthetic inspiration for government spaces. She hated it. She hated it a lot.
But she walked. One foot in front of the other. Tap. Tap. Tap. The rhythms were all off-beat, the space was all grating on her nerves, and she kept getting the sensation of tearing through metal on the tips of her fingers, tempting her to do the same to her surroundings.
But she did not. Because if she did, this would take more time, and if it took any more time, Addy would simply get worse.
She knew that. So she walked.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Walking wasn't easy like this. She felt stiff, she was stiff, too tense to the point where each movement was jagged and jerky. Her identity was revealed, she was going to have to move and all of her comforts were up in flames. No more couch times with Kara in the apartment, no more relaxing with Saturday on her bed, staring out through the window in the bricks, watching the streets below. Change came, and Addy loathed it.
Maybe it just hadn't sunk in yet until now what being in the public would actually do to her privacy and comforts. It was echoing into every aspect of her life, and it left her wondering how much more it was going to ruin before everything was all said and done with. She didn't want to move, but she was going to have to. She liked working at L-Corp, but would she even have a job when she got back there? Lena had a lot of power, and might be able to forestall a firing, but the board probably didn't want her in their building, whether because she was an alien or because she was a superhero. It wouldn't matter.
They might outvote her.
Would she still have friends? Serling clearly knew she was Administrator beforehand, but knew to keep it close to her chest. Emil and June, though? She didn't know. Kelso was nice to her, and he was one of the only other people she really interacted with in L-Corp outside of Lena, but would he remain that way, now that he and everyone else knew? Her Twitter account for geese was attached to her actual, official - and for some unspeakably stupid reason mandatory - professional Twitter account, which listed her profession, job, name and more. Would she lose her geese, too? Would people start using it to contact Administrator, instead of Addy Queen, who just liked geese?
She hated it. Hated it furiously and deeply.
She didn't see J'onn move, but rather felt his attention slip over to her through her own powers. Her eyes were trained right ahead, down the length of the hallway, so she didn't linger overly long on any wall, at risk of her giving in to impulse and ripping a hole in it.
"I can't tell you everything will be fine," J'onn started, as though that was some kind of wisdom. Of course he couldn't. Nobody could. Things were out of her control and if they were out of her control, she most certainly could not trust anyone else to have it in their control. "There was... a considerable adjustment period for me, after my own identity became public knowledge. Some of it was good. I received a number of fascinating phone calls from anthropologists who wanted to know more about my people's history, to get their first real glimpse into the inner workings of a culture that can be called truly alien to their own. I shared with them what I was comfortable sharing, but... it was still an adjustment, and not everyone was so kind or considerate."
Addy said nothing, because anything she would say would be hurtful and though she was angry and feeling rather destructive she did not feel that way towards J'onn. Yes, he was the one making her move, no, it was not his fault.
It was hers. Queen Administrator, Addy Queen, flouting security protocols. That was what made the anger so intense, truthfully.
J'onn accepted her silence and continued. "Even if I'm not your boss, even if you're not aligned with the D.E.O., I will do everything in my power, Administrator, to make sure this is better for you. That this will be as comfortable of a transition as I can manage with the power I have. But this will be a transition, and there is little either of us can do to change that without a miracle. You are not alone, I am here, Supergirl is here, Agent Danvers, Vasquez and Miss Luthor. You will never be alone, we can help."
She listened, and a distant part of her recognized that this line of conversation might've soothed her, on any other day. But something about where she was, mentally, made it so that she couldn't even appreciate the attempt to calm her down. She was too angry, too upset, and nothing penetrated past that. It was a surreal experience, being able to rationally identify as much while still being so upset anyway.
"It was my morality that prevented me from acting on what should've been standard protocol. People should not know my identity, and keeping secrets is ingrained in me. I felt a moment of intense glee when I told you about the cycle, when we first met, because it was the first time I could do so without being violently erased from existence." She breathed in, raggedly, then out, and it came a bit more smooth than the last time. "I barely thought about what I was doing, I did not expect consequences, and now here they are. I can do nothing but weather them. Everything is wrong, because I was sloppy and inaccurate."
"Administrator, truth be told I was really quite relieved when you told me you didn't just retroactively wipe knowledge about you from an entire building of civilians," J'onn said.
Addy froze a bit, turned slightly to get him into her line of sight, even if it was only out of the corner of her eye. "But you frowned when I said as much."
J'onn smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. "You're better at reading emotions nowadays, but not perfect. I frowned because I felt relieved you didn't do so, and then realized you put yourself in danger to accomplish that, which made me unhappy about still being relieved."
Addy said nothing to that.
Neither did J'onn.
They made the rest of the trip in silence.
The door to the cell was located at the end of the hallway, accompanied by about ten other duplicates of the same cell structure next to it and on the wall opposite to it. All but one of them were currently empty, their spaces visible through the force shield that served as an unmovable door between whoever was within and the building beyond them.
The former Riot clone was still asleep, stretched out carefully over a metal cot. They had been arranged by agents, most likely, to keep all arms and legs inside of the cot, rather than simply being dropped in place and everyone walking off. She could appreciate the professionalism they displayed, even if she didn't know she could match them at this point in her life.
Reaching out to the ex-clone's mind, even with the shield up, she found the various nerves she had pinched and began to untangle them back into their normal state of affairs.
J'onn, meanwhile, occupied himself with the keypad next to the entrance, tapping in a password and then pressing his thumb up against a scanner. A second later, the keypad dinged, shining green, as the force shield covering the entrance dissipated into the open air.
He looked at her as he pulled away from the keypad. "It'll get better, Administrator, I promise you that."
Addy shrugged it off, already stepping forward, reaching out to the waking mind before her. "I will make it better."
"And we will be with you every step of the way."
Addy ignored that, and felt an odd combination of frustration and relief as those words washed over her and started to soothe the hurt part of her, the one that wanted her to scream and stomp and tear things apart until all of the energy was out of her.
J'onn stepped in behind her, but remained in the threshold of the door, though she used her psychic awareness to sense that much. She didn't bother to look back, didn't look away from the ex-clone as they began to fully emerge from sleep.
First, they blinked, sluggish and slow, eyes confused, but like most things, focus returned suddenly, and the former clone jerked, harshly, fear, panic, and confusion replacing the sleepy expression on their face. They turned, saw her, flinched again, opened their mouth, and—
Addy interrupted them. "I am going to explain to you what's going to happen. You will listen, and you will comply. I am going to look through your memories to gather important data to take down Cadmus. This will likely be a prolonged process, possibly taking hours to conclude, depending on the density of data. You will experience these memories with me, but I will be keeping you separate from the memories so that you cannot influence them." Gayle had a leg up in some ways, in that Addy hadn't been able to really do that with her, but still, it made this process easier. "This will go much easier if you do not resist this process. You can resist, and it will, truthfully, slow me down, but I will push back harder, and with it will come headaches, bad ones. You will annoy me in the process, as well."
She almost told the ex-clone that she was in a bad mood, so they shouldn't do that, but held back on it. That was her anger, that was the impulse to threaten and scream. She knew better. Giving nothing away was better than threats; fear was all the more potent from the unknown, and anticipation did much to amplify that effect.
The ex-clone pushed themselves upright, not looking thrilled at her statement, but Addy didn't exactly care about their feelings on the matter. Nonetheless, they did seem to process they weren't really in a position to argue, and so made no attempt to attack her, run away, or argue that she shouldn't be doing that.
It was also possible they were just still dazed from being created from nothing, and were trying to process reality in a way that wasn't painful to experience.
Addy didn't know. Her ability to parse most expressions had vanished with the rise of her anger.
"Can I ask you one thing? Before any of this happens?" The ex-clone suddenly asked, focusing on her. "I need to know something."
Addy stared blankly at them. "Do not stall. I will, however, answer if I feel it's necessary."
"What's my name?"
They asked it as though Addy would have an answer for them, as though she would give a name to something which could perfectly decide on one for themselves. "That is up for you to decide. I gave myself a name, so you can do the same."
That did not seem to impress the former clone.
Addy didn't care.
Before they could open their mouth to complain, Addy drove a psychic spike into their brain, and funnelled herself inside.
It was time to see what exactly she was working against, and how best to break Riot when the time came.
Addy was as gentle as she could bring herself to be as she swam through the memories and consciousness of the former clone. She felt their presence, too, connected to her own, following her, but as she had told them, she boxed it away, pressed it outside of interference range, and dove deeper.
She combed through memories, looking for a natural place to start. The frayed threads of thoughts and histories, the places where the mind - and the personality alongside it - naturally defined the beginning of its story. For her, it was countless thousands of years ago, separated from this universe.
For Riot? For Frederick Murphy? It was when he was thirteen, for that was when he became homeless.
Frederick Murphy had been born to a mother who would never become a fixture in his life. He had memories of her, sparse and almost non-existent, which aborted suddenly at around the age of six, when one day he simply stopped having memories of her whatsoever. He didn't know if she'd left suddenly, or given him some explanation for it, or how he even reacted after it, and a part of him knew better than to dig, seeing the repressed memories for what they were: a trauma response.
But he grew up without her, from thereon. His father was like his mother, but remained in his orbit: neglectful, disinterested in Frederick's own hobbies, and someone who very visibly - and vocally - disliked the responsibility that came along with having a child. Whenever he could, he got drunk, to not have that responsibility for Frederick anymore, to leave it with a child just in elementary school.
To his credit, Frederick did rise to the task. When his father didn't cook, clean, or do really anything, Frederick tried his best, often failing, but he got good at it as the years went by. He learned quickly that not doing it was an easy way to get his ass beaten, too, so it became a default state of affairs: his father would do a few things around the house every week, minimal things, and complain about every last bit of it. Maybe it might be microwaving dinner one night, maybe it might be cleaning up a spill he made himself, but each and every one of them was accompanied by the man loudly telling Frederick how grateful he should be about it.
And Frederick did the rest. He did everything his father didn't, because the other option was to get bruises, whether from fists or thrown objects. The abuse became another rhythm in his life, but it was an odd, infrequent rhythm, one that left him ever on the edge of his own life, isolated from even the feeling of security and stability that came with living in a house.
So, one day, at the age of 13, with his future prospects dim, he just left.
Frederick's father never looked for him.
Being homeless in general is not a good experience, and being homeless in California carried with it a kind of stigma that got you spit on, but Frederick often comforted himself with the fact that it could be worse. The seasons didn't change in a way that put him at risk of dying to exposure, with that really only being the case during heatwaves, which thankfully didn't last for entire seasons most of the time. He had heard horror stories from people who had lived in Alaska, how the homeless population there died like guppies once the winter months came around if they had no place to stay.
A lot of those stories were exaggerated, but the feeling still remained, and really that was all that mattered.
A thirteen-year-old shouldn't be able to survive on the streets, or last for very long before a concerned member of the government came and picked them up, yet Frederick managed it. He hid from people who might raise reports about him, primarily, so he wouldn't have to face whatever kind of apocalyptic fit his father would throw upon his return. That fear turned dull and distant as his first year stretched into two years of homelessness, but had never managed to completely go away.
Frederick adapted to life anyway. It wasn't that much more tiring than the life he'd been living since he was six. He learned how to carve out a little place for himself over the years, toting his cart around, how to best avoid the cops that would tear his property to shreds and arrest him for loitering. He learned where to put up his tents, where not to, and what people might sic dogs on him if he tried.
The fringes of National City, the industrial parts, became his home.
Then, at seventeen years old, the sky fell.
Frederick jerked from his tent at the sounds, the bangs, crashes, explosions. He didn't know what was happening, stuck in that between state, where half of his brain was still asleep and the other half was pumped thick with adrenaline, but his body moved, scrambling out of the tent to avoid being trapped in it.
What he stepped out into was hell.
A citadel of alien steel and machinery—Fort Rozz, Addy recognized—fell from the sky like meteors, crashing into buildings, into the concrete and earth around him, sending up thick plumes of smoke and energetic discharges that took chunks out of the ground and anything near to them. The world shook, buckled like a massive earthquake, and where sleep made him slow, the primal, human survival instinct made him move without hesitating.
Stumbling to the side, Frederick dove forward, down, collapsed into the bramble and bush that he had set up his tent next to, and crawled forward until he slotted himself beneath the picnic table that occupied this end of the park. He shut his eyes, pulled his hands over his head, and waited.
The storm of meteors lasted for another half a minute before, at last, the world stopped shaking, things stopped breaking, and the dust settled.
With great care, Frederick hauled himself out from beneath the picnic table and into a world that had changed.
All around him were half-destroyed towers of machinery, chunks of glimmering metal he'd never seen before, some inscribed and glowing, others very much not. A chunk of what looked to be a wire walkway sat half-entombed in the earth, as though someone had stabbed it deep into the ground and left it there. It was, really, the only thing he could recognizably identify, and even that was spotty, considering how warped it was.
Off in the distance, fires burned and alarm sirens wailed. He'd been out of the loop for a while, keeping his head down since that narrow brush with the cops, but clearly something had happened.
He just wasn't sure what.
There was no easily visible path out of the ruin of machinery and metal around him either. The towers of it formed walls of a sort, hemming him in, and while some of it was angled enough that he could reasonably climb up it, only one part of the ruin around him had his eye. It was straight ahead of him, and it was the one thing untouched from its dramatic fall to the ground: a house-sized block of metal, overlaid with glowing lines that converged towards a bulkhead, which was recessed into the face of the metal box.
The sight of it was almost too bright. The lines glowed with almost a magnesium-flare quality to them, making spots flicker at the sides of his vision, but it wasn't white in colour—it was a sharp, cherry red, and almost all the more blinding for it.
He tried to get his bearings again, looked around and imagined in what direction things might be, but without any good line of sight on a building, came up empty.
The only way forward was towards the box, and he figured it was about the best landmark he could use at this point.
Gathering himself, Frederick walked ahead, leaning down just briefly to grab his backpack - already packed, he would be stupid not to have it - and throw it over his back. It took a bit of clambering and awkward shimmying, but before long he had crested up a bent stump of metal and managed to climb to the top of one of the pillars, in the direction of the box.
At the top of the pillar was a small, cube-shaped fixture, with similar lines on it as there were on the box in front of him. In fact, they glowed in sync with one another: whenever the light of the larger box faded, so too did the one on the smaller cube next to him. There were symbols he could see now on it, too, a language he had never read—but one that was eminently familiar to Addy: Kryptahniuo. The entire thing was inscribed with warnings, radiation levels too high, fuel systems compromised, power failure imminent, and so forth.
But Frederick didn't linger on it long enough for anything to come of it. Impulse took control of him, and he almost brought out a hand, sought to touch one of the symbols, one that looked like—no, was the same symbol he saw on Superman's chest.
And that was the point where the structure, already unstable, buckled. There was a scream of tearing metal, and a scream from Frederick's mouth alone as he dropped eight feet and hit the half-broken concrete below him with a sharp blast of pain. He landed on his front, just meters away from the box, his ribs aching from the impact.
The collapse propagated, spread out; towers of metal buckled as they fell into one another, and Frederick had exactly enough time to glance up and watch two of those inscribed cubes slam into one another. Instead of bouncing off each other, or even bending upon impact, they shattered like glass, and from it poured a glowing, cyan muck.
He wasn't fast enough to get out of the way, and it poured onto him, over him, soaked into his clothing, his backpack, his hair. For one brief moment, there was no pain.
Then, there was only pain.
It was like submerging a limb in acid, or being on fire, possibly both at once. Frederick felt his nerves fry, burn away, turn to dust and agony in his body, a kind of sickness that spread through him like veins, into his spine, into his bones. He opened his mouth to scream, but no noise came out, such was the pain. He tried to crawl away, but his body began seizing, spasming, and the pain pulled him under.
Consciousness ebbed, flowed. Frederick wasn't sure how long he slept, or if he was awake and just didn't remember it, but it felt like an eternity, wrapped up in a second.
It was only when the pain had dulled, ebbed just the slightest bit, that he picked up on a new sensation: something hard and pointed jabbing into his side. His eyes open, crusted over by blood or tears or something worse, and he found what was poking him: the barrel of a gun, pointed by one man among a squad of them, all of them wearing full body armour and masks, all of them unmarked.
Soldiers, but not ones that were familiar.
His eyes, as much as they could, flicked down. His own clothes were gone, melted into a puddle around his body, and his skin was the red of an open - but not bleeding - wound, like someone had taken the top layer of skin and peeled it away.
The gun jabbed him in the side again, and his eyes managed to focus back up on the soldier, and to the man watching the soldier poke him—a man with dark skin, a bald head, and what looked to be machinery shoved into his body, glowing dimly beneath the dermis of his skin.
It was Hank Henshaw, that much Addy could recognize. Which meant the soldiers were Cadmus soldiers.
She considered what happened to Frederick, went back briefly through the memory. That fluid was probably fuel, highly exotic fuel at that, probably part of a secondary system to keep that cube powered. But speaking of the cube, the memory shifted, continued forward.
And Frederick saw that the cube was open. The bulkhead had been peeled away and discarded next to it, and between two soldiers was a new face, a person with an actual face, not a man made out of machinery faking at having one, not soldiers with their full helmets, but a man, a simple, kindly-looking man.
He was bald, with features that made him look in his mid-40s. He wasn't smiling, but he didn't look afraid, either, even as one of the soldiers jabbed a syringe into his unclothed arm and injected some kind of glowing green serum into him. The man lagged a bit, staggered, but the soldiers dragged him up to the cyborg anyway, who in turn stared at the man in complete silence.
"What should we do with the kid?" one soldier asked, gun still pointed at him.
The one who was poking him paused. "He seems awake, but not by much. Whatever he was exposed to has really done a number, do you think he's contagious?"
Some of the other soldiers took a cautionary step back, as though he was radioactive.
Frederick would've laughed, if he had the physical ability to do so.
The cyborg turned towards Frederick, looked at him like a butcher looked at the lamb he was about to make into stew, then looked away, dismissive, back to the bald man. "He's clearly homeless," the cyborg said, voice a gravelly drone. "The research team will get some use out of him. Put the other one down in front of him, we'll move them both."
The bald man, now barely able to walk himself, with veins of green running beneath his skin, was hauled forward and thrown down. He met the ground same as Frederick had: belly-down, nose against the spiderweb cracks in the concrete.
But unlike Frederick, he could move. His head glanced up, looked at Frederick, and his mouth opened.
"It'll be okay," the bald man murmured, voice kinder than anything he'd heard since he'd ended up on the streets.
Something hit Frederick on the back of the head before he could respond.
Frederick sat in the gloom. Not darkness, just something very close to it. He stared out from his cell, between the tall bars that prevented him from leaving, out into the hallway and that narrow shaft of blinding light that stretched out from it. There were other cells in this hallway, cells that were once occupied, but he was alone, nowadays.
The light let him see his hands, how thin they'd gotten over the last weeks. The small scars from incisions he'd collected. The pallor of his skin, as it had regrown in the darkness of his cell.
Bathed in the light were the researchers, calmly talking amongst each other about his death.
"He shouldn't be alive. The exotic radiation he was exposed to melts DNA, he should either be a single, contiguous tumour or a pile of sludge," one said.
The other shrugged. "Weirder things have happened with testing. Who's to say something more random like this couldn't happen too?"
"Logic," the third replied sharply.
"The exposure to that energy destroyed parts of him and activated others," the first said, cutting the conversation short. "We've done sampling on him, and none of us can even really make out what we're looking at. He's alive, and he's healing, and that's what we're here for."
The second to speak stepped forward, out of the light and into the gloom, to look at him. "I figure you know why your body repairs itself, and if you cooperate and give us anything, any hint of knowledge, even just hunches, we can get you out of this cell, get you more food. Things to help your stay here be more comfortable." The scientist paused. "But not a stop to the tests, unfortunately. That much I can't promise you."
Frederick started rocking, back and forth, back and forth, cradling his knees to his chest. "I already told you everything already," he lied.
Frederick could repair himself, but it was... unusual. It wasn't just his body healing quickly, it was... a kind of other sense, one that had grown stronger ever since they put him in the cell. It was like another limb, but intangible, and not limb-shaped. He could push it around his body, and whenever he'd focus it on a part, it'd make that area warm up, and begin to repair itself if repairs were necessary. He was really aware of his own body too, the state it was in.
Between those two things, he'd healed what he was pretty sure was six tumours from forming in his stomach.
He wanted to escape, but he couldn't. They never let him out of his cage unless he was sedated, and the one time he'd tried to use this new power to fight off that sedation and try to make a run, well—he still couldn't move, but he was conscious when they brought him into the operating room to poke holes in him and sew him back up.
And he was conscious when, four hours later, they carted him out of the operating room and back to his pitch-black cell.
He didn't want to experience that again.
His rocking intensified, and he started humming, trying to soothe nerves, phantom pains.
The scientist clicked their tongue, turning away with a sigh. "You guys were right, trying to engage with prisoners is stupid. We'll get reports anyway," the scientist said, walking back into the light. "A biopsy has been scheduled, so let's just leave it be."
There was a chorus of agreements.
"We'll be back in a day," the third scientist called out.
Then they left, closing the door behind them, and cast the entire cell into perfect, pitch blackness.
Something was wrong with Frederick, he knew that, because he'd heard about what sensory deprivation does to prisoners. A lot of homeless people used to be people locked up, after all, and a lot of them got put in solitary. A lot of them told him about how they went insane in there, just with nothing to do, not without any light, not like he had.
He liked it better when it was dark. When it was quiet.
But maybe. Just maybe. He was sane because he had something they didn't. He had a saviour.
"Jax-Ur?" Frederick called out, his voice a murmur.
"Yes, child?" Jax-Ur's voice responded, coming through the vents that connected the two prisons they were in, cells, separated by a wing, but still audible to one another.
"Can you tell me more about where you're from?"
"...Of course."
Addy pulled herself out of the direct stream of memories, and took a stronger control over it, thumbing through the memories as they came.
Frederick's association with Jax-Ur had always been known, and when the scientists never found any good explanation for his inhuman healing ability - and the fact that he wasn't dead - they gave up trying. Eventually, he was put to use as something they could trust he wouldn't sabotage: being Jax-Ur's assistant. Maybe it was an attempt to ensure the two were bound, and so one could be leveraged against the other if necessary.
Addy didn't know, she didn't really care, either.
But she walked through the memories in bursts anyway. They were of Frederick in the lab with Jax-Ur, and things progressed in about the way Addy expected them to. First, it was just general technology, whatever Jax-Ur could supply to Cadmus to improve quality of life, defences, and so on. Then it transitioned to psychic blockers, at about the time Addy could remember those becoming increasingly common.
Jax-Ur walked Frederick through most of it, explaining it best he could with the limited schooling Frederick had. Jax-Ur taught him things he would've learned in high school, had he gone, filled in education that Frederick had denied himself to get away from his home life. He explained it to Frederick just as he explained Krypton to him, just as he explained the myriad of alien civilizations out there: all of it captured Frederick's imagination, his joy.
But Cadmus was not a place of joy. The first major change was for Jax-Ur to make weapons, and he did. But maybe they weren't good enough, maybe they were, and Cadmus just wanted to punish him anyway. Whatever it was, one day, Jax-Ur came back with half of his face turned to leathery skin, with a metal implant driven into his flesh and bone, screwed very literally into place.
Frederick watched Jax-Ur the first day he was back, the pain the man was in, the glowing green collar, and seethed.
Frederick was there when Jax-Ur was introduced to Jeremiah Danvers - pertinent data, Addy downloaded it for later proliferation - and for when Jeremiah Danvers had one of his arms augmented, half-amputated as a punishment only to be replaced by intentionally painful cybernetics.
She added that, too, to proliferate later.
Frederick was there when Cadmus nearly fell apart, when Jax-Ur got his own team, more and more and more.
And eventually, it all came to a head.
One day, Frederick woke up in his pitch-black cell, hours before he would normally wake. He felt like a cracked egg, a pressure in his body pushing against the boundaries that existed, force applied against something that was giving in by fractions, widening spiderweb cracks in a part of him he was not aware existed. In the part of him that let him repair his body.
He could barely breathe, and laid there in the darkness for hours, writhing, feeling the ever-widening pressure like an itch he simply could not scratch or stretch out. How long this took, Jackson didn't know, and his memories didn't elucidate it either; consciousness ebbed and flowed, more and more, reality became harder to make out.
In that darkness, after an unknown amount of time, an unknown amount of discomfort, something finally broke. One body became two as Frederick finally felt that phantom limb stretch out beyond the boundaries of his own body.
And Frederick's mind broke with it.
Addy moved past that, working through what memories led them up to this moment. She watched as Frederick was trained, she watched as Frederick watched Jax-Ur help refine Medusa. Frederick, being put to use for his abilities by Cadmus, contrasted against Jax-Ur, training him, praising him, and teaching him all he could with his new abilities. A limit of four bodies lasted for less than a day, and the number he could create beyond him continued to rise.
And with it rose problems, problems that Frederick had to overcome.
Problems he couldn't overcome, in truth.
Frederick, finding out he couldn't sleep anymore, yet feeling the way his mind slid and unravelled the longer he went without it. Frederick, feeling his mind warp with each new limit to his cloning abilities, stretching into new shapes, the 'limb' inside of him growing in scope and size and capacity, writhing like something new. Frederick, starting to lose grasp on which body was his, which was the original.
Frederick, becoming less and less human, slowly losing the perspective of mortality, of humanity, of just having one body. Jax-Ur, reinforcing that it was a good thing, that becoming more than that was great, that he was unique for it, and all the stronger. Jax-Ur, telling him of species who had similar problems—a novel hivemind structure two and a half thousand light-years out which had semi-independent hive minds overseeing a strict number of individual drones, and who experienced the same difficulties when they diverged from their parents, their original hivemind.
Addy tore herself free of that line of thought, directing her focus. She still couldn't see the plan, couldn't see why they'd done what they'd done, what they were leading up to. She was working her way through memories too slowly, or at least not in a properly efficient manner. She didn't need to dwell on Frederick slowly losing himself to his changes, or the way that the people around him reinforced those changes.
She needed answers.
So she reached out to the memories, the streams of data, and started sorting them. Human brains were rather more difficult to sort than The Live Wire's mind had been, but it wasn't a strain, and before long, one stream of memories became two, then four, then six, and onwards. She parted the memories, drew context from them and assigned them into specific streams as necessary, filtering them and directing them down the branching paths of memory.
And when she saw the totality of what she was looking for, Addy felt only a rising sense of alarm.
Why did Cadmus do the things it did? It was a question Addy had been asking herself for a while. Why attack state capitals? Why out her now, instead of when they had revealed the news about the incoming invasion? Why set themselves up like this? People hated Cadmus; even the more fringe, xenophobic organizations saw them as killers of other humans, and not even just humans who happened to like aliens too much. They were a fringe domestic terrorist group lashing out, attacking, without any real rhyme or reason but with enough firepower to make it hurt.
And yet, that was wrong.
They introduced alien guns into the wider world not just to earn money and make contacts, but to make people feel empowered, to give them a taste of the abilities most aliens took for granted. They initiated terror attacks on people not just to scare them away or injure them, but because they wanted the aliens to know that the government couldn't protect them, to further isolate them. They set off Medusa to further that sentiment, and also to show the world that aliens could die, that they weren't as invulnerable as they seemed to be.
It was more than that, too.
Because the attack on the state capitals wasn't just to let them get footage for their propaganda video at the conclave; it wasn't even just to do six to eight other operations - which she was quickly noting down, as Frederick's memories recounted them - in the intervening chaos. It was to make people afraid, to make them feel unsafe, and to cut down on the protection people felt towards the police. It was also to make those who happened to like what they were doing feel empowered; look, it said, at what just a few people with superpowers can do to all the people you hate.
The reveal of the conclave to the wider public was to incite fear, to justify their attacks on state buildings, but more than that it was to undercut the trust people had for their governments. To, as they had with the attacks on the state capitals, make people question if they should really be relying on the government for any type of protection, in any kind of capacity, to seek out their own protection however they might find it. They sought to leave the world in a state of paralyzed fear and distrust, a lack of confidence in anything but themselves.
And all of it was simply the framework for what was to come next.
Heightened emotions, a lack of trust or confidence in the government, conspiracies running wild, the world looking a whole lot more violent than it had since World War 2. An incoming invasion, people losing sleep, those traumatized by the attacks on capital buildings, and even those not directly in the line of fire during those times. The tension and rising panic among the population.
All it needed was a critical element.
Frederick was the one to watch it play out.
Frederick, at last, being told Jax-Ur's plan for the future. The thing that had Frederick so devoted, so chained to Jax-Ur, so loyal to a system that had once tortured and mutilated him.
Manipulation, written clearly in the memories, yet none Frederick could notice or, truthfully, cared to notice. A desperate man, lonely and seeking approval, love, or at least an explanation why the world had hurt him the way it did.
And Jax-Ur's answer was that it was because of imbalanced power; because some people had tons of it, and everyone else didn't. How on Earth, power was defined through strictly legal, political and monetary power, not physical ones, not force or violence, but rather how much of those you could get other people to do on your behalf. How Jax-Ur intended to change that, how he spun that to each person, to put everyone on an even playing field.
For Cadmus, it was the goal of making humans equal to aliens, capable of driving them off.
For the public - if it ever was necessary - it was to make humans capable of defending themselves against interstellar dangers, and to find kinship with neighbours.
For Frederick, it was to make sure nobody like him ever came to be again, that nobody could be so small as to be squashed.
How the plan has been coming together, many months in the making. How Frederick's attack on the L-Corp building was a distraction, keeping Addy away from the courthouse.
How the plan to change the world was already in motion, had been happening since this morning.
How Jax-Ur intended to turn the entire human population into metahumans, to fight back the Daxamites, to fight back aliens in general, or to give everyone the power to get what they needed, without compromise, depending on who he was speaking to at the time.
The reason why Cadmus was outing her now, was doing the kinds of things that would get their organization dismantled by a fully-backed American military response, was because Cadmus did not see themselves as surviving as an organization going into the future. The organization would die, but the people? They would survive, hiding in bunkers or on oil rigs as they watched the apocalypse play out in safety and secrecy.
An apocalypse birthed from introducing a highly virulent, modified metagene catalyzing virus into the population already this primed for panic. The metagene itself wouldn't immediately fully activate, taking time to properly manifest changes, but that process could be sped up significantly if said individual was under extreme amounts of emotional stress or physical injury; the body pumping enough hormones, enough of a combination of chemicals, to kick the gene fully into activity, even if the body might not be quite ready to manifest it safely.
They intended to turn the world - a world already haunted by the terror they've created - into a place where any one individual just needed a bit of a push to gain superpowers, one not too dissimilar to the one Addy had come from, even, though she doubted it would look remotely the same.
And what was the Daxamite invasion, if not a push?
Addy tore herself free of the mind of the former clone of Frederick Murphy, with all his trauma and changes and twists. She almost staggered, turning quickly, her own anger at the state of things vanishing. This was an emergency, and they were already far too slow on the uptake.
She turned to J'onn, who was already alert, already tense, waiting for the danger.
"Administrator? What's wrong?"
Behind her, the former clone groaned as the headache set in.
"We have an emergency," she said quickly, already filing her thoughts into place, organizing her plan, smothering her anger beneath the reality that she needed to get things done, unless she wanted everything to go to shit. "Jax-Ur intends to expose the entire human population of the planet to the metagene activator serum."
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- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hey guys! Another chapter day, another chapter! I hope you all enjoy this chapter as much I enjoyed writing it.
I did want to clarify something. I know people have been talking about Addy's secret identity and how it could remain hidden, and I know a lot of people will want that for her, as this chapter does go over the natural fallout of that occurence and Addy's own upset surrounding it. I know that people don't really like Addy hurting in any meaningful capacity the way she is now, but it is still going to happen. It kind of has to.
Superhero identities are, always, a polite fiction meant not to be looked at too closely. This is true for Kara, it's true for others, and so on. What keeps superhero identities safe is the fact that the people behind them are one among a hundred thousand. There's a scene from the Justice League (I think?) where Lex Luthor somehow manages to take over Barry Allen's body, and upon unmasking the Flash in a bathroom, has literally no idea who he is. That's kind of key to how superhero identities work, even among people like Kara and Clark.
But Addy's secret identity is much more of a polite fiction than most. Addy's secret identity is an open secret among the telepathically inclined, as it doesn't take a whole lot to connect "Addy, the super-powerful telepath" with "Administrator, the super-powerful telepath", especially when they both keep appearing in the radius of the other. People have kept it secret, yes, because there's literally nothing more intimidating than her simple existence, but still.
All things together, this means that Addy's secret identity is... weak. And, honestly, this was always a part of the fic! This part has gone through about eight different revisions, sure, but her becoming known to the public has always been a part of my drafts for this season.
One way or another, though, I hope you enjoy this chapter, thank you for reading, and I'll see you again next Thursday!
I did want to clarify something. I know people have been talking about Addy's secret identity and how it could remain hidden, and I know a lot of people will want that for her, as this chapter does go over the natural fallout of that occurence and Addy's own upset surrounding it. I know that people don't really like Addy hurting in any meaningful capacity the way she is now, but it is still going to happen. It kind of has to.
Superhero identities are, always, a polite fiction meant not to be looked at too closely. This is true for Kara, it's true for others, and so on. What keeps superhero identities safe is the fact that the people behind them are one among a hundred thousand. There's a scene from the Justice League (I think?) where Lex Luthor somehow manages to take over Barry Allen's body, and upon unmasking the Flash in a bathroom, has literally no idea who he is. That's kind of key to how superhero identities work, even among people like Kara and Clark.
But Addy's secret identity is much more of a polite fiction than most. Addy's secret identity is an open secret among the telepathically inclined, as it doesn't take a whole lot to connect "Addy, the super-powerful telepath" with "Administrator, the super-powerful telepath", especially when they both keep appearing in the radius of the other. People have kept it secret, yes, because there's literally nothing more intimidating than her simple existence, but still.
All things together, this means that Addy's secret identity is... weak. And, honestly, this was always a part of the fic! This part has gone through about eight different revisions, sure, but her becoming known to the public has always been a part of my drafts for this season.
One way or another, though, I hope you enjoy this chapter, thank you for reading, and I'll see you again next Thursday!
Lagoon12002
How far have I fell down into this deep deep sea
Well. This world is about to go downhill very quickly, to a point where I think Bet will be more stable.
Will be glad to watch this play out.
Will be glad to watch this play out.