Aperion Comes Home
The sky over the city had been dark for days. The trapped warmth and humidity making everything sticky and uncomfortable. It had been oppressive. The darkness covering the city was unexpected but understood.
It wasn't until the third day when they noticed that the clouds were definitely unnatural and spinning slowly in the opposite direction of what should be possible in the northern hemisphere. All the clouds freezing in place should have been the first clue. People were entirely comfortable with the slowly shifting clouds or the unresolvable mess that resulted in rain. Unfortunately they lacked the time to process with what came next. The whole punched through the cloud cover was a rare but not unknown arial phenomena becoming less rare now that the thermocline could be triggered randomly be any parahuman with the right powerset. Over any many city this almost always passed without incident. It had been been weaponized by several villains in the past but was considered 'old=hat or dépassé', as it was more a giant pain to deal with that achieving any real tangible benefit. The startling beam overly luminous sunlight shining down finger-of-god style on a singular spot was less so normal. Converging upon a singular spot the world seems to wash out with white before her eye could adjust.
The shout of "Mother, I'm here." strangely didn't shatter any glass but the ground quaked with the shout. Appearing like an angel in the sun beam his words boomed out very clearly. Ringing across the land his words saturated and seemed to drown the air. The radios of completely unaffiliated bandwidths dimming in intensity. It didn't make any sense. Why was Aperion here in her city countless miles away. The whole PRT was taking a 'hands off' approach to this new and potential ally. Besides that inane woman heading up the Brockton branch, continued contact had been cordial. Regarding the extensive property damage, it was fixable and could have worse without Aperion's intervention.
The ground beneath almost quietly reverberating with the echo's without quiet actually being on the menu. The pulsing red mink Bounced across the shoulders of possibly the strongest Rouge to join the pantheon. Aperion clearly had favorites, if the reports she received from the villain meeting were accurate. Clearly this was one of his; If 'that' person/creature regularly inhabited his body not for its powers but so it could be fed, well, she didn't want to think about that. She had more pressing matters to deal with.
The windows in her office flexed with the sound. Shimmering with the reflected light the normally translucent material shimmered as it danced in the frame. All of the windows in the whole city as she saw windows of high-rises miles away take on a distinctly unnatural haze of reflected light.
Alexandria was floored. Aperion was here. In her city. What she had left after the disaster that robbed Hero from underneath her. She was forced to respond. If there was going to be a public show there were vanishingly few options, narrowing to one. Left with little choice after the public declaration and show of force. It was not something that she could trust to a third party or cover up. She could use the Internet to blitz the news feed of the interested parties with false premises, red herrings, and half truths. If there were not ten thousand cell phone cameras pointed at the man as he strode the last hundred meters to the the PRT headquarters, she would not even bother with that standard tactics. Word would get out.
The behavior analyst assured that he was attempting form a new power block emboldened and founded upon by the standard precepts of the established order. Alexandria could understand the sentiment because that was her modus operandi.
She didn't know what was happening but the rumors of Aperion's heritage were not lost on her. She had to be right in front if she wanted to head off the disaster that was quickly approaching. She didn't know what Cauldron was capable of with regards to cloning but she wasn't stupid enough to believe they didn't have genetic samples when she had genes that weren't crystalized. She wouldn't delude herself of what someone could do with her, Hero's, and Eidolon's DNA. Throw Haywire or Pocket's in to the mix with a couple of Trumps and you would have an unkillable monster of world ending power. Forget containment zones. You would have to contain whole dimensions and that might not be enough.
"I want to know what happened to the others. I was the weakest one... I am starting to remember". Or more like he was forced to know. Aperion was looking decidedly sick, almost like he was remembering something horrible that happened to him. Memories seemed to flow behind his eyes. She had seen that haunted look to many times to mistake it as anything else. To live something unforgettable. She had seen that face in a mirror on enough occasions that it was instantly recognizable.
"Where are my brothers and sisters! They are not in this dimension. I would know. I checked. What kind of sick games are you playing with our lives! You were supposed to be there for us, or something..." The words trailed off getting more distant and seemingly farther away. The red monster had jumped off his shoulder at some point to stand in line with the rest of the forge.
A lone slap rang out with a sonic boom.
Aperion left the office via the wall at several times the speed of sound. Alexandria knew she had really done it now. Casus belli. As the shredded walls and ceiling crashed around her she knew she had made a mistake. The Aperion sized hole in the wall was her testament. Part of it was the personal accusation; a loss of control. That part of her was out there alone, standing right in front of her might be the one thing she dreaded the most. A child grown into a man but hers. She couldn't stand the fact that fate might have just slapped her so hard.
The other part was the loss of Hero. They had a thing, maybe, once. Life and death situations drove people together like nothing else. If the rumors were true and he had been made from both of their genetics she was more than terrified of whatever Cauldron might be planning.
As the wall between the CRT and and the Celestial Forge were blown away everyone got a good look at the whole situation. The entire floor was rubble. The thankfully tinkered support columns tanking the damage mostly intact. The last valiant bit of plaster fell. Smashing to the ground caused her to cease introspection. She had to pick up the pieces. This was her mistake. The threat rating said non-confrontational unless attacked. She would have found it hard not to believe that every member of the forge had a least a minor undocumented Trump rating.
Her biology was atypical and impervious to anything besides certain Trump powers. She knew she would never have children, the impossibility of it made the prospect of a serious relationship that resulted in children unimaginable and impossible. For all that Hero was, he still talked about being able to retire and watch his children grow up. He wanted to have an apple orchard and a swing on a hill. All the things he talked about she couldn't forget. He really did talk about that often.
The Celestial Forge looked almost comically unperturbed as the Critical Response Team did their best to pick themselves and look imposing and dangerous. If such a thing was even possible, covered in dust and coughing powder, but they were making an effort. She was thankful they had cleared the floor of all PRT personnel that couldn't take a hit. The pulsing red mink now was a girl suddenly? She must have missed the transformation or it was to fast to observe. She was sure that the girl was the same one in Dauntless's report. The pulsing girl slapped her hands together with sparks of electricity seeming to bloom from every surface. The room started to come back together. She had to shake her head a little to get the image of a white being with flanked in black with teeth and endless black hands stretching forth. I was probably some memetic cost or side effect. She chose to ignore it.
The purple armored woman was still there but was had her head at an odd angle to the bare wall opposite her while she swung a heeled shoe and looked like she would rather be anywhere else. Survey's eyes never left her for a moment. The cat was paced around looking like it was was waiting for things to get put back together enough to find somewhere soft enough to take a nap. The golden man hadn't moved but a bow in his hands had a appeared at some point. The man with the helmet looked left and right and took a step back with a 'go-a-head' gesture.
Not knowing what was happening but if they weren't becoming hostile she was going to go with the flow. She had to have a conversation.
Opening the newly restored door to her office she stepped in, the Critical Response Team, with billowing streamers of dust coming off their bodies to rejoin with the ceiling, floors, and walls. Chubster stepped up, "Mam', situation report?" "All is good so far, looks like the Celestial Forge is not considering this an attack by me and is standing down; don't anyone give them an excuse to consider otherwise." Chubster wisely kept his mouth shut. Alexandria leveraged her considerable force towards the Mach diamonds laid into the collapsed piles of concrete where she was sure she had just killed thousands just from the collapsed buildings alone.
The force of the deceleration of any hypersonic object with the drag coefficient of a large tumbling human alone would be devastation. It had left a large circle of shattered windows on the periphery of several kilometers. As she descended she could see the results of her attack. In his wake of being shot through several buildings. All the buildings in the immediate path were reduced to powder and simply didn't exist any more. Beyond those, everything look like what you would expect if a buildings were pushed sideways, everywhere, all at once. A turbulent over-pressure/under-pressure wave guaranteed deaths and countless bodies would surely be covered in rubble. Of those that didn't die immediately from the collapsed building anyone standing to near a window that wasn't shredded by the shattered glass or die bleeding from a thousand wounds would be lucky to keep their eyesight but would invariably be horribly scarred. She had been there and done that. They said outside of six to seven meters binocular vision was useless but maybe it worked differently for parahumans. The irony wasn't lost on her.
It was quiet. Normally there would be sirens wailing in the distance. Screams and crying and people gurgling on their last breath. She had seen people running away from the area. There was nothing. No fire hydrants, no shouts of alarms or radio chatter. When she did hear something and her head snapped to the sound. It was came from the largest crater. Where Aperion impacted. With a breeze she did not feel all the rubble in the immediate area started to disintegrate seemingly blowing away into nothing as he stood there without a scratch.
The red lock of hair seemed to be glow much more brightly and she could swear she could see a spiral pattern glowing in electric blue laid on to the ground before it was gone. Slowly and with no sound a sphere of disintegration started to become evident around the man. The strangest thing was there was still no sound. Aperion looked directly at her. He was standing in the empty air with no obvious Tinker means for the effect. That didn't mean much but it made the sound of his footsteps make a ringing sound as they collided with empty air as the expansion stopped and he started to approach her.
In a burst of sparks and flame the rest of the Celestial Forge was standing behind him. She could feel the ground quake as some giant robots seemed to appear and disappear in a misty gloom that wasn't there a few seconds ago. Was this the start of the robot hell apocolypse that had been postulated as one of the most survivable if Aperion decided to attack. The sun had already dimmed. and seemed to only get darker. The fog grew thicker by the second until it was just her. A table sprung up from the middle of the ground. A chair on each side, a high-backed affair with royal overtones with ornate engravings covering everything she was struggled to see of her journey to save the world chronicled in elaborate and excruciating detail. Within the periphery in a hemi-circle, smaller but no less intricate chairs rose up flanking Aperion as if to bear witness. Each of the smaller throne chairs cradling a member of the Celestial Forge to bear witness.
Sitting down, he poured out two cups of some liquid into two cups and a pitcher that seemed to rise ominously from the surface of the the table. He drank from his deeply. "I can see them, you know? The passengers. You are connected with a dead one. Its grinding itself down into dust. Your ending will not be a good one. Eternity, forever, infinity.... However you choose to describe it; it will be hell. Tell me what I need to know about Cauldron and I will save you. No one will know what happened here. I switched everything and everyone in this city before I came. No one died, there is no damage, I can erase the memories of your CRT. Where are they keeping '
it'".
There it was again! The Oh my gosh at look behind his eyes like looking into a flowing river. She didn't miss him shudder as she contemplated her next words. "I was offered a deal. A deal so good I couldn't say no. Part of that deal was that I never spoke of it to a second person. We obviously have an audience here. Its a little hard to speak." Part of being able to speak authoritatively was the leeway it granted her to give an inch and gain a mile. "Perhaps we could speak more succinctly in a private venue." Alexandria wasn't sure of the source of his breaker powers, maybe some some sort of apocalypse scenario no one could remember. He might be be some sort of genetic chimera with her, Eidolon and Hero's DNA mixed in a cocktail of nightmare proportions with Haywire or Dodge's work added for flavor. That might explain things but not how Cauldron thought such an individual would mean in a broader context.