Ancient Legos
Chapter 12
Libra
Several long and detailed explanations later, Piggot had her head in her hands, Armsmaster had gone back to banging his helmet on the back of his halberd's axe head, and everyone else just seemed… done.
All except Dragon, who was grinning like a loon.
I was really happy to see that the autonomic and subconscious emotional display directives I'd tossed into her new body were still working. She was technically inhabiting the Mark I version of her particular variant of Asuran. I'd designed everything to be self repairing and error, if not proof, at least correcting, but… well, I was glad it was working out!
"Should we even
bother trying to draw up Master/Stranger protocols for you?" Piggot drawled, groaning.
I grinned sheepishly, rubbing the back of my head. "Honestly?" I asked.
Piggot moved her fingers so that she could glare at me from between them. "Yes."
I shook my head, grimacing slightly. "With my technology and the abilities at my disposal… it's probably a worthless endeavor," was my, as asked, honest reply. "My telepathy can't be blocked, nor can my telekinesis, and the Hyperion can scan computer systems from
orbit no matter how secure or air gapped they are, sooo…"
Piggot slid her fingers back over her eyes and groaned even louder. "That's what I was afraid of."
Not that what I was saying was entirely accurate. Yes, my telepathy couldn't be blocked. That much was certainly true. However, there
were ways to turn it off at the source; namely, bombarding me with certain infrasonic frequencies to shut down the parts of my brain that allowed me to have Alteran abilities in the first place.
Not that they'd be very effective on someone at 80% of the way to Ascension, like I was. Then again, when effectiveness drops, 'just throw more power at it' was a viable solution to these kinds of things.
Even so… there was absolutely no way I'd ever tell
anyone that. My biggest weakness? Contained in anything but my own head? Yeah no thanks, I'll pass.
For the same reason I'd never spill the beans on Dragon's own particular weakness, now that she had her new body.
And even though Alteran technology was insane by my world's standards… well, it could protect against itself, so it was at least
possible to stop.
And it's not that I didn't trust my team, the Protectorate, or the Director. I trusted them a long,
long way despite how short a time I'd spent in their presence.
It was hard not to trust them when they were effectively an open book you couldn't stop seeing glimpses of even as you tried your hardest to ignore the flashing neon of the pages.
How a book gets the ability to change colors and flash brightly is up to you, it's an analogy.
No, I trusted my team nearly implicitly now. They weren't the problem. Neither was Dragon.
I eyed a certain woman with a black tower on her chest out of the corner of my eye.
I didn't trust
her.
Trust, but verify, and unfortunately for Alexandria, she'd attacked me without cause. Possibly under the influence of the disease that had infected Director Piggot, but still.
The disease's former presence told me that even if I trusted the
person explicitly and without fail, they weren't always the only ones in command of their decisions.
That meant I had to do a
frakton of verification before I'd trust anyone with important secrets, or decisions.
And those points were to say nothing of the stray thoughts I kept picking up despite what must've been her powers making mind reading more difficult. Even though I was focusing as hard as I could, and pointedly ignoring the actually recognizable content in whatever went through her head, her emotions had no such protection from me. I had to focus on one, and I figured with Dean present nobody would care if I slipped up and read their emotions because he was already doing it.
Alexandria was constantly scared and duplicitous. She had a very obvious agenda and something that terrified her to her core. It wasn't exactly imminent fear; no, whatever it was she was afraid of was far off, a sort of looming thing that weighed on every single action and bit of reasoning she went through.
That wasn't the disease which may or may not have compromised her. It was something bigger. I'd ask her to spill the beans eventually, but tensions were high at that moment. Discretion was the better way.
Plus, zealots have been built on less than what she was constantly feeling. The fact that she still held noble intentions only made her more dangerous, not less, because it meant that her cause was just. Well, at least to her, I was going to have to decide that for myself when I got her to tell me what the hell it was.
Lisa's words came back to me again. I was the gorilla. Not Alexandria, not anymore.
Me. And so far, it seemed I was the only one of such power that couldn't be compromised.
Which really said a lot about how much my Earth sucked.
Thus, I needed to throw that weight around in order to help my team, my Director, and even possibly Alexandria. I had to be the backstop for them for
when they failed, not if.
And I
was the one suited to the task, after all.
Somehow.
"Can you read my mind?" Alexandria asked, frowning. Her question snapped me out of my internal musing.
I looked at her and contemplated my response for a moment. Well, I didn't exactly need to trust her to tell her the truth here, did I? Whether she knew or not, she would be unable to stop me if I chose to exercise that ability of mine beyond the emotional sensing.
"Yes," I finally nodded.
Her eyes grew hard, expression becoming menacing. "
Have you."
It wasn't a question.
While her sudden anger was surprising, I also understood it. Someone in her position couldn't afford to have their mind read. The same was true for me.
"No," I answered honestly. "While there
is an aspect I can't turn off at the moment, that being empathy, like Gallant," I gestured to my teammate without a care, "I am intentionally reigning my telepathy in as hard as I can right now because I'd rather not do unspeakable things to the Unwritten Rules, thanks."
Alexandria frowned harder. "But you said-" she began again.
For frak's sake.
Take a hint, lady! I'm trying not to and you want to distract me from that?! You're supposed
to be a Thinker!
Of course, I said exactly
none of that out loud. Tensions were already pretty high. I was dense, not an idiot, and the way people were looking at me, I knew I was on pretty shaky ground with all the adults.
Well, except Dragon. I'm pretty sure she'd be on my side.
And Assault. He found all of this very amusing.
However, the fact that Dragon and I could defeat everyone in the room didn't change things. I was a member of the Protectorate, even if just a Ward. It was my duty to uphold the law and protect people. Not attack them.
So I attempted a somewhat natural feeling deescalation. Emphasis on attempt.
"I
know what I said!" I snapped, rounding on Alexandria. Almost immediately after she flinched -since when does Alexandria
flinch? What was her Thinker power reading off me?!- I forced my face to look tired, not mad, and brought a hand up to massage my eyebrows. "Look, it is
very hard to do this, so if you would please stop distracting me from keeping myself from reading you all like an open book, that would be great."
Alexandria closed her mouth. She didn't look happy, but nodded.
The almost physical tension in the room began to subside, and I knew I'd made the right call.
I'm totally claiming that was the outcome I planned and you can't prove otherwise!
Whether Alexandria and Dragon, the two Thinkers besides me in the room, picked up on my
totally not abrupt plan, I didn't know. I suspected I never would.
Not because Dragon at the least wouldn't tell me, but because of a series of synthetic tones that started going off.
DEE DEE DEET, DE DE DEE DA DEET
Alexandria froze, her eyes widening behind her mask.
Pretty much everyone turned to look at her.
I raised my eyebrows as she pulled a phone out of a hidden pocket. It was black to fit her color scheme, but it was also one of those extremely secure burner phones that the PRT Manual had said we could get for off-duty Wards communication.
She flipped the screen open, looked at the caller, and froze again.
The ringtone kept going as nobody moved.
"Well?" Assault spoke up. "You gonna answer that?"
Alexandria audibly gulped and nodded. "I need to use a secure room," she told Piggot.
A secure room? To talk on a secure
phone? There wasn't a more secure room
in the world than where we were standing! Who the hell was calling?!
Hyperion's sensors painted me a picture of her phone's screen, and I suddenly knew why she was worried.
The President was calling.
I carefully schooled my expression while on the inside I allowed my freakout to continue full force.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS CALLING!!!
I mean, yeah, it was Alexandria… it kinda made sense that she was someone who received calls from the President of the United States.
Still, that was the closest I'd ever been to someone that famous, and I was struggling not to hyperventilate.
...It took me a couple of seconds to realize I was in the same room as Alexandria and Dragon, two women arguably
more famous than the most powerful head of state on the planet, and I totally didn't internally fangirl and you can't prove I did.
The Director nodded, gesturing to the door out of the conference room. "Three down to your left."
"Thanks." And with that, the black clad superheroine and Triumvirate member swept out of the room, leaving us all to wonder.
Including me, because even though I had Hyperion record the call, I sure as hell wasn't going to listen.
...Yet.
I did make sure to help Alexandria leave the phasing field as she stormed out, though, because I didn't want to see what happened when someone whose body was hyper spatially compressed crystal crossed a phase gradient like what I'd created.
My Alteran memories informed me it wouldn't have been pretty… on their scale.
They considered moons detonating a mild inconvenience.
Like I said…
not pretty.
Alexandria went to her area, picked up her phone, and when I returned my attention to my body I found I was once more the target of all the attention.
"Heh, so," I tried to nonchalantly state, running the back of my head, "what now?"
The answer turned out to be many, many questions and a lecture from pretty much everyone in the room on many different things.
Also they made me beam down Missy so she could be checked out by PRT doctors.
They didn't really believe me when I told them I was probably the most qualified person in the city to monitor her, but at least they had the consideration to
look like they did.
Piggot didn't even tell me she was calling in Panacea! Of course, I heard it from her brain yelling it at me anyways, but still. It's the thought that counts.
I was starting to get worried about said Dallon when Alexandria slammed the door open and stormed back in.
I only quirked an eyebrow at her.
"What happened?" Director Piggot asked.
"Shipyard and I have a meeting with the President and Director Costa-Brown in DC in an hour," she declared.
The room went silent.
I couldn't believe what I'd just heard.
"...Come again?"
"Why the hell does the President want to talk to me?" I asked, totally not internally freaking out at
all.
My state didn't prevent my ability to fly the Jumper with Alexandria, Dragon, and I up to the Hyperion, but that was only because of my new species.
My previously human brain wouldn't have been able to handle it.
Alexandria grunted from her chair. "Are you actually this dense or are you just acting, like my powers seem to think?" she shot back as a counter to my question. "I'd usually trust them but you yourself admitted to not being human anymore."
Dragon got an upset look on her face and rose to defend me, but I waved her down. Alexandria clearly took that little interaction into her legendary memory, and if I'd cared I would've probably talked to Dragon about the way she seemed to practically obey me, but I didn't and it
definitely wasn't caused by any last minute surprises from her chains, I made
quadruple sure of that, so I wouldn't begrudge her feeling grateful.
"Fine, you want to be fully clear?" I directed at the knockoff Kryptonian of the group.
Alexandria looked at me, straight in the eyes, and nodded. Once.
I sighed, long and drawn out. "I
am aware, kinda, of what kind of weight I can throw around," I began to answer her, shaking my head. "But I don't
want to. Just because I have the most advanced technology on the planet, probably the biggest guns, and beat an Endbringer doesn't mean I enjoy the results." I frowned and crossed my arms. This left the Jumper to autopilot its way the remaining distance to the Hyperion's now opening hangar bay. "Tattletale said I was the new gorilla. I don't want to be that gorilla. I will if I
have to, but I'd rather not."
Alexandria searched my face, no doubt looking for deception, then her frown abated somewhat. "That's a decent stance to take," were her words in reply.
"Stop it, Alexandria," Dragon spoke up, "we both know that's a much more level headed outlook than
half the Protectorate and most of the Wards-"
Before she could finish, the Jumper crossed the Hyperion's shield.
Alexandria, on the cusp of interrupting Dragon, collapsed like a puppet without any strings.
Dragon and I sat there in stunned silence for
far longer than I'm willing to admit.
"SHIT!" I shouted, springing from my chair.
Damn damn damn! I should've guessed this would happen! The woman had a body practically
made of the Shardling biocrystal! Of
course she'd be unable to run it without that connection!
"Shipyard, what just happened?!" Dragon exclaimed.
"Uh-" I stammered, eyes darting around the cabin. I didn't have any Legos on me! How stupid was I, to not have my power's
main ammo source on my body? I could just print any I wanted from the Beaming system on the Hyperion, I could've made a backpack to hold them and a modification of an Alteran uniform to hold
tha-
Dragon grasped both my shoulders and brought her face into range of my vision, a stern look directed my way. I only barely noticed that she'd exited her armor in order to do so. "Weldon, snap out of it," she ordered. "What happened to Alexandria, and how do we fix it?"
"I- I don't know!" I gasped out. I was barely cognizant of what I was saying, my mind whirling along at a speed likely only Dragon could match now. "She's- her body is a construct but her mind should be running on it, not from somewhere else!!" I began babbling, putting my hands on my face and dragging them down.
"Weldon! If I turn this ship around, will that fix her?"
"I DON'T KNOW! Crystalline constructs controlled from biological supercomputers in other realities
is not what I signed up for and I have no idea!"
I was about to go off the deep end… but then my Shardling poked me.
[Data]
My babbling cut off and I stared, stunned, into the distance.
"Weldon? Shipyard!" Dragon called my name, trying to get my attention.
My Shardling had just told me what it guessed was Alexandria's situation. It couldn't give me a confirmation because apparently her own Shardling wasn't responding, but my own had grown to an incredible size due to my influence, according to it, and so it was… smarter was a bad term for the thing's new state, but close enough.
It told me what it guessed Alexandria's body mind relationship was.
And I was amazed.
"That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard, and I'm an Alteran," I deadpanned.
Dragon stopped trying to shake me, instead staring into my eyes with her own worried ones. "What?"
I signed and put a palm to my forehead. "Dragon, imagine how dumb something would have to be to seem incredibly stupid to a civilization which holds the record for having no wisdom and making idiotic mistakes."
Dragon blinked in bewilderment at me. "Again, what?"
I growled and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Nevermind, I'll explain it later when I
don't feel like training myself on the nearest bulkhead." A sigh and o directed the powerful beaming arrays on the Hyperion to toss me a few Lego pieces. "I know how to fix her, and how to prevent this from happening again."
The white light and chime of the transport rang out above my outstretched hand as Dragon stared at me, even more confused.
I grunted and began assembling the pieces into what my Shardling said it could turn into a timeline isolation unit. "Long story and science lecture short, Alexandria's body is a crystalline construct not unlike the Endbringers which her mind pilots from her Shardling in another reality." I clicked the last two pieces together, ending up with a weird plus shaped arrangement of plastic. "The Hyperion's shield blocks the connection unless it's specifically white listed, which hers is not. Neither was Glory Girl's. Glory Girl fell out of the sky." I turned around and gestured back toward the slumped form of one of the most well known heroes on the planet. "She stops driving."
I tossed the Lego over my shoulder. It only made a tiny puff of displaced air as it realized, clunking onto the floor of the Jumper at the end of its arc.
Dragon took an impressively short amount of time to understand what I'd just said. "Wait, you know where powers come from?" aaand that was definitely not the question I expected.
I huffed, yanking the newly materialized piece of tech into my hand telekinetically. "Yeah, I do, and mine is really talkative. But I don't trust Alexandria entirely. You I do, since, well," I coughed into my hand awkwardly and looked anywhere but at Dragon, "I may or may not know you inside and out due to having to rewrite you to rip out all the control systems."
My blush was legendary, Hyperion's sensors informed me.
I sent back a scathing remark.
I
swear my flagship giggled.
Dragon was blushing fairly heavily as well, but she was much better at discussing adult topics than I. "But you didn't see the inside of her head, so you can't trust her with this information," she deduced.
I nodded, not trusting my mouth.
"Why? She's one of the Triumvirate."
That wasn't scandalized, which meant Dragon was testing me. She didn't ask as if offended, more… curiously.
"Well, I can actually read her emotions and she's
major grade conflicted and dead set on… something. Something overwhelming, that she feels she has to fight, but has little hope of actually winning. I don't know what that something
is, but I can recognize desperation when I feel it."
Dragon watched me for a few more moments, then seemingly made up her mind. "Okay, we'll talk about the source of powers without her, when we can." She glanced behind me, out the Jumper window, and found what the Hyperion's sensors were already showing me; we were arriving. "Will that thing you made let her wake up?"
I nodded and started moving forward to put it on her. "Yeah. It'll open the connection for a moment, just enough to yank her mind through, then monitor her and run her body for her. Even if she doesn't have it on her, her mind will be safe inside."
Dragon smiled at me. "Good. Although, maybe… don't put it on her just yet?"
I hesitated, just about to drop the device onto Alexandria's costumed chest. I turned back to look at my AI superior and raised an eyebrow questioningly. "Why not?"
Dragon looked hesitant to answer, but sighed and shook her head. "She isn't exactly the most calm person, and she's probably panicking right now, wherever she is. That device will give her the powers of her body, right?"
I nodded along, still not following very well.
"Do you have a containment system that can hold her? At least while she comes back to her senses? I can probably survive her hits, but you're organic."
"...Oh." I hastily jumped back from Alexandria's slumped form and shivered at the idea Dragon had put in my head. "Yeah, that's a really solid point, and thank you for having the good idea I missed entirely."
"You're welcome!"
The door to the primary brig slammed closed and locked with a rather annoying sound just after I tossed the device in my hand onto Alexandria's body.
"I go unconscious for two hours and you kidnap Alexandria," Tattletale deadpanned from next to me.
The
BOOM as my boss I'd just temporarily imprisoned woke up, panicked, and slammed into the shield of the cell shook the air in the hallway.
"You don't really
do subtle, do you?"
"I
swear, this is not as bad as it looks. Right, Dragon?"
Another
BOOM rocked the ship.
"We did not kidnap her. She just needs to calm down from being disembodied for a few minutes," the heroine supplied in my defense.
"...Honestly, I have no idea what to say to that," Lisa replied.
I groaned and dropped my head into my hands.
BOOM!
"She's going to stop that eventually, right?"
Head, meet palms. Now shake on it. "She'd better, because we're supposed to meet the President in like half an hour."
Lisa turned to me, shocked. "Say what?"
I directed the Hyperion to lift away from Brockton Bay and head towards Washington DC as Alexandria decided to wail on another equally tough shielded wall. "Long story, but we're going to DC. I hope you packed your toothbrush."
"You're taking
me to see the President of the United States?!" She held a hand up to my forehead and affected concern. "Are you sick?"
I batted her hand away and threw her an unimpressed scowl. "I'm
not sick. and yes, you're coming. You can use the transporters to make some clothes or whatever it is girls do. Who knows, but my memories say that you'll want that." I turned to Dragon and rolled my eyes. "You can too. The design programs are pretty good. You both have quarters on the ship, Alexandria is cooling off, and I need a session in my Throne to stave off this headache."
I turned around and headed back towards the bridge, waving behind me. "Just don't go into any of the Science Labs, and don't blow the ship or anything outside the ship up. Other than that, have fun."
I only barely heard the "Does he know what he just offered us?" from Lisa, but my mind was already elsewhere.
Namely, a comfy chair.
I wasn't going to meet the leader of my country on anything less than a full night's sleep even if I had to use temporal dilation around the Throne to achieve it.
I
could go without sleep. As an Alteran I was capable of running my biology on zero point energy.
But it wasn't a great idea. Mental maintenance occurred while asleep, and with all the stuff that'd been happening, I needed to be fully alert and at my best for my upcoming meeting.
She deserved nothing less.
A/N: Alongside this chapter I have replaced Chapters 1 and 2 with their new, updated, revised versions, both to remove some cringe and bring them up to my current writing standards. All good things, new threads, but nothing important is gone. Enjoy!
And now Contessa, who apparently IS Contessa, and not just Fortuna and Victory Path but an amalgamation of the two, seems to be Ascending herself?
