If players are meant to be plainswalkers, and a game ends when one players life total is reduced to zero, then there needs to be a way in lore for them to recover from that.
Exploding Canon (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Ghoul King
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- worm bakuda self insert oni-lady
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- The Great Beyond
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I hate this fallacy, let's call it 'always lethal combat fallacy'. If two men fight, one decides he's outmatched and retreats? Two men walk away. Surrenders? both may survive. They fought only to first blood in the first place? No death.
You don't have to 'kill or be killed or be immortal' in literally every fight ever, that's not how it works.
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Given you're sending entire armies at each other (As in, a single card can be a large number of soldiers), it's pretty obvious that either life is very much an abstraction or that Planeswalkers can survive an astonishing amount of punishment.
Either way, it's completely unnecessary to toss immortality in to explain their survival, and anyway I was talking more about the long-lived aspect than I was talking about the "Wait, how do you kill these people?" aspect.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Magician series, Magician series... ugh. Why can't I remember...
Oh yeah! That one. With the half dozen immortal dudes running around and the Egyptian gods trying do... something. Yeah, I totally understand that. It only got horrible in the last couple of books, where I just lost track of what was going on. Of course, I haven't read it for a few years now, so my memory is a bit fuzzy.
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- The Great Beyond
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I believe he's referring to... what was it called... oh yes, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, the first book in which is called Magician.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Haven't heard of that one.
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- Wherever
Which is exactly why I didn't use it as my example, even though it's so much better of an example.
Sad thing is it's got a cool start and a lot of interesting worldbuilding stuff -it has some of the coolest dwarves in any setting ever- but it devoles into Mary Sue bullshit fairly quickly and gets incredibly squicky if you start really thinking about some of the more minor plotpoints.
Like: one of the main characters put on a Dragon Lord's armor. This causes him to start becoming that Dragon Lord. This is already kind of unsettling, but potentially in an awesome way, but once he's fairly far along in the transformation the story just gets full-on wtf horrible about it -the elves of the setting are hardwired for loyalty to Dragon Lords or something, I forget exactly what, and the net result is that he starts sleeping with an elf queen whom has literally no choice in the matter. Also? The character himself was in his teens before he puts on the armor, while the elf is, like, hundreds of years old because elf. So it's this really horrifying reverse-pedophilia-rape thing, and the story just sort of... has it as this aside that isn't worth much commentary. The story does acknowledge that what's going on with the character is a bit unsettling, but I don't think the author intended it to be half a screwed-up as it actually is.
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That was retconned several years ago. Planeswalkers are just as mortal as any other extremely powerful mage (they'll live longer, but not much so). One of the main characters' current story revolves around fucking up the demons she made a pact with to get her immortality back.
The book series that Syfy's TV show is based on, or a different Magician series?
Also, just curious, but have you read the the Mistborn Trilogy? Or any of Brandon Sanderson's other stuff? He does a good job of making setting that are more than props for the characters, and actually has a pretty good "anyone can die" policy in ways that are often surprising. Although I would hesitate to recommend the Reckoners trilogy to you or anyone else bothered by Magic A not being Magic A since it's pretty directly Worm metaphysics with tweaks to make the story flow better and make the a "Triumph of the Human Spirit" that doesn't make sense.
Although Regent!Scion is actually a pretty funny/interesting character
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
That was waaay beyond merely WTF horrifying.
Summarized version: Thomas is an ordinary human lad (16-18 kinda range, I believe), a soldier in training of no particular significance. The Queen of the elves visits the town he lives in (diplomatic business with the local noble) and it's love at first sight, for him, she doesn't notice him (his friends council him 'forget it, you have no chance'. he doesn't). Fastforward, he gets lost in the Dwarves mines (The noble he works under is passing through to reach the capital, as I recall, and he's part of the retinue. They get attacked by an unkillable undead monster, and he gets caught on the other side of it as compared to rest of the group. They flee out, he flees deeper), he finds a Dragon, the Dragon is dying, gives him the armor, Dwarf Leader man who was escorting them through the mines turns back once the noble's retinue is through to try to save him (no hope of a human navigating the deep, twisting darkness on his own), and finds him.
Fast forward again, he's been slowly turning into this Dragon Lord dude, valiant ally/hero of the Dwarves in big war that's on due to legit merit/heroism/stuff. Runs into the elves, we learn elves have no choice but to obey Dragon Lords and also no choice but to see them as their masters, queen (who, by the by, has been in mourning for centuries over her dead husband and accordingly not taken a new lover or spouse) 'falls in love', we are expected to believe this is true love and not creepy mind-slave rape since, you know, he fell for her already, held on to that, and now she's his mind slave because of species as is her entire species so none of them can defend her either, YAY TWUE WUV.
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- Wherever
4.a
Alexandria
Shortly after the Simurgh's arrival
She's reviewing the latest efforts to track the Slaughterhouse Nine, working through how to arrange the next encounter, when the phone rings. The red one, only used for alerting her regarding threats that deserve the S rating. It's about the right time for an Endbringer strike, though it's more likely to be a different matter -maybe the Slaughterhouse Nine have stopped skulking already, made another big play.
It's the Simurgh, hitting the eastern seaboard -Brockton Bay, specifically.
She frowns. That's the "feudal parahuman society" experiment ruined. It's a point in favor of it being a workable model, though, same as when the Endbringer ruined Sphere. She makes a mental note to work with Contessa on planning a larger seeding of such experiments, spread them across the planet so a single Endbringer attack can't kill the entire experiment. (Again) Consider setting one on another Earth entirely, entirely out of the damned things' reach.
She's already implementing Director Costa-Brown's privacy protocols and moving to change into her costume, thinking for the 3,542nd time that she wishes Cauldron's need for secrecy wasn't paramount. The precious minutes wasted having to Door to Los Angeles and then fly from there to wherever she needs to be that could be saved by having Doormaker take her directly in the first place... she resents them, resents in a smaller way that human failings force her to waste those minutes. If people weren't such stupid, greedy, fearful-
-she cuts off that line of thought as unproductive. It is what it is. Americans send a relief convoy to a third-world country wracked by war, and the combatants waging the war seize it, extending a conflict that might otherwise burn itself out when the soldiers find themselves unable to feed themselves, unable to treat their illnesses. Purchasable powers being widely known, all by itself, would produce class warfare of unprecedented violence and bitterness.
It is what it is.
By a similar token, she doesn't use the tinkertech comms in her helmet to inform Legend and Eidolon. This bothers her less, as they've likely been informed already anyway. A small, debatable waste. Instead, she uses her Chief Director's Voice to start issuing orders -Strider is woken up and assigned to mass transport volunteers in and evacuate civilians out, along with a dozen less impressive Movers of similar utility who are also on the Endbringer Ready Volunteer List, Director Piggot is given a brief pep talk, and other PRT departments are made ready to receive refugees and wounded. Much of this would happen without her, but she adds precision, speed, and makes sure the big picture makes sense. Chicago isn't in any condition to help, for instance, overburdened by the cascades of violence and chaos so common to parahumans and saddled with teamwork problems they've not had time to iron out, so she makes sure they're left out of the proceedings and increases the load at three departments more ready to take on extra strain to make up the difference, knowing the Chicago unit would stubbornly take on the challenge and then buckle under the pressure if she didn't step in.
The list of things to stay on top of is endless, but she manages it easily, a mile and a half into the sky, and the tinkertech reproduces her voice as if she was sitting at her desk rather than flying at tremendous speeds. The only really noteworthy event is learning that Coil was outed in his identity as Calvert, attempted to escape. Fate currently unknown. Well then. Feudal parahuman society experiment dead twice over.
Once her duties as Chief Director are largely carried out, she switches to the discreet comms, text-only and managed by eye movement, and double-checks with Contessa on the far-too-long list of things that need double-checking. She puts on a burst of speed and detours for a full thirty seconds to put down a villain with a useless power in Nebraska who, if left alone, will restore key memories in Subject 557/"Tigerheart", creating further problems down the line. She spends an additional five seconds ensuring the murder looks like an animal attack the villain brought down on herself, and then continues her route.
As she's entering the clouds that helped the Endbringer reach the city unnoticed, she finally learns that Piggot authorized the "rescue" of Purity of Empire Eighty Eight's children -in the most idiotic way possible. One of the children died not long after the Simurgh arrived, and Purity blamed the PRT. Even knowing the Simurgh's tampering is probably involved...
Alexandria finds herself wishing she'd kept a closer eye on Piggot in the past few days. She'd focused on other Directors, with unproven track records or more difficult problems. Piggot, ill-concealed loathing of parahumans aside, had been a competent enough Director. She hadn't seemed to require much oversight anymore, and even for someone who needs no sleep, has perfect recall, and superb analytical ability, there's only so many hours in the day.
Mistake.
She hates mistakes.
She ignores the base, brief urge to seek out and throttle Piggot. It wouldn't fix anything, would create problems, wouldn't even be all that satisfying. Given Piggot's stubbornness, it might not be necessary either.
Instead, she sublimates, focuses her loathing on the Endbringer, and accelerates to her maximum speed, aimed straight for the thing's head.
When Powerpoint abruptly vanishes, his legs from the knee down his only remains, Oni Lady's efforts stop being cute. Whatever she's doing, it's not doing much to the Endbringer, but it sure as hell has cost several capes their lives.
Alexandria drops down and demands "What the hell are you doing, Oni Lady." This is not going to continue. She notes details of posture on her way down, collates patterns, guesses: concussed, on her period. Impaired judgment. Possibly just not thinking ahead? Might be possible to talk reason with her. Would be nice to have a reasonable villain for a change.
Oni Lady twitches, makes no effort to hide the twitch. Touched a nerve of some kind. Twitched at the name, specifically. Doesn't like the name. You should have made sure everyone knew what name you wanted to go by if you care that much. No sympathy felt. Oni Lady stares at the bomb in her hand, frowning, seeming to ignore Alexandria deliberately. After a slightly too long delay she responds with "Trying to kill the Simurgh." with almost no inflection. Sounds deliberate, an affectation. Not entirely untrue, her lack of passion, but trying to hide something.
Alexandria frowns and says "Better capes than you have tried many times over the years." Like Hero, Eidolon, Legend, and myself. Dozens of others. Thin justification for casual murder. Oni Lady doesn't care about the lives she's ruining. Wouldn't care if she was killing them for no reason at all. If Alexandria's control weren't inhumanly perfect, she'd probably be feeling sick right now -she hates people like this, the monsters of the world, worse than anything she's done as part of Cauldron. Only puts up with them at all because one of them might be the one who kills Scion one day, saves everyone still alive.
Oni Lady shrugs and says "Doesn't mean I shouldn't try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, ya know?" The casualness isn't affected -she really doesn't care. She understands people are dying, discards their lives as unimportant. Something off about her body language, tone of voice, too. Alexandria can't quite pin it down, the wrongness. A parahuman ability? Some tinkers have secondary powers.
Alexandria renders her frown severe and says "Stop killing perfectly good capes over a maybe." Only haven't wrung out your neck because you might kill Scion. Maybe. I doubt it, narrow tinker power. Just a bomb theme, varying effects, nothing really interesting bar maybe the time stop effect. Clockblocker's is more useful, though. Tempting to crush her skull.
Oni Lady bursts into giggles. They're... strangely masculine giggles. Slightly hysterical, but the register is low, the pattern off. They don't fit the body they're coming from, and not in the way of parahuman abilities -she isn't producing giggles a woman couldn't do, she's producing giggles a woman wouldn't do involuntarily, without thought. Odd. Trans? (But isn't she on her period?... might be a power involved)
In most situations Alexandria would ignore that detail, pretend she hadn't noticed. Once someone is triggered, there's little point to provoking them -second triggers never deviate far enough from their original abilities for a power that is questionable against Scion to become a power that could be instrumental. So she normally ignores trans people who have triggered, lets them think she believes them to be whatever gender they present as. It's convenient.
Non-parahumans are another matter entirely. Trans people have a higher trigger rate than a randomly selected person, on average, and more critically they are 2.3 times more likely to significantly deviate from typical patterns. Most cases aren't helpful -a power that heals people with a soothing aura of darkness isn't any kind of relevance against Scion or even just an Endbringer, as atypical, psychologically, as it is- but they still present a higher proportion of the kinds of powers that might "break the rules" and provide a real shot at survival.
So even though she has 3-and-a-half plans for how to potentially stamp out 90~% of all forms of relevant bigotry, she's never bothered to run them past Contessa. The suffering of a small percentage of humanity is worth the potential for all humanity, in all dimensions, to survive. She tolerates bigotry in the ranks, and even slightly encourages it -if she can promote a trooper who "hates faggots" or a trooper of peerless moral character, she'll promote the latter. That way, the bigot will be out there in the world, interacting with people with better odds of triggering, helping make those triggers happen.
She tells herself that when they win, she'll make it up to the trans/genderqueer/etc community. Sometimes she even believes it.
In the here and now though, in this case, she'll toe the bigot line. Get Oni Lady off-balance, see if she can be talked down from doing this shit from there. If respect for human lives won't sway her, maybe shame or guilt about her own condition will. Once Oni Lady's giggling fit settles down, Alexandria says in a deliberately even tone "You're walking dangerous ground..." narrow the eyes for effect "... sir."
Oni Lady snorts. "Oh yeah, my body language is too masculine or something, you're scary-smart, I'm intimidated now. Not." Alexandria makes sure she doesn't blink. Unexpected. Not necessarily the response itself, but the body language, the tone: Oni Lady has no guilt, shame, or psychological discomfort. No dysphoria. Then why does she self-identify as male in a female body? What happened? Something about her trigger event? The report on the Cornell Bomber, the files on Alicia Black, nothing suggests a woman who has self-identified as a man -and she certainly wasn't a man who became a woman when she triggered. Photos from before her trigger are not of a trans man trying to pass for a woman, and it doesn't fit the psychological profile of the parents anyway. They both desperately wanted a son and seemed essentially happy with their daughter's life choices. Pushed for her to be her best. Not sufficiently accepting to be supportive of a trans child, either.
None of it fit.
Alexandria lets none of this show, giving a thin smile and pointedly saying "A guess you confirmed, if you must know." Oni Lady rolls her eyes behind her mask. Defiant. Disinterested. She thinks I'm trying to impress or intimidate her. Wouldn't admit to being impressed or intimidated if either happened: more relevantly, is genuinely unimpressed. Intimidated by my presence, but not by my deductive ability. She doesn't feel she has secrets to hide. She just doesn't want my fist going through her face. Alexandria smooths out the emotion on her face, produces the blank, unyielding face that intimidates people. "I can see this won't go anywhere."
Then she puts on a burst of speed, grabs Oni Lady by the neck, lifts her off the ground, and lays down the law. "If you try to leave the interdicted zone after this is over, I will personally insure you don't survive the attempt. Don't try." Scared, but not scared off. Reacts to fear by lashing out or becoming intractable. Fight or flight? Fight or fight in her case. Made a mistake. Shouldn't have threatened her -not yet, at least. I still don't think she'd have listened to reason. Maybe a bribe would have worked better?
Oni Lady arms the bomb she's holding. Alexandria slides her eyes toward it. She'd noticed it of course, but ignored it. The way Oni Lady handled it, it was clear that she felt it too dangerous to use in self-defense. Too likely to backfire. Ignorable, therefore. Oni Lady smiles the smile of someone staring death in the face, the fearless face of someone who knows they are dead and decides fear is pointless. "Fuck you and your hypocritical bullshit." Alexandria pays attention to the body language: the bomb is engaged, but not counting down. If it was counting down, Oni Lady would be paying more attention to it, waiting for it to explode, but she is being careful to keep the trigger down, hand tense, tighter than necessary. The bomb is only fully armed once she releases the trigger.
Alexandria lets no emotion show while she studies Oni Lady. Fearless because she thinks she's dead, doesn't actually want to die. Still looking for a chance to survive, thinks I might back off if she holds this threat in my face, save her life. Glancing at the roof's entry point: thinking about escape once I let go.
Won't follow through.
"You won't actually follow through."
Oni Lady follows through.
Damnation.
Alexandria slams a fist into Oni Lady's gut, grabs the bomb, hurls it away as far as she can. I am going to put her dow-
Oni Lady's eyes track something, the eyes widening in shock, possibly some horror, all of it genuine. The bomb. A glance, and Alexandria spots the bomb, its course all wrong for the angle she threw it at. She'd deliberately avoided throwing it at the anomaly, and yet the anomaly is exactly where it is headed. She curses the Endbringer, spends a nanosecond considering punching Oni Lady again -more for the satisfaction than for any practical reason- and then discards the notion as taking too much time and launches herself after the bomb.
She's already thinking about what's the least problematic body part to lose if Oni Lady is right and this bomb is a threat to her. Left leg. It's her weaker leg, she strikes at foes with her legs much less than her hands or arms, she doesn't actually need either of her legs for full mobility, and even the best tinkers struggle to make a completely believable, fully articulate hand. Legs are easier. In the worst case scenario, Director Costa-Brown can suffer an accident or be attacked by a villain and left bound in a wheelchair without raising too many questions at the coincidence. A missing hand would be harder to explain -require a villain whose MO includes cutting off a hand (I can think of three in America, none convenient to the main HQ) to be used, probably still result in tinfoil hats drawing connections. Too early to risk the reveal happening.
So she kicks it with her left leg, right leg tucked into her body as far from the bomb as she can physically go, trying to strike it toward the Endbringer. If it doesn't detonate on contact, then it will have been turned on the monster. If it does detonate on contact... acceptable losses.
It detonates on contact (of course it does), and even with her inhuman reaction times she is only barely able to prevent the suction it creates from pulling her in more than a couple of inches. She stops feeling everything inside the complete blackness, instantly. No report of pain. No temperature, no touch. It's simply gone.
She ups Oni Lady's threat rating and reconsiders her desire to kill the girl. Definitely quarantine, definitely quarantine, but if she can be maneuvered into producing plausible Endbringer killers after the battle (she dares not hope for Scion killers), then Contessa can retrieve them with Doormaker's assistance after the Simurgh has left. Slightly risky, but only slightly -Contessa and the Endbringer cancel each other out to an extent, foil each others' plans, the Simurgh foiling Contessa more than the other way around... but Contessa's influence is able to make such a plan safe enough.
Alexandria activates the comms in her helmet, maintaining the right amount of propulsion to seem trapped, unmoving, and switches to the Triumvirate's personal channel. (The Protectorate's she thinks in a small, barely acknowledged corner of her mind, but even in the privacy of her head she prefers clarity over sentiment) "Eidolon, I need your help placating Oni Lady. She's not going to listen to me at this point, but one of her bombs just removed most of my leg."
She ignores Legend's dismayed outburst. She doesn't need the man's sympathy, and he can't enter the Simurgh's "song" range safely. He doesn't understand the import anyway. It'll come to him in a few minutes. She waits a long, long eight seconds for Eidolon's response, already thinking about how she'll coach him, planning out how she'll "interrupt", be "talked out of" killing the girl, pull good cop/bad cop with Eidolon as good cop...
Eidolon's voice is level, careful. He's surprised, a little concerned, but he recognizes the significance too -they've harmed the Endbringers before. Only (Doctor Manton) the Siberian has ever harmed her before. "I see her. I'm on my way." She coaches him until just before he lands on the roof Oni Lady is gasping on top of.
The following ten minutes are a carefully managed balancing act in which Alexandria keeps herself threatening enough for Oni Lady to see Eidolon as the "reasonable" one, but not so threatening the girl closes up entirely, expecting death. The argument they have is a carefully selected one -for all his virtues, David is a depressingly bad actor, so she selects one he has strong feelings on, one they've been over before. That way his acting is limited to hiding that this is planned -she avoided an actual script, trusting him to be natural and stick to the goals. He does splendidly, doesn't get caught up in the moment, only has two, maybe three moments where he's not genuine enough for her senses (but more than genuine enough for the rest of the world), and she takes the opportunity of "private" conversation to switch over to briefing him.
"Might be oppositional-defiant disorder. Sociopathic, has low affect. She does have emotions, stronger than she evinces, but her low response is not all faked. Don't give her orders, keep to questions, if you try to get her to do something without it being a direct question be subtle-" she gives him a pointed look. He knows which incident she's thinking of. "-and keep ignoring any attempt to bring up Cauldron. She's doing it to provoke us, thinks she knows a lot, doesn't. We can figure that part out later. Right now we need her alive, we need her pliable, we need her ready to tinker. Encourage tinkering if you can without making her think you're trying to do it."
Eidolon gives the prearranged signal that he understands: he crosses his arms (again) as if defensive.
She leaves, trusting Eidolon to handle this, and starts talking to Legend. He figured it out on his own, though he's still upset that she's hurt. His earnest compassion annoys her, useful as it is for managing the Protectorate. She's fine, she makes sure he knows it, she cuts him off when he won't let it go. Not important.
She gives him coordinates to subtly stop some of the threats already forming around Oni Lady. (Bakuda, she hears through Eidolon's earpiece. Whatever) Most of his options are comparatively flashy, but he has invisible lasers, and he puts them to good use to clear out some of the "zombies" searching the area. She makes a mental note -killing the zombies prevents them from triggering their Shaker effect. Useful to know.
Then she turns 95% of her attention to the battle with the Simurgh.
When Eidolon informs her that "Bakuda has given me an... idea. For the Simurgh, I mean." Alexandria doesn't bother to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. The conversation they played out for Bakuda's benefit wasn't entirely fake, after all. David's endless, baseless optimism grates. She says nothing, while Legend makes polite noises.
Once the Simurgh's "flesh" melts off its "bones", she finds herself glad she said nothing. This way, she doesn't have to admit to being wrong about anything. She's fairly sure Eidolon will be rubbing it in her face for weeks anyway. Not that he ever intends to gloat, but he never restrains himself from lingering on his big successes when they happen. Self-esteem problems. She understood it. Still found it irritating.
She punches and kicks the Simurgh as hard as she can and feels no give at all. She's already guessed the black knot is either a weak point or a trap, but she's more concerned with determining if she can even contribute anything against this inner layer. The answer: not really.
She flies away, intending to build speed and hit the black knot full-tilt, but is distracted by the clouds converging on the Simurgh's position. It's unprecedented from this Endbringer, and frankly baffling. She racks her brain, trying to imagine why it would be doing this, what's the point, and continues to fly out to her intended starting point.
Once there she turns around, takes a deep breath (More for the psychological effect than any other reason), and goes.
Halfway to impact she sees the glitter of ice and thinks Ah.
Three-quarters of the way to impact she correlates the ice's visual properties to the densest, toughest ice known to the world. She finds herself unsurprised.
On impact with the ice surrounding the black knot, the outermost layer cracks, but nothing more. She also notes that grit and small rocks are mixed in. Protection against the resonance effect? She considers berating herself for not trying to hit the black knot sooner... but it may yet prove a trap, and other parahumans were firing on it to little or no effect. (She makes a note for public benefit that projectiles seem to enter the black knot, rather than impact it, uploads it to the Protectorate database)
Punching the ice provokes small cracks, chips off pieces. She can contribute against this new layer of armor, at least, where her efforts against the "bones" themselves seemed to be in vain.
She puts her back into it. (More metaphorically than literally)
Oni Lee finally abandons the fight, injured, around the same time comms chatter brings to Alexandria's attention that somebody -Bakuda, by the sound of it- had tried to approach the growing ocean wall. They'd already turned away, but Alexandria frowned regardless. If it was Bakuda... the girl was already trying to circumvent the quarantine?
Dammit.
Her first impulse is to do something a bit more... permanent. Ensure the girl gets the memo that she is not leaving the city. She's halfway into analyzing the benefits of breaking an arm vs breaking a leg (Leaning toward breaking a leg: impair mobility without impairing tinkering) when she decides she needs more information, first. So, while she continues to pound the Endbringer's ice armor -which is much diminished, apparently difficult for the Endbringer to replace now that the clouds have all been sucked out of the sky- she switches her helmet's mode to "Costa-Brown", cycles to the channel temporarily assigned to the contingent constructing/defending the sea portion of the quarantine wall, and demands "What's this I'm hearing about a cape trying to breach the perimeter at the sea wall?"
"Oh!" Vocal analysis: PRT trooper who never expected to personally talk to the Chief Director. "Chief Director sir, uh, ma'am? The parahuman was successfully dissuaded from approaching and has left. Unless you mean-"
"What did the parahuman do?"
"... nothing, ma'am. They approached to within... two blocks, I'd say, I got on the horn to demand a confirmation code, they left." There was a noise Alexandria pinned down as abrupt displacement of air. She mulled over the information. Given Bakuda's pattern of behavior so far, she'd expected the girl to react to the obstacle by trying to blow it up. It seemed to be how she handled all her problems. Parahuman tunnel vision, she thought with some condescension.
The PRT Trooper apologetically says "Oh. I'm sorry ma'am, I'm to be evacuated now. I have to go." and she hears a click as he turns off his radio.
She doesn't bother to acknowledge his response. She's busy trying to parse Bakuda's behavior. If Bakuda was trying to escape the quarantine, it doesn't add up for her to then turn around and leave because someone had stern words for her. It seemed unlikely Bakuda had expected to go to ground at the ocean -her tinkertech has no particular utility at sea, and there is no reason to believe she could make a tinkertech lair in the ocean, at least no stronger evidence than the fact that she is a tinker. Bakuda's desire to kill the Simurgh didn't offer an explanation -the Simurgh's current position is almost at the other side of the city from the ocean, currently drifting further away.
Blind wandering was a possibility, but a questionable one. The girl had been obviously flagging before making this trek. The most likely thing she would do would be to find a place to rest, or find a way to defend herself and then find a place to rest. Manic focus on her objectives would just loop back to the prior problems -that it didn't make sense for trying to escape the quarantine, and it didn't make sense for trying to kill the Simurgh.
Bakuda's affiliation didn't clarify anything either. It was the wrong part of the city to be trying to reunite with her gang members, it was the wrong part of the city to be engaging in an idiotic attack on the white supremacists even if they hadn't already evacuated their surviving members, and Alexandria was skeptical that Bakuda had any particular grudge with the Archer's Bridge Merchants. She wasn't a biotinker, so she was unlikely to be interested in the animals in the ocean or the people that hadn't been evacuated...
The obvious answer, all things considered, was that Bakuda had been subverted and this somehow advanced the Endbringer's agenda. Even that didn't quite add up -Bakuda would've been bent to the Endbringer's purposes long before she started attacking the Simurgh. Even considering some of the twisting paths the Endbringer's plots could take at times, even considering some of the more convoluted plots Contessa had pulled off, it seemed... off, to hack someone's brain and then allow or force them to attack you, ultimately leading into the Endbringer being substantially weakened in an unprecedented fashion.
The fact that sloughing off more than 95% of the Endbringer's body hadn't allowed them to kill it wasn't even a major blow to morale. Comms chatter made it clear that most of those present were focused on the fact that this was more damage than it had ever taken before, not on the ongoing difficulty in causing further harm to it. A number of parahumans had reacted to the ice armor as proof that the Endbringer was on the back foot -why reveal a new defense if it wasn't vulnerable, after all? Alexandria was skeptical, fully aware that the Endbringers were canny and prone to subterfuge, but that was beside the point.
The point was: "It's a Simurgh plot" was a shaky theory. The best one she had, but not a good one. Especially since she wasn't going to be fooled into thinking Bakuda was immune just on that basis -it wasn't a plot to trick the Protectorate into evacuating a Simurgh bomb, because it wouldn't work.
She pushed it to the back of her mind and returned her focus to the Endbringer.
Legend's superhuman sight and inhuman intake of visual information means he spots Bakuda's latest attempt to explode something before anyone else.
She's firing at the seawall.
Oh for the love of-
"No wait,-" Legend corrects. "-she's firing over the seawall."
Alexandria allows a frown to take over her face for a moment, back to being puzzled. What possible avenue of thought could Bakuda's mind be going down? Was the nature of her tinkertech being fundamentally misunderstood somehow, such that firing at the ocean made any sense at all?
She breaks off another chunk of the Simurgh's ice armor, silently waiting for Legend to report on the outcome.
"It's-" he stops. That's ominous. After a second he says, in the tone Alexandria recognizes as the one he uses when he's very upset and trying to keep it out of his voice, "There's some kind of tinkertech in the bay. It's huge, sprawling, and I think it'll be self-propelled when it's completed. Bakuda's grenade cleared away water, did some damage to it, but not nearly as much as I'd prefer."
He doesn't need to say it for Alexandria to know: the Endbringer built it. That's never a good sign.
She does a mental tally of all the tinkers that have been in the Endbringer's reach at any point in this battle, trying to work out what kind of device this might be.
Squealer: specializes in big machinery, primarily vehicles.
Armsmaster: specializes in producing compact, multipurpose tools.
Kid Win: specialty not yet discovered. Has produced hover technology, "laser" weapons that have stun settings, and a "cannon" that teleports in piece-by-piece.
Bakuda: specializes in bombs or grenades, with a versatile output in effects.
Leet: methodology seems to allow him exceptional versatility, but he's been noted to avoid repeats. A limitation?
Trainwreck: Cauldron-made Case 53. Specialty was poorly tested before release, but appeared to be focused on producing cybernetic limbs and other enhancements for himself.
That was the local tinkers, and it already painted an ugly picture. If Leet's capabilities were as they appeared to be, by himself he was granting the Endbringer an alarming array of possibilities, and Kid Win and Trainwreck were sufficiently unclear in their capabilities that it was all too easy for the Endbringer to spring a nasty surprise.
Then there were the visiting tinkers, the ones here to defend against the Endbringer, and not for the first time Alexandria found herself weighing the benefits of allowing Tinkers to participate in fights against the Simurgh against the costs of allowing the Endbringer access to their tinkertech.
Dragon: seems to replace originality with reverse-engineering. Possibly a more esoteric methodology obscuring her true specialty.
On the plus side, Dragon's participation had yet to have a clear manifestation in abuse from the Simurgh -possibly related to her proven immunity to the Endbringer's "song". It was unlikely she'd been tapped by the Endbringer for whatever was being created.
Gremlin: rapidly produces short-lived robots that are especially adept at sabotage of technology.
Host: produces nanotechnological enhancements to her own body (Known to reach Brute 3, Mover 2, Thinker 2, still early in career), possibly others as well.
Orchestrate: constructs robots that he controls with music. If he has a specialty beyond that, it's not yet clear.
Ares: specializes in melee weaponry and heavy (unpowered) armor.
Nautilus: villain specializing in aquatic tools. In spite of name, not known to have produced any kind of submersible vehicle, though this may be a matter of preference or secrecy.
She was especially unhappy that there were two robot-producing tinkers in the area. Three if you counted Host's nanotechnology. (Nautilus' influence on the tinkertech was obvious) It strongly suggested that the tinkertech in the bay would be an autonomous intelligence once completed, presumably working to advance some hideous agenda of the Endbringers'. It seemed unlikely to limit itself to the Endbringer schedule, too.
This made it a priority target, potentially more of one than the Endbringer itself. In the worst-case scenario, the machine might be able to manufacture more devices, more copies of itself not even necessarily the worst possibility. The fact that it was hidden underwater was a problem as well -only a small fraction of parahumans were particularly functional underwater, suffocation was one of the only ways to kill Alexandria herself (Contessa-tested), and many blaster powers and tinkertech weapons had poor penetration into water. Destroying the device would be difficult.
It was a worrying combination, reeking of the kind of no-win scenario the Simurgh arranged routinely. Focusing on the device would take effort away from fighting the Endbringer, buying it time to enact some other plan, while ignoring the device was obviously unacceptable. If it wasn't destroyed, it would be entirely unaffected by the quarantine measures, and the device would probably be able to reach any coastline in the world -which meant it would go to whatever was the most problematic one, of course.
For the moment she confirms that Legend is contributing damage against the device and starts thinking of what capes would be best to handle it. Gremlin and Nautilus working together provide an obvious avenue, but even tinkers with a positive relationship under better circumstances often struggle to actually tinker cooperatively. Usually tinkers who try end up tinkering in each others' vicinity and drawing inspiration from the creations and process of each other, rather than producing a combined whole. Then there was the question of time. More likely she'd have to turn to non-tinkers -the ones that hadn't already been exposed to the Simurgh's song for too long or evacuated to avoid that fate, that is, which wasn't many at this point. There were other parahumans with immunity present, of course, but the list was not eminently suited to attacking the device.
She considered the possibility of ordering inter-city missile batteries to fire on the device in her role as Costa-Brown. After a moment's consideration, she rejected it: it was far too likely the Simurgh would arrange for them to cause cape collateral damage and very possibly not even hit the device. Even much-reduced -and it seemed to have grown a thin layer of its usual flesh underneath the ice at some point- it wouldn't surprise Alexandria if it could use its own body as a shield against missiles. The PRT didn't (yet) have tinkertech missile batteries in place, either.
After a full minute of discarding options, she again switched her helmet's mode to open communications with Contessa.
Simurgh tinker device. Need solution.
You know I can't promise a solution.
Give me one anyway.
So long as you understand the risk.
Alexandria scoffed to herself, but didn't take the bait, simply waiting for Contessa to get on with it.
After a moment's delay, text began smoothly scrolling, paced to match her reading speed exactly. She implemented the instructions perfectly, keeping her awareness up for evidence that the Simurgh's presence was compromising the instructions but otherwise focusing solely on enacting them.
She swooped down at a seemingly arbitrary location and grabbed what was obviously a bomb of Bakuda's, presumably lost at some point and overlooked by others. A short flight later, she grabbed one of the "zombies" -a teenage girl with hair going almost to her knees- by the hair, dangling them such that they couldn't reach her, not unless they thought to start pulling theirself up their hair. The incoherent screaming didn't suggest that much intelligence.
From there she flew over to directly above the tinkertech, using the tallest building in the city as a visual reference point as instructed by Contessa. Then she jerked the "zombie" up, stuffed the grenade into their mouth, activated the grenade, and with a violent spin threw them head-first into the water, all before the "zombie" could react and attempt to convert Alexandria.
The final step was to flee as fast as she could West.
This final step ran into the Endbringer.
It was a small thing, which was why she knew it was the Endbringer. A misaligned attack from one of the Blasters -she recognized it as the work of the independent hero "Sticking Point"- missed the Endbringer, missed every defensive measure the Endbringer's telekinesis was controlling, passed cleanly through the handful of capes remaining to fight the Endbringer, and went straight for Alexandria. She had all of 1/100th of a second to see it coming as she turned and infer these events before it impacted her.
Sticking Point's Blaster power was convenient for a hero who wanted to make live captures. This was ironic, as Sticking Point had tried repeatedly to execute Kill Orders and also to convince the local department to issue Kill Orders on villains he had a grudge with. Where most Blaster powers imparted heat or concussive force in an attempt to inflict damage, Sticking Point launched a pitch-black net that enshrouded an individual on impact and proceeded to carry them along its ballistic trajectory until it impacted a solid surface, after which there was a 57.7 second-long delay before the net crumbled to a fine powder scientists had determined was identical in all observable ways to coffee grindings. The net had yet to be destroyed, deformed, or in any way caused to deviate from its course by any parahuman he had interacted with, nor by non-powered efforts. There were powers the scientists suspected would work, but as Sticking Point was an indie hero, he wasn't very obliging about showing up for tests. Alexandria had her own suspicions of viable options, and they included none of the capes that were currently in Brockton Bay.
Naturally.
Bar Eidolon, of course, but he would take too long to pull a relevant power.
The result being: Alexandria was plummeting down toward where she'd just set up an insanely destructive combination at Contessa's direction, where the final instruction was to escape as fast as she could. Not only was it a near-certainty that she would be unable to escape the net herself, but it was too late anyway.
"Door me."
She fell through the portal, which promptly winked out, almost certainly to preserve Cauldron's oh-so-important secrecy.
She was still in Brockton Bay, still falling toward the "zombie" that was in the middle of its own effect triggering, its body surprisingly intact for having impacted water at speeds that would make it equivalent to slamming into concrete. Additionally, the grenade inside of it should have detonated by now, and Alexandria could find no evidence of such. She worried for a moment that Contessa's plan had failed, but then the "zombie" rippled with green lights, expanded grotesquely for a moment, and then burst into a stark white effect that, in short order surrounded Alexandria, though not before she took a deep breath.
The net did not break or vanish, and she realized it was still dragging her down, further into the water. She saw, dimly, the Tinkertech device in all its vast, black-plated terribleness, become consumed by the white effect, seeming to turn into an origami version of itself, black outlines on white paper. The process was slower than she might have imagined, not complete by the time she had impacted the sea floor, churning up thick brown mud. Her vision cleared before her breath failed, after 15 seconds, the mud overtaken by the white effect and vanishing.
The white effect stopped expanding, Alexandria mulling over her life choices, wondering what, if anything, she should've done differently. Her brain insisted "Nothing, save perhaps not trusting Contessa to be sufficiently proof against the Simurgh." Her heart disagreed vehemently with her life choices. She ignored it, as she usually did, and focused on watching the effect of what she had done.
It was difficult to parse, and she was beginning to truly suffocate, which was not helping. The device shuddered and activated, climbing to many spidery feet, or so she guessed, the visual input sufficiently bizarre she was not certain she understood it. The device tried to move East, out into the ocean, but almost immediately stopped as if it had bumped into a wall. Alexandria guessed it had hit the edge of the effect, though it was hard to say with how there was no depth perception at all, no shadows or other subtle clues to provide a 3-dimensional understanding of the image.
Her mouth opened on its own, conscious control over her involuntary actions be damned. She sucked sea water into her lungs and immediately, viscerally regretted it, while a more analytical portion of her mind thought Well then, dumb primate instincts, why did you force me to breathe it in?
That was the moment the net disintegrated, and Alexandria was abruptly not underwater, instead sharing a endless white void with the black tinkertech machine. It turned its attention to her the instant she vomited up sea water, and she barely had time to suck in air -empty of most scents, but gloriously breathable- before it was aiming some kind of weapon at her and firing.
She threw herself to one side and choked out "Door me."
Nothing happened, aside from a sky-blue ray striking her previous position.
Wonderful.
It was only once she'd fully dismantled the device that Alexandria realized that, barring some form of rescue occurring, her fate would be to die of dehydration. She needed little in the way of fluids, only needing to support her brain, so it would take longer than if she were not a parahuman, as well.
She settled herself in to be rescued, attempting to avoid thinking hard. Don't overwork the brain, draw it out...
By Alexandria's estimation it had been three months, and she felt no worse off, no closer to death. No evidence that rescue was coming had manifested itself, either.
Alexandria had begun to suspect that this was meant to be a fate worse than death. She hadn't gone mad from boredom and isolation yet, but that didn't mean it wouldn't happen. There was nothing to explore -it had only taken three days of effort to determine that the space contained nothing except her, the device's broken remains, and the remains of various fish. They weren't rotting. She'd tried eating one, but it had tasted like nothing and seemed to provide no nutritional benefit.
Nothing to do, unable to kill herself -she'd tried suffocating herself, but that damn reflex wouldn't let her hold her breath for long enough and nothing in the space had sufficed to block off her lungs- her fate was to go mad over an eternity.
She couldn't quite tell herself she didn't deserve this personal Hell.
She returned to looking for a escape from this damnable cage, ignoring that she'd run out of possible ideas a month ago.
Alexandria
Shortly after the Simurgh's arrival
She's reviewing the latest efforts to track the Slaughterhouse Nine, working through how to arrange the next encounter, when the phone rings. The red one, only used for alerting her regarding threats that deserve the S rating. It's about the right time for an Endbringer strike, though it's more likely to be a different matter -maybe the Slaughterhouse Nine have stopped skulking already, made another big play.
It's the Simurgh, hitting the eastern seaboard -Brockton Bay, specifically.
She frowns. That's the "feudal parahuman society" experiment ruined. It's a point in favor of it being a workable model, though, same as when the Endbringer ruined Sphere. She makes a mental note to work with Contessa on planning a larger seeding of such experiments, spread them across the planet so a single Endbringer attack can't kill the entire experiment. (Again) Consider setting one on another Earth entirely, entirely out of the damned things' reach.
She's already implementing Director Costa-Brown's privacy protocols and moving to change into her costume, thinking for the 3,542nd time that she wishes Cauldron's need for secrecy wasn't paramount. The precious minutes wasted having to Door to Los Angeles and then fly from there to wherever she needs to be that could be saved by having Doormaker take her directly in the first place... she resents them, resents in a smaller way that human failings force her to waste those minutes. If people weren't such stupid, greedy, fearful-
-she cuts off that line of thought as unproductive. It is what it is. Americans send a relief convoy to a third-world country wracked by war, and the combatants waging the war seize it, extending a conflict that might otherwise burn itself out when the soldiers find themselves unable to feed themselves, unable to treat their illnesses. Purchasable powers being widely known, all by itself, would produce class warfare of unprecedented violence and bitterness.
It is what it is.
By a similar token, she doesn't use the tinkertech comms in her helmet to inform Legend and Eidolon. This bothers her less, as they've likely been informed already anyway. A small, debatable waste. Instead, she uses her Chief Director's Voice to start issuing orders -Strider is woken up and assigned to mass transport volunteers in and evacuate civilians out, along with a dozen less impressive Movers of similar utility who are also on the Endbringer Ready Volunteer List, Director Piggot is given a brief pep talk, and other PRT departments are made ready to receive refugees and wounded. Much of this would happen without her, but she adds precision, speed, and makes sure the big picture makes sense. Chicago isn't in any condition to help, for instance, overburdened by the cascades of violence and chaos so common to parahumans and saddled with teamwork problems they've not had time to iron out, so she makes sure they're left out of the proceedings and increases the load at three departments more ready to take on extra strain to make up the difference, knowing the Chicago unit would stubbornly take on the challenge and then buckle under the pressure if she didn't step in.
The list of things to stay on top of is endless, but she manages it easily, a mile and a half into the sky, and the tinkertech reproduces her voice as if she was sitting at her desk rather than flying at tremendous speeds. The only really noteworthy event is learning that Coil was outed in his identity as Calvert, attempted to escape. Fate currently unknown. Well then. Feudal parahuman society experiment dead twice over.
Once her duties as Chief Director are largely carried out, she switches to the discreet comms, text-only and managed by eye movement, and double-checks with Contessa on the far-too-long list of things that need double-checking. She puts on a burst of speed and detours for a full thirty seconds to put down a villain with a useless power in Nebraska who, if left alone, will restore key memories in Subject 557/"Tigerheart", creating further problems down the line. She spends an additional five seconds ensuring the murder looks like an animal attack the villain brought down on herself, and then continues her route.
As she's entering the clouds that helped the Endbringer reach the city unnoticed, she finally learns that Piggot authorized the "rescue" of Purity of Empire Eighty Eight's children -in the most idiotic way possible. One of the children died not long after the Simurgh arrived, and Purity blamed the PRT. Even knowing the Simurgh's tampering is probably involved...
Alexandria finds herself wishing she'd kept a closer eye on Piggot in the past few days. She'd focused on other Directors, with unproven track records or more difficult problems. Piggot, ill-concealed loathing of parahumans aside, had been a competent enough Director. She hadn't seemed to require much oversight anymore, and even for someone who needs no sleep, has perfect recall, and superb analytical ability, there's only so many hours in the day.
Mistake.
She hates mistakes.
She ignores the base, brief urge to seek out and throttle Piggot. It wouldn't fix anything, would create problems, wouldn't even be all that satisfying. Given Piggot's stubbornness, it might not be necessary either.
Instead, she sublimates, focuses her loathing on the Endbringer, and accelerates to her maximum speed, aimed straight for the thing's head.
------------------------------------------
When Powerpoint abruptly vanishes, his legs from the knee down his only remains, Oni Lady's efforts stop being cute. Whatever she's doing, it's not doing much to the Endbringer, but it sure as hell has cost several capes their lives.
Alexandria drops down and demands "What the hell are you doing, Oni Lady." This is not going to continue. She notes details of posture on her way down, collates patterns, guesses: concussed, on her period. Impaired judgment. Possibly just not thinking ahead? Might be possible to talk reason with her. Would be nice to have a reasonable villain for a change.
Oni Lady twitches, makes no effort to hide the twitch. Touched a nerve of some kind. Twitched at the name, specifically. Doesn't like the name. You should have made sure everyone knew what name you wanted to go by if you care that much. No sympathy felt. Oni Lady stares at the bomb in her hand, frowning, seeming to ignore Alexandria deliberately. After a slightly too long delay she responds with "Trying to kill the Simurgh." with almost no inflection. Sounds deliberate, an affectation. Not entirely untrue, her lack of passion, but trying to hide something.
Alexandria frowns and says "Better capes than you have tried many times over the years." Like Hero, Eidolon, Legend, and myself. Dozens of others. Thin justification for casual murder. Oni Lady doesn't care about the lives she's ruining. Wouldn't care if she was killing them for no reason at all. If Alexandria's control weren't inhumanly perfect, she'd probably be feeling sick right now -she hates people like this, the monsters of the world, worse than anything she's done as part of Cauldron. Only puts up with them at all because one of them might be the one who kills Scion one day, saves everyone still alive.
Oni Lady shrugs and says "Doesn't mean I shouldn't try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, ya know?" The casualness isn't affected -she really doesn't care. She understands people are dying, discards their lives as unimportant. Something off about her body language, tone of voice, too. Alexandria can't quite pin it down, the wrongness. A parahuman ability? Some tinkers have secondary powers.
Alexandria renders her frown severe and says "Stop killing perfectly good capes over a maybe." Only haven't wrung out your neck because you might kill Scion. Maybe. I doubt it, narrow tinker power. Just a bomb theme, varying effects, nothing really interesting bar maybe the time stop effect. Clockblocker's is more useful, though. Tempting to crush her skull.
Oni Lady bursts into giggles. They're... strangely masculine giggles. Slightly hysterical, but the register is low, the pattern off. They don't fit the body they're coming from, and not in the way of parahuman abilities -she isn't producing giggles a woman couldn't do, she's producing giggles a woman wouldn't do involuntarily, without thought. Odd. Trans? (But isn't she on her period?... might be a power involved)
In most situations Alexandria would ignore that detail, pretend she hadn't noticed. Once someone is triggered, there's little point to provoking them -second triggers never deviate far enough from their original abilities for a power that is questionable against Scion to become a power that could be instrumental. So she normally ignores trans people who have triggered, lets them think she believes them to be whatever gender they present as. It's convenient.
Non-parahumans are another matter entirely. Trans people have a higher trigger rate than a randomly selected person, on average, and more critically they are 2.3 times more likely to significantly deviate from typical patterns. Most cases aren't helpful -a power that heals people with a soothing aura of darkness isn't any kind of relevance against Scion or even just an Endbringer, as atypical, psychologically, as it is- but they still present a higher proportion of the kinds of powers that might "break the rules" and provide a real shot at survival.
So even though she has 3-and-a-half plans for how to potentially stamp out 90~% of all forms of relevant bigotry, she's never bothered to run them past Contessa. The suffering of a small percentage of humanity is worth the potential for all humanity, in all dimensions, to survive. She tolerates bigotry in the ranks, and even slightly encourages it -if she can promote a trooper who "hates faggots" or a trooper of peerless moral character, she'll promote the latter. That way, the bigot will be out there in the world, interacting with people with better odds of triggering, helping make those triggers happen.
She tells herself that when they win, she'll make it up to the trans/genderqueer/etc community. Sometimes she even believes it.
In the here and now though, in this case, she'll toe the bigot line. Get Oni Lady off-balance, see if she can be talked down from doing this shit from there. If respect for human lives won't sway her, maybe shame or guilt about her own condition will. Once Oni Lady's giggling fit settles down, Alexandria says in a deliberately even tone "You're walking dangerous ground..." narrow the eyes for effect "... sir."
Oni Lady snorts. "Oh yeah, my body language is too masculine or something, you're scary-smart, I'm intimidated now. Not." Alexandria makes sure she doesn't blink. Unexpected. Not necessarily the response itself, but the body language, the tone: Oni Lady has no guilt, shame, or psychological discomfort. No dysphoria. Then why does she self-identify as male in a female body? What happened? Something about her trigger event? The report on the Cornell Bomber, the files on Alicia Black, nothing suggests a woman who has self-identified as a man -and she certainly wasn't a man who became a woman when she triggered. Photos from before her trigger are not of a trans man trying to pass for a woman, and it doesn't fit the psychological profile of the parents anyway. They both desperately wanted a son and seemed essentially happy with their daughter's life choices. Pushed for her to be her best. Not sufficiently accepting to be supportive of a trans child, either.
None of it fit.
Alexandria lets none of this show, giving a thin smile and pointedly saying "A guess you confirmed, if you must know." Oni Lady rolls her eyes behind her mask. Defiant. Disinterested. She thinks I'm trying to impress or intimidate her. Wouldn't admit to being impressed or intimidated if either happened: more relevantly, is genuinely unimpressed. Intimidated by my presence, but not by my deductive ability. She doesn't feel she has secrets to hide. She just doesn't want my fist going through her face. Alexandria smooths out the emotion on her face, produces the blank, unyielding face that intimidates people. "I can see this won't go anywhere."
Then she puts on a burst of speed, grabs Oni Lady by the neck, lifts her off the ground, and lays down the law. "If you try to leave the interdicted zone after this is over, I will personally insure you don't survive the attempt. Don't try." Scared, but not scared off. Reacts to fear by lashing out or becoming intractable. Fight or flight? Fight or fight in her case. Made a mistake. Shouldn't have threatened her -not yet, at least. I still don't think she'd have listened to reason. Maybe a bribe would have worked better?
Oni Lady arms the bomb she's holding. Alexandria slides her eyes toward it. She'd noticed it of course, but ignored it. The way Oni Lady handled it, it was clear that she felt it too dangerous to use in self-defense. Too likely to backfire. Ignorable, therefore. Oni Lady smiles the smile of someone staring death in the face, the fearless face of someone who knows they are dead and decides fear is pointless. "Fuck you and your hypocritical bullshit." Alexandria pays attention to the body language: the bomb is engaged, but not counting down. If it was counting down, Oni Lady would be paying more attention to it, waiting for it to explode, but she is being careful to keep the trigger down, hand tense, tighter than necessary. The bomb is only fully armed once she releases the trigger.
Alexandria lets no emotion show while she studies Oni Lady. Fearless because she thinks she's dead, doesn't actually want to die. Still looking for a chance to survive, thinks I might back off if she holds this threat in my face, save her life. Glancing at the roof's entry point: thinking about escape once I let go.
Won't follow through.
"You won't actually follow through."
Oni Lady follows through.
Damnation.
Alexandria slams a fist into Oni Lady's gut, grabs the bomb, hurls it away as far as she can. I am going to put her dow-
Oni Lady's eyes track something, the eyes widening in shock, possibly some horror, all of it genuine. The bomb. A glance, and Alexandria spots the bomb, its course all wrong for the angle she threw it at. She'd deliberately avoided throwing it at the anomaly, and yet the anomaly is exactly where it is headed. She curses the Endbringer, spends a nanosecond considering punching Oni Lady again -more for the satisfaction than for any practical reason- and then discards the notion as taking too much time and launches herself after the bomb.
She's already thinking about what's the least problematic body part to lose if Oni Lady is right and this bomb is a threat to her. Left leg. It's her weaker leg, she strikes at foes with her legs much less than her hands or arms, she doesn't actually need either of her legs for full mobility, and even the best tinkers struggle to make a completely believable, fully articulate hand. Legs are easier. In the worst case scenario, Director Costa-Brown can suffer an accident or be attacked by a villain and left bound in a wheelchair without raising too many questions at the coincidence. A missing hand would be harder to explain -require a villain whose MO includes cutting off a hand (I can think of three in America, none convenient to the main HQ) to be used, probably still result in tinfoil hats drawing connections. Too early to risk the reveal happening.
So she kicks it with her left leg, right leg tucked into her body as far from the bomb as she can physically go, trying to strike it toward the Endbringer. If it doesn't detonate on contact, then it will have been turned on the monster. If it does detonate on contact... acceptable losses.
It detonates on contact (of course it does), and even with her inhuman reaction times she is only barely able to prevent the suction it creates from pulling her in more than a couple of inches. She stops feeling everything inside the complete blackness, instantly. No report of pain. No temperature, no touch. It's simply gone.
She ups Oni Lady's threat rating and reconsiders her desire to kill the girl. Definitely quarantine, definitely quarantine, but if she can be maneuvered into producing plausible Endbringer killers after the battle (she dares not hope for Scion killers), then Contessa can retrieve them with Doormaker's assistance after the Simurgh has left. Slightly risky, but only slightly -Contessa and the Endbringer cancel each other out to an extent, foil each others' plans, the Simurgh foiling Contessa more than the other way around... but Contessa's influence is able to make such a plan safe enough.
Alexandria activates the comms in her helmet, maintaining the right amount of propulsion to seem trapped, unmoving, and switches to the Triumvirate's personal channel. (The Protectorate's she thinks in a small, barely acknowledged corner of her mind, but even in the privacy of her head she prefers clarity over sentiment) "Eidolon, I need your help placating Oni Lady. She's not going to listen to me at this point, but one of her bombs just removed most of my leg."
She ignores Legend's dismayed outburst. She doesn't need the man's sympathy, and he can't enter the Simurgh's "song" range safely. He doesn't understand the import anyway. It'll come to him in a few minutes. She waits a long, long eight seconds for Eidolon's response, already thinking about how she'll coach him, planning out how she'll "interrupt", be "talked out of" killing the girl, pull good cop/bad cop with Eidolon as good cop...
Eidolon's voice is level, careful. He's surprised, a little concerned, but he recognizes the significance too -they've harmed the Endbringers before. Only (Doctor Manton) the Siberian has ever harmed her before. "I see her. I'm on my way." She coaches him until just before he lands on the roof Oni Lady is gasping on top of.
The following ten minutes are a carefully managed balancing act in which Alexandria keeps herself threatening enough for Oni Lady to see Eidolon as the "reasonable" one, but not so threatening the girl closes up entirely, expecting death. The argument they have is a carefully selected one -for all his virtues, David is a depressingly bad actor, so she selects one he has strong feelings on, one they've been over before. That way his acting is limited to hiding that this is planned -she avoided an actual script, trusting him to be natural and stick to the goals. He does splendidly, doesn't get caught up in the moment, only has two, maybe three moments where he's not genuine enough for her senses (but more than genuine enough for the rest of the world), and she takes the opportunity of "private" conversation to switch over to briefing him.
"Might be oppositional-defiant disorder. Sociopathic, has low affect. She does have emotions, stronger than she evinces, but her low response is not all faked. Don't give her orders, keep to questions, if you try to get her to do something without it being a direct question be subtle-" she gives him a pointed look. He knows which incident she's thinking of. "-and keep ignoring any attempt to bring up Cauldron. She's doing it to provoke us, thinks she knows a lot, doesn't. We can figure that part out later. Right now we need her alive, we need her pliable, we need her ready to tinker. Encourage tinkering if you can without making her think you're trying to do it."
Eidolon gives the prearranged signal that he understands: he crosses his arms (again) as if defensive.
She leaves, trusting Eidolon to handle this, and starts talking to Legend. He figured it out on his own, though he's still upset that she's hurt. His earnest compassion annoys her, useful as it is for managing the Protectorate. She's fine, she makes sure he knows it, she cuts him off when he won't let it go. Not important.
She gives him coordinates to subtly stop some of the threats already forming around Oni Lady. (Bakuda, she hears through Eidolon's earpiece. Whatever) Most of his options are comparatively flashy, but he has invisible lasers, and he puts them to good use to clear out some of the "zombies" searching the area. She makes a mental note -killing the zombies prevents them from triggering their Shaker effect. Useful to know.
Then she turns 95% of her attention to the battle with the Simurgh.
-----------------------------
When Eidolon informs her that "Bakuda has given me an... idea. For the Simurgh, I mean." Alexandria doesn't bother to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. The conversation they played out for Bakuda's benefit wasn't entirely fake, after all. David's endless, baseless optimism grates. She says nothing, while Legend makes polite noises.
Once the Simurgh's "flesh" melts off its "bones", she finds herself glad she said nothing. This way, she doesn't have to admit to being wrong about anything. She's fairly sure Eidolon will be rubbing it in her face for weeks anyway. Not that he ever intends to gloat, but he never restrains himself from lingering on his big successes when they happen. Self-esteem problems. She understood it. Still found it irritating.
She punches and kicks the Simurgh as hard as she can and feels no give at all. She's already guessed the black knot is either a weak point or a trap, but she's more concerned with determining if she can even contribute anything against this inner layer. The answer: not really.
She flies away, intending to build speed and hit the black knot full-tilt, but is distracted by the clouds converging on the Simurgh's position. It's unprecedented from this Endbringer, and frankly baffling. She racks her brain, trying to imagine why it would be doing this, what's the point, and continues to fly out to her intended starting point.
Once there she turns around, takes a deep breath (More for the psychological effect than any other reason), and goes.
Halfway to impact she sees the glitter of ice and thinks Ah.
Three-quarters of the way to impact she correlates the ice's visual properties to the densest, toughest ice known to the world. She finds herself unsurprised.
On impact with the ice surrounding the black knot, the outermost layer cracks, but nothing more. She also notes that grit and small rocks are mixed in. Protection against the resonance effect? She considers berating herself for not trying to hit the black knot sooner... but it may yet prove a trap, and other parahumans were firing on it to little or no effect. (She makes a note for public benefit that projectiles seem to enter the black knot, rather than impact it, uploads it to the Protectorate database)
Punching the ice provokes small cracks, chips off pieces. She can contribute against this new layer of armor, at least, where her efforts against the "bones" themselves seemed to be in vain.
She puts her back into it. (More metaphorically than literally)
-------------------------------
Oni Lee finally abandons the fight, injured, around the same time comms chatter brings to Alexandria's attention that somebody -Bakuda, by the sound of it- had tried to approach the growing ocean wall. They'd already turned away, but Alexandria frowned regardless. If it was Bakuda... the girl was already trying to circumvent the quarantine?
Dammit.
Her first impulse is to do something a bit more... permanent. Ensure the girl gets the memo that she is not leaving the city. She's halfway into analyzing the benefits of breaking an arm vs breaking a leg (Leaning toward breaking a leg: impair mobility without impairing tinkering) when she decides she needs more information, first. So, while she continues to pound the Endbringer's ice armor -which is much diminished, apparently difficult for the Endbringer to replace now that the clouds have all been sucked out of the sky- she switches her helmet's mode to "Costa-Brown", cycles to the channel temporarily assigned to the contingent constructing/defending the sea portion of the quarantine wall, and demands "What's this I'm hearing about a cape trying to breach the perimeter at the sea wall?"
"Oh!" Vocal analysis: PRT trooper who never expected to personally talk to the Chief Director. "Chief Director sir, uh, ma'am? The parahuman was successfully dissuaded from approaching and has left. Unless you mean-"
"What did the parahuman do?"
"... nothing, ma'am. They approached to within... two blocks, I'd say, I got on the horn to demand a confirmation code, they left." There was a noise Alexandria pinned down as abrupt displacement of air. She mulled over the information. Given Bakuda's pattern of behavior so far, she'd expected the girl to react to the obstacle by trying to blow it up. It seemed to be how she handled all her problems. Parahuman tunnel vision, she thought with some condescension.
The PRT Trooper apologetically says "Oh. I'm sorry ma'am, I'm to be evacuated now. I have to go." and she hears a click as he turns off his radio.
She doesn't bother to acknowledge his response. She's busy trying to parse Bakuda's behavior. If Bakuda was trying to escape the quarantine, it doesn't add up for her to then turn around and leave because someone had stern words for her. It seemed unlikely Bakuda had expected to go to ground at the ocean -her tinkertech has no particular utility at sea, and there is no reason to believe she could make a tinkertech lair in the ocean, at least no stronger evidence than the fact that she is a tinker. Bakuda's desire to kill the Simurgh didn't offer an explanation -the Simurgh's current position is almost at the other side of the city from the ocean, currently drifting further away.
Blind wandering was a possibility, but a questionable one. The girl had been obviously flagging before making this trek. The most likely thing she would do would be to find a place to rest, or find a way to defend herself and then find a place to rest. Manic focus on her objectives would just loop back to the prior problems -that it didn't make sense for trying to escape the quarantine, and it didn't make sense for trying to kill the Simurgh.
Bakuda's affiliation didn't clarify anything either. It was the wrong part of the city to be trying to reunite with her gang members, it was the wrong part of the city to be engaging in an idiotic attack on the white supremacists even if they hadn't already evacuated their surviving members, and Alexandria was skeptical that Bakuda had any particular grudge with the Archer's Bridge Merchants. She wasn't a biotinker, so she was unlikely to be interested in the animals in the ocean or the people that hadn't been evacuated...
The obvious answer, all things considered, was that Bakuda had been subverted and this somehow advanced the Endbringer's agenda. Even that didn't quite add up -Bakuda would've been bent to the Endbringer's purposes long before she started attacking the Simurgh. Even considering some of the twisting paths the Endbringer's plots could take at times, even considering some of the more convoluted plots Contessa had pulled off, it seemed... off, to hack someone's brain and then allow or force them to attack you, ultimately leading into the Endbringer being substantially weakened in an unprecedented fashion.
The fact that sloughing off more than 95% of the Endbringer's body hadn't allowed them to kill it wasn't even a major blow to morale. Comms chatter made it clear that most of those present were focused on the fact that this was more damage than it had ever taken before, not on the ongoing difficulty in causing further harm to it. A number of parahumans had reacted to the ice armor as proof that the Endbringer was on the back foot -why reveal a new defense if it wasn't vulnerable, after all? Alexandria was skeptical, fully aware that the Endbringers were canny and prone to subterfuge, but that was beside the point.
The point was: "It's a Simurgh plot" was a shaky theory. The best one she had, but not a good one. Especially since she wasn't going to be fooled into thinking Bakuda was immune just on that basis -it wasn't a plot to trick the Protectorate into evacuating a Simurgh bomb, because it wouldn't work.
She pushed it to the back of her mind and returned her focus to the Endbringer.
----------------------------------
Legend's superhuman sight and inhuman intake of visual information means he spots Bakuda's latest attempt to explode something before anyone else.
She's firing at the seawall.
Oh for the love of-
"No wait,-" Legend corrects. "-she's firing over the seawall."
Alexandria allows a frown to take over her face for a moment, back to being puzzled. What possible avenue of thought could Bakuda's mind be going down? Was the nature of her tinkertech being fundamentally misunderstood somehow, such that firing at the ocean made any sense at all?
She breaks off another chunk of the Simurgh's ice armor, silently waiting for Legend to report on the outcome.
"It's-" he stops. That's ominous. After a second he says, in the tone Alexandria recognizes as the one he uses when he's very upset and trying to keep it out of his voice, "There's some kind of tinkertech in the bay. It's huge, sprawling, and I think it'll be self-propelled when it's completed. Bakuda's grenade cleared away water, did some damage to it, but not nearly as much as I'd prefer."
He doesn't need to say it for Alexandria to know: the Endbringer built it. That's never a good sign.
She does a mental tally of all the tinkers that have been in the Endbringer's reach at any point in this battle, trying to work out what kind of device this might be.
Squealer: specializes in big machinery, primarily vehicles.
Armsmaster: specializes in producing compact, multipurpose tools.
Kid Win: specialty not yet discovered. Has produced hover technology, "laser" weapons that have stun settings, and a "cannon" that teleports in piece-by-piece.
Bakuda: specializes in bombs or grenades, with a versatile output in effects.
Leet: methodology seems to allow him exceptional versatility, but he's been noted to avoid repeats. A limitation?
Trainwreck: Cauldron-made Case 53. Specialty was poorly tested before release, but appeared to be focused on producing cybernetic limbs and other enhancements for himself.
That was the local tinkers, and it already painted an ugly picture. If Leet's capabilities were as they appeared to be, by himself he was granting the Endbringer an alarming array of possibilities, and Kid Win and Trainwreck were sufficiently unclear in their capabilities that it was all too easy for the Endbringer to spring a nasty surprise.
Then there were the visiting tinkers, the ones here to defend against the Endbringer, and not for the first time Alexandria found herself weighing the benefits of allowing Tinkers to participate in fights against the Simurgh against the costs of allowing the Endbringer access to their tinkertech.
Dragon: seems to replace originality with reverse-engineering. Possibly a more esoteric methodology obscuring her true specialty.
On the plus side, Dragon's participation had yet to have a clear manifestation in abuse from the Simurgh -possibly related to her proven immunity to the Endbringer's "song". It was unlikely she'd been tapped by the Endbringer for whatever was being created.
Gremlin: rapidly produces short-lived robots that are especially adept at sabotage of technology.
Host: produces nanotechnological enhancements to her own body (Known to reach Brute 3, Mover 2, Thinker 2, still early in career), possibly others as well.
Orchestrate: constructs robots that he controls with music. If he has a specialty beyond that, it's not yet clear.
Ares: specializes in melee weaponry and heavy (unpowered) armor.
Nautilus: villain specializing in aquatic tools. In spite of name, not known to have produced any kind of submersible vehicle, though this may be a matter of preference or secrecy.
She was especially unhappy that there were two robot-producing tinkers in the area. Three if you counted Host's nanotechnology. (Nautilus' influence on the tinkertech was obvious) It strongly suggested that the tinkertech in the bay would be an autonomous intelligence once completed, presumably working to advance some hideous agenda of the Endbringers'. It seemed unlikely to limit itself to the Endbringer schedule, too.
This made it a priority target, potentially more of one than the Endbringer itself. In the worst-case scenario, the machine might be able to manufacture more devices, more copies of itself not even necessarily the worst possibility. The fact that it was hidden underwater was a problem as well -only a small fraction of parahumans were particularly functional underwater, suffocation was one of the only ways to kill Alexandria herself (Contessa-tested), and many blaster powers and tinkertech weapons had poor penetration into water. Destroying the device would be difficult.
It was a worrying combination, reeking of the kind of no-win scenario the Simurgh arranged routinely. Focusing on the device would take effort away from fighting the Endbringer, buying it time to enact some other plan, while ignoring the device was obviously unacceptable. If it wasn't destroyed, it would be entirely unaffected by the quarantine measures, and the device would probably be able to reach any coastline in the world -which meant it would go to whatever was the most problematic one, of course.
For the moment she confirms that Legend is contributing damage against the device and starts thinking of what capes would be best to handle it. Gremlin and Nautilus working together provide an obvious avenue, but even tinkers with a positive relationship under better circumstances often struggle to actually tinker cooperatively. Usually tinkers who try end up tinkering in each others' vicinity and drawing inspiration from the creations and process of each other, rather than producing a combined whole. Then there was the question of time. More likely she'd have to turn to non-tinkers -the ones that hadn't already been exposed to the Simurgh's song for too long or evacuated to avoid that fate, that is, which wasn't many at this point. There were other parahumans with immunity present, of course, but the list was not eminently suited to attacking the device.
She considered the possibility of ordering inter-city missile batteries to fire on the device in her role as Costa-Brown. After a moment's consideration, she rejected it: it was far too likely the Simurgh would arrange for them to cause cape collateral damage and very possibly not even hit the device. Even much-reduced -and it seemed to have grown a thin layer of its usual flesh underneath the ice at some point- it wouldn't surprise Alexandria if it could use its own body as a shield against missiles. The PRT didn't (yet) have tinkertech missile batteries in place, either.
After a full minute of discarding options, she again switched her helmet's mode to open communications with Contessa.
Simurgh tinker device. Need solution.
You know I can't promise a solution.
Give me one anyway.
So long as you understand the risk.
Alexandria scoffed to herself, but didn't take the bait, simply waiting for Contessa to get on with it.
After a moment's delay, text began smoothly scrolling, paced to match her reading speed exactly. She implemented the instructions perfectly, keeping her awareness up for evidence that the Simurgh's presence was compromising the instructions but otherwise focusing solely on enacting them.
She swooped down at a seemingly arbitrary location and grabbed what was obviously a bomb of Bakuda's, presumably lost at some point and overlooked by others. A short flight later, she grabbed one of the "zombies" -a teenage girl with hair going almost to her knees- by the hair, dangling them such that they couldn't reach her, not unless they thought to start pulling theirself up their hair. The incoherent screaming didn't suggest that much intelligence.
From there she flew over to directly above the tinkertech, using the tallest building in the city as a visual reference point as instructed by Contessa. Then she jerked the "zombie" up, stuffed the grenade into their mouth, activated the grenade, and with a violent spin threw them head-first into the water, all before the "zombie" could react and attempt to convert Alexandria.
The final step was to flee as fast as she could West.
This final step ran into the Endbringer.
It was a small thing, which was why she knew it was the Endbringer. A misaligned attack from one of the Blasters -she recognized it as the work of the independent hero "Sticking Point"- missed the Endbringer, missed every defensive measure the Endbringer's telekinesis was controlling, passed cleanly through the handful of capes remaining to fight the Endbringer, and went straight for Alexandria. She had all of 1/100th of a second to see it coming as she turned and infer these events before it impacted her.
Sticking Point's Blaster power was convenient for a hero who wanted to make live captures. This was ironic, as Sticking Point had tried repeatedly to execute Kill Orders and also to convince the local department to issue Kill Orders on villains he had a grudge with. Where most Blaster powers imparted heat or concussive force in an attempt to inflict damage, Sticking Point launched a pitch-black net that enshrouded an individual on impact and proceeded to carry them along its ballistic trajectory until it impacted a solid surface, after which there was a 57.7 second-long delay before the net crumbled to a fine powder scientists had determined was identical in all observable ways to coffee grindings. The net had yet to be destroyed, deformed, or in any way caused to deviate from its course by any parahuman he had interacted with, nor by non-powered efforts. There were powers the scientists suspected would work, but as Sticking Point was an indie hero, he wasn't very obliging about showing up for tests. Alexandria had her own suspicions of viable options, and they included none of the capes that were currently in Brockton Bay.
Naturally.
Bar Eidolon, of course, but he would take too long to pull a relevant power.
The result being: Alexandria was plummeting down toward where she'd just set up an insanely destructive combination at Contessa's direction, where the final instruction was to escape as fast as she could. Not only was it a near-certainty that she would be unable to escape the net herself, but it was too late anyway.
"Door me."
She fell through the portal, which promptly winked out, almost certainly to preserve Cauldron's oh-so-important secrecy.
She was still in Brockton Bay, still falling toward the "zombie" that was in the middle of its own effect triggering, its body surprisingly intact for having impacted water at speeds that would make it equivalent to slamming into concrete. Additionally, the grenade inside of it should have detonated by now, and Alexandria could find no evidence of such. She worried for a moment that Contessa's plan had failed, but then the "zombie" rippled with green lights, expanded grotesquely for a moment, and then burst into a stark white effect that, in short order surrounded Alexandria, though not before she took a deep breath.
The net did not break or vanish, and she realized it was still dragging her down, further into the water. She saw, dimly, the Tinkertech device in all its vast, black-plated terribleness, become consumed by the white effect, seeming to turn into an origami version of itself, black outlines on white paper. The process was slower than she might have imagined, not complete by the time she had impacted the sea floor, churning up thick brown mud. Her vision cleared before her breath failed, after 15 seconds, the mud overtaken by the white effect and vanishing.
The white effect stopped expanding, Alexandria mulling over her life choices, wondering what, if anything, she should've done differently. Her brain insisted "Nothing, save perhaps not trusting Contessa to be sufficiently proof against the Simurgh." Her heart disagreed vehemently with her life choices. She ignored it, as she usually did, and focused on watching the effect of what she had done.
It was difficult to parse, and she was beginning to truly suffocate, which was not helping. The device shuddered and activated, climbing to many spidery feet, or so she guessed, the visual input sufficiently bizarre she was not certain she understood it. The device tried to move East, out into the ocean, but almost immediately stopped as if it had bumped into a wall. Alexandria guessed it had hit the edge of the effect, though it was hard to say with how there was no depth perception at all, no shadows or other subtle clues to provide a 3-dimensional understanding of the image.
Her mouth opened on its own, conscious control over her involuntary actions be damned. She sucked sea water into her lungs and immediately, viscerally regretted it, while a more analytical portion of her mind thought Well then, dumb primate instincts, why did you force me to breathe it in?
That was the moment the net disintegrated, and Alexandria was abruptly not underwater, instead sharing a endless white void with the black tinkertech machine. It turned its attention to her the instant she vomited up sea water, and she barely had time to suck in air -empty of most scents, but gloriously breathable- before it was aiming some kind of weapon at her and firing.
She threw herself to one side and choked out "Door me."
Nothing happened, aside from a sky-blue ray striking her previous position.
Wonderful.
-------------------------------------
It was only once she'd fully dismantled the device that Alexandria realized that, barring some form of rescue occurring, her fate would be to die of dehydration. She needed little in the way of fluids, only needing to support her brain, so it would take longer than if she were not a parahuman, as well.
She settled herself in to be rescued, attempting to avoid thinking hard. Don't overwork the brain, draw it out...
------------------------------------
By Alexandria's estimation it had been three months, and she felt no worse off, no closer to death. No evidence that rescue was coming had manifested itself, either.
Alexandria had begun to suspect that this was meant to be a fate worse than death. She hadn't gone mad from boredom and isolation yet, but that didn't mean it wouldn't happen. There was nothing to explore -it had only taken three days of effort to determine that the space contained nothing except her, the device's broken remains, and the remains of various fish. They weren't rotting. She'd tried eating one, but it had tasted like nothing and seemed to provide no nutritional benefit.
Nothing to do, unable to kill herself -she'd tried suffocating herself, but that damn reflex wouldn't let her hold her breath for long enough and nothing in the space had sufficed to block off her lungs- her fate was to go mad over an eternity.
She couldn't quite tell herself she didn't deserve this personal Hell.
She returned to looking for a escape from this damnable cage, ignoring that she'd run out of possible ideas a month ago.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wonderful job Piggot.
You'll forgive me for not buying a word of your argument.
Almost as if you punched her and were an all around cast iron bitch or something.
Good. Deal with it.
Oh, you do. Believe me on that account.
- Location
- United States
It's okay everyone! I mean, its Worm. What is the worst thing that can happen?
Fitting that the Kryptonian expy gets thrown into a Phantom Zone equivalent.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
I'm not. Not particularly happy either, since this keeps her corpse from being puppeted as a meat shield, or dissected with the aid of the Siberian, Bakuda, or Flechette for the benefit of all mankind, but eh.
- Location
- US
Wow, those reactions. Solitary confinement for an extended period is a form of torture, (especially for as long as it's implied it will be happening to Alexandria). Regardless of what she's done, she had good intentions and has done what she thought was best, even if it was hard for her.
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consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
What, you thought the resurgence of fucking Nazis was somehow an accident?
If you aren't willing to be sacrificed for the greater good, don't sacrifice people for the greater good. Or at the very least don't work with people just as willing to sacrifice you as you are willing to sacrifice others.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...given real world politics in some cases sadly, it honestly hadn't occured to me. But seriously, freaking Cauldron. They're a good chunk of why I'm not really into Worm, the actual canon story. (Worm is one of those fandoms where I find the fanfic more interesting than the original, and I can kind of get over my issues with canon when the annoying bits are used in fanfic because well, they didn't come up with them, if it isn't too egregious.)
EDIT: It wouldn't bother me as much with Cauldron if their ends-justify-the-means morally terrible plan actually impressed me in the end with what it was.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
She appears to have been caught in a modified
one of
these jerks explosion/effect
as affected by interacting with a Bakuda Bomb.
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- Location
- US
It's also that some punishments are just so horrible that doing them to the person who did them to others doesn't make you even, it just makes the total amount of misery in the world greater. ( not to mention killing someone is not nearly as bad as trapping them alone forever/ years/decades).
On another note, I thought the nazis still existing was because of normal politics. If they had been able to eliminate that kind of thing fully everywhere even with powers, that would have been shocking.
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