I was hoping to see a return. Maybe 2024 will finally be a good year!
Some woman in a fedora, who'd just walked in through a hole in space just outside my field's silence bubble but inside the reality separation, stared at me.
Hey wait a minute, I know her! And she probably wasn't a threat, because neither of the other women in the room had reacted to her.
Well. To
you she's not a threat.
"Okay then, the big deep dark secret I found is that you two are alternate universe versions of each other."
...I don't know what I was expecting but this was not it.
"The best part about this is that you're not even doing it on purpose," Contessa grinned, shaking her head. "Just like you didn't do on purpose what happened to me either."
I know!
Alexandria turned to her alternate version and asked for something I knew wasn't a good idea. "Please hit me, because I think this is a drug induced fever dream."
President Brown immediately cradled her hand and leaned away from her. "Absolutely not! I value my fingers, thanks!"
It feels rather out of character at times, but also not, if that makes sense?
The leader of the PRR froze.
PRT?
"That's a huge breach of security, you know!" I called out after her.
"I know!~" she singsonged, twirling on her heel. "But someone's got to keep you on your toes!"
"I'll find a way to block it!"
"I know that too!" she repeated herself. "Good luck~"
It's really just two friends trying to improve each others' security measures. Or something.
And… hold on, why is he designing technological Legos with some pretty important pieces flat out missing? I mean, circuits just don't connect like that!
"Hey, Chris. Your specialty is modules. Also I can reverse-engineer tinker stuff now."
had some very detailed doodles of the inside of a fusion reactor and packed it up too.
Given what I'd written in it, I'd very likely have to start hiding it from everyone else as well.
I did send a query to my little Shardling, but it replied with a vague feeling of shrugging. It wasn't responsible but it had some ideas.
Wait, so he's doing tinker doodles and neither he nor his Shard know how?!
They held no sympathies for me in their eyes.
I rolled my own and sighed. Guess this was my life now. Gods, it was gonna be hard enough to ignore being talked about out loud, much less what I saw in their heads due to my not exactly well controlled and actively burgeoning telepathy.
Yeah, that could be an issue
Despite being a victim of one of my creations… and her own recklessness, well, that didn't seem to deter her at all.
Nor did Dean's status as her boyfriend.
Sitting right next to her.
Well isn't that interesting.
There has to be something about that family. It's probably Carol.
the rest of her battered soul needed deeper hugs and therapy than anyone but I could provide
From most people that would be a sign of narcissism. In Weldon's case it is
also true.
and a Shardling derived power that would've been terrifying in its scope and power to the old me.
New, fully Alteran me? I could build something that did what she did, only better, in a day or so with nothing but mundane science, two microwaves, a toaster, five flashlights, a few double A batteries and a banana, to say nothing of if I leveraged the matter printing abilities of my Shardling. I wasn't that impressed.
Please, tell someone this fact. I want to see what happens.
I rolled my eyes and grinned to myself. Chris really wasn't masked. We cape geeks just thrilled in the hunt, not the capture.
This is absolutely my headcanon but it's sad how it's so rarely actually explored.
I smirked. "Right. At the cape geeks table. I'm one of them, Dennis," I informed him.
Cue the "the murderer was in the room the whole time" meme.
Lewis got the best reaction. He told Dennis he wanted to bring up several loopholes with the PRT… but only after he was done exploiting them as an example.
If Carlos, Dean, or Missy had been at that table, they would've probably been able to talk him down, and then overcome the complaints of the rest of us when we called them party poopers.
Carlos, Dean, and Missy were not at that table.
I see no problem with this.
No, to stop the onslaught of what in retrospect were bad, but incredibly fun ideas, we had Dennis, Chris, and I.
Chris folded when Dennis and I teamed up.
Okay, we might be doomed, but it will be worth it.
But noooooo, Armsy had to give me a responsibility lecture. No overhauling the scientific fields Weldon, no rewriting the history books Weldon, don't use your telekinesis to write anything on the whiteboard, Weldon.
I know I would absolutely do that, so the lecture was probably a good idea. Sadly.
Still, get yourself an anonymous account on ArXiv, start posting some papers...
Well, I'd left her core on the Hyperion. All night. And then I had to come to school, which meant I couldn't even check up on her.
Uhm, Weldon... I have a feeling you may have forgotten something
important...
The door opened, and in walked a girl. Nice figure, blonde hair, white skin. She seemed to be fond of white, given how much of it she was wearing, and when she arrived at the front of the class and waved, I found that her irises were also a pearly kind of white.
Too late.
I couldn't help myself, gulping hard. Those eyes, her love for white… feather white. And her smirk.
I'd seen them before.
And the penny drops.
She leveled an incredulous gaze my way. "Weldon, you left me, the world's best Tinker, in the science lab of a starship. Overnight. And all day," she stressed.
I stared at her for several long, heavy moments while it occurred to me just how badly I fucked up.
"...Whoops."
Only Alteran for
one day and he's already made a quite frankly impressive screwup. He's doing his legacy proud.
"No, save it. You're going to need to. Because as the highest ranking Ward here, I'm deciding to roll with helping you get an Endbringer into the Wards."
I love the idea, but also I can't help but envision this with the original 15' version and have to cry at what could have been.
Granted, I doubt Armsmaster mentally included 'ferrying the Endbringer you want to recruit' in his list of allowances, but if he started complaining I'd just have to toss him another piece of Alteran technology.
Their coffee makers were amazing. Especially for making hot chocolate.
This is not going to help his neuroses if he has to get this dang detailed with his lists.
Also, please do
not give the man Alteran coffee. We'll have a second Agatha situation.
"You expect me to believe all those people went crazy and evil after a horrible... traumatic..."
"Yeah. Why would I bother doing something like that? Humans are way worse than anything I could come up with."
"But it didn't happen after the other fights... as much."
"Confirmation bias. Also, I actually killed a lot less than the others in general. Lots of mayhem, very little clean sweeps. I would also point out that blaming me for all the worlds ills is pretty convenient for some people."
...That noise was the sound of an entire worldview shifting. I love it!
He's gonna get them all as his Pals at minimum.
"Finally, I have an intellectual equal who's likely as long-lived as me! Oh, and he happens to have all the scientific info we've been searching in the dark for. Was there ever any other option?"
"Well it makes sense from that angle."
"Also, he messes with people just by existing."
"...I knew it."
