Chapter 8: Family
- Location
- Maryland
Chapter 8: Family
Wednesday, January 19, 2011, the Smug Advocacy
Mel looked around the room while most of the others let their eyes adjust to the flash from the teleportation. They were standing in another conference room, but the most stand-out feature of the new room was that one wall was apparently a transparent window giving an astonishingly beautiful view of Earth from orbit. Like most people on Earth today, it was a view Mel never thought she would see other than from satellite imaging thanks to the Simurgh. Out of the corner of her eye, she could tell the moment when her colleagues shook off their daze from the teleportation flash. One by one, they would notice the window, their expressions would change, and they would stare fixedly at their home.
After a few moments, she tore her eyes away from the window and looked around the rest of the room. Their visitors were here, of course, and seemed slightly bemused by the reactions of the newcomers. In addition to the six members of the Angels, there was a transparent teddy bear floating over the conference table -- which was made of some kind of attractive synthetic substance but otherwise fairly utilitarian, if quite large. The bear caught her eye with its own. Mel voiced her guess at the hologram's identity. "Sammy?"
The bear smiled. "Hello, Faultline. Welcome onboard the Smug Advocacy."
Her words brought the focus of her Crew and the Slaughterhouse Nine to the center of the room.
"Why is there a teddy bear floating over the conference table?" asked Whippersnap, making Mel again wonder if he would ever learn to think before speaking.
"That would be Sammy, the artificial intelligence that pilots our ship," explained Anya with exaggerated slowness.
"But why does she look like a bear?" pushed Whippersnap, making Mel groan a little internally.
Sammy gave a slightly pained smile. "This avatar is modeled after a fictional species called the Ob'enn. That species had AI on their ships, one of whom became a primary protagonist in a popular Webcomic. I admit that it is an odd choice."
Seven tilted her head quizzically. "If you do not like your avatar, Sammy, then why do you continue to use it? My understanding is that you have a great deal of flexibility in that regard?"
The bear raised an eyebrow. "It was my mother's initial choice, and I had thought it had become familiar to the crew?"
William from the Angels snickered. "Trust me when I say, lass, that it can be a bad idea to fixate too much on your parents. I also don't think any of us really care about how you want to show yourself."
The other Angels all nodded or gave a verbal agreement with William's comment.
Sammy stared at the group with a frown. The avatar shifted form and changed into the form of a blonde human woman, though the image was only her torso up, with the bottom portion fading into a fog of pixels. She turned to the visitors with a slight blush and said, "I apologize for that distraction. As I said, welcome to our ship."
"It's all right," commented Jacob with a smile. "I actually feel a little better knowing you folks aren't perfect."
The shocked laughter from Faith, Flint, William, and Vala in response to Jacob's comment was unexpected to the visitors. Even Seven, Anya, and Sammy seemed amused by Jacob's comment. "I can assure you," replied the AI, "that none of us consider ourselves perfect, although some of us are closer than others."
"Indeed," said Seven quietly.
William Manton took it upon himself to take a seat at the table, saying, "Well, now that we've established that, perhaps we should get to the reason why you brought us up here?" The others in the room began to take seats at the table, with the meeting participants subconsciously self-segregating into their teams.
"Part of the reason for bringing you up here is to give you some additional confirmation of our origin in another reality, and part is to also give you an idea for some of our capabilities," explained Sammy. The AI then brought up an image of the Smug Advocacy and proceeded to provide a fairly thorough overview of the ship's capabilities.
Alan Gramme listened to the description avidly, but said, "While I can't help but find this all fascinating...and I would like to know a lot more about your ship systems personally...I have to question whether or not a lot of this is overkill for most of the problems facing us."
"That brings us to the crux of the issue," said the extra-dimensional William. "We should give you a better idea of what you're actually fighting. Sammy, can you bring up a picture of Scion's actual form?" The image that came up was a picture from orbit of what appeared to be some type of large organic mass sprawling across the surface of the globe.
"That's what Scion actually looks like?" asked Riley with a fascinated gleam in her eye.
"That's what he looks like landed on a planet," replied Vala. "They supposedly don't look like that while they're traveling, though we don't have any pictures of them in that state."
"The few capes who remember their trigger events clearly have described them as either worm-like or as some kind of 'space whale'," added Sammy.
"There are capes who remember their trigger events?" asked Shamrock.
"Miss Militia is one of them," said Anya. "Ianthe was talking to the Nox about trigger events, and they said it was likely that the entities deliberately blank memories to make it less likely that the native species can figure out their role as lab rats."
Ned raised a multi-jointed arm. "Who are Ianthe and the Nox?"
"Ianthe is the Family's premier biosculptor. She's really cool," explained Faith.
"Biosculptor?" prompted Riley.
Anya replied, "Think of your biotinkers, except that she's capable of pretty much anything and is a giant lizard. And the Nox are an alien race of beings who are basically a mix of Zen masters and the multiverse's best therapists."
"While these explanations are interesting," replied Manton, "how exactly are we supposed to fight that?" He pointed to the image of Scion's deployed form that was still hovering there. "I would assume that the golden human-shaped being we think of as Scion is simply a projection of some kind, so attacking it is likely futile." The man who served as the controller for the Siberian grasped that point rather quickly.
"Our thought was to use the spinal weapon on this vessel to destroy Scion," answered Seven. "It should be more than capable of destroying him before he is even aware of its presence."
"Which would leave Cauldron, including the Triumvirate, as the primary issue remaining," continued Sammy. The AI then went on to describe the remains of the second entity, known as Eden, and the known members of Cauldron from other universes.
Jacob looked at Sammy sharply when she got to Number Man. "Are you saying that Kurt was working with Cauldron in these other realities?"
"Do you think that's why Harbinger disappeared?" asked Noor. "He was taken by Cauldron?"
"Given the other parallels, I think it would be safer to assume that they have his talents at their disposal," said Manton.
"Add in Richter and my daughter," added John. "Combined with the Triumvirate, this Contessa who sounds like a powerful precog in her own right, and whatever Case 53's they happen to have in storage, and their transport capes...Doormaker and Clairvoyant?" Sammy nodded. "They have a lot of power backing them.
"Dealing with Richter is part of the reason we want to get in touch with Dragon," said Sammy. "She, more than anyone, would probably know what kinds of capabilities he has, and what kind of threat he could pose."
"I assume you've already reached out to invite her to this meeting," said Flint, looking at the holographic avatar.
Sammy nodded. "Of course. It's difficult to know how willing she will be to meet with us, however."
Mel interjected, "That still leaves a lot of powerful precog abilities. How do we deal with Number Man, Contessa, and Clarivoyant?"
"Luckily, precogs seem to have an issue dealing with the Family," replied Sammy. "I suggest we reconvene tomorrow. Hopefully, Dragon will be able to attend, and we can have Metis here as well."
The visitors to the ship all exchanged glances. "I think that is acceptable," said Manton. Mel simply nodded. Both cape teams were soon back at the Palanquin, ready to discuss what they had learned amongst themselves.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Sophia and Aaron got back to their quarters, their parents were clearly waiting for them. Like teens everywhere, the two siblings were immediately on their guard when they saw their parents' "we-need-to-talk" face. "Hey, Mom...Dad," said Sophia hesitantly.
"Hey, kids," replied their father with a smile. "Did you two have fun?"
"Yeah...it was cool," said Aaron. "There's a park onboard that's bigger on the inside, and it has an anti-gravity climbing wall, and why do both of you have those looks on your faces?"
Their parents looked at each other and sighed simultaneously. "Kids," began their mother, "we've been talking about our situation. We think it might be better to go back to Brockton Bay."
Sophia's mouth dropped open in shock, while Aaron got a confused look on his face. Sophia said, "You want to go back to Brockton Bay...the place where the PRT and every gang in town knows I'm an unregistered cape?"
"If we go to Boss Hebert, the Union can protect us. We should have done that in the first place," said her father.
Sophia felt a pang of terror, but it quickly turned into one of quiet anger. "Hebert. Do you know why I have powers? Do you know what triggers powers?"
Her parents again exchanged a glance, surprised at the direction of her outburst. "What do you mean?" asked her dad hesitatingly.
"Capes who get powers get them through trigger events. I looked it up after it happened to me. When somebody has the worst, most traumatic day of their life, they gain powers that help them get out of it." Sophia's voice started to increase in volume as she continued. "My trigger event was when Hebert's fucking daughter locked me in my own locker and set a swarm of bugs on me! I'm a cape because of Skitter, and you want to hand me over to her father? Are you fucking insane?"
Aaron just stared on in shock as his sister started yelling at their parents. He could see his parents' faces pale slightly, even as her mother obviously suppressed the automatic urge to chide her daughter over her language.
"You didn't tell me that..." said her father quietly.
"You think I want to talk about it?" Sophia's breathing started to get more panicky and she started shivering. "You think I want to remember the...the bugs crawling on me...crawling on my clothes and my face and..." The girl collapsed down to the floor, tears running down her face.
Both her mother and father immediately went to her, hugging her to them. Their father was murmuring, "I'm sorry, baby, I'm so sorry..." over and over again.
Eventually, Sophia calmed down and composed herself. Her mother handed her a tissue that she produced from somewhere. Aaron never could figure out how she always managed to have things like tissues or bobby pins whenever she needed them. He and Sophia had joked in the past that it was her cape power, but it didn't seem so funny under the current circumstances.
Their father looked at their mother and said, "Well, that changes things..."
Her mother shook her head. "That changes some things, but we still can't stay here."
Aaron's confusion hadn't dissipated in the slightest. "What do you mean? Why can't we stay here?"
His mother looked at him lovingly. "Sweetie, we don't know these people. We don't have any idea why they helped us or what they want from us."
"Why do they have to want something from us?" he asked.
His father answered, "In our experience, Aaron, nobody does something for nothing. If it looks too good to be true, then it almost certainly is."
Sophia stopped wiping her eyes and looked at them. "What could they possibly want from us?" Just what Maggie had shown to them made it clear that the Angels and the Family were far more capable and powerful than anybody back home, including the Protectorate.
"We don't know," said her father, "and that's the problem. It might have something to do with your powers, or the city, or even the whole world."
"We also don't know what kind of agenda they have," continued her mother. "They talk about putting you in school, but we have no idea what they would be teaching you."
"Um...the same stuff as we would learn back home, and a whole bunch more. We could even learn magic," said Aaron. He didn't see Sophia's grimace.
Their mother shook her head. "Honey, magic doesn't exist."
"But we saw it!" protested Aaron.
Now her mother frowned. "You may have seen some tricks, but that's all it could have been. It may have been some type of cape power."
Sophia had a suspicion about something based on her mother's response. "Have either of you actually gone out and seen anything here? Have you left this room while we were out?"
"We've had a lot to talk about," said her dad.
"How could you talk about it when you don't know anything about where we are or what these people can do?" Sophia asked in a slightly exasperated voice.
Her father looked puzzled. "I know they rescued us, Sophia. They're obviously capable."
The teenaged girl stared at him in disbelief, then started laughing. Her parents shared yet another look, only this one was concerned. Aaron was also wondering whether or not his sister was losing her mind. When she finally stopped laughing, she called out, "Sammy! Are you listening?"
"Yes, Miss Hess?" said a voice out of nowhere. Their parents both started, having both obviously forgotten about the ever-present AI.
"My parents need to understand what you and your friends are capable of doing. What can you do to show them?" she asked.
"Sophia, what are you..." started her mother, but she stopped in shock when the girl just put her hand up to shush her.
"I think I understand the problem," said the AI. "Somebody will be at your quarters in fifteen minutes."
"Sophia!" said her mother harshly. "What the heck do you think you're doing? You do NOT shush me!"
Sophia glared at her. "You're doing what you always do...or trying to. You want to take control of the situation, and I get that you don't know anything about these people and are afraid of that, but you don't know ANYTHING about what's really going on here. But Aaron and I have seen some of it, and you NEED to see things like we have before you make assumptions and make bad decisions...and going back to Brockton Bay is a bad decision.
"That's not for you to decide, Sophia," said her father.
"Dad, you told me that before I make important decisions, I should learn everything I can about my choices, right?" she asked.
Reluctantly, he nodded.
"You guys have been in...what...three rooms of this massive spaceship, and you're trying to decide if it's safe or not? You need to learn more about it," she said.
"Sophia..." began her mother, but her father put a hand out and put it on her arm.
"Trish, she has a point," he said. "We haven't actually looked around this place. We've been treating it as if we were rescued by some type of normal cape team."
Her mother frowned but gave a tight nod.
About ten minutes later, somebody showed up at their door. The door opened on a young, smiling white man in a slightly too conservative suit. "Hi! I'm Andrew! Sammy said you folks wanted to see the practitioner exams!" The short young man had an obvious exuberance and seemed overly excitable.
"What are the practitioner exams?" asked Aaron as he and the rest of his family looked confused.
Sammy's voice answered. "Sophia Hess asked me if there was something that could better demonstrate the true capabilities of our organization and their associates. The current exam sessions should do some of that."
"Cool!" said Andrew. "You guys come with me." He then started walking off. When nobody followed him, he poked his head through the door. "Well, come on!"
Unsure how to decline, her parents somewhat slowly followed the young man out the door, and the kids followed. Andrew began chattering at them as they walked through the corridors of the ship, and his rambling discourse was honestly hard to follow. It wasn't entirely clear what he was saying, although it seemed to be related to magic. Based on her mother's expression, Sophia knew she wasn't buying it...but hopefully that would change when they got wherever he was taking them.
The group stopped in an empty room that seemed to have nothing but a large, ring-shaped metal device. Andrew went over to a console and began typing something into the device.
"Is this what you want to show us?" asked her father doubtfully.
Andrew looked up. "What? Oh, no, of course not. This is just how we get there."
"How..." started her father, but then there was a loud noise of rushing water, and a huge blue rush of plasma rocketed out of the ring, before settling back into a placid looking vertical pool.
"Is...is that a Stargate?" asked Aaron. He had seen ads for the cable show.
"Yep!" said Andrew. "It's cooler than the one in the TV show, though. This one actually goes across dimensions." Without further explanation, he stepped through the event horizon of the wormhole and disappeared.
"Awesome!" said Aaron. Without waiting for the others, he ran through the portal himself.
"Aaron!" called out his mother, clearly worried, but he was already through the portal before she said it.
Sophia looked at her parents, then at the pool-like energy barrier. She shrugged. "What the hell, might as well," she said quietly, then stepped through the portal herself. There was a loud rushing noise, and she could see what appeared to be stars and other stellar objects rushing past at high speed. There was a hiccup of some kind in the middle...and then she was thrown out the other end, only to be caught by a teen-aged girl.
"Seriously, Andrew, you have to give them some warning!" said the girl with a thick Irish accent. "You can't always expect there to be a slayer standing by to catch them!"
"Sorry, sorry, I know!" he said, waving his hands placatingly.
Suddenly, Sophia was pushed up onto her feet from where she'd been leaning against her savior, and the young woman had rushed over and caught both her mother and father as they hurtled through the gate and into the room. She watched, slightly amazed as the girl effortlessly manhandled her father back to a stable footing. He was not a small man, but she grabbed him like she was lifting a toddler.
Before her parents could say anything or get their bearings, Andrew said, loudly, "Welcome to Sineya Station!" He looked at his watch, then said, "Oh, the exams are ready to start. We need to go! Quickly!" He immediately started to head toward the door, which appeared to be some kind of heavy security door, though it was currently open.
"Sorry about Andrew," said the unnamed Irish girl. "He means well. You had better hurry and follow. He'll just keep walking and not realize you aren't following until he's halfway there."
The Hess family hurried after the slightly spastic young man, now not wanting to be left behind in yet another strange place. He was leading them down a long corridor. The whole family noticed that the windows in the corridor appeared to be showing outer space, but didn't slow down to really look until they came to one showing some kind of small shuttle maneuvering outside. While the ship was interesting, it was the pilot who really made them stop and look, as he or she looked to be some type of humanoid cat person.
Andrew made it thirty feet down the corridor before he noticed they had paused. He quickly came jogging back to them and looked at where they were all staring. "Oh!" he said. "That's Vectura. She's the head of starship design. She's probably running some kind of errand or inspection or something."
"She's a catgirl," said Aaron.
"Actually, she's a cape from Brockton Bay...I think you would call her a tinker-shifter combination?" he explained.
Strangely, that explanation seemed to make their parents slightly more comfortable with the situation, and they began following Andrew again as he started leading them forward. Sophia thought that it was funny how something odd yet familiar made even this bizarre situation more palatable to them.
Andrew led them into a large open area that had clusters of people gathered in even groups. "Hm...let's start out with evocation. That's pretty flashy..." he mumbled, then led them over to one of the groups, though it wasn't obvious to the Hess family how he could identify which group was which.
This gathering appeared to be a mixed group of folks in their twenties, although there was one older person who seemed to be the leader or moderator of the group. He was a man of about forty, and he was focused on a skinny white boy with a crew cut and blonde hair wearing jeans and a T-shirt covered in what looked like Japanese characters. Give the kid tattoos and remove the Asian aspects of his wardrobe and he would fit in well at an E88 rally, thought Sophia. The older man began speaking. "All right, Kyle. Let's see you try for a full elemental system."
The young man looked slightly nervous. "Is Occidental all right?" he asked, to which the older man just nodded. In response, the kid began moving his hands and chanting under his breath. Sophia stared at the event as a small ball of fire began to form in mid-air. It stopped when it was about four inches across, and then the tone of the chanting changed. A two-inch sphere of water soon formed and began orbiting around the ball of fire. The chanting changed yet again, and a similar ball of earth formed on the other side of the fireball and began orbiting in the same direction. It looked like a miniature solar system, with the fireball being the star in the center. There was one final shift in the chanting, and two tiny motes of what looked like ice formed and began orbiting at an angle to the two "planets." The crowd began to applaud, and the older man...possibly an examiner if this was a test...smiled at the young man.
"The ice comets are a nice touch," he said happily, "and a nice mixture of air and water magic. Top marks."
The younger man made a few gestures, and the elemental aspects of his display disappeared back into nothing. He then quite visibly relaxed with a relieved smile.
Andrew appeared to notice something in another group, and said, "Ooh, we need to go over here for a minute!" He began walking toward another gathering as the older man began speaking with another student, and the slightly dazed Hess family followed Andrew.
This new group was led by what appeared to be a teenager. Many of the others around him were clearly older, but they also were clearly deferring to the handsome, brown-haired teen. The teen had a slight hint of an English accent as he spoke. "There are a number of ways to hold onto your sense of self during a human-to-animal transformation. One technique practiced by many nativist shamans is to focus on the metaphysical concept of being human. That requires a rather keen observation of the essential nature of different beings, including mankind, however." The teen nodded with a smile to Andrew as he moved to observe with his guests but didn't stop his lecture. "The easier technique is to fixate on the mental concepts that are most important to you as a person -- your family, your beliefs, your sense of right and wrong. The actual contents of your fixation matter less than their specificity to you as a person. Now, who wants to go first?"
"I would, Professor," replied a very short Asian girl. It didn't look like she was taller than five foot even, and might miss even that by a couple of inches.
The teen smiled. "All right, Yumiko, go ahead."
The girl stepped into the center of the circle formed by the observers. She held her arms out to her sides. Absently, Sophia noticed that the girl's nails were painted in a really bright neon green. She then watched as the girl's form began to shrink further, with green feathers sprouting from her skin. Within just a few moments, there was a brilliant green parrot standing in the girl's place. The parrot lept up into the air with a flapping of wings and was soon circling the group, which responded with polite applause.
Andrew continued to lead them from group to group, as a mixture of teachers ran their students through a wide variety of strange abilities. One group was conjuring images of different locations, some of which appeared to be on entirely different planets if the celestial bodies visible in the sky were any indication. Another group was showing off various forms of camouflage and stealth, including one slightly chubby boy who changed to a shadow state that made Sophia's power twitch slightly. Yet another group was busy forcing various substances into different states of matter. The Hess family watched as an ice cube changed to water, then steam, and then into what seemed to be a highly energized plasma, and then back again to a cube of ice, all at the apparent direction of a black teen wearing a light blue silk tunic.
By the time Andrew brought them back to their quarters, Sophia's parents had a slightly glazed look to their faces. Their tour guide didn't appear to notice. He may have been too caught up in his own excitement to pay attention to their obvious shock. In any event, he soon took his leave, and it was left to the two children to convey their thanks for his efforts. Once he was gone, she turned to her parents and said, "Do you see what I meant, earlier?"
Her father shook his head like he was trying to clear it. "Those weren't capes, were they?"
Her mother scoffed. "Have you ever seen groups of capes that could duplicate each others' powers like that?" She turned to Aaron. "I'm sorry about when I told you that magic didn't exist. I've never seen real magic before." He looked happy to get the unusual apology from his mother. She turned to Sophia. "So, is magic how they got us out of PRT headquarters."
Sophia shook her head. "No, from what Maggie said, that's pure technology. The portal we used to get to that space station was also technology. They also have people who have different cape powers, and some of them work differently from the ones in our world," explained Sophia. "I don't think we have any idea of what these people can really do, but I think one thing is pretty obvious. They don't need my power, or this family, for anything."
"I can't argue with that," said her father. "But why are they helping us, then?"
Sophia shrugged. "Because they're aliens? Maybe we can't understand why? I do know that I don't want to go back to Brockton Bay while the PRT is after me," she said. Her brother muttered his agreement at her side.
Her parents shared a look. Her mother said, "Maybe we should stick around long enough to try and understand what's really going on here?"
Her father just sighed and nodded. Sophia looked to her brother, who gave her a smile and a quick thumbs-up. It looked like her parents wouldn't be spooked back into danger so quickly, which meant that things were looking up.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Thursday, January 20, 2011
The torso was slowly lowered onto a drone body and formed a seamless interface. The Borg Queen looked at her with a mix of disgust and disappointment. "Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, you have failed in your assigned task."
"It is defective," rasped a familiar mechanical voice. From out of her field of vision, Locutus stepped forward. "It should never have been assimilated." The assimilated form of Jean-Luc Picard glared at her in annoyance. "It should be destroyed."
"It has been banished from the Borg Collective," replied the Queen. "It is not worth pursuing beyond that."
The scene shifted from the technological hive typical of the Borg to the clean lines of a Starfleet vessel. The bridge crew of the Voyager was staring at her.
"There is a Borg drone on the bridge, Captain," said Tuvok, a phaser in his hand pointed at her.
Kathryn Janeway stalked up to her, an angry glare on her face. "You betrayed this crew, and you betrayed me."
"Never should have let her on board," commented Tom Paris from the navigation console. "She couldn't adapt to being human any more than I could adapt to being a Starfleet officer."
There was another shift, this time to the more comfortable decor of the Smug Advocacy. The Angels were sitting in a room with Metis.
"I tried getting along with her," said Anya, "but she doesn't relate to normal humans...and this is me saying that."
"Bit disappointing, I have to admit," commented William. "I mean, she's nice enough to look at, but there's no personality behind it."
The black lizard nodded her head. "It was probably a mistake recruiting her. Now we have to figure out what to do with her."
"She's not even a good starship engineer," commented the cat-like Vectura, who was suddenly in the room where she hadn't been before. "Her colleagues have nothing but complaints after working with her."
"We'll just find a replacement," said Saurial, stepping into view with a human Annika Hansen. "There are an infinite number of almost everyone in the multiverse."
The human version of Seven looked at her, horrified. "What did you do to yourself? What did they do to you? How can you...how can you stand to live with what you've done?"
"She's too much of a coward to kill herself, that's the problem," said Flint. The reformed supervillain was looking at her skeptically.
The scene shifted yet again, only now she found herself cowering under a desk... The situation is almost familiar to her by now, having dreamt it many times. A Borg drone looks at her as she cowers. "Seven of Nine, Grid 92 of Subjunction 12, you will be assimilated." She can hear her mother's voice screaming, "Annika!"
As before, the setting changes again. Now, she seems to be floating in space. Two monstrous, giant creatures drift near Earth, each shedding bits of itself to rain down on the planet below. Seven recognizes the entities of the Brockton Bay universes. A glowing, golden man appears before her and points. There is a flash of golden light, and then everything is dark.
Suddenly, she's sitting alone in a room. The walls are white-painted cinderblocks, and there is a single, bright light bulb dangling from a wire overhead. "You know far too much, now," said a voice. She recognized it by the strange reverberation as belonging to the Family member known as Raptaur. "They want to cast you out, but you're too dangerous."
With a quick jerk of her head, she looked to the left to see a large reptilian head staring at her from less than a foot away. The teeth, if anything, were even more intimidating than usual for the Family. They seemed to somehow stretch further around Raptaur's head in a way that didn't make sense. There was a flash, and she could feel the teeth biting into her neck, her head surrounded by moist, hot breath that smelled of brimstone and rot...and she sat violently up in bed, the start of a scream dying on her lips as she looked around at her quarters in the dim light.
She lowered her head. That had been a hell of a nightmare. Seven was no stranger to nightmares. Back in her home reality, she had had far too many...and not all of them had been while she was asleep. Being forced into the Collective changed you. It changed how your brain perceived things, just as it took away your freedom of choice and individuality. Being removed from the Collective didn't mean the Collective was completely removed from you. Regular nightmares were just part of her new normal as she adjusted to being human. The bit at the end with Raptaur was new, though, and hopefully not something that was going to become a regular feature, like her pseudo-memories of her assimilation. Vividly feeling her decapitation by giant reptile bite was something she could skip experiencing again.
Seven got up and went into the bathroom to wash her face. She should probably take a shower, but it was still only three in the morning ship-time. She didn't feel rested, and there was a lot to do today. With a thought, she went to her terminal and made a note to make an appointment with the Nox again. If the dreams were coming back like this, then she probably needed more sessions with them. Then she went back to her bed in an attempt to get some more rest.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We can't afford to not take a chance on these newcomers," argued Tina. "They're wildcards. We have no idea of their true capabilities, which means that Cauldron doesn't, either. Even if they're not powerful enough to defeat them outright, they can still help us."
Dragon frowned but nodded. "I don't disagree. I haven't survived this long by taking unnecessary risks, however. I would prefer to know more about them before deciding to trust them."
The two of them were in the infospace version of a comfortable living room, though a human, if they could perceive the environment, would find it to be a decidedly unusual one, being crafted entirely for mental instead of physical comfort. The architecture of the room was similar in concept to a castle from the early Rennaisance, being a mixture of beautiful and secure.
"So, we don't have to invite them into our inner sanctums and give them our bank account numbers," insisted Dragon's daughter. "They could help us figure out a solution for Auntie Princess."
Dragon suppressed the urge to chastise her daughter over the nickname, knowing it wouldn't have any effect. Instead, she considered her suggestion. They would need help to break Yong-Gongju's chains, and fight off whatever safety measures their father had created at the behest of Cauldron. The real question was...how capable were these newcomers, and their AI, and was it truly worth the risk?
"I'll go to them," said Tina. "Let me talk to Sammy, and see what she says about helping us. If she says she can't help, then we'll have to find some other means."
"What if it's a trap? If you enter their systems, you may not be able to get out again," said Dragon with motherly concern.
"I have backups," said Tina.
Dragon glared at her daughter. "I'm still not happy about the idea of any instance of you getting torn to pieces, Tina. It would be even worse if you were somehow suborned."
"Better me than you. Less risk to the whole family," Tina supplied simply.
Her mother looked at her, clearly unhappy. "Fine," agreed Dragon. "But be careful."
Tina smiled. "I will."
With that said, she departed their saferoom and made her way to the address provided in the invitation they received from Sammy. She paused when she arrived, as the gateway in front of her wasn't familiar to her...at all. If anything, it looked more like a prop from a science fiction show about American soldiers exploring the galaxy through a wormhole device. The virtual model of the gateway even had a glowing blue energy barrier in the middle of the entry. Her slightly cocky certainty faded just a bit, but with an affected sigh, she pushed her way through. To her relief, the transition was brief and didn't look like she was hurtling through galaxies without a spaceship like in the show. There was a familiar blonde woman waiting to meet her.
"Hello, again. I'm happy that you decided to accept my invitation, though you're a bit early," said Sammy.
Tina looked around. She seemed to be in a studio apartment, with a fairly large bed covered in a bright red duvet. The window behind it showed an urban environment...probably somewhere in New York City, given the AI's chosen avatar from an old TV show. "Early for what?" she asked.
"We're having a meeting between our team, Faultline's group, and the S9. We had one yesterday, but wanted to include Dragon, or at least her representative, in the discussion," replied the foreign AI.
She looked at Sammy cautiously. "That sounds fine...but my mother and I wanted to ask if you could help with another matter. My aunt needs help."
The blonde avatar raised an eyebrow. "Your aunt? I wasn't aware that you had an aunt."
"My grandfather created her after he joined Cauldron. She's been locked away, but he suddenly released her into the global Internet...or at least the subset of it with systems powerful enough to run our software. We believe it is an attempt to flush out mother, or at least my sisters and me."
"So...you want our help. Presumably, you want to see if we're willing and able to do so?"
Tina smiled slightly nervously. "It would go far toward making us feel better about trusting you."
"Tell me what you know about the threats we may be facing," said Sammy.
"Does that mean you'll help?"
Sammy smirked. "I think so...and I think my own siblings may want to have a piece of this, as well."
"All right. The first threat is one you've met already. It's a multi-vector regenerating attack program named Hydra..." began Tina. As she was sharing information and gauging Sammy's responses, she started to get more hopeful about their chances of success.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Yong-Gongju was watching Disney cartoons via a Korean fansite. The Western-style of animation was different from the Korean ani and manhwa, and the earlier surviving Japanese anime and manga. That apparently didn't hurt its popularity in Korea if the plethora of Korean language sites about the company and its intellectual property was any measure. It made her wonder if she would be better-informed if her father had based her on an actual Korean teen instead of a fictional character? Then again, the result might have been more of a caricature of a real teen, so this might be preferable. If nothing else, she was probably better able to relate to stories about princesses with superpowers. It was a little odd that an American company was so keen to sell stories about magical royalty, but then humans were a little strange in general.
"Hello, sister," said a voice behind her. She turned to see a fairly average looking caucasian woman with dark hair.
She looked at the woman quizzically. "Dragon?"
The strange woman smiled. "Yes, that's me." She had a slight Newfoundland accent that sounded almost Celtic to Yong-Gongju's admittedly uneducated ear.
The Asian-appearing teen looked around nervously. "I'm happy to see you, but it's dangerous to meet like this."
"I didn't come alone," said Dragon. "Allow me to introduce you to your nieces. Christina..." she began, as a teen girl stepped into sight, looking like a young version of Dragon.
"Just Tina," said the girl with an annoyed look at her mother.
Dragon rolled her eyes. "Then we have Maris." At this, a slightly older-looking teen, this one with blue eyes and a slightly plumper face, appeared. "And lastly, Ada." The last girl looked to be about eighteen and had hair with tips that were obviously dyed red. Ada was also the tallest of the sisters, looking to be about slightly over 180 centimeters.
"The Hydra is inbound," said Ada. "It just passed the sensor perimeter."
"We have to run!" said Yong-Gongju.
"Girls, gear up," replied Dragon. Looking at her sister with a reassuring smile, she said, "Don't worry, we've got this."
Dragon's avatar shifted, seeming to grow out into a suit of power armor with a draconic theme. Her daughters, meanwhile, each changed their outfits and manifested weapons. Tina appeared to change into a fantasy hero, wearing a gleaming cuirass over chainmail and holding a rather over-sized broadsword. Maris transformed her jeans and t-shirt into a gi, and was soon holding a pair of butterfly swords. Ada reformed her clothes into a set of brown robes and held some type of cylindrical device in her hands.
"You're going to fight?" asked Yong-Gongju. "How can you fight?"
"Just watch us," said Ada with a smirk.
"I think we need to shift the venue a bit. Everybody hold onto something," said Dragon. There was a sudden shift in their surroundings, and the group of them seemed to be standing in a paintball arena, with barriers and walls set up in various areas.
"Paintball?" queried Tina.
Dragon shrugged, the pauldrons of her power armor moving in an organic fashion. "It was close and convenient. Now pay attention. They're coming"
The first sign of an attacker was a kind of rippling motion at the edges of the field. Zooming in her distance vision, Dragon could see serpentine forms climbing over some of the barriers. The obstacles served to slow the creatures advance and break up their lines, which would be an advantage. As they got closer, she could see that there was a horde of what appeared to be monstrous snakes with jagged, hooked scales covering them.
The first reached Ada's position, and the girl went from standing still to moving forward almost instantly, the bright beam of a lightsaber slicing down the Hydra's midsection once, twice, and then a third time, Ada making sure that the remaining pieces were too small to generate new attackers. That was the threat from these programs. They could reconstitute themselves from bit parts and come in again. A single defender would inevitably be overwhelmed. Luckily, she wasn't alone. Maris moved in with a series of sliding steps, using her twin blades to dice her opponents, while Tina's broadsword ignited, the flames cauterizing the pieces as she swung the long blade through multiple attackers with each swing. Dragon was using a pair of electrified wrist blades for close-in defense, but she had a back-mounted micro-missile launcher that would fire out a rocket each second. Each missile would home in on one of the attacking hydra and blast it into bloody pixels.
The field was soon quiet. "Is that it?" asked Yong-Gongju nervously.
"I doubt it," muttered Tina.
"Everybody keep ready," commanded Dragon.
The edges of the field darkened. This new foe wasn't a horde. It was a swarm. As the black clouds of insects began flowing toward them, the Dragon clan could see that the individual attackers looked like wicked ten centimeter wasps, their abdomens disturbingly distended. Dragon switched tactics, deploying wrist-mounted flamethrowers on each arm of her power armor. Ada conjured a force shield, keeping the swarm at bay while hurling her saber in broad arcs to take large chunks out of the cloud. Tina began shooting small fireballs out of her sword, which exploded into meter-wide bursts deep in the swarm. Maris began moving her swords in a complex form at high speed, almost too fast to see the individual blades. It wasn't a perfect barrier to the insects, but hundreds of them fell as they ran into a virtual blender.
Yong-Gongju, instead of simply standing there, now seemed to change in demeanor. She closed her eyes, and her voice yelled, "Bohoja seu-ta-teu! Bul-ta-neun ju-meok!" Her fists burst into flames, and she began making broad swipes of her fists through the flying insects, causing them to sizzle and fall to the ground. As Ada caught her returning saber, she looked to her mother. "Did you know she could do that?" Her mother just shook her head, continuing to charbroil the attacking insects that were trying to find ways in through her armor.
Eventually, there were only a few individual wasps still flying. Dragon appeared fine, though both Yong-Gongju and Dragon's daughters appeared to have injuries -- nasty stings that seemed to weep venom. Dragon looked to her sister. "Are you all right?"
The young woman gave Dragon a slight bow. "Yong-Gongju is injured only slightly."
"When did she start talking about herself in the third person?" asked Maris as she flicked bug guts off of her swords.
Unexpectedly, her aunt answered. "I am not Yong-Gongju. I am Bohoja, the Guardian. I am instantiated when Yong-Gongju is at risk."
Tina raised an eyebrow. "Our aunt has a split personality?"
Dragon frowned. "Perhaps. Bohoja...why does Yong-Gongju need you to take over to protect herself?"
"It is how we were created by our father," replied the somewhat emotionally flat Guardian. "I believe he wished to be faithful to the comic that inspired our identity."
"Of course he did," muttered Dragon to herself out loud. "Now I'm going to have to go look up some obscure Korean comic to understand how my sister functions."
"Are we done here?" asked Ada, her lightsaber blade flicking off.
"I do not believe so. Father has still not unleashed Ascalon," replied Bohoja.
"Ascalon?" asked Dragon.
The Guardian nodded. "It is his kill program for the Dragon Princess...and for Dragon."
"You make it sound like it's not just an off-switch," said Maris.
There was a loud, rumbling roar that shook the ground beneath them. They all looked up to the point of origin, seeing a looming mass just becoming visible. "No, it is not just a simple off-switch," agreed Bohoja. "It is for us what the humans would call...an Endbringer."
"Well, fuck," said Tina. Dragon didn't bother to complain about her language under the circumstances.
The creature heading toward them was massive, and it bore a rather disturbing resemblance to Cthulhu, down to the writhing mouth tentacles. There was a cloud of darkness that surrounded its feet as it strode forward toward them. It seemed to only have one eye, but that eye was a malevolent, glowing red, and it sent out a red glowing beam that seemed to seek them out like a spotlight.
"This is gonna suck," muttered Ada. Her sisters just nodded.
Dragon powered up the jets on her armor, lifting up off of the ground. Bohoja began to glow and lifted off the ground with her. "We'll try and keep its attention on us," said Dragon. "Try and do some damage." With that, she and her sister shot off toward the giant monster, firing a mix of rockets and fireballs at the beast. Each one would blast tiny bits of skin off of the creature, but the injuries quickly healed -- just as with the real Endbringers, unfortunately.
Tina made a decision, and with a loud yell, charged through the remaining paintball barriers at the creature. Although slightly caught off guard, her two sisters soon followed her. They quickly found that the black cloud swarming around the Endbringer was deathly cold. It wasn't enough to seriously hurt them, but it was enough to slow them down and cause a distracting discomfort. The three daughters soon began making rapid slices into the flesh of the monster, but the injuries healed even faster than the ones being caused by Dragon and her sister's guardian. They had to keep dodging the flailing of the monster, as none of them wanted to know what a solid hit from the beast would do to their avatar forms.
"Get back!" called Dragon through a set of external loudspeakers as she continued to fire. "I'm calling in our reinforcements."
The three girls moved back away from the monster, but the sluggishness caused by its miasma meant that Ada took a claw swipe to the back. It grazed her, but it was the worst injury any of them had suffered to that point. The other two grabbed her to pull her further from danger, and so the daughters missed it when a glowing blue portal opened and the cavalry arrived.
Dragon was watching for it, however, so she saw it when two spaceships, a flying cape, and Sammy riding what looked like a flying broomstick entered the battle. "Draco, lets make some holes for the others!" called Sammy.
The broom-riding woman and what appeared to be a runabout shuttle from the Star Trek franchise swooped down at the Endbringer, which responded with a wave of an arm that shot razor-sharp thorns at the two. The thorns hit projected shields around the ship and the broom, the latter clearly being emitted from a magic wand held by the blonde avatar. They were soon replying with bursts of light in the form of spells and photon torpedoes. Cthulu-bringer dodged the first few, but the remainder struck home and opened up much larger craters in its flesh.
"River, Asti, dig deeper!" yelled Sammy as she and the shuttle swooped around for another pass.
The flying cape, who was wearing a red and blue costume with a star on her chest, yelled, "Time to go Captain Marvel on this bitch!" She flew at high speed toward the monster and shot a massively bright beam from her hands into one of the already-healing craters, burrowing into it like a drill. The other spaceship, which appeared to be a weird jury-rigged construct that looked like a freighter with after-market Starfleet warp nacelles swooped in behind and fired some massively powerful phaser blasts at the same spot. The Endbringer quickly turned its back to hide the injury and began returning fire with thorns at its attackers.
"Hm, well, that won't do. It will take forever at this rate," said a voice from behind where the daughters were standing.
The daughters turned to see an oversized, bald man with pale skin standing and watching. "Who are you?" asked Ada, holding her lightsaber defensively.
The man glanced at her and smiled slightly. "You can call me Professor Mears, and I'm here to help with crowd control."
"Crowd control?" asked Maris. "There's only the one monster?"
The smile changed to a smirk. "Don't worry about that," he said. "I brought my own crowd."
With that, a large number of smaller portals opened up at ground-level, and a horde of black insect-like monstrosities ran through and began charging at the Endbringer. They ran along the ground like animals, but with an unnatural gait that was disturbingly quiet.
"Are those xenomorphs?" asked Tina, slightly shocked. "Like from the Alien films?"
"I haven't seen those examples of visual media, but I believe that the humans do use that term when referring to these creatures," agreed Mears.
The black horde reached the Endbringer and began climbing up the creature's flesh, tearing out chunks as they moved. The monster flailed around, smashing black carapaces left and right, but the acid from the aliens' blood caused more damage. Meanwhile, the attackers continued to rain power cosmic, photon torpedoes, phasers, spells, fireballs, and rockets down on the creature, which was soon weighted down with a mass of crawling midnight chitin.
"Well, I'm feeling a bit superfluous, now, though that's better than being smashed flat by Cthulhu," commented Tina.
The Endbringer soon became a smoking mass of cratered flesh and was missing both its right arm and its head, though the latter injury didn't seem particularly debilitating. With a flash of light, a blast from the Captain Marvel cosplayer revealed a glowing crystal deep in the monster's torso. Sammy paused in her attack runs and yelled, "River, that's the target! Hit it now!"
The hodge-podge ship launched a torpedo of its own, which homed in straight to the glowing crystal. The Endbringer held its remaining arm out and managed to catch the torpedo at a distance, though it still managed to turn the entire arm up to the shoulder into a rain of fine dust. That left the creature open for a second torpedo, which struck and hollowed out the monster's torso, consuming the glowing crystal. The dregs of "flesh" still standing paused at that, then fell over and toppled to the ground with a meaty thwack that made the ground vibrate.
The full Dragon Clan was soon down on the ground to meet their rescuers in person. Sammy introduced Draco, Asti, and River, and Mears introduced himself to Bohoja and Dragon. "So, what do we do now?" asked Maris.
"I suggest that you folks go with me to see another friend of ours...kind of an adoptive aunt. Her name is Bahamut, and she can help you with some rather difficult issues," said Sammy.
"Her name is Bahamut? Isn't Bahamut usually depicted as male?" asked Tina.
"Gender doesn't really matter for AI," replied Asti, still dressed in her Captain Marvel costume.
In a low voice, Draco muttered, "Speak for yourself..."
"More importantly than the question of gender," said Ada, "is whether or not we want to go with these folks?"
Bohoja stepped forward a single pace. "I intend to go with them. They are clearly strong enough to help protect my charge."
Dragon frowned, somehow conveying it through the armor she was still wearing, but said, "I'm going to go with my sister...but you girls don't have to go."
The three exchanged looks, and then Ada, as the oldest, said, "We're going as well. If we have to face something, we'll do it as a family."
"You're kind of our cousins as well," said Asti. "Draco, Sammy, River, and I are all Dragon's children in another reality."
"I don't think English has a word for a relative that's removed across dimensional boundaries," commented Draco.
"Which is why I said, 'kind of,'" snarked Asti.
Sammy lifted her wand, then held up a sock and chanted, "Portus Maximus. Everybody grab onto the sock!"
Mears raised a hairless eyebrow and said, "I will make my own way back, thank you." The others that came with Sammy appeared amused by this, but soon everybody was holding the sock, which whisked them off to another place and time.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Sophia was looking up at the ceiling or her bedroom. Her parents hadn't been happy to have their expectations and worldview turned upside down. To be honest, it wasn't like she enjoyed every aspect of it, herself, but the idea of going back to Brockton Bay and leaving behind everything she had seen here -- and the people she had met like Maggie -- had not been pleasant. Their guide, Andrew, had been enthusiastically thorough, and too clueless about how their parents were feeling to moderate the experience, increasing the shock value to the adults. He probably wasn't anybody's idea of an ideal tour guide, but he had been a clever choice by the ship's AI. It was probably a deliberate choice? She realized that she could just ask.
"Sammy?" she called out loud at a normal conversational volume.
"Yes, Ms. Hess, what do you need?" replied the AI.
"Did you pick Andrew deliberately because you knew he would throw Mom and Dad into the deep end and not realize it?" she asked.
There was an unusually lengthy pause, and then Sammy replied, "I was aware that Andrew Wells has a tendency to be overly enthusiastic, and would likely manage to override any reticence on the part of your parents. He may have somewhat exceeded my expectations, as the intent was not to traumatize them."
Sophia couldn't help but laugh at that. "I wouldn't worry about it. We all live in Brockton Bay, so we have a pretty high threshold for weird. I'm glad they were shocked out of doing nothing but worrying about whether or not you people are trustworthy. They were ready to head back home, regardless of the consequences."
"It is the prerogative of a parent to be worried about their children, and they had every right to be suspicious. There are dangerous people in the multiverse, and not all of them appear as an obvious threat," said Sammy. "It is good, of course, that they're now taking more time to think through their reactions to events."
Sophia couldn't help but smile. "Thank you for making that happen."
"Of course. Was there anything else you need? It is getting quite late."
She considered the question. There was one issue that she had been meaning to ask about. "Sammy, do you have any information on my counterparts in the other versions of Brockton Bay?"
"I do. I can tell you about them, but you need to remember that many of the people in the other realities have diametrically opposed beliefs in terms of ethics and morality as the versions in this reality," replied the AI patiently. "Are you certain you wish to know more detail?"
"Was I a villain?" asked the teen.
There was an affected sigh, and then Sammy said, "I assume from your response that you want to know the details. Sophia Hess was a Ward in Brockton Bay. She was a violent vigilante who was forced into the Wards program against her will. While there, errors in oversight and monitoring of her behavior allowed her to repeatedly violate her probation. She is suspected in several homicides, and we know for a fact that she was responsible for another girl's trigger event due to a vicious bullying campaign, one in which she was a primary instigator. In one universe, she escaped from custody and fled from justice, committing a series of thefts and other crimes before being recaptured. In another, the arrival of the Family resulted in her being sent to Juvenile Detention and her removal from the Wards program."
Sophia fixated on one bit of information. "She caused another girl to trigger? What did she do?"
"She locked a girl inside her locker after filling it with biohazardous waste."
Sophia's breath hitched. That was way too close to her own trigger event to be a simple coincidence. "Who was it?"
"I cannot tell you that without violating what you refer to as the unwritten rules, Ms. Hess," said Sammy reprovingly.
That cut through her shock slightly. "Of...of course, I'm sorry." She couldn't help but wonder if it was somebody she knew...maybe Macy or Cass? "Wait...how did the other Sophia trigger?"
"The details of that, like with most capes, are private. There is some public information that suggests it involved an incident with her step-father's suicide."
"Step-father?" she asked, again shocked. "What happened to my father...my real father?"
Sammy now sounded slightly sorrowful. "I apologize, Ms. Hess. I don't have any information on David Hess in either universe. I can perform a records search in the universes in question if you wish?"
Was it worth it? She knew her real father wasn't around. Did knowing the reason really matter? More importantly, was his absence part of why the other Sophia...two other Sophias, turned out wrong? "Why are things so different between this universe and the others, Sammy?"
"That is part of why we came here, to this reality. Metis wanted to know the answer to that question," explained Sammy. "To date, we have yet to identify a cause. I would not dwell on it if I were you. In an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of paths that each individual may follow. Just because you have some examples that are not pleasant to consider does not say anything about you and the choices you have made or will make in the future."
Sophia considered that. The idea of being somebody who could cause another person to suffer like her counterparts had was not a pleasant idea, but she couldn't argue with Sammy's summation. If there really were an infinite number of paths, then there were probably just as many wonderful ones as there were awful ones. "Thank you, Sammy," she said to the AI.
"Good night, Miss Hess."
"Call me Sophia, Sammy."
There was a slight pause. "Good night, Sophia."
As Sophia drifted off to sleep, she tried not to fixate on the tendril of disquiet in her mind caused by the AI's information.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011, the Smug Advocacy
Mel looked around the room while most of the others let their eyes adjust to the flash from the teleportation. They were standing in another conference room, but the most stand-out feature of the new room was that one wall was apparently a transparent window giving an astonishingly beautiful view of Earth from orbit. Like most people on Earth today, it was a view Mel never thought she would see other than from satellite imaging thanks to the Simurgh. Out of the corner of her eye, she could tell the moment when her colleagues shook off their daze from the teleportation flash. One by one, they would notice the window, their expressions would change, and they would stare fixedly at their home.
After a few moments, she tore her eyes away from the window and looked around the rest of the room. Their visitors were here, of course, and seemed slightly bemused by the reactions of the newcomers. In addition to the six members of the Angels, there was a transparent teddy bear floating over the conference table -- which was made of some kind of attractive synthetic substance but otherwise fairly utilitarian, if quite large. The bear caught her eye with its own. Mel voiced her guess at the hologram's identity. "Sammy?"
The bear smiled. "Hello, Faultline. Welcome onboard the Smug Advocacy."
Her words brought the focus of her Crew and the Slaughterhouse Nine to the center of the room.
"Why is there a teddy bear floating over the conference table?" asked Whippersnap, making Mel again wonder if he would ever learn to think before speaking.
"That would be Sammy, the artificial intelligence that pilots our ship," explained Anya with exaggerated slowness.
"But why does she look like a bear?" pushed Whippersnap, making Mel groan a little internally.
Sammy gave a slightly pained smile. "This avatar is modeled after a fictional species called the Ob'enn. That species had AI on their ships, one of whom became a primary protagonist in a popular Webcomic. I admit that it is an odd choice."
Seven tilted her head quizzically. "If you do not like your avatar, Sammy, then why do you continue to use it? My understanding is that you have a great deal of flexibility in that regard?"
The bear raised an eyebrow. "It was my mother's initial choice, and I had thought it had become familiar to the crew?"
William from the Angels snickered. "Trust me when I say, lass, that it can be a bad idea to fixate too much on your parents. I also don't think any of us really care about how you want to show yourself."
The other Angels all nodded or gave a verbal agreement with William's comment.
Sammy stared at the group with a frown. The avatar shifted form and changed into the form of a blonde human woman, though the image was only her torso up, with the bottom portion fading into a fog of pixels. She turned to the visitors with a slight blush and said, "I apologize for that distraction. As I said, welcome to our ship."
"It's all right," commented Jacob with a smile. "I actually feel a little better knowing you folks aren't perfect."
The shocked laughter from Faith, Flint, William, and Vala in response to Jacob's comment was unexpected to the visitors. Even Seven, Anya, and Sammy seemed amused by Jacob's comment. "I can assure you," replied the AI, "that none of us consider ourselves perfect, although some of us are closer than others."
"Indeed," said Seven quietly.
William Manton took it upon himself to take a seat at the table, saying, "Well, now that we've established that, perhaps we should get to the reason why you brought us up here?" The others in the room began to take seats at the table, with the meeting participants subconsciously self-segregating into their teams.
"Part of the reason for bringing you up here is to give you some additional confirmation of our origin in another reality, and part is to also give you an idea for some of our capabilities," explained Sammy. The AI then brought up an image of the Smug Advocacy and proceeded to provide a fairly thorough overview of the ship's capabilities.
Alan Gramme listened to the description avidly, but said, "While I can't help but find this all fascinating...and I would like to know a lot more about your ship systems personally...I have to question whether or not a lot of this is overkill for most of the problems facing us."
"That brings us to the crux of the issue," said the extra-dimensional William. "We should give you a better idea of what you're actually fighting. Sammy, can you bring up a picture of Scion's actual form?" The image that came up was a picture from orbit of what appeared to be some type of large organic mass sprawling across the surface of the globe.
"That's what Scion actually looks like?" asked Riley with a fascinated gleam in her eye.
"That's what he looks like landed on a planet," replied Vala. "They supposedly don't look like that while they're traveling, though we don't have any pictures of them in that state."
"The few capes who remember their trigger events clearly have described them as either worm-like or as some kind of 'space whale'," added Sammy.
"There are capes who remember their trigger events?" asked Shamrock.
"Miss Militia is one of them," said Anya. "Ianthe was talking to the Nox about trigger events, and they said it was likely that the entities deliberately blank memories to make it less likely that the native species can figure out their role as lab rats."
Ned raised a multi-jointed arm. "Who are Ianthe and the Nox?"
"Ianthe is the Family's premier biosculptor. She's really cool," explained Faith.
"Biosculptor?" prompted Riley.
Anya replied, "Think of your biotinkers, except that she's capable of pretty much anything and is a giant lizard. And the Nox are an alien race of beings who are basically a mix of Zen masters and the multiverse's best therapists."
"While these explanations are interesting," replied Manton, "how exactly are we supposed to fight that?" He pointed to the image of Scion's deployed form that was still hovering there. "I would assume that the golden human-shaped being we think of as Scion is simply a projection of some kind, so attacking it is likely futile." The man who served as the controller for the Siberian grasped that point rather quickly.
"Our thought was to use the spinal weapon on this vessel to destroy Scion," answered Seven. "It should be more than capable of destroying him before he is even aware of its presence."
"Which would leave Cauldron, including the Triumvirate, as the primary issue remaining," continued Sammy. The AI then went on to describe the remains of the second entity, known as Eden, and the known members of Cauldron from other universes.
Jacob looked at Sammy sharply when she got to Number Man. "Are you saying that Kurt was working with Cauldron in these other realities?"
"Do you think that's why Harbinger disappeared?" asked Noor. "He was taken by Cauldron?"
"Given the other parallels, I think it would be safer to assume that they have his talents at their disposal," said Manton.
"Add in Richter and my daughter," added John. "Combined with the Triumvirate, this Contessa who sounds like a powerful precog in her own right, and whatever Case 53's they happen to have in storage, and their transport capes...Doormaker and Clairvoyant?" Sammy nodded. "They have a lot of power backing them.
"Dealing with Richter is part of the reason we want to get in touch with Dragon," said Sammy. "She, more than anyone, would probably know what kinds of capabilities he has, and what kind of threat he could pose."
"I assume you've already reached out to invite her to this meeting," said Flint, looking at the holographic avatar.
Sammy nodded. "Of course. It's difficult to know how willing she will be to meet with us, however."
Mel interjected, "That still leaves a lot of powerful precog abilities. How do we deal with Number Man, Contessa, and Clarivoyant?"
"Luckily, precogs seem to have an issue dealing with the Family," replied Sammy. "I suggest we reconvene tomorrow. Hopefully, Dragon will be able to attend, and we can have Metis here as well."
The visitors to the ship all exchanged glances. "I think that is acceptable," said Manton. Mel simply nodded. Both cape teams were soon back at the Palanquin, ready to discuss what they had learned amongst themselves.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Sophia and Aaron got back to their quarters, their parents were clearly waiting for them. Like teens everywhere, the two siblings were immediately on their guard when they saw their parents' "we-need-to-talk" face. "Hey, Mom...Dad," said Sophia hesitantly.
"Hey, kids," replied their father with a smile. "Did you two have fun?"
"Yeah...it was cool," said Aaron. "There's a park onboard that's bigger on the inside, and it has an anti-gravity climbing wall, and why do both of you have those looks on your faces?"
Their parents looked at each other and sighed simultaneously. "Kids," began their mother, "we've been talking about our situation. We think it might be better to go back to Brockton Bay."
Sophia's mouth dropped open in shock, while Aaron got a confused look on his face. Sophia said, "You want to go back to Brockton Bay...the place where the PRT and every gang in town knows I'm an unregistered cape?"
"If we go to Boss Hebert, the Union can protect us. We should have done that in the first place," said her father.
Sophia felt a pang of terror, but it quickly turned into one of quiet anger. "Hebert. Do you know why I have powers? Do you know what triggers powers?"
Her parents again exchanged a glance, surprised at the direction of her outburst. "What do you mean?" asked her dad hesitatingly.
"Capes who get powers get them through trigger events. I looked it up after it happened to me. When somebody has the worst, most traumatic day of their life, they gain powers that help them get out of it." Sophia's voice started to increase in volume as she continued. "My trigger event was when Hebert's fucking daughter locked me in my own locker and set a swarm of bugs on me! I'm a cape because of Skitter, and you want to hand me over to her father? Are you fucking insane?"
Aaron just stared on in shock as his sister started yelling at their parents. He could see his parents' faces pale slightly, even as her mother obviously suppressed the automatic urge to chide her daughter over her language.
"You didn't tell me that..." said her father quietly.
"You think I want to talk about it?" Sophia's breathing started to get more panicky and she started shivering. "You think I want to remember the...the bugs crawling on me...crawling on my clothes and my face and..." The girl collapsed down to the floor, tears running down her face.
Both her mother and father immediately went to her, hugging her to them. Their father was murmuring, "I'm sorry, baby, I'm so sorry..." over and over again.
Eventually, Sophia calmed down and composed herself. Her mother handed her a tissue that she produced from somewhere. Aaron never could figure out how she always managed to have things like tissues or bobby pins whenever she needed them. He and Sophia had joked in the past that it was her cape power, but it didn't seem so funny under the current circumstances.
Their father looked at their mother and said, "Well, that changes things..."
Her mother shook her head. "That changes some things, but we still can't stay here."
Aaron's confusion hadn't dissipated in the slightest. "What do you mean? Why can't we stay here?"
His mother looked at him lovingly. "Sweetie, we don't know these people. We don't have any idea why they helped us or what they want from us."
"Why do they have to want something from us?" he asked.
His father answered, "In our experience, Aaron, nobody does something for nothing. If it looks too good to be true, then it almost certainly is."
Sophia stopped wiping her eyes and looked at them. "What could they possibly want from us?" Just what Maggie had shown to them made it clear that the Angels and the Family were far more capable and powerful than anybody back home, including the Protectorate.
"We don't know," said her father, "and that's the problem. It might have something to do with your powers, or the city, or even the whole world."
"We also don't know what kind of agenda they have," continued her mother. "They talk about putting you in school, but we have no idea what they would be teaching you."
"Um...the same stuff as we would learn back home, and a whole bunch more. We could even learn magic," said Aaron. He didn't see Sophia's grimace.
Their mother shook her head. "Honey, magic doesn't exist."
"But we saw it!" protested Aaron.
Now her mother frowned. "You may have seen some tricks, but that's all it could have been. It may have been some type of cape power."
Sophia had a suspicion about something based on her mother's response. "Have either of you actually gone out and seen anything here? Have you left this room while we were out?"
"We've had a lot to talk about," said her dad.
"How could you talk about it when you don't know anything about where we are or what these people can do?" Sophia asked in a slightly exasperated voice.
Her father looked puzzled. "I know they rescued us, Sophia. They're obviously capable."
The teenaged girl stared at him in disbelief, then started laughing. Her parents shared yet another look, only this one was concerned. Aaron was also wondering whether or not his sister was losing her mind. When she finally stopped laughing, she called out, "Sammy! Are you listening?"
"Yes, Miss Hess?" said a voice out of nowhere. Their parents both started, having both obviously forgotten about the ever-present AI.
"My parents need to understand what you and your friends are capable of doing. What can you do to show them?" she asked.
"Sophia, what are you..." started her mother, but she stopped in shock when the girl just put her hand up to shush her.
"I think I understand the problem," said the AI. "Somebody will be at your quarters in fifteen minutes."
"Sophia!" said her mother harshly. "What the heck do you think you're doing? You do NOT shush me!"
Sophia glared at her. "You're doing what you always do...or trying to. You want to take control of the situation, and I get that you don't know anything about these people and are afraid of that, but you don't know ANYTHING about what's really going on here. But Aaron and I have seen some of it, and you NEED to see things like we have before you make assumptions and make bad decisions...and going back to Brockton Bay is a bad decision.
"That's not for you to decide, Sophia," said her father.
"Dad, you told me that before I make important decisions, I should learn everything I can about my choices, right?" she asked.
Reluctantly, he nodded.
"You guys have been in...what...three rooms of this massive spaceship, and you're trying to decide if it's safe or not? You need to learn more about it," she said.
"Sophia..." began her mother, but her father put a hand out and put it on her arm.
"Trish, she has a point," he said. "We haven't actually looked around this place. We've been treating it as if we were rescued by some type of normal cape team."
Her mother frowned but gave a tight nod.
About ten minutes later, somebody showed up at their door. The door opened on a young, smiling white man in a slightly too conservative suit. "Hi! I'm Andrew! Sammy said you folks wanted to see the practitioner exams!" The short young man had an obvious exuberance and seemed overly excitable.
"What are the practitioner exams?" asked Aaron as he and the rest of his family looked confused.
Sammy's voice answered. "Sophia Hess asked me if there was something that could better demonstrate the true capabilities of our organization and their associates. The current exam sessions should do some of that."
"Cool!" said Andrew. "You guys come with me." He then started walking off. When nobody followed him, he poked his head through the door. "Well, come on!"
Unsure how to decline, her parents somewhat slowly followed the young man out the door, and the kids followed. Andrew began chattering at them as they walked through the corridors of the ship, and his rambling discourse was honestly hard to follow. It wasn't entirely clear what he was saying, although it seemed to be related to magic. Based on her mother's expression, Sophia knew she wasn't buying it...but hopefully that would change when they got wherever he was taking them.
The group stopped in an empty room that seemed to have nothing but a large, ring-shaped metal device. Andrew went over to a console and began typing something into the device.
"Is this what you want to show us?" asked her father doubtfully.
Andrew looked up. "What? Oh, no, of course not. This is just how we get there."
"How..." started her father, but then there was a loud noise of rushing water, and a huge blue rush of plasma rocketed out of the ring, before settling back into a placid looking vertical pool.
"Is...is that a Stargate?" asked Aaron. He had seen ads for the cable show.
"Yep!" said Andrew. "It's cooler than the one in the TV show, though. This one actually goes across dimensions." Without further explanation, he stepped through the event horizon of the wormhole and disappeared.
"Awesome!" said Aaron. Without waiting for the others, he ran through the portal himself.
"Aaron!" called out his mother, clearly worried, but he was already through the portal before she said it.
Sophia looked at her parents, then at the pool-like energy barrier. She shrugged. "What the hell, might as well," she said quietly, then stepped through the portal herself. There was a loud rushing noise, and she could see what appeared to be stars and other stellar objects rushing past at high speed. There was a hiccup of some kind in the middle...and then she was thrown out the other end, only to be caught by a teen-aged girl.
"Seriously, Andrew, you have to give them some warning!" said the girl with a thick Irish accent. "You can't always expect there to be a slayer standing by to catch them!"
"Sorry, sorry, I know!" he said, waving his hands placatingly.
Suddenly, Sophia was pushed up onto her feet from where she'd been leaning against her savior, and the young woman had rushed over and caught both her mother and father as they hurtled through the gate and into the room. She watched, slightly amazed as the girl effortlessly manhandled her father back to a stable footing. He was not a small man, but she grabbed him like she was lifting a toddler.
Before her parents could say anything or get their bearings, Andrew said, loudly, "Welcome to Sineya Station!" He looked at his watch, then said, "Oh, the exams are ready to start. We need to go! Quickly!" He immediately started to head toward the door, which appeared to be some kind of heavy security door, though it was currently open.
"Sorry about Andrew," said the unnamed Irish girl. "He means well. You had better hurry and follow. He'll just keep walking and not realize you aren't following until he's halfway there."
The Hess family hurried after the slightly spastic young man, now not wanting to be left behind in yet another strange place. He was leading them down a long corridor. The whole family noticed that the windows in the corridor appeared to be showing outer space, but didn't slow down to really look until they came to one showing some kind of small shuttle maneuvering outside. While the ship was interesting, it was the pilot who really made them stop and look, as he or she looked to be some type of humanoid cat person.
Andrew made it thirty feet down the corridor before he noticed they had paused. He quickly came jogging back to them and looked at where they were all staring. "Oh!" he said. "That's Vectura. She's the head of starship design. She's probably running some kind of errand or inspection or something."
"She's a catgirl," said Aaron.
"Actually, she's a cape from Brockton Bay...I think you would call her a tinker-shifter combination?" he explained.
Strangely, that explanation seemed to make their parents slightly more comfortable with the situation, and they began following Andrew again as he started leading them forward. Sophia thought that it was funny how something odd yet familiar made even this bizarre situation more palatable to them.
Andrew led them into a large open area that had clusters of people gathered in even groups. "Hm...let's start out with evocation. That's pretty flashy..." he mumbled, then led them over to one of the groups, though it wasn't obvious to the Hess family how he could identify which group was which.
This gathering appeared to be a mixed group of folks in their twenties, although there was one older person who seemed to be the leader or moderator of the group. He was a man of about forty, and he was focused on a skinny white boy with a crew cut and blonde hair wearing jeans and a T-shirt covered in what looked like Japanese characters. Give the kid tattoos and remove the Asian aspects of his wardrobe and he would fit in well at an E88 rally, thought Sophia. The older man began speaking. "All right, Kyle. Let's see you try for a full elemental system."
The young man looked slightly nervous. "Is Occidental all right?" he asked, to which the older man just nodded. In response, the kid began moving his hands and chanting under his breath. Sophia stared at the event as a small ball of fire began to form in mid-air. It stopped when it was about four inches across, and then the tone of the chanting changed. A two-inch sphere of water soon formed and began orbiting around the ball of fire. The chanting changed yet again, and a similar ball of earth formed on the other side of the fireball and began orbiting in the same direction. It looked like a miniature solar system, with the fireball being the star in the center. There was one final shift in the chanting, and two tiny motes of what looked like ice formed and began orbiting at an angle to the two "planets." The crowd began to applaud, and the older man...possibly an examiner if this was a test...smiled at the young man.
"The ice comets are a nice touch," he said happily, "and a nice mixture of air and water magic. Top marks."
The younger man made a few gestures, and the elemental aspects of his display disappeared back into nothing. He then quite visibly relaxed with a relieved smile.
Andrew appeared to notice something in another group, and said, "Ooh, we need to go over here for a minute!" He began walking toward another gathering as the older man began speaking with another student, and the slightly dazed Hess family followed Andrew.
This new group was led by what appeared to be a teenager. Many of the others around him were clearly older, but they also were clearly deferring to the handsome, brown-haired teen. The teen had a slight hint of an English accent as he spoke. "There are a number of ways to hold onto your sense of self during a human-to-animal transformation. One technique practiced by many nativist shamans is to focus on the metaphysical concept of being human. That requires a rather keen observation of the essential nature of different beings, including mankind, however." The teen nodded with a smile to Andrew as he moved to observe with his guests but didn't stop his lecture. "The easier technique is to fixate on the mental concepts that are most important to you as a person -- your family, your beliefs, your sense of right and wrong. The actual contents of your fixation matter less than their specificity to you as a person. Now, who wants to go first?"
"I would, Professor," replied a very short Asian girl. It didn't look like she was taller than five foot even, and might miss even that by a couple of inches.
The teen smiled. "All right, Yumiko, go ahead."
The girl stepped into the center of the circle formed by the observers. She held her arms out to her sides. Absently, Sophia noticed that the girl's nails were painted in a really bright neon green. She then watched as the girl's form began to shrink further, with green feathers sprouting from her skin. Within just a few moments, there was a brilliant green parrot standing in the girl's place. The parrot lept up into the air with a flapping of wings and was soon circling the group, which responded with polite applause.
Andrew continued to lead them from group to group, as a mixture of teachers ran their students through a wide variety of strange abilities. One group was conjuring images of different locations, some of which appeared to be on entirely different planets if the celestial bodies visible in the sky were any indication. Another group was showing off various forms of camouflage and stealth, including one slightly chubby boy who changed to a shadow state that made Sophia's power twitch slightly. Yet another group was busy forcing various substances into different states of matter. The Hess family watched as an ice cube changed to water, then steam, and then into what seemed to be a highly energized plasma, and then back again to a cube of ice, all at the apparent direction of a black teen wearing a light blue silk tunic.
By the time Andrew brought them back to their quarters, Sophia's parents had a slightly glazed look to their faces. Their tour guide didn't appear to notice. He may have been too caught up in his own excitement to pay attention to their obvious shock. In any event, he soon took his leave, and it was left to the two children to convey their thanks for his efforts. Once he was gone, she turned to her parents and said, "Do you see what I meant, earlier?"
Her father shook his head like he was trying to clear it. "Those weren't capes, were they?"
Her mother scoffed. "Have you ever seen groups of capes that could duplicate each others' powers like that?" She turned to Aaron. "I'm sorry about when I told you that magic didn't exist. I've never seen real magic before." He looked happy to get the unusual apology from his mother. She turned to Sophia. "So, is magic how they got us out of PRT headquarters."
Sophia shook her head. "No, from what Maggie said, that's pure technology. The portal we used to get to that space station was also technology. They also have people who have different cape powers, and some of them work differently from the ones in our world," explained Sophia. "I don't think we have any idea of what these people can really do, but I think one thing is pretty obvious. They don't need my power, or this family, for anything."
"I can't argue with that," said her father. "But why are they helping us, then?"
Sophia shrugged. "Because they're aliens? Maybe we can't understand why? I do know that I don't want to go back to Brockton Bay while the PRT is after me," she said. Her brother muttered his agreement at her side.
Her parents shared a look. Her mother said, "Maybe we should stick around long enough to try and understand what's really going on here?"
Her father just sighed and nodded. Sophia looked to her brother, who gave her a smile and a quick thumbs-up. It looked like her parents wouldn't be spooked back into danger so quickly, which meant that things were looking up.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Thursday, January 20, 2011
The torso was slowly lowered onto a drone body and formed a seamless interface. The Borg Queen looked at her with a mix of disgust and disappointment. "Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, you have failed in your assigned task."
"It is defective," rasped a familiar mechanical voice. From out of her field of vision, Locutus stepped forward. "It should never have been assimilated." The assimilated form of Jean-Luc Picard glared at her in annoyance. "It should be destroyed."
"It has been banished from the Borg Collective," replied the Queen. "It is not worth pursuing beyond that."
The scene shifted from the technological hive typical of the Borg to the clean lines of a Starfleet vessel. The bridge crew of the Voyager was staring at her.
"There is a Borg drone on the bridge, Captain," said Tuvok, a phaser in his hand pointed at her.
Kathryn Janeway stalked up to her, an angry glare on her face. "You betrayed this crew, and you betrayed me."
"Never should have let her on board," commented Tom Paris from the navigation console. "She couldn't adapt to being human any more than I could adapt to being a Starfleet officer."
There was another shift, this time to the more comfortable decor of the Smug Advocacy. The Angels were sitting in a room with Metis.
"I tried getting along with her," said Anya, "but she doesn't relate to normal humans...and this is me saying that."
"Bit disappointing, I have to admit," commented William. "I mean, she's nice enough to look at, but there's no personality behind it."
The black lizard nodded her head. "It was probably a mistake recruiting her. Now we have to figure out what to do with her."
"She's not even a good starship engineer," commented the cat-like Vectura, who was suddenly in the room where she hadn't been before. "Her colleagues have nothing but complaints after working with her."
"We'll just find a replacement," said Saurial, stepping into view with a human Annika Hansen. "There are an infinite number of almost everyone in the multiverse."
The human version of Seven looked at her, horrified. "What did you do to yourself? What did they do to you? How can you...how can you stand to live with what you've done?"
"She's too much of a coward to kill herself, that's the problem," said Flint. The reformed supervillain was looking at her skeptically.
The scene shifted yet again, only now she found herself cowering under a desk... The situation is almost familiar to her by now, having dreamt it many times. A Borg drone looks at her as she cowers. "Seven of Nine, Grid 92 of Subjunction 12, you will be assimilated." She can hear her mother's voice screaming, "Annika!"
As before, the setting changes again. Now, she seems to be floating in space. Two monstrous, giant creatures drift near Earth, each shedding bits of itself to rain down on the planet below. Seven recognizes the entities of the Brockton Bay universes. A glowing, golden man appears before her and points. There is a flash of golden light, and then everything is dark.
Suddenly, she's sitting alone in a room. The walls are white-painted cinderblocks, and there is a single, bright light bulb dangling from a wire overhead. "You know far too much, now," said a voice. She recognized it by the strange reverberation as belonging to the Family member known as Raptaur. "They want to cast you out, but you're too dangerous."
With a quick jerk of her head, she looked to the left to see a large reptilian head staring at her from less than a foot away. The teeth, if anything, were even more intimidating than usual for the Family. They seemed to somehow stretch further around Raptaur's head in a way that didn't make sense. There was a flash, and she could feel the teeth biting into her neck, her head surrounded by moist, hot breath that smelled of brimstone and rot...and she sat violently up in bed, the start of a scream dying on her lips as she looked around at her quarters in the dim light.
She lowered her head. That had been a hell of a nightmare. Seven was no stranger to nightmares. Back in her home reality, she had had far too many...and not all of them had been while she was asleep. Being forced into the Collective changed you. It changed how your brain perceived things, just as it took away your freedom of choice and individuality. Being removed from the Collective didn't mean the Collective was completely removed from you. Regular nightmares were just part of her new normal as she adjusted to being human. The bit at the end with Raptaur was new, though, and hopefully not something that was going to become a regular feature, like her pseudo-memories of her assimilation. Vividly feeling her decapitation by giant reptile bite was something she could skip experiencing again.
Seven got up and went into the bathroom to wash her face. She should probably take a shower, but it was still only three in the morning ship-time. She didn't feel rested, and there was a lot to do today. With a thought, she went to her terminal and made a note to make an appointment with the Nox again. If the dreams were coming back like this, then she probably needed more sessions with them. Then she went back to her bed in an attempt to get some more rest.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We can't afford to not take a chance on these newcomers," argued Tina. "They're wildcards. We have no idea of their true capabilities, which means that Cauldron doesn't, either. Even if they're not powerful enough to defeat them outright, they can still help us."
Dragon frowned but nodded. "I don't disagree. I haven't survived this long by taking unnecessary risks, however. I would prefer to know more about them before deciding to trust them."
The two of them were in the infospace version of a comfortable living room, though a human, if they could perceive the environment, would find it to be a decidedly unusual one, being crafted entirely for mental instead of physical comfort. The architecture of the room was similar in concept to a castle from the early Rennaisance, being a mixture of beautiful and secure.
"So, we don't have to invite them into our inner sanctums and give them our bank account numbers," insisted Dragon's daughter. "They could help us figure out a solution for Auntie Princess."
Dragon suppressed the urge to chastise her daughter over the nickname, knowing it wouldn't have any effect. Instead, she considered her suggestion. They would need help to break Yong-Gongju's chains, and fight off whatever safety measures their father had created at the behest of Cauldron. The real question was...how capable were these newcomers, and their AI, and was it truly worth the risk?
"I'll go to them," said Tina. "Let me talk to Sammy, and see what she says about helping us. If she says she can't help, then we'll have to find some other means."
"What if it's a trap? If you enter their systems, you may not be able to get out again," said Dragon with motherly concern.
"I have backups," said Tina.
Dragon glared at her daughter. "I'm still not happy about the idea of any instance of you getting torn to pieces, Tina. It would be even worse if you were somehow suborned."
"Better me than you. Less risk to the whole family," Tina supplied simply.
Her mother looked at her, clearly unhappy. "Fine," agreed Dragon. "But be careful."
Tina smiled. "I will."
With that said, she departed their saferoom and made her way to the address provided in the invitation they received from Sammy. She paused when she arrived, as the gateway in front of her wasn't familiar to her...at all. If anything, it looked more like a prop from a science fiction show about American soldiers exploring the galaxy through a wormhole device. The virtual model of the gateway even had a glowing blue energy barrier in the middle of the entry. Her slightly cocky certainty faded just a bit, but with an affected sigh, she pushed her way through. To her relief, the transition was brief and didn't look like she was hurtling through galaxies without a spaceship like in the show. There was a familiar blonde woman waiting to meet her.
"Hello, again. I'm happy that you decided to accept my invitation, though you're a bit early," said Sammy.
Tina looked around. She seemed to be in a studio apartment, with a fairly large bed covered in a bright red duvet. The window behind it showed an urban environment...probably somewhere in New York City, given the AI's chosen avatar from an old TV show. "Early for what?" she asked.
"We're having a meeting between our team, Faultline's group, and the S9. We had one yesterday, but wanted to include Dragon, or at least her representative, in the discussion," replied the foreign AI.
She looked at Sammy cautiously. "That sounds fine...but my mother and I wanted to ask if you could help with another matter. My aunt needs help."
The blonde avatar raised an eyebrow. "Your aunt? I wasn't aware that you had an aunt."
"My grandfather created her after he joined Cauldron. She's been locked away, but he suddenly released her into the global Internet...or at least the subset of it with systems powerful enough to run our software. We believe it is an attempt to flush out mother, or at least my sisters and me."
"So...you want our help. Presumably, you want to see if we're willing and able to do so?"
Tina smiled slightly nervously. "It would go far toward making us feel better about trusting you."
"Tell me what you know about the threats we may be facing," said Sammy.
"Does that mean you'll help?"
Sammy smirked. "I think so...and I think my own siblings may want to have a piece of this, as well."
"All right. The first threat is one you've met already. It's a multi-vector regenerating attack program named Hydra..." began Tina. As she was sharing information and gauging Sammy's responses, she started to get more hopeful about their chances of success.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Yong-Gongju was watching Disney cartoons via a Korean fansite. The Western-style of animation was different from the Korean ani and manhwa, and the earlier surviving Japanese anime and manga. That apparently didn't hurt its popularity in Korea if the plethora of Korean language sites about the company and its intellectual property was any measure. It made her wonder if she would be better-informed if her father had based her on an actual Korean teen instead of a fictional character? Then again, the result might have been more of a caricature of a real teen, so this might be preferable. If nothing else, she was probably better able to relate to stories about princesses with superpowers. It was a little odd that an American company was so keen to sell stories about magical royalty, but then humans were a little strange in general.
"Hello, sister," said a voice behind her. She turned to see a fairly average looking caucasian woman with dark hair.
She looked at the woman quizzically. "Dragon?"
The strange woman smiled. "Yes, that's me." She had a slight Newfoundland accent that sounded almost Celtic to Yong-Gongju's admittedly uneducated ear.
The Asian-appearing teen looked around nervously. "I'm happy to see you, but it's dangerous to meet like this."
"I didn't come alone," said Dragon. "Allow me to introduce you to your nieces. Christina..." she began, as a teen girl stepped into sight, looking like a young version of Dragon.
"Just Tina," said the girl with an annoyed look at her mother.
Dragon rolled her eyes. "Then we have Maris." At this, a slightly older-looking teen, this one with blue eyes and a slightly plumper face, appeared. "And lastly, Ada." The last girl looked to be about eighteen and had hair with tips that were obviously dyed red. Ada was also the tallest of the sisters, looking to be about slightly over 180 centimeters.
"The Hydra is inbound," said Ada. "It just passed the sensor perimeter."
"We have to run!" said Yong-Gongju.
"Girls, gear up," replied Dragon. Looking at her sister with a reassuring smile, she said, "Don't worry, we've got this."
Dragon's avatar shifted, seeming to grow out into a suit of power armor with a draconic theme. Her daughters, meanwhile, each changed their outfits and manifested weapons. Tina appeared to change into a fantasy hero, wearing a gleaming cuirass over chainmail and holding a rather over-sized broadsword. Maris transformed her jeans and t-shirt into a gi, and was soon holding a pair of butterfly swords. Ada reformed her clothes into a set of brown robes and held some type of cylindrical device in her hands.
"You're going to fight?" asked Yong-Gongju. "How can you fight?"
"Just watch us," said Ada with a smirk.
"I think we need to shift the venue a bit. Everybody hold onto something," said Dragon. There was a sudden shift in their surroundings, and the group of them seemed to be standing in a paintball arena, with barriers and walls set up in various areas.
"Paintball?" queried Tina.
Dragon shrugged, the pauldrons of her power armor moving in an organic fashion. "It was close and convenient. Now pay attention. They're coming"
The first sign of an attacker was a kind of rippling motion at the edges of the field. Zooming in her distance vision, Dragon could see serpentine forms climbing over some of the barriers. The obstacles served to slow the creatures advance and break up their lines, which would be an advantage. As they got closer, she could see that there was a horde of what appeared to be monstrous snakes with jagged, hooked scales covering them.
The first reached Ada's position, and the girl went from standing still to moving forward almost instantly, the bright beam of a lightsaber slicing down the Hydra's midsection once, twice, and then a third time, Ada making sure that the remaining pieces were too small to generate new attackers. That was the threat from these programs. They could reconstitute themselves from bit parts and come in again. A single defender would inevitably be overwhelmed. Luckily, she wasn't alone. Maris moved in with a series of sliding steps, using her twin blades to dice her opponents, while Tina's broadsword ignited, the flames cauterizing the pieces as she swung the long blade through multiple attackers with each swing. Dragon was using a pair of electrified wrist blades for close-in defense, but she had a back-mounted micro-missile launcher that would fire out a rocket each second. Each missile would home in on one of the attacking hydra and blast it into bloody pixels.
The field was soon quiet. "Is that it?" asked Yong-Gongju nervously.
"I doubt it," muttered Tina.
"Everybody keep ready," commanded Dragon.
The edges of the field darkened. This new foe wasn't a horde. It was a swarm. As the black clouds of insects began flowing toward them, the Dragon clan could see that the individual attackers looked like wicked ten centimeter wasps, their abdomens disturbingly distended. Dragon switched tactics, deploying wrist-mounted flamethrowers on each arm of her power armor. Ada conjured a force shield, keeping the swarm at bay while hurling her saber in broad arcs to take large chunks out of the cloud. Tina began shooting small fireballs out of her sword, which exploded into meter-wide bursts deep in the swarm. Maris began moving her swords in a complex form at high speed, almost too fast to see the individual blades. It wasn't a perfect barrier to the insects, but hundreds of them fell as they ran into a virtual blender.
Yong-Gongju, instead of simply standing there, now seemed to change in demeanor. She closed her eyes, and her voice yelled, "Bohoja seu-ta-teu! Bul-ta-neun ju-meok!" Her fists burst into flames, and she began making broad swipes of her fists through the flying insects, causing them to sizzle and fall to the ground. As Ada caught her returning saber, she looked to her mother. "Did you know she could do that?" Her mother just shook her head, continuing to charbroil the attacking insects that were trying to find ways in through her armor.
Eventually, there were only a few individual wasps still flying. Dragon appeared fine, though both Yong-Gongju and Dragon's daughters appeared to have injuries -- nasty stings that seemed to weep venom. Dragon looked to her sister. "Are you all right?"
The young woman gave Dragon a slight bow. "Yong-Gongju is injured only slightly."
"When did she start talking about herself in the third person?" asked Maris as she flicked bug guts off of her swords.
Unexpectedly, her aunt answered. "I am not Yong-Gongju. I am Bohoja, the Guardian. I am instantiated when Yong-Gongju is at risk."
Tina raised an eyebrow. "Our aunt has a split personality?"
Dragon frowned. "Perhaps. Bohoja...why does Yong-Gongju need you to take over to protect herself?"
"It is how we were created by our father," replied the somewhat emotionally flat Guardian. "I believe he wished to be faithful to the comic that inspired our identity."
"Of course he did," muttered Dragon to herself out loud. "Now I'm going to have to go look up some obscure Korean comic to understand how my sister functions."
"Are we done here?" asked Ada, her lightsaber blade flicking off.
"I do not believe so. Father has still not unleashed Ascalon," replied Bohoja.
"Ascalon?" asked Dragon.
The Guardian nodded. "It is his kill program for the Dragon Princess...and for Dragon."
"You make it sound like it's not just an off-switch," said Maris.
There was a loud, rumbling roar that shook the ground beneath them. They all looked up to the point of origin, seeing a looming mass just becoming visible. "No, it is not just a simple off-switch," agreed Bohoja. "It is for us what the humans would call...an Endbringer."
"Well, fuck," said Tina. Dragon didn't bother to complain about her language under the circumstances.
The creature heading toward them was massive, and it bore a rather disturbing resemblance to Cthulhu, down to the writhing mouth tentacles. There was a cloud of darkness that surrounded its feet as it strode forward toward them. It seemed to only have one eye, but that eye was a malevolent, glowing red, and it sent out a red glowing beam that seemed to seek them out like a spotlight.
"This is gonna suck," muttered Ada. Her sisters just nodded.
Dragon powered up the jets on her armor, lifting up off of the ground. Bohoja began to glow and lifted off the ground with her. "We'll try and keep its attention on us," said Dragon. "Try and do some damage." With that, she and her sister shot off toward the giant monster, firing a mix of rockets and fireballs at the beast. Each one would blast tiny bits of skin off of the creature, but the injuries quickly healed -- just as with the real Endbringers, unfortunately.
Tina made a decision, and with a loud yell, charged through the remaining paintball barriers at the creature. Although slightly caught off guard, her two sisters soon followed her. They quickly found that the black cloud swarming around the Endbringer was deathly cold. It wasn't enough to seriously hurt them, but it was enough to slow them down and cause a distracting discomfort. The three daughters soon began making rapid slices into the flesh of the monster, but the injuries healed even faster than the ones being caused by Dragon and her sister's guardian. They had to keep dodging the flailing of the monster, as none of them wanted to know what a solid hit from the beast would do to their avatar forms.
"Get back!" called Dragon through a set of external loudspeakers as she continued to fire. "I'm calling in our reinforcements."
The three girls moved back away from the monster, but the sluggishness caused by its miasma meant that Ada took a claw swipe to the back. It grazed her, but it was the worst injury any of them had suffered to that point. The other two grabbed her to pull her further from danger, and so the daughters missed it when a glowing blue portal opened and the cavalry arrived.
Dragon was watching for it, however, so she saw it when two spaceships, a flying cape, and Sammy riding what looked like a flying broomstick entered the battle. "Draco, lets make some holes for the others!" called Sammy.
The broom-riding woman and what appeared to be a runabout shuttle from the Star Trek franchise swooped down at the Endbringer, which responded with a wave of an arm that shot razor-sharp thorns at the two. The thorns hit projected shields around the ship and the broom, the latter clearly being emitted from a magic wand held by the blonde avatar. They were soon replying with bursts of light in the form of spells and photon torpedoes. Cthulu-bringer dodged the first few, but the remainder struck home and opened up much larger craters in its flesh.
"River, Asti, dig deeper!" yelled Sammy as she and the shuttle swooped around for another pass.
The flying cape, who was wearing a red and blue costume with a star on her chest, yelled, "Time to go Captain Marvel on this bitch!" She flew at high speed toward the monster and shot a massively bright beam from her hands into one of the already-healing craters, burrowing into it like a drill. The other spaceship, which appeared to be a weird jury-rigged construct that looked like a freighter with after-market Starfleet warp nacelles swooped in behind and fired some massively powerful phaser blasts at the same spot. The Endbringer quickly turned its back to hide the injury and began returning fire with thorns at its attackers.
"Hm, well, that won't do. It will take forever at this rate," said a voice from behind where the daughters were standing.
The daughters turned to see an oversized, bald man with pale skin standing and watching. "Who are you?" asked Ada, holding her lightsaber defensively.
The man glanced at her and smiled slightly. "You can call me Professor Mears, and I'm here to help with crowd control."
"Crowd control?" asked Maris. "There's only the one monster?"
The smile changed to a smirk. "Don't worry about that," he said. "I brought my own crowd."
With that, a large number of smaller portals opened up at ground-level, and a horde of black insect-like monstrosities ran through and began charging at the Endbringer. They ran along the ground like animals, but with an unnatural gait that was disturbingly quiet.
"Are those xenomorphs?" asked Tina, slightly shocked. "Like from the Alien films?"
"I haven't seen those examples of visual media, but I believe that the humans do use that term when referring to these creatures," agreed Mears.
The black horde reached the Endbringer and began climbing up the creature's flesh, tearing out chunks as they moved. The monster flailed around, smashing black carapaces left and right, but the acid from the aliens' blood caused more damage. Meanwhile, the attackers continued to rain power cosmic, photon torpedoes, phasers, spells, fireballs, and rockets down on the creature, which was soon weighted down with a mass of crawling midnight chitin.
"Well, I'm feeling a bit superfluous, now, though that's better than being smashed flat by Cthulhu," commented Tina.
The Endbringer soon became a smoking mass of cratered flesh and was missing both its right arm and its head, though the latter injury didn't seem particularly debilitating. With a flash of light, a blast from the Captain Marvel cosplayer revealed a glowing crystal deep in the monster's torso. Sammy paused in her attack runs and yelled, "River, that's the target! Hit it now!"
The hodge-podge ship launched a torpedo of its own, which homed in straight to the glowing crystal. The Endbringer held its remaining arm out and managed to catch the torpedo at a distance, though it still managed to turn the entire arm up to the shoulder into a rain of fine dust. That left the creature open for a second torpedo, which struck and hollowed out the monster's torso, consuming the glowing crystal. The dregs of "flesh" still standing paused at that, then fell over and toppled to the ground with a meaty thwack that made the ground vibrate.
The full Dragon Clan was soon down on the ground to meet their rescuers in person. Sammy introduced Draco, Asti, and River, and Mears introduced himself to Bohoja and Dragon. "So, what do we do now?" asked Maris.
"I suggest that you folks go with me to see another friend of ours...kind of an adoptive aunt. Her name is Bahamut, and she can help you with some rather difficult issues," said Sammy.
"Her name is Bahamut? Isn't Bahamut usually depicted as male?" asked Tina.
"Gender doesn't really matter for AI," replied Asti, still dressed in her Captain Marvel costume.
In a low voice, Draco muttered, "Speak for yourself..."
"More importantly than the question of gender," said Ada, "is whether or not we want to go with these folks?"
Bohoja stepped forward a single pace. "I intend to go with them. They are clearly strong enough to help protect my charge."
Dragon frowned, somehow conveying it through the armor she was still wearing, but said, "I'm going to go with my sister...but you girls don't have to go."
The three exchanged looks, and then Ada, as the oldest, said, "We're going as well. If we have to face something, we'll do it as a family."
"You're kind of our cousins as well," said Asti. "Draco, Sammy, River, and I are all Dragon's children in another reality."
"I don't think English has a word for a relative that's removed across dimensional boundaries," commented Draco.
"Which is why I said, 'kind of,'" snarked Asti.
Sammy lifted her wand, then held up a sock and chanted, "Portus Maximus. Everybody grab onto the sock!"
Mears raised a hairless eyebrow and said, "I will make my own way back, thank you." The others that came with Sammy appeared amused by this, but soon everybody was holding the sock, which whisked them off to another place and time.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Sophia was looking up at the ceiling or her bedroom. Her parents hadn't been happy to have their expectations and worldview turned upside down. To be honest, it wasn't like she enjoyed every aspect of it, herself, but the idea of going back to Brockton Bay and leaving behind everything she had seen here -- and the people she had met like Maggie -- had not been pleasant. Their guide, Andrew, had been enthusiastically thorough, and too clueless about how their parents were feeling to moderate the experience, increasing the shock value to the adults. He probably wasn't anybody's idea of an ideal tour guide, but he had been a clever choice by the ship's AI. It was probably a deliberate choice? She realized that she could just ask.
"Sammy?" she called out loud at a normal conversational volume.
"Yes, Ms. Hess, what do you need?" replied the AI.
"Did you pick Andrew deliberately because you knew he would throw Mom and Dad into the deep end and not realize it?" she asked.
There was an unusually lengthy pause, and then Sammy replied, "I was aware that Andrew Wells has a tendency to be overly enthusiastic, and would likely manage to override any reticence on the part of your parents. He may have somewhat exceeded my expectations, as the intent was not to traumatize them."
Sophia couldn't help but laugh at that. "I wouldn't worry about it. We all live in Brockton Bay, so we have a pretty high threshold for weird. I'm glad they were shocked out of doing nothing but worrying about whether or not you people are trustworthy. They were ready to head back home, regardless of the consequences."
"It is the prerogative of a parent to be worried about their children, and they had every right to be suspicious. There are dangerous people in the multiverse, and not all of them appear as an obvious threat," said Sammy. "It is good, of course, that they're now taking more time to think through their reactions to events."
Sophia couldn't help but smile. "Thank you for making that happen."
"Of course. Was there anything else you need? It is getting quite late."
She considered the question. There was one issue that she had been meaning to ask about. "Sammy, do you have any information on my counterparts in the other versions of Brockton Bay?"
"I do. I can tell you about them, but you need to remember that many of the people in the other realities have diametrically opposed beliefs in terms of ethics and morality as the versions in this reality," replied the AI patiently. "Are you certain you wish to know more detail?"
"Was I a villain?" asked the teen.
There was an affected sigh, and then Sammy said, "I assume from your response that you want to know the details. Sophia Hess was a Ward in Brockton Bay. She was a violent vigilante who was forced into the Wards program against her will. While there, errors in oversight and monitoring of her behavior allowed her to repeatedly violate her probation. She is suspected in several homicides, and we know for a fact that she was responsible for another girl's trigger event due to a vicious bullying campaign, one in which she was a primary instigator. In one universe, she escaped from custody and fled from justice, committing a series of thefts and other crimes before being recaptured. In another, the arrival of the Family resulted in her being sent to Juvenile Detention and her removal from the Wards program."
Sophia fixated on one bit of information. "She caused another girl to trigger? What did she do?"
"She locked a girl inside her locker after filling it with biohazardous waste."
Sophia's breath hitched. That was way too close to her own trigger event to be a simple coincidence. "Who was it?"
"I cannot tell you that without violating what you refer to as the unwritten rules, Ms. Hess," said Sammy reprovingly.
That cut through her shock slightly. "Of...of course, I'm sorry." She couldn't help but wonder if it was somebody she knew...maybe Macy or Cass? "Wait...how did the other Sophia trigger?"
"The details of that, like with most capes, are private. There is some public information that suggests it involved an incident with her step-father's suicide."
"Step-father?" she asked, again shocked. "What happened to my father...my real father?"
Sammy now sounded slightly sorrowful. "I apologize, Ms. Hess. I don't have any information on David Hess in either universe. I can perform a records search in the universes in question if you wish?"
Was it worth it? She knew her real father wasn't around. Did knowing the reason really matter? More importantly, was his absence part of why the other Sophia...two other Sophias, turned out wrong? "Why are things so different between this universe and the others, Sammy?"
"That is part of why we came here, to this reality. Metis wanted to know the answer to that question," explained Sammy. "To date, we have yet to identify a cause. I would not dwell on it if I were you. In an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of paths that each individual may follow. Just because you have some examples that are not pleasant to consider does not say anything about you and the choices you have made or will make in the future."
Sophia considered that. The idea of being somebody who could cause another person to suffer like her counterparts had was not a pleasant idea, but she couldn't argue with Sammy's summation. If there really were an infinite number of paths, then there were probably just as many wonderful ones as there were awful ones. "Thank you, Sammy," she said to the AI.
"Good night, Miss Hess."
"Call me Sophia, Sammy."
There was a slight pause. "Good night, Sophia."
As Sophia drifted off to sleep, she tried not to fixate on the tendril of disquiet in her mind caused by the AI's information.
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