Arguably the best Assassin in the game all the way until Kama decided to finally show up. Arguments can be made for Gramps, yes, but for a long ass time the go-to when you absolutely needed to kill anything anything female in the game was Jackie.
Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]
- Thread starter James D. Fawkes
- Start date
- Crossover
Nitramy
Love! Snow! Really Magic
- Location
- Home of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage
Oh man. Kama was already powerful on her own, but her recent strengthen quest just turned her into "NOW WITNESS THE POWER OF THIS FULLY ARMED AND OPERATIONAL BATTLE NUGGET."
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
In a game that has been described as being a waifu simulator, turns out the character designed to murder waifus is pretty good.
Chapter CLXXIII: Parahumans 101
New
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, Peter Parker, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CLXXIII: Parahumans 101
By unanimous agreement, it was decided that we could not simply drop all of this news on everyone immediately — a small mercy, that I wasn't going to be forced to dig up the past I'd thought dead and buried on such short notice. It still took another hour of discussion before we settled on when to do the briefing, how much time we could afford to take to prepare all of the relevant information for everyone.
A week. It felt both like an eternity and yet no time at all.
But we were already so far behind where we wanted to be, in terms of our timeline. After America, there were still going to be two more Singularities, and if we put off this one for too long, then we might not have enough time to find the last two, prepare for them, and resolve them, especially if the time differential wasn't on our side.
Marie was already allotting two weeks for final preparations for Rayshifting, after the briefing, and if we included that week of getting the briefing ready, then that was going to put our deployment at the end of March. A week didn't feel like enough time, but it was all we could afford to lose.
I spent a good portion of that week in Marie's office with her. Romani and Da Vinci joined us occasionally, but they had responsibilities that they had to see to, and with Marie busy with me while we pieced together what we should and shouldn't say, a lot of her responsibilities had no one else to fall to but Romani.
Someone had to keep the facility running smoothly. If it couldn't be Marie, then she had to delegate it to the only people left who had the experience and the authority in the organization to do so.
The twins and Mash were almost certainly suspicious of my spending so much time with Marie like this, and every day when I saw them at breakfast, their curiosity got the better of them. Every time, I had to tell them the same thing:
"It's to do with the next Singularity. You'll find out what's going on in a few days."
It wasn't a satisfying answer, and I could see that it wasn't a satisfying answer, just by the expressions on their faces, but it wasn't like I could just drop everything on them in the middle of the cafeteria either. It wasn't the time or the place for topics that dense and that heavy.
Even the Servants started to notice. Arash almost certainly had some idea of exactly what was going on, but I had cut my lessons with Aífe back to every other day instead of every day, done the same with Mash's swimming lessons, and was leaving Jackie with Arash for hours at a time, and she definitely wasn't happy about that.
The only thing I could tell her was, "Mommy is helping prepare for the next Singularity, Jackie. It's not for forever, I promise."
She made me pinky swear, and I had no idea where she had even picked that up, but she snuggled up even more at bedtime as though she was making up for the lost time during the day. I let it pass for no other reason than because it was the only way I could apologize to her.
I didn't doubt that the technicians were starting to catch on, too. Sylvia and I regularly used the simulator together to enjoy the Roman baths in the only way we could without actually Rayshifting — seeing as Da Vinci still hadn't finished Nero's request amidst all of the other things pulling at her attention — and my absence had almost certainly been noticed.
And while Sylvia was a magus and knew how to keep secrets, she was also a woman who hadn't been able to talk to anyone else aside from her coworkers for over six months. It was almost a guarantee that the others knew by now, too.
There wasn't anything to be done about it. They were all going to find out soon enough, and all I could do was bear the stares and the curiosity and the suspicions in the meantime.
Only once did I question the entire thing.
"Are we sure about this?" I asked Marie one day midway through the week. We were in her office at the time, papers strewn all about as we scribbled notes about relevant details and what didn't need to be said. Marie's hair had been messy and unkempt from the number of times she had scrubbed at her scalp, frustrated, to the point her characteristic braid had come undone on the one side.
I knew it was a stupid question before it had even finished leaving my lips.
Dark bags hung like blackish crescents under her eyes when she turned to look at me, skin paler than usual and as white as the paper we were writing on. Her bottom lip was swollen from how much she had been chewing on it, and the thumbnail on her left thumb was a worn, jagged mess streaked with dried saliva.
She only told me what I already knew. "We can't send the others in unprepared. They have no idea what's waiting for them or what to expect from Earth Bet, and even if that didn't get them hurt or killed, they would find out everything eventually anyway."
And it was that simple. Yes, we could keep hiding it and try to smother the information, but what would be the point? The instant they saw their first cape fight, the jig would be up, and I would be forced to tell them at least something about what was going on. Worse, we didn't know when in 2011 we were going to be Rayshifting into, which meant it was entirely possible we could find ourselves caught up in the middle of the Nine's attack on Brockton Bay.
Nothing could prepare you for what that looked like and what they were like, but I could at least warn them not to trust Bonesaw or Crawler and not to listen to Jack fucking Slash.
So if they were going to find out anyway, if I was going to be forced to explain all of this one way or another, better to do it now, when we were getting ready and had the time and space to be comprehensive, instead of hoping it didn't bite us in the ass later when we didn't have a choice and were scrambling to catch everyone up.
I left it at that and went back to work, because I thought it was settled. Marie apparently didn't.
"When this is all over," she said, unprompted, "I'm going to call in a favor from Lord Zelretch. I don't care what it takes or what he asks for. When the Association comes to investigate, I will make sure that you can retire to whichever parallel world you want."
And where will that leave you? I didn't ask. Or the twins, or any of the technicians who would very soon know things that the Association would be very interested in learning? She should know better than to think I was just going to up and abandon everyone so I could save my own skin. I couldn't be the person who stood by and let an atrocity be committed simply because it was inconvenient for me to risk myself to stop it. Never, not ever again.
I didn't have anything more than vague ideas yet, but there were plenty of options in my arsenal to bring to bear against anyone who thought they were going to do whatever they wanted with us all.
Over the course of that week, we started off with just about everything and every detail we could think of, both about Earth Bet and my life, and we slowly pared it all down to the important stuff, the stuff that the team needed to know going in. A lot of the parts of my life were, thankfully, left by the wayside. No one needed to know about my history, about how my Trigger Event occurred, they just needed to know that Trigger Events existed and how they worked, how important deescalation was when someone was freaking out and probably not in full control of powers they just got.
Some part of me also worried about what it would mean for the twins to be on Earth Bet. If a passenger started paying attention to them and thought they might make good hosts. It was enough that I would have to worry about myself when this was all over, I didn't want them to be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives, too, expecting some pitiless mage with more curiosity than morals to snatch them up in broad daylight.
My Skitter phase was unfortunately relevant details. If we landed in Brockton in the aftermath of Leviathan, then the fact we might run into my younger self was very relevant and very important, because she was much less likely to be measured than I was, caught up as she was in both dragging her city back from the brink and earning enough trust from Coil to free Dinah.
If we were lucky… If we were lucky, then we would find Brockton in the calmer period, after the Nine had left and after I had turned myself in to the PRT, when things had settled down enough that there wouldn't be any real chance of having to deal with the major players or facing down me at my worst.
I wasn't betting on us being lucky.
The more we carved out of the briefing plans, however, the more that seemed to be left. Did we need this? Yes. Then we had to explain this, and this, and then that, too, just to make sure. Would that be important? Probably, so we needed to make sure that we included some context about how that would impact things and what it might mean during our deployment.
In the end, we had enough to go over that I wasn't sure we would be able to cover it all in a single session, and frankly, I'd had to root through history lessons that I wasn't sure I even remembered properly anymore. I couldn't even be sure exactly how much it would all be relevant, because we still had no idea what the fluctuations in the readings meant and how they might manifest in the Singularity.
We could even be looking at something completely ridiculous. Like all of the citizens of modern Brockton Bay stuck in the middle of whatever might have been in the city's place in 1783, in which case there was no telling how things would have settled by the time we deployed.
It wasn't an excuse to leave anything out. No — the twins and Mash, all our Servants, even the technicians who would be watching the situation unfold from here in Chaldea, they were all going to get as complete a picture as we could give them, and what that would mean for the aftermath of this crisis, we were going to have to deal with that later.
The day of the briefing, I skipped my morning workout and went straight to breakfast instead. Marie, predictably, was already in the cafeteria and eating slowly, although she looked like she was having trouble keeping it down. I couldn't blame her. A bundle of nerves sat uncomfortably in my own belly, twitching and squirming like a colony of earthworms.
Emiya, perhaps sensing my mood, dished me up my breakfast silently. The smile he usually gave me was nowhere to be seen — he stared instead directly at me, as though he could read my thoughts if he looked straight at my forehead. I had never been so self-conscious about the almost invisible scars still left from what Contessa had done to me at the end of it all.
Whether he saw them or not, I had no idea. Whether he'd ever questioned where they could have come from, I didn't know that either. The only person I could remember deliberately showing them to was Medea, in that church on Captain Morgan's Port Royal.
Marie didn't react at all when I sat down across from her at the table the twins and I usually used, not even when I mutely gave Jackie her own tray and portion. Even Jackie, just then, seemed to have some idea of the weight that hung about our shoulders, glancing at us with childish concern.
I didn't know what she had already seen in her dreams, but she was going to learn more about my world soon enough.
"Are you ready?" I asked Marie lowly. She stopped eating, and her mouth drew into a tight line as her brow crinkled and the hand holding her fork slowly drooped back down to her plate. A glob of brown syrup dribbled and dripped, drawing a gossamer line back down to the puddle neatly set to one side.
"I have to be," she replied quietly, "don't I?" She closed her eyes for a brief moment, a sigh hissing out of her nostrils, and then they snapped back open and she narrowed them on me. "And shouldn't I be asking you that? It's not my life and my world whose history is going to be shared around like the latest Clock Tower gossip!"
She wasn't wrong. But, while I wasn't and had never been excited at the idea of baring so much of myself and my past to everyone in the facility, the need for secrecy had always been an artifact of Marie's world, of the magi, and that was largely the reason I'd kept it for so long to begin with. To protect both myself and the twins from the inevitable fallout of everyone knowing where I'd come from, because I had firsthand experience with someone who cared more about satisfying their own curiosity than the people they'd have to maim and kill to do so.
I didn't think that decision had ever been wrong. If I had the choice, I would hoard as many of my secrets as I could, just to keep the wolves at bay and eyes off of us all. The questions once this was all over were inevitable, but the fewer questions to be asked, the better off everyone here would be. It just wasn't really my decision anymore.
"There's nothing I can do about it," I said. "It's like you said, it's all going to come out one way or the other, so we might as well do it now instead of scrambling to bring everyone up to date after something happens inside the Singularity."
The answer didn't make her happy, and it didn't make me happy either, but that was the truth of the matter, and neither of us could fight it. This was the hand Solomon had dealt us, and no matter how much it galled us, we had to play it. This was his game.
And it was like I'd thought a long time ago, a lifetime ago, now: I hated that trope in fiction, of teams breaking up and people fighting each other over simple misunderstandings because no one communicated and too many people kept secrets they didn't need to keep. If Solomon expected us to tear each other apart over my secrets, then just as a matter of giving him the middle finger, I would have spilled it all. Because fuck Solomon.
We finished breakfast quietly. Neither of us had much else to say, and if I knew Marie as well as I thought I did, she was stewing in worries about the briefing. Not that I was much better, because I had my own concerns, too. About everyone's reactions. About how it might change team dynamics. About whether or not Rika could keep her mouth shut about it in the future.
That last one might not have been entirely fair or accurate.
After breakfast, Marie and I left the cafeteria long before the twins or Mash showed up and headed together to the orientation room, where the briefing was going to take place, so that we could get everything we needed prepared. Jackie was allowed to accompany us and stay in the room, as long as she was quiet and didn't interrupt us while we worked.
The minutes flew by. The hour and a half that had been allotted for us to get everything ready vanished like water in a desert, and it felt like no time at all before we were waiting for everyone to show up so that we could begin.
Perhaps predictably, most of the Servants showed up first. They didn't need sleep, they didn't really get tired, and they didn't need to eat, shower, or relieve themselves, so it was only natural that most of them could show up on time or even early. Shakespeare, perhaps somewhat worryingly, was the first to arrive, in fact, and he found a seat in the back, parked himself there, and settled in, watching with wide-eyed expectation and an air of eagerness.
Uneasiness squirmed in my belly. He wasn't contracted to me, so there was no way he'd experienced the dream cycle and seen my past that way, but he gave me the uncomfortable sense that he knew more than he'd ever let on. The how concerned me as much as the possibility itself did, because the only times Marie and I had ever shared anything about my past or my world had all been in secure places that he shouldn't have been able to access, not without alerting someone that he was there.
After Shakespeare, the others began to trickle in. Aífe, Hippolyta, Arash, Siegfried, Bradamante, Mordred, Emiya, El-Melloi II, Jeanne Alter, and then Nero appeared last, accompanied by the twins and Mash. They all found seats, because there were plenty to go around, with Nero, Mash, and the twins clustered together almost as though they meant to draw strength from one another for what came next.
But it didn't end there, because several technicians — all the ones who could be spared, if only because they weren't on duty just then — showed up, too, to the apparent surprise of Rika, Ritsuka, and Mash, who all craned their necks to watch the unexpected arrivals pick their way through the room to find a spot they were comfortable with.
Once everyone who was supposed to be there had walked through the door and sat down, Marie stepped forward and cleared her throat, and immediately, the entire room fell silent and turned to face her, attentive. A stray thought wondered if Ritsuka and Rika were remembering that fateful day at the beginning of all of this, when they had been thrown out of the orientation for falling asleep on her, and if they were being especially alert because of it.
"All of you should have at least some idea of why you're here," Marie began in a strong, clear voice. She swept her gaze across the room. "For the sake of clarity, however, let me reiterate it: recent developments have given us a better look at the next Singularity, and therefore a clearer image of what to expect from it. Although there is much we still don't know about what might be waiting on the ground — and won't know for certain until the Masters have Rayshifted into the Singularity and given us the ability to look closer — given what we do know and what information we do have, there are certain things that are almost sure to appear."
Capes, I heard, even though no one else did.
"To that end," she continued, "we'll be conducting this briefing to bring everyone up to date about what we know so far and what to expect going forward. Yes, that includes the technical staff, because this is information they will absolutely need to know in order to monitor the situation as it develops. Those who couldn't be here for this briefing will be briefed separately, so no one is being left out."
She took a deep, bracing breath. "Furthermore… It appears we finally understand to at least some degree exactly what the King of Mages meant when he said that Taylor Hebert, the leader of our team of Masters, would return home and have a chance to lay her demons to rest."
Murmurs broke out, but Ritsuka's hand rose, and Marie looked towards him sharply. "Yes?"
The murmurs quieted. "Are Doctor Roman and Da Vinci part of the group that will hear about this later?" he asked.
"They've already been briefed," Marie answered bluntly. "This is all information they have already received, so they're currently handling their normal responsibilities." She glanced around the room. "Any more questions, or can we actually get started?"
No one else dared to raise a hand or speak out. Marie nodded, and then she turned to the enormous windows behind her. With the click of a remote, the clear glass turned into an absolutely gigantic screen, and depicted on it was the North American continent in all its glory. As Da Vinci had shown us before, a blazing orange point sat on the northeastern coast, and a hazy film covered the rest of the country, from east coast to west coast, along with a decent chunk of Canada.
Up in the left hand corner, "2011 AD" glared, bright and clear.
"This is the American Singularity," Marie announced. "As you can see, the Singularity itself covers the entirety of the continental United States, with the exception of Alaska, as well as a large portion of southern Canada. This is the most stable reading of the Singularity we've been able to manage with the sensors. As you can see, the Singularity occurs in 2011 AD. This, however…"
She pressed another button on the remote, and for a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, however, the image began to flicker. The Singularity itself remained the same, but the date in the upper left corner changed to 1783 AD and back again, and every time it did, the bright, orange dot on the northeastern coast moved just the slightest.
Marie looked back at the assembled group. "This is the Singularity over the course of the last forty-eight hours. As you can see, there were fluctuations at apparently random intervals, wherein the sensors read the era of the Singularity as 1783 AD, the year the American war for independence concluded."
"What the shit?" Mordred said loudly. "The fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"At this time," Marie began, pitching her voice to drown out anyone else, "we don't know what is causing these fluctuations or what they mean. Without the Masters inside the Singularity to act as points of reference, higher resolution scans aren't possible." She lanced Mordred with a short glare. "As someone should have explained to you already!"
Mordred grunted, but Aífe, who was sitting behind her and Jeanne Alter with both of them in reach, laid a heavy hand atop her head before she could mouth off. Mordred's expression contorted with frustration, and then she scoffed quietly and let it drop.
Ritsuka raised his hand again, and a flash of annoyance crossed Marie's face, but she still looked at him and asked, "Yes?"
What now, she didn't say, but I was sure most of the room still heard it.
"Is this going to change anything about how we handle the next Singularity?" was his question. "Like who is deployed and where?"
Marie's lips drew tight. "We're still discussing our options for how to approach the issue, but no. We have no intention of splitting the team up or sending you in through separate Rayshifts. Everyone who is being deployed will be deployed at the same time during the same Rayshift."
It was a smart question, I thought. Rayshifting separately, so that one team wound up near the echo to investigate that and one team wound up in Brockton Bay, that wasn't a completely terrible idea, if you knew nothing else about the situation. It was just that splitting us up for this one in particular was the worst possible idea I could think of.
"Anything else?" asked Marie.
Mash's hand rose. "Director, what event in 2011 do we think the King of Mages might be attempting to overturn?"
"It's not like anything all that interesting happened in America that year," El-Melloi II added, just a little too loudly to avoid notice.
Marie's brow twitched, but… "We don't know," she had to admit, but she made it sound less like an admission of ignorance and more like a simple, unavoidable fact. "None of it makes any sense with what the King of Mages told us at the end of the last Singularity, so none of the theories Da Vinci, Romani, Taylor, and I came up with fit. It may even have something to do with the fluctuations, but that isn't something we can say with any confidence either."
She turned back to the gigantic screen and pressed more buttons on her remote. First, the image froze on the 2011 map, and then it zoomed in to the bright, glowing dot. Marie looked back at the assembled group and gestured to the dot with her off hand.
"We're not sure how or why," she went on, "but this point is important to the Singularity. Whether it's the point where the divergence occurred or the point where the Grail was located at the moment of the Singularity's formation, we don't know. Da Vinci wants the team to investigate to see if we can narrow it down."
She pressed another button, and what looked like a satellite image of the area was overlaid atop the original map.
"A forest?" Jeanne Alter muttered, not realizing how easily her voice carried in the room. "Are we going to be literally barking up the fucking trees now?"
Marie took a bracing breath and didn't acknowledge her at all, which may have been Jeanne Alter's preference, because her cheeks had gained a slightly red tint. "This is the map of this area according to proper history as we know it, and that is exactly why it's relevant to this briefing. We have reason to believe that this Singularity is based upon an alternate timeline, one still considered within the scope of proper history, where this area is host instead to a coastal city called Brockton Bay."
She clicked one more button, and even though I knew it was coming, a funny little jolt shot through my stomach when that forest and beach were replaced by a sprawling city. Even though the image was far too zoomed out to see individual buildings, I knew it well enough that I could have pointed out all of the landmarks by memory. The docks, the Boat Graveyard, the PRT HQ, the rig that had been repurposed into the Protectorate ENE's HQ, even the singular pixel that should have denoted my house.
Sylvia, ironically, was the first person to pick up on the implication, and she shot out of her seat. "H-hold on a second, Director Animusphere! You can't possibly be suggesting…!"
"I am," Marie answered calmly. "This timeline is referred to as Earth Bet, and has been observed and verified by Laplace. The briefing on all the information you will need regarding this timeline and this city, however, will be delivered by Chaldea's firsthand source, who was brought here after helping to avert the apocalyptic event known locally as Gold Morning."
Every eye in the room turned to me as Marie handed over the remote. "Taylor?"
I took a bracing breath of my own and accepted the remote. The weight settled in my hand like lead. "Thank you, Director."
Several voices suddenly rose, shouting questions and disbelieving statements that I couldn't make out. A number of the Servants, however, particularly Arash, Aífe, and Siegfried, did not seem at all surprised, and Shakespeare only watched with an ever widening grin, like he was feeding off of the drama.
Rika, loudly enough to be heard over the rest of the commotion, squealed, "Senpai's an isekai protagonist!"
It was Aífe who stood up from the group and brought her hands together with a sound like a thunderclap that echoed off the walls and seemed to vibrate the floor beneath our feet, and everyone winced and fell silent. I gave her a nod to show my appreciation.
"Thank you." My stomach squirmed as I turned to face the rest of the group, who were all wearing varying expressions of disbelief, surprise, suspicion, and betrayal. I soldiered past it and started. "Let me begin by talking about divergences, and how Earth Bet is different from history as the rest of you know it. There are several minor differences that I've noticed, such as the Protestant Reformation that doesn't seem to have occurred here, but the most important one occurred in May of 1982, the appearance of the first recorded parahuman, discovered floating above the Atlantic Ocean. He encountered a cruise liner, introducing himself only as Scion."
I half-expected someone to jump to their feet again, exclaiming about the 'god' I had been forced to talk about in the aftermath of the London fiasco, and only belatedly did I realize I had never actually named him back then. Instead, Ritsuka raised his hand and asked, "What's a parahuman?"
"That's also a part of the briefing," I acknowledged. "It's a term for those who develop special powers during a moment of crisis we called a Trigger Event. Someone facing life or death in a fight might develop superstrength, for example, and someone trapped in a fire might suddenly find himself a pyrokinetic. Someone running away from danger might develop superspeed or the ability to expand the space around her."
El-Melloi II lurched forward in his chair. "Hold on. You're saying this happens spontaneously?"
I chose my next words carefully, because we were still skirting around the issue of passengers. It was one of the rabbit holes Marie and I had agreed to avoid going down.
"As far as anyone knew at the time, yes. Only parahumans themselves knew that the cost for their sudden powers was having to experience the worst, most traumatic moment of their lives."
"One bad day," Ritsuka murmured, although it was so quiet that I wasn't sure I even heard him right. Rika's head swiveled towards him, eyes wide.
It was overshadowed by El-Melloi II leaping to his feet. "That's absolutely…!" And then something seemed to occur to him and he blanched, staggering so hard so quickly that he had to grab the back of the seat in front of him to stay standing. "The first parahuman, that god you helped to kill — they're one in the same, aren't they?"
I'd been hoping to avoid having to reveal that part, especially since it wouldn't be relevant to the Singularity itself, but… "Yes."
"Wait!" Rika squeaked. "I thought you said that mad-guy person only woke that god up two years ago?"
"Shut up, Rika!" El-Melloi II hissed at her, to her shock, and then pinned me with a glare. "That god, Scion, he's also the one responsible for the existence of all other parahumans, isn't he?"
El-Melloi II really was cleverer than I ever gave him credit for. "He is."
El-Melloi II's fingers curled tightly into the back of the seat he was clutching. The fabric squealed in protest. "And you," he said, and I could already tell the question he was about to ask, "you're a parahuman, too, aren't you? That's how your powers work. They're not magecraft, not normal magecraft at any rate. They're the fragments of that god's power, handed out like candy to gullible kids too desperate to say no."
It felt dangerous to admit it, especially to a Lord of the Clock Tower, but if we encountered my younger self and especially as the data started pouring in over the course of the Singularity, then the truth was unavoidable.
"That's right."
"Ha!" There was no mirth in it as El-Melloi II flopped back into his seat, pressing one hand to his forehead. "Of all the explanations there could have been…! Let me guess." The grin on his face looked almost deranged. "That madman who 'woke up' this god of yours and caused its rampage, he was one of these parahumans as well, wasn't he?"
"He was." There was no point in hiding that now. "On the surface, his power was the projection of bladed weapons along the path of the cut, but underneath that, the core was…transmission, is how I would put it. His power let him know what to say to other parahumans, how to manipulate them, how to manage them. It's how he knew exactly what to say to set Scion off."
"Scion isn't the point of this briefing," Marie interrupted sharply. Her voice contained a note of warning, aimed at El-Melloi II. "There was no trace of his presence inside the Singularity, so the exact circumstances of his existence and the events of his rampage aren't relevant."
Drop it, she said without saying.
"El-Melloi," I said, backing her up, "this briefing would be very different if Scion was something we had to worry about. If you want anything more than that, then we're already at the limits of what I know about him."
It wasn't even strictly a lie. He'd already guessed the broad strokes well enough that the only things left I could have told him were finer details, like what passengers were and the fact that Scion was some sort of alien superorganism. Those, however, might put me even more at risk than this much already would.
"That's how it is, huh?" El-Melloi II huffed out a sigh. "Heh. Whatever I might have been expecting, this certainly wasn't it."
"Senpai," said Ritsuka, "even if…Scion isn't there, the madman who made him rampage will be, won't he?"
So he'd caught that, had he?
"Yes," I answered. "Whether or not we'll encounter him at any point can't be said for sure, not when we don't know when in 2011 we'll find ourselves, but that brings me to the next topic: who we can expect to help us, who we should avoid, and who will almost certainly try to kill or subvert us."
A click of the remote, and the image on the window behind me changed to a chart. On the x-axis, a division between ally and enemy, and on the y-axis, hero and villain. Another click — Slaughterhouse Nine, sitting firmly in both enemy and villain categories.
"That madman, Jack Slash, runs one of the most dangerous groups in the continental United States on Earth Bet," I explained. "The Slaughterhouse Nine are a roving band of psychopaths who revel in torturing and killing. In the almost thirty years they've been active, they've depopulated entire towns and brought whole cities to their knees. I realize this might not mean much to the Servants here, so let me be clear: there was no higher purpose, no ideology, no reason more complicated than the simple fact that they enjoyed the act itself. Jack in particular enjoyed pulling people apart psychologically, like a kid pulling the wings off of flies just so he can see all of the ways they squirm and struggle."
Most of the Servants seemed only mildly concerned, with the exception of the noble types, like Siegfried and Bradamante, whose expressions were hard and stony. The twins and Mash, however, looked disturbed, although not entirely surprised. I guess they'd seen enough that this wasn't going to make them flinch.
It probably helped that the Avenger sitting near them had, in another life, depopulated entire cities, too, and we had accepted her into our ranks anyway.
"As of 2011, other members of the Nine included Bonesaw, who liked to turn people into 'art' pieces by doing things like flaying them alive and spreading their skin out to look like butterflies," I went on, "or stitching multiple people together to create a human hydra, as well as Crawler, whose power has mutated him into a monster the size of a minivan with acid spit and other adaptations to make him more lethal. Shatterbird has control over silicates, and her power can propagate after use to affect an entire city. The Nine often announced their presence by having her shatter every piece of glass in the city."
"For real?" Jeanne Alter asked. She even sounded a little envious. "Shit. That actually sounds kinda badass."
I pinned her with a stare. "In a world where a large number of our modern amenities contain silicon in some form or fashion, it's also exceptionally deadly. The reason you should care, Jeanne Alter, is because every single one of these people would gleefully kill us Masters, and they have a large enough toolkit that they might be able to do it, if you don't take them seriously."
"You don't think I couldn't just torch them and be done with it?" she challenged.
"I think that if you give him the chance, Jack Slash will open up Ritsuka's throat first," I told her bluntly, and even Mash flinched at that one. "Each and every single member of the Nine is bad enough and has committed enough atrocities to earn a Kill Order. That means that the US government put out a bounty on them, and anyone who kills a member of the Nine can claim it, no matter who they are or what they've done in the past. I will say it again: none of them would hesitate for a single second to try and kill us, and they have plenty of ways to try."
Jeanne Alter looked ready to argue more, but as she had with Mordred, Aífe set a heavy hand on Jeanne Alter's head and spoke over her, "You called them the Slaughterhouse Nine, so I'm assuming there are more members than just those four."
I nodded. "Yes. There's also Mannequin, the Siberian, and Burnscar, and depending upon when we arrive, Cherish and Hatchet Face, as well…"
I detailed the rest of the Nine and the things I could remember about them, going over their powers as completely as I could. I gave everyone descriptions, too, so they knew exactly who to look out for and what they were looking at if we ever encountered the Nine. The twins were appropriately horrified when I finally told them what Bonesaw looked like.
"Twelve?" Rika demanded, her voice an octave higher than normal. "There was a bounty out to kill a twelve-year-old?"
"A twelve-year-old who makes Doctor Mengele look like a saint," I reminded her. "One who will hum and sing to herself as she cuts you and your brother in half and sews you two together so that you never have to ever be separated again. Without anesthesia."
That shut her up quickly. She even looked faintly green at the idea, matched by her brother's pale face and nauseous expression.
"Fortunately," I said, "if we arrive before or after June, then our odds of actually meeting Jack and the Nine are much, much lower. After June would be better for us. The Nine went into hibernation for two years after that."
I clicked the remote again. Next to the Slaughterhouse Nine, another name appeared, The Fallen.
"The Fallen are a kind of doomsday religious cult. They worship a trio of monsters that we called Endbringers, and style themselves after one or the other based upon which sect they belong to…"
Mostly, my warnings about the Fallen had to do with being wary of kidnapping attempts, because I'd heard of a number of Wards who had been snatched up and brainwashed by the Fallen, forced into their 'families' as breeding stock. I…wasn't sure how much they would have to worry about that, if only because they weren't actually capes and the Fallen might lose interest in them specifically once they realized the mystic codes were basically tinkertech. It was something they needed to be on guard for regardless, just in case.
But mentioning the Endbringers even so obliquely meant that I had to cover them, too, and there had to come a point where the facts that I took for granted on Earth Bet started to sound outlandish to some of the people there.
It was Sylvia who leapt to her feet, this time, as I was in the middle of detailing the powers of the Endbringers and how unstoppable they were. "Hold on! These don't sound like…like more of these parahumans, they sound like Phantasmals! No — Leviathan? Simurgh? Behemoth? Those…those are the names of Divine Beasts! In the modern world! They should be on the Reverse Side!"
Neither of the twins asked about the Reverse Side, which I suppose meant that their lessons with El-Melloi II had gotten pretty far. But the other handful of magi among the technicians seemed to be equally disturbed and equally incredulous.
I tried not to think about the eager look on some of the Servants' faces. Aífe in particular looked like she was daydreaming about going up against Behemoth or Leviathan and seeing exactly how invincible they really were.
"They're not Divine Beasts," I said, "although you'd be forgiven for thinking they were. I couldn't tell you why they were created the way they were, but the reason we gave them the names that we did was because they looked like monsters out of mythology."
Something like terror crept into Sylvia's face, and she tilted her head down, and lowly, asked, "Created?"
My lips drew into a thin line, and for a moment, I debated the wisdom of it, and then I clicked the remote. On the chart, several names filled in. Under Villain and Ally, Undersiders was one, as well as Accord, although he was frankly more tentative than I would have preferred, and Faultline, even though she was even more tentative than Accord. Coil went under Villain and Enemy, along with Empire Eighty-Eight, The Teeth, and Azn Bad Boys.
Then, the Protectorate, Dragon, and The Guild popped up under Hero and Ally, with the Triumvirate singled out from the rest. I saw Siegfried stir at the name 'Dragon,' but even though his curiosity must have been burning a hole in his gut, he held it in without interrupting.
"Near the beginning of the appearance of parahumans, there was a small group that called themselves the Protectorate," I began. "They consisted of four members: Legend, whose power involved shooting lasers with esoteric and exotic effects, Alexandria, the 'flying brick' for whom all later fliers with superstrength got labeled an 'Alexandria package,' Hero, who could create things like jetpacks and hoverboards and laser pistols, and Eidolon, whose power was to pull on other powers from a pool. They were four of the strongest parahumans to ever live, and until the Siberian literally tore Hero in half, everyone thought they were invincible."
I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. "During Gold Morning, Eidolon pressured Scion in a way no other parahuman could, so Scion used a form of Clairvoyance to see how he could defeat Eidolon with the least amount of effort. He used only four words: you needed worthy opponents."
It took a moment for the implication to sink in, for her to draw all of the right conclusions from what I'd said, what I hadn't said, and the context of the whole conversation. Why else bring it up when talking about the Endbringers if it wasn't relevant to the topic? Because it was relevant. It was connected.
That was when the surprise and the horror kicked in.
"He created them?" she said in a small voice. "He — a human had the power to create three monsters on the level of Divine Beasts?"
"Whether he created them or just awoke them is something I've never been clear on," was the answer I gave her. "Either way, he was responsible for their existence, somehow or another. A…friend of mine had a theory, that maybe they were originally a kind of weapon Scion would use to keep us in line, and Eidolon probably woke them up accidentally."
El-Melloi II chuckled lowly. "Why not? A god with a handful of pet Divine Beasts. The only thing strange about that is the fact it took place in the modern day."
I didn't have an answer for that. The truth would mean telling them about the passengers and the Entities to which they belonged, and we weren't going to be doing that.
Aífe leaned forward in her chair. "Should we expect to come to blows with any of these Endbringers of yours?"
To that, I could only tell her, "I can't say for sure. Their normal habit is to attack once every three months or so, but there's no way to know until we get in there how the Singularity might have affected them. If we do encounter them…"
It wasn't the worst case scenario, but it was up there.
"…we'll call in as many reinforcements as we can to distract them while us Masters retreat to safety as quickly as possible."
Aífe clicked her tongue and sat back, not entirely satisfied.
"B-but that means…!" Mash gasped. "Miss Taylor! You said they destroy entire cities at a time!"
"And a good day when one of them attacks is one in four of the defenders dead," I replied. "A bad day sees upwards of fifty percent casualties. We can send in our Servants to help, Mash, but the first priority in that situation is making sure the Masters survive. The Singularity can be fixed, the people who die saved by correcting it, but if one of us dies, we can't be brought back."
This didn't seem to sit right with Mash either, but she settled down uneasily. Ritsuka set a comforting hand on her arm, as though to let her know that he felt the same way. When he spoke up, however, his question was entirely different, "Senpai, those names on that chart, some of them look like gang names, so I can understand why we wouldn't expect them to help, but what about the others in the 'hero' column?"
Oh, good, an easier question. "The Triumvirate is the name given to the original members of the Protectorate after Hero was killed, and the Protectorate became the name of the government-backed hero organization. They handled villains and villainous gangs in cities where parahumans were more prominent. We can expect they'll help us to at least some degree or another, even if only to house us and transport us across the country as necessary."
That…might have been a little bit of a white lie. I wasn't sure how much of an in I had with the Protectorate or the PRT, and if we showed up while my younger self was in the height of her villain era, the answer might wind up being none at all. At the very least, however, I knew enough of the big names personally enough to get my foot in the door, and that might be enough to get us at least an audience.
"Likewise, the Guild and Dragon are technically speaking connected, since Dragon is a major member of the Guild. Different from the PRT, the Guild more often takes on larger, more serious threats instead of focusing on single cities or territories. They're also not officially government backed, which means they have a little more leeway in how they handle things, even if Dragon is also a government contractor and an honorary member of the Protectorate."
Finally, Siegfried's curiosity got the better of him. "And what is this Dragon you speak of, Master?"
"The world's preeminent Tinker." And then, realizing they wouldn't know the term, I added, "Ah, that is, someone whose powers specialize in the creation of exotic technology. The hallmark of what's called tinkertech is that it's usually impossible to replicate with modern technology, and Dragon is considered the world's greatest Tinker because her power is to replicate tinkertech."
"Something like that wonderful knife of yours, perhaps?" Shakespeare asked knowingly. His grin threatened to split his face.
If he was expecting me to deny it, I disappointed him. "It was a collaboration between her and a fellow Tinker who she was friends with, Defiant. He specialized in miniaturization and made the nanothorns, and she helped another Tinker named Masamune create a limited batch of them. I received one."
"And these…Undersiders?" said Bradamante, her distaste clear in her voice. "Accord? Faultline? You have them listed as both villains and allies, Master."
"Faultline is a mercenary," I told her bluntly. "She'll go wherever the coin is, and I have a few answers she's been looking for. Accord is…prickly, but he can be convinced to work for the betterment of mankind. He came up with a solution to world hunger, and then quit when the government refused to even attempt it. The Undersiders…"
God, how could I even explain that one? There was so much history, so much bundled up with all of that, so much that was far too tangled to explain properly here and now. How could I even begin to explain everything we'd done together and why?
"They'll depend," I settled on. "If we show up too early, then they won't be able to help us. If we show up past June, however…" It…wasn't a guarantee, but, "Then we can reach enough of an understanding with them to get at least some assistance while we're in Brockton Bay."
Bradamante didn't…seem exactly happy with that, but she accepted it with a stiff nod. She'd spent enough time here with the likes of Jeanne Alter, Sam Bellamy, and Mordred to understand by now that you accepted help wherever it came from, as long as it was honest.
"Wait," said Rika, and she almost jumped out of her seat, "wait, wait, wait! Defiant, Accord, Faultline? Eidolon, Hero, Legend? People getting superpowers from one bad day? Gangs of villains running around, terrorizing cities, while a league of heroes set out to stop them from robbing banks and pushing old ladies into traffic? A costume that looks like it came off the cover of a DC comic book? Senpai…you were a superhero!"
It was a lot more complicated than that, but, "Yes. Yes, I was."
There was no pride, no bragging, just simple fact. Yes, at one point, I was a superhero, however roundabout the route to it wound up being.
"Holy shit," said Jeanne Alter, stunned. "For real?"
"For real."
"Oh my god!" Rika squealed. "Senpai was a superhero!"
Right then, El-Melloi II looked like he regretted ever coming back with us.
Next — Chapter CLXXIV: No Capes
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way...
Chapter CLXXIII: Parahumans 101
By unanimous agreement, it was decided that we could not simply drop all of this news on everyone immediately — a small mercy, that I wasn't going to be forced to dig up the past I'd thought dead and buried on such short notice. It still took another hour of discussion before we settled on when to do the briefing, how much time we could afford to take to prepare all of the relevant information for everyone.
A week. It felt both like an eternity and yet no time at all.
But we were already so far behind where we wanted to be, in terms of our timeline. After America, there were still going to be two more Singularities, and if we put off this one for too long, then we might not have enough time to find the last two, prepare for them, and resolve them, especially if the time differential wasn't on our side.
Marie was already allotting two weeks for final preparations for Rayshifting, after the briefing, and if we included that week of getting the briefing ready, then that was going to put our deployment at the end of March. A week didn't feel like enough time, but it was all we could afford to lose.
I spent a good portion of that week in Marie's office with her. Romani and Da Vinci joined us occasionally, but they had responsibilities that they had to see to, and with Marie busy with me while we pieced together what we should and shouldn't say, a lot of her responsibilities had no one else to fall to but Romani.
Someone had to keep the facility running smoothly. If it couldn't be Marie, then she had to delegate it to the only people left who had the experience and the authority in the organization to do so.
The twins and Mash were almost certainly suspicious of my spending so much time with Marie like this, and every day when I saw them at breakfast, their curiosity got the better of them. Every time, I had to tell them the same thing:
"It's to do with the next Singularity. You'll find out what's going on in a few days."
It wasn't a satisfying answer, and I could see that it wasn't a satisfying answer, just by the expressions on their faces, but it wasn't like I could just drop everything on them in the middle of the cafeteria either. It wasn't the time or the place for topics that dense and that heavy.
Even the Servants started to notice. Arash almost certainly had some idea of exactly what was going on, but I had cut my lessons with Aífe back to every other day instead of every day, done the same with Mash's swimming lessons, and was leaving Jackie with Arash for hours at a time, and she definitely wasn't happy about that.
The only thing I could tell her was, "Mommy is helping prepare for the next Singularity, Jackie. It's not for forever, I promise."
She made me pinky swear, and I had no idea where she had even picked that up, but she snuggled up even more at bedtime as though she was making up for the lost time during the day. I let it pass for no other reason than because it was the only way I could apologize to her.
I didn't doubt that the technicians were starting to catch on, too. Sylvia and I regularly used the simulator together to enjoy the Roman baths in the only way we could without actually Rayshifting — seeing as Da Vinci still hadn't finished Nero's request amidst all of the other things pulling at her attention — and my absence had almost certainly been noticed.
And while Sylvia was a magus and knew how to keep secrets, she was also a woman who hadn't been able to talk to anyone else aside from her coworkers for over six months. It was almost a guarantee that the others knew by now, too.
There wasn't anything to be done about it. They were all going to find out soon enough, and all I could do was bear the stares and the curiosity and the suspicions in the meantime.
Only once did I question the entire thing.
"Are we sure about this?" I asked Marie one day midway through the week. We were in her office at the time, papers strewn all about as we scribbled notes about relevant details and what didn't need to be said. Marie's hair had been messy and unkempt from the number of times she had scrubbed at her scalp, frustrated, to the point her characteristic braid had come undone on the one side.
I knew it was a stupid question before it had even finished leaving my lips.
Dark bags hung like blackish crescents under her eyes when she turned to look at me, skin paler than usual and as white as the paper we were writing on. Her bottom lip was swollen from how much she had been chewing on it, and the thumbnail on her left thumb was a worn, jagged mess streaked with dried saliva.
She only told me what I already knew. "We can't send the others in unprepared. They have no idea what's waiting for them or what to expect from Earth Bet, and even if that didn't get them hurt or killed, they would find out everything eventually anyway."
And it was that simple. Yes, we could keep hiding it and try to smother the information, but what would be the point? The instant they saw their first cape fight, the jig would be up, and I would be forced to tell them at least something about what was going on. Worse, we didn't know when in 2011 we were going to be Rayshifting into, which meant it was entirely possible we could find ourselves caught up in the middle of the Nine's attack on Brockton Bay.
Nothing could prepare you for what that looked like and what they were like, but I could at least warn them not to trust Bonesaw or Crawler and not to listen to Jack fucking Slash.
So if they were going to find out anyway, if I was going to be forced to explain all of this one way or another, better to do it now, when we were getting ready and had the time and space to be comprehensive, instead of hoping it didn't bite us in the ass later when we didn't have a choice and were scrambling to catch everyone up.
I left it at that and went back to work, because I thought it was settled. Marie apparently didn't.
"When this is all over," she said, unprompted, "I'm going to call in a favor from Lord Zelretch. I don't care what it takes or what he asks for. When the Association comes to investigate, I will make sure that you can retire to whichever parallel world you want."
And where will that leave you? I didn't ask. Or the twins, or any of the technicians who would very soon know things that the Association would be very interested in learning? She should know better than to think I was just going to up and abandon everyone so I could save my own skin. I couldn't be the person who stood by and let an atrocity be committed simply because it was inconvenient for me to risk myself to stop it. Never, not ever again.
I didn't have anything more than vague ideas yet, but there were plenty of options in my arsenal to bring to bear against anyone who thought they were going to do whatever they wanted with us all.
Over the course of that week, we started off with just about everything and every detail we could think of, both about Earth Bet and my life, and we slowly pared it all down to the important stuff, the stuff that the team needed to know going in. A lot of the parts of my life were, thankfully, left by the wayside. No one needed to know about my history, about how my Trigger Event occurred, they just needed to know that Trigger Events existed and how they worked, how important deescalation was when someone was freaking out and probably not in full control of powers they just got.
Some part of me also worried about what it would mean for the twins to be on Earth Bet. If a passenger started paying attention to them and thought they might make good hosts. It was enough that I would have to worry about myself when this was all over, I didn't want them to be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives, too, expecting some pitiless mage with more curiosity than morals to snatch them up in broad daylight.
My Skitter phase was unfortunately relevant details. If we landed in Brockton in the aftermath of Leviathan, then the fact we might run into my younger self was very relevant and very important, because she was much less likely to be measured than I was, caught up as she was in both dragging her city back from the brink and earning enough trust from Coil to free Dinah.
If we were lucky… If we were lucky, then we would find Brockton in the calmer period, after the Nine had left and after I had turned myself in to the PRT, when things had settled down enough that there wouldn't be any real chance of having to deal with the major players or facing down me at my worst.
I wasn't betting on us being lucky.
The more we carved out of the briefing plans, however, the more that seemed to be left. Did we need this? Yes. Then we had to explain this, and this, and then that, too, just to make sure. Would that be important? Probably, so we needed to make sure that we included some context about how that would impact things and what it might mean during our deployment.
In the end, we had enough to go over that I wasn't sure we would be able to cover it all in a single session, and frankly, I'd had to root through history lessons that I wasn't sure I even remembered properly anymore. I couldn't even be sure exactly how much it would all be relevant, because we still had no idea what the fluctuations in the readings meant and how they might manifest in the Singularity.
We could even be looking at something completely ridiculous. Like all of the citizens of modern Brockton Bay stuck in the middle of whatever might have been in the city's place in 1783, in which case there was no telling how things would have settled by the time we deployed.
It wasn't an excuse to leave anything out. No — the twins and Mash, all our Servants, even the technicians who would be watching the situation unfold from here in Chaldea, they were all going to get as complete a picture as we could give them, and what that would mean for the aftermath of this crisis, we were going to have to deal with that later.
The day of the briefing, I skipped my morning workout and went straight to breakfast instead. Marie, predictably, was already in the cafeteria and eating slowly, although she looked like she was having trouble keeping it down. I couldn't blame her. A bundle of nerves sat uncomfortably in my own belly, twitching and squirming like a colony of earthworms.
Emiya, perhaps sensing my mood, dished me up my breakfast silently. The smile he usually gave me was nowhere to be seen — he stared instead directly at me, as though he could read my thoughts if he looked straight at my forehead. I had never been so self-conscious about the almost invisible scars still left from what Contessa had done to me at the end of it all.
Whether he saw them or not, I had no idea. Whether he'd ever questioned where they could have come from, I didn't know that either. The only person I could remember deliberately showing them to was Medea, in that church on Captain Morgan's Port Royal.
Marie didn't react at all when I sat down across from her at the table the twins and I usually used, not even when I mutely gave Jackie her own tray and portion. Even Jackie, just then, seemed to have some idea of the weight that hung about our shoulders, glancing at us with childish concern.
I didn't know what she had already seen in her dreams, but she was going to learn more about my world soon enough.
"Are you ready?" I asked Marie lowly. She stopped eating, and her mouth drew into a tight line as her brow crinkled and the hand holding her fork slowly drooped back down to her plate. A glob of brown syrup dribbled and dripped, drawing a gossamer line back down to the puddle neatly set to one side.
"I have to be," she replied quietly, "don't I?" She closed her eyes for a brief moment, a sigh hissing out of her nostrils, and then they snapped back open and she narrowed them on me. "And shouldn't I be asking you that? It's not my life and my world whose history is going to be shared around like the latest Clock Tower gossip!"
She wasn't wrong. But, while I wasn't and had never been excited at the idea of baring so much of myself and my past to everyone in the facility, the need for secrecy had always been an artifact of Marie's world, of the magi, and that was largely the reason I'd kept it for so long to begin with. To protect both myself and the twins from the inevitable fallout of everyone knowing where I'd come from, because I had firsthand experience with someone who cared more about satisfying their own curiosity than the people they'd have to maim and kill to do so.
I didn't think that decision had ever been wrong. If I had the choice, I would hoard as many of my secrets as I could, just to keep the wolves at bay and eyes off of us all. The questions once this was all over were inevitable, but the fewer questions to be asked, the better off everyone here would be. It just wasn't really my decision anymore.
"There's nothing I can do about it," I said. "It's like you said, it's all going to come out one way or the other, so we might as well do it now instead of scrambling to bring everyone up to date after something happens inside the Singularity."
The answer didn't make her happy, and it didn't make me happy either, but that was the truth of the matter, and neither of us could fight it. This was the hand Solomon had dealt us, and no matter how much it galled us, we had to play it. This was his game.
And it was like I'd thought a long time ago, a lifetime ago, now: I hated that trope in fiction, of teams breaking up and people fighting each other over simple misunderstandings because no one communicated and too many people kept secrets they didn't need to keep. If Solomon expected us to tear each other apart over my secrets, then just as a matter of giving him the middle finger, I would have spilled it all. Because fuck Solomon.
We finished breakfast quietly. Neither of us had much else to say, and if I knew Marie as well as I thought I did, she was stewing in worries about the briefing. Not that I was much better, because I had my own concerns, too. About everyone's reactions. About how it might change team dynamics. About whether or not Rika could keep her mouth shut about it in the future.
That last one might not have been entirely fair or accurate.
After breakfast, Marie and I left the cafeteria long before the twins or Mash showed up and headed together to the orientation room, where the briefing was going to take place, so that we could get everything we needed prepared. Jackie was allowed to accompany us and stay in the room, as long as she was quiet and didn't interrupt us while we worked.
The minutes flew by. The hour and a half that had been allotted for us to get everything ready vanished like water in a desert, and it felt like no time at all before we were waiting for everyone to show up so that we could begin.
Perhaps predictably, most of the Servants showed up first. They didn't need sleep, they didn't really get tired, and they didn't need to eat, shower, or relieve themselves, so it was only natural that most of them could show up on time or even early. Shakespeare, perhaps somewhat worryingly, was the first to arrive, in fact, and he found a seat in the back, parked himself there, and settled in, watching with wide-eyed expectation and an air of eagerness.
Uneasiness squirmed in my belly. He wasn't contracted to me, so there was no way he'd experienced the dream cycle and seen my past that way, but he gave me the uncomfortable sense that he knew more than he'd ever let on. The how concerned me as much as the possibility itself did, because the only times Marie and I had ever shared anything about my past or my world had all been in secure places that he shouldn't have been able to access, not without alerting someone that he was there.
After Shakespeare, the others began to trickle in. Aífe, Hippolyta, Arash, Siegfried, Bradamante, Mordred, Emiya, El-Melloi II, Jeanne Alter, and then Nero appeared last, accompanied by the twins and Mash. They all found seats, because there were plenty to go around, with Nero, Mash, and the twins clustered together almost as though they meant to draw strength from one another for what came next.
But it didn't end there, because several technicians — all the ones who could be spared, if only because they weren't on duty just then — showed up, too, to the apparent surprise of Rika, Ritsuka, and Mash, who all craned their necks to watch the unexpected arrivals pick their way through the room to find a spot they were comfortable with.
Once everyone who was supposed to be there had walked through the door and sat down, Marie stepped forward and cleared her throat, and immediately, the entire room fell silent and turned to face her, attentive. A stray thought wondered if Ritsuka and Rika were remembering that fateful day at the beginning of all of this, when they had been thrown out of the orientation for falling asleep on her, and if they were being especially alert because of it.
"All of you should have at least some idea of why you're here," Marie began in a strong, clear voice. She swept her gaze across the room. "For the sake of clarity, however, let me reiterate it: recent developments have given us a better look at the next Singularity, and therefore a clearer image of what to expect from it. Although there is much we still don't know about what might be waiting on the ground — and won't know for certain until the Masters have Rayshifted into the Singularity and given us the ability to look closer — given what we do know and what information we do have, there are certain things that are almost sure to appear."
Capes, I heard, even though no one else did.
"To that end," she continued, "we'll be conducting this briefing to bring everyone up to date about what we know so far and what to expect going forward. Yes, that includes the technical staff, because this is information they will absolutely need to know in order to monitor the situation as it develops. Those who couldn't be here for this briefing will be briefed separately, so no one is being left out."
She took a deep, bracing breath. "Furthermore… It appears we finally understand to at least some degree exactly what the King of Mages meant when he said that Taylor Hebert, the leader of our team of Masters, would return home and have a chance to lay her demons to rest."
Murmurs broke out, but Ritsuka's hand rose, and Marie looked towards him sharply. "Yes?"
The murmurs quieted. "Are Doctor Roman and Da Vinci part of the group that will hear about this later?" he asked.
"They've already been briefed," Marie answered bluntly. "This is all information they have already received, so they're currently handling their normal responsibilities." She glanced around the room. "Any more questions, or can we actually get started?"
No one else dared to raise a hand or speak out. Marie nodded, and then she turned to the enormous windows behind her. With the click of a remote, the clear glass turned into an absolutely gigantic screen, and depicted on it was the North American continent in all its glory. As Da Vinci had shown us before, a blazing orange point sat on the northeastern coast, and a hazy film covered the rest of the country, from east coast to west coast, along with a decent chunk of Canada.
Up in the left hand corner, "2011 AD" glared, bright and clear.
"This is the American Singularity," Marie announced. "As you can see, the Singularity itself covers the entirety of the continental United States, with the exception of Alaska, as well as a large portion of southern Canada. This is the most stable reading of the Singularity we've been able to manage with the sensors. As you can see, the Singularity occurs in 2011 AD. This, however…"
She pressed another button on the remote, and for a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, however, the image began to flicker. The Singularity itself remained the same, but the date in the upper left corner changed to 1783 AD and back again, and every time it did, the bright, orange dot on the northeastern coast moved just the slightest.
Marie looked back at the assembled group. "This is the Singularity over the course of the last forty-eight hours. As you can see, there were fluctuations at apparently random intervals, wherein the sensors read the era of the Singularity as 1783 AD, the year the American war for independence concluded."
"What the shit?" Mordred said loudly. "The fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"At this time," Marie began, pitching her voice to drown out anyone else, "we don't know what is causing these fluctuations or what they mean. Without the Masters inside the Singularity to act as points of reference, higher resolution scans aren't possible." She lanced Mordred with a short glare. "As someone should have explained to you already!"
Mordred grunted, but Aífe, who was sitting behind her and Jeanne Alter with both of them in reach, laid a heavy hand atop her head before she could mouth off. Mordred's expression contorted with frustration, and then she scoffed quietly and let it drop.
Ritsuka raised his hand again, and a flash of annoyance crossed Marie's face, but she still looked at him and asked, "Yes?"
What now, she didn't say, but I was sure most of the room still heard it.
"Is this going to change anything about how we handle the next Singularity?" was his question. "Like who is deployed and where?"
Marie's lips drew tight. "We're still discussing our options for how to approach the issue, but no. We have no intention of splitting the team up or sending you in through separate Rayshifts. Everyone who is being deployed will be deployed at the same time during the same Rayshift."
It was a smart question, I thought. Rayshifting separately, so that one team wound up near the echo to investigate that and one team wound up in Brockton Bay, that wasn't a completely terrible idea, if you knew nothing else about the situation. It was just that splitting us up for this one in particular was the worst possible idea I could think of.
"Anything else?" asked Marie.
Mash's hand rose. "Director, what event in 2011 do we think the King of Mages might be attempting to overturn?"
"It's not like anything all that interesting happened in America that year," El-Melloi II added, just a little too loudly to avoid notice.
Marie's brow twitched, but… "We don't know," she had to admit, but she made it sound less like an admission of ignorance and more like a simple, unavoidable fact. "None of it makes any sense with what the King of Mages told us at the end of the last Singularity, so none of the theories Da Vinci, Romani, Taylor, and I came up with fit. It may even have something to do with the fluctuations, but that isn't something we can say with any confidence either."
She turned back to the gigantic screen and pressed more buttons on her remote. First, the image froze on the 2011 map, and then it zoomed in to the bright, glowing dot. Marie looked back at the assembled group and gestured to the dot with her off hand.
"We're not sure how or why," she went on, "but this point is important to the Singularity. Whether it's the point where the divergence occurred or the point where the Grail was located at the moment of the Singularity's formation, we don't know. Da Vinci wants the team to investigate to see if we can narrow it down."
She pressed another button, and what looked like a satellite image of the area was overlaid atop the original map.
"A forest?" Jeanne Alter muttered, not realizing how easily her voice carried in the room. "Are we going to be literally barking up the fucking trees now?"
Marie took a bracing breath and didn't acknowledge her at all, which may have been Jeanne Alter's preference, because her cheeks had gained a slightly red tint. "This is the map of this area according to proper history as we know it, and that is exactly why it's relevant to this briefing. We have reason to believe that this Singularity is based upon an alternate timeline, one still considered within the scope of proper history, where this area is host instead to a coastal city called Brockton Bay."
She clicked one more button, and even though I knew it was coming, a funny little jolt shot through my stomach when that forest and beach were replaced by a sprawling city. Even though the image was far too zoomed out to see individual buildings, I knew it well enough that I could have pointed out all of the landmarks by memory. The docks, the Boat Graveyard, the PRT HQ, the rig that had been repurposed into the Protectorate ENE's HQ, even the singular pixel that should have denoted my house.
Sylvia, ironically, was the first person to pick up on the implication, and she shot out of her seat. "H-hold on a second, Director Animusphere! You can't possibly be suggesting…!"
"I am," Marie answered calmly. "This timeline is referred to as Earth Bet, and has been observed and verified by Laplace. The briefing on all the information you will need regarding this timeline and this city, however, will be delivered by Chaldea's firsthand source, who was brought here after helping to avert the apocalyptic event known locally as Gold Morning."
Every eye in the room turned to me as Marie handed over the remote. "Taylor?"
I took a bracing breath of my own and accepted the remote. The weight settled in my hand like lead. "Thank you, Director."
Several voices suddenly rose, shouting questions and disbelieving statements that I couldn't make out. A number of the Servants, however, particularly Arash, Aífe, and Siegfried, did not seem at all surprised, and Shakespeare only watched with an ever widening grin, like he was feeding off of the drama.
Rika, loudly enough to be heard over the rest of the commotion, squealed, "Senpai's an isekai protagonist!"
It was Aífe who stood up from the group and brought her hands together with a sound like a thunderclap that echoed off the walls and seemed to vibrate the floor beneath our feet, and everyone winced and fell silent. I gave her a nod to show my appreciation.
"Thank you." My stomach squirmed as I turned to face the rest of the group, who were all wearing varying expressions of disbelief, surprise, suspicion, and betrayal. I soldiered past it and started. "Let me begin by talking about divergences, and how Earth Bet is different from history as the rest of you know it. There are several minor differences that I've noticed, such as the Protestant Reformation that doesn't seem to have occurred here, but the most important one occurred in May of 1982, the appearance of the first recorded parahuman, discovered floating above the Atlantic Ocean. He encountered a cruise liner, introducing himself only as Scion."
I half-expected someone to jump to their feet again, exclaiming about the 'god' I had been forced to talk about in the aftermath of the London fiasco, and only belatedly did I realize I had never actually named him back then. Instead, Ritsuka raised his hand and asked, "What's a parahuman?"
"That's also a part of the briefing," I acknowledged. "It's a term for those who develop special powers during a moment of crisis we called a Trigger Event. Someone facing life or death in a fight might develop superstrength, for example, and someone trapped in a fire might suddenly find himself a pyrokinetic. Someone running away from danger might develop superspeed or the ability to expand the space around her."
El-Melloi II lurched forward in his chair. "Hold on. You're saying this happens spontaneously?"
I chose my next words carefully, because we were still skirting around the issue of passengers. It was one of the rabbit holes Marie and I had agreed to avoid going down.
"As far as anyone knew at the time, yes. Only parahumans themselves knew that the cost for their sudden powers was having to experience the worst, most traumatic moment of their lives."
"One bad day," Ritsuka murmured, although it was so quiet that I wasn't sure I even heard him right. Rika's head swiveled towards him, eyes wide.
It was overshadowed by El-Melloi II leaping to his feet. "That's absolutely…!" And then something seemed to occur to him and he blanched, staggering so hard so quickly that he had to grab the back of the seat in front of him to stay standing. "The first parahuman, that god you helped to kill — they're one in the same, aren't they?"
I'd been hoping to avoid having to reveal that part, especially since it wouldn't be relevant to the Singularity itself, but… "Yes."
"Wait!" Rika squeaked. "I thought you said that mad-guy person only woke that god up two years ago?"
"Shut up, Rika!" El-Melloi II hissed at her, to her shock, and then pinned me with a glare. "That god, Scion, he's also the one responsible for the existence of all other parahumans, isn't he?"
El-Melloi II really was cleverer than I ever gave him credit for. "He is."
El-Melloi II's fingers curled tightly into the back of the seat he was clutching. The fabric squealed in protest. "And you," he said, and I could already tell the question he was about to ask, "you're a parahuman, too, aren't you? That's how your powers work. They're not magecraft, not normal magecraft at any rate. They're the fragments of that god's power, handed out like candy to gullible kids too desperate to say no."
It felt dangerous to admit it, especially to a Lord of the Clock Tower, but if we encountered my younger self and especially as the data started pouring in over the course of the Singularity, then the truth was unavoidable.
"That's right."
"Ha!" There was no mirth in it as El-Melloi II flopped back into his seat, pressing one hand to his forehead. "Of all the explanations there could have been…! Let me guess." The grin on his face looked almost deranged. "That madman who 'woke up' this god of yours and caused its rampage, he was one of these parahumans as well, wasn't he?"
"He was." There was no point in hiding that now. "On the surface, his power was the projection of bladed weapons along the path of the cut, but underneath that, the core was…transmission, is how I would put it. His power let him know what to say to other parahumans, how to manipulate them, how to manage them. It's how he knew exactly what to say to set Scion off."
"Scion isn't the point of this briefing," Marie interrupted sharply. Her voice contained a note of warning, aimed at El-Melloi II. "There was no trace of his presence inside the Singularity, so the exact circumstances of his existence and the events of his rampage aren't relevant."
Drop it, she said without saying.
"El-Melloi," I said, backing her up, "this briefing would be very different if Scion was something we had to worry about. If you want anything more than that, then we're already at the limits of what I know about him."
It wasn't even strictly a lie. He'd already guessed the broad strokes well enough that the only things left I could have told him were finer details, like what passengers were and the fact that Scion was some sort of alien superorganism. Those, however, might put me even more at risk than this much already would.
"That's how it is, huh?" El-Melloi II huffed out a sigh. "Heh. Whatever I might have been expecting, this certainly wasn't it."
"Senpai," said Ritsuka, "even if…Scion isn't there, the madman who made him rampage will be, won't he?"
So he'd caught that, had he?
"Yes," I answered. "Whether or not we'll encounter him at any point can't be said for sure, not when we don't know when in 2011 we'll find ourselves, but that brings me to the next topic: who we can expect to help us, who we should avoid, and who will almost certainly try to kill or subvert us."
A click of the remote, and the image on the window behind me changed to a chart. On the x-axis, a division between ally and enemy, and on the y-axis, hero and villain. Another click — Slaughterhouse Nine, sitting firmly in both enemy and villain categories.
"That madman, Jack Slash, runs one of the most dangerous groups in the continental United States on Earth Bet," I explained. "The Slaughterhouse Nine are a roving band of psychopaths who revel in torturing and killing. In the almost thirty years they've been active, they've depopulated entire towns and brought whole cities to their knees. I realize this might not mean much to the Servants here, so let me be clear: there was no higher purpose, no ideology, no reason more complicated than the simple fact that they enjoyed the act itself. Jack in particular enjoyed pulling people apart psychologically, like a kid pulling the wings off of flies just so he can see all of the ways they squirm and struggle."
Most of the Servants seemed only mildly concerned, with the exception of the noble types, like Siegfried and Bradamante, whose expressions were hard and stony. The twins and Mash, however, looked disturbed, although not entirely surprised. I guess they'd seen enough that this wasn't going to make them flinch.
It probably helped that the Avenger sitting near them had, in another life, depopulated entire cities, too, and we had accepted her into our ranks anyway.
"As of 2011, other members of the Nine included Bonesaw, who liked to turn people into 'art' pieces by doing things like flaying them alive and spreading their skin out to look like butterflies," I went on, "or stitching multiple people together to create a human hydra, as well as Crawler, whose power has mutated him into a monster the size of a minivan with acid spit and other adaptations to make him more lethal. Shatterbird has control over silicates, and her power can propagate after use to affect an entire city. The Nine often announced their presence by having her shatter every piece of glass in the city."
"For real?" Jeanne Alter asked. She even sounded a little envious. "Shit. That actually sounds kinda badass."
I pinned her with a stare. "In a world where a large number of our modern amenities contain silicon in some form or fashion, it's also exceptionally deadly. The reason you should care, Jeanne Alter, is because every single one of these people would gleefully kill us Masters, and they have a large enough toolkit that they might be able to do it, if you don't take them seriously."
"You don't think I couldn't just torch them and be done with it?" she challenged.
"I think that if you give him the chance, Jack Slash will open up Ritsuka's throat first," I told her bluntly, and even Mash flinched at that one. "Each and every single member of the Nine is bad enough and has committed enough atrocities to earn a Kill Order. That means that the US government put out a bounty on them, and anyone who kills a member of the Nine can claim it, no matter who they are or what they've done in the past. I will say it again: none of them would hesitate for a single second to try and kill us, and they have plenty of ways to try."
Jeanne Alter looked ready to argue more, but as she had with Mordred, Aífe set a heavy hand on Jeanne Alter's head and spoke over her, "You called them the Slaughterhouse Nine, so I'm assuming there are more members than just those four."
I nodded. "Yes. There's also Mannequin, the Siberian, and Burnscar, and depending upon when we arrive, Cherish and Hatchet Face, as well…"
I detailed the rest of the Nine and the things I could remember about them, going over their powers as completely as I could. I gave everyone descriptions, too, so they knew exactly who to look out for and what they were looking at if we ever encountered the Nine. The twins were appropriately horrified when I finally told them what Bonesaw looked like.
"Twelve?" Rika demanded, her voice an octave higher than normal. "There was a bounty out to kill a twelve-year-old?"
"A twelve-year-old who makes Doctor Mengele look like a saint," I reminded her. "One who will hum and sing to herself as she cuts you and your brother in half and sews you two together so that you never have to ever be separated again. Without anesthesia."
That shut her up quickly. She even looked faintly green at the idea, matched by her brother's pale face and nauseous expression.
"Fortunately," I said, "if we arrive before or after June, then our odds of actually meeting Jack and the Nine are much, much lower. After June would be better for us. The Nine went into hibernation for two years after that."
I clicked the remote again. Next to the Slaughterhouse Nine, another name appeared, The Fallen.
"The Fallen are a kind of doomsday religious cult. They worship a trio of monsters that we called Endbringers, and style themselves after one or the other based upon which sect they belong to…"
Mostly, my warnings about the Fallen had to do with being wary of kidnapping attempts, because I'd heard of a number of Wards who had been snatched up and brainwashed by the Fallen, forced into their 'families' as breeding stock. I…wasn't sure how much they would have to worry about that, if only because they weren't actually capes and the Fallen might lose interest in them specifically once they realized the mystic codes were basically tinkertech. It was something they needed to be on guard for regardless, just in case.
But mentioning the Endbringers even so obliquely meant that I had to cover them, too, and there had to come a point where the facts that I took for granted on Earth Bet started to sound outlandish to some of the people there.
It was Sylvia who leapt to her feet, this time, as I was in the middle of detailing the powers of the Endbringers and how unstoppable they were. "Hold on! These don't sound like…like more of these parahumans, they sound like Phantasmals! No — Leviathan? Simurgh? Behemoth? Those…those are the names of Divine Beasts! In the modern world! They should be on the Reverse Side!"
Neither of the twins asked about the Reverse Side, which I suppose meant that their lessons with El-Melloi II had gotten pretty far. But the other handful of magi among the technicians seemed to be equally disturbed and equally incredulous.
I tried not to think about the eager look on some of the Servants' faces. Aífe in particular looked like she was daydreaming about going up against Behemoth or Leviathan and seeing exactly how invincible they really were.
"They're not Divine Beasts," I said, "although you'd be forgiven for thinking they were. I couldn't tell you why they were created the way they were, but the reason we gave them the names that we did was because they looked like monsters out of mythology."
Something like terror crept into Sylvia's face, and she tilted her head down, and lowly, asked, "Created?"
My lips drew into a thin line, and for a moment, I debated the wisdom of it, and then I clicked the remote. On the chart, several names filled in. Under Villain and Ally, Undersiders was one, as well as Accord, although he was frankly more tentative than I would have preferred, and Faultline, even though she was even more tentative than Accord. Coil went under Villain and Enemy, along with Empire Eighty-Eight, The Teeth, and Azn Bad Boys.
Then, the Protectorate, Dragon, and The Guild popped up under Hero and Ally, with the Triumvirate singled out from the rest. I saw Siegfried stir at the name 'Dragon,' but even though his curiosity must have been burning a hole in his gut, he held it in without interrupting.
"Near the beginning of the appearance of parahumans, there was a small group that called themselves the Protectorate," I began. "They consisted of four members: Legend, whose power involved shooting lasers with esoteric and exotic effects, Alexandria, the 'flying brick' for whom all later fliers with superstrength got labeled an 'Alexandria package,' Hero, who could create things like jetpacks and hoverboards and laser pistols, and Eidolon, whose power was to pull on other powers from a pool. They were four of the strongest parahumans to ever live, and until the Siberian literally tore Hero in half, everyone thought they were invincible."
I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. "During Gold Morning, Eidolon pressured Scion in a way no other parahuman could, so Scion used a form of Clairvoyance to see how he could defeat Eidolon with the least amount of effort. He used only four words: you needed worthy opponents."
It took a moment for the implication to sink in, for her to draw all of the right conclusions from what I'd said, what I hadn't said, and the context of the whole conversation. Why else bring it up when talking about the Endbringers if it wasn't relevant to the topic? Because it was relevant. It was connected.
That was when the surprise and the horror kicked in.
"He created them?" she said in a small voice. "He — a human had the power to create three monsters on the level of Divine Beasts?"
"Whether he created them or just awoke them is something I've never been clear on," was the answer I gave her. "Either way, he was responsible for their existence, somehow or another. A…friend of mine had a theory, that maybe they were originally a kind of weapon Scion would use to keep us in line, and Eidolon probably woke them up accidentally."
El-Melloi II chuckled lowly. "Why not? A god with a handful of pet Divine Beasts. The only thing strange about that is the fact it took place in the modern day."
I didn't have an answer for that. The truth would mean telling them about the passengers and the Entities to which they belonged, and we weren't going to be doing that.
Aífe leaned forward in her chair. "Should we expect to come to blows with any of these Endbringers of yours?"
To that, I could only tell her, "I can't say for sure. Their normal habit is to attack once every three months or so, but there's no way to know until we get in there how the Singularity might have affected them. If we do encounter them…"
It wasn't the worst case scenario, but it was up there.
"…we'll call in as many reinforcements as we can to distract them while us Masters retreat to safety as quickly as possible."
Aífe clicked her tongue and sat back, not entirely satisfied.
"B-but that means…!" Mash gasped. "Miss Taylor! You said they destroy entire cities at a time!"
"And a good day when one of them attacks is one in four of the defenders dead," I replied. "A bad day sees upwards of fifty percent casualties. We can send in our Servants to help, Mash, but the first priority in that situation is making sure the Masters survive. The Singularity can be fixed, the people who die saved by correcting it, but if one of us dies, we can't be brought back."
This didn't seem to sit right with Mash either, but she settled down uneasily. Ritsuka set a comforting hand on her arm, as though to let her know that he felt the same way. When he spoke up, however, his question was entirely different, "Senpai, those names on that chart, some of them look like gang names, so I can understand why we wouldn't expect them to help, but what about the others in the 'hero' column?"
Oh, good, an easier question. "The Triumvirate is the name given to the original members of the Protectorate after Hero was killed, and the Protectorate became the name of the government-backed hero organization. They handled villains and villainous gangs in cities where parahumans were more prominent. We can expect they'll help us to at least some degree or another, even if only to house us and transport us across the country as necessary."
That…might have been a little bit of a white lie. I wasn't sure how much of an in I had with the Protectorate or the PRT, and if we showed up while my younger self was in the height of her villain era, the answer might wind up being none at all. At the very least, however, I knew enough of the big names personally enough to get my foot in the door, and that might be enough to get us at least an audience.
"Likewise, the Guild and Dragon are technically speaking connected, since Dragon is a major member of the Guild. Different from the PRT, the Guild more often takes on larger, more serious threats instead of focusing on single cities or territories. They're also not officially government backed, which means they have a little more leeway in how they handle things, even if Dragon is also a government contractor and an honorary member of the Protectorate."
Finally, Siegfried's curiosity got the better of him. "And what is this Dragon you speak of, Master?"
"The world's preeminent Tinker." And then, realizing they wouldn't know the term, I added, "Ah, that is, someone whose powers specialize in the creation of exotic technology. The hallmark of what's called tinkertech is that it's usually impossible to replicate with modern technology, and Dragon is considered the world's greatest Tinker because her power is to replicate tinkertech."
"Something like that wonderful knife of yours, perhaps?" Shakespeare asked knowingly. His grin threatened to split his face.
If he was expecting me to deny it, I disappointed him. "It was a collaboration between her and a fellow Tinker who she was friends with, Defiant. He specialized in miniaturization and made the nanothorns, and she helped another Tinker named Masamune create a limited batch of them. I received one."
"And these…Undersiders?" said Bradamante, her distaste clear in her voice. "Accord? Faultline? You have them listed as both villains and allies, Master."
"Faultline is a mercenary," I told her bluntly. "She'll go wherever the coin is, and I have a few answers she's been looking for. Accord is…prickly, but he can be convinced to work for the betterment of mankind. He came up with a solution to world hunger, and then quit when the government refused to even attempt it. The Undersiders…"
God, how could I even explain that one? There was so much history, so much bundled up with all of that, so much that was far too tangled to explain properly here and now. How could I even begin to explain everything we'd done together and why?
"They'll depend," I settled on. "If we show up too early, then they won't be able to help us. If we show up past June, however…" It…wasn't a guarantee, but, "Then we can reach enough of an understanding with them to get at least some assistance while we're in Brockton Bay."
Bradamante didn't…seem exactly happy with that, but she accepted it with a stiff nod. She'd spent enough time here with the likes of Jeanne Alter, Sam Bellamy, and Mordred to understand by now that you accepted help wherever it came from, as long as it was honest.
"Wait," said Rika, and she almost jumped out of her seat, "wait, wait, wait! Defiant, Accord, Faultline? Eidolon, Hero, Legend? People getting superpowers from one bad day? Gangs of villains running around, terrorizing cities, while a league of heroes set out to stop them from robbing banks and pushing old ladies into traffic? A costume that looks like it came off the cover of a DC comic book? Senpai…you were a superhero!"
It was a lot more complicated than that, but, "Yes. Yes, I was."
There was no pride, no bragging, just simple fact. Yes, at one point, I was a superhero, however roundabout the route to it wound up being.
"Holy shit," said Jeanne Alter, stunned. "For real?"
"For real."
"Oh my god!" Rika squealed. "Senpai was a superhero!"
Right then, El-Melloi II looked like he regretted ever coming back with us.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
I was very careful about how much detail went into the latter... Well, I can't call it a "half" when it takes up the majority of the chapter, but still. I didn't want this to feel too much like an infodump, and I was also leery of how many interruptions was too much and how much was not enough.
This...is also a very big chapter. Still not the biggest, because that honor goes to the beach episode, but it's 8.4K and some change. There was just so much to cover and not enough room to do it more succinctly.
Like with Hanging Questions, this isn't quite the end of things where Earth Bet's circumstances are concerned, but it's the end for now. The rest of the briefing will be off-screened, just as a matter of not trying to get too into the weeds with everything. But there will be more that rears its head, later on.
This...is also a very big chapter. Still not the biggest, because that honor goes to the beach episode, but it's 8.4K and some change. There was just so much to cover and not enough room to do it more succinctly.
Like with Hanging Questions, this isn't quite the end of things where Earth Bet's circumstances are concerned, but it's the end for now. The rest of the briefing will be off-screened, just as a matter of not trying to get too into the weeds with everything. But there will be more that rears its head, later on.
- Location
- ?????????
At one point in her life, she was a superhero. At other points in her life...not so much
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Taylor: Screw that guy, I'm going to clear up any misunderrstandings.
Also, Taylor: I can't let mychildren students Co-workers find out about my embarrassingly dark and edgy backstory.
Also, Taylor: I can't let my
- Location
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
I haven't finished the chapter yet but. BHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Quen of Escalation say what?
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
"I snorted enough cocaine to think I was a carp jumping over the dragon gate."
... You're kinda underselling things here, Tay.
Imagine what the kids will think when they get the full Warlord Skitter experience now?
Warmach1ne32
Machine of War and Quests
- Location
- Indonesia
"Aren't you a little young to be a superhero?"
"Yes. Yes, I was."
"Yes. Yes, I was."
Glory to the Most High
- Location
- Argentina
Supervillain for six months, Hero for two then doing whatever the fuck was needed to save the world.
Yes Taylor expended about two years as a Ward she literally was a Hero about three and a half times longer that a villain.
If they were Rayshifting to when she was a Ward this would be pertinent, but they're not, are they?
It's something she says in canon among several messed up points mainly because she tends to lay out the situation and what she wants then gripes about how unreasonable and unwilling to communicate to they are when they don't just accept that.
Your timing is a bit off Taylor triggers in January, goes out as a cape in April and then I'm not clear on the exact timeline but she surrenders around July and is a ward for the Behemoth atk in August. That means she'd only be a villain for around 3 months.
It's possible because they are appearing somewhere in 2011 and she was a ward from something like August onwards but it's far more likely they'd be in April to July since that's when canon and all the stuff like the nine are
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
One thing that I think would've been relevant to mention to the rest of the Team, regarding Bonesaw, would've been how she was able to cook up a prion disease that made people incapable of recognizing her as Bonesaw and even mistaking her for people she has no physical resemblance to. This was something Taylor had firsthand experience of, even. And also how her body's loaded down with superplagues wired to a deadman switch (so lethal attacks shouldn't be used in her case, unlike the rest of the Nine, unless they've got her in a completely sealed container). Or how she can surgically alter people to look and act like convincing decoys of members of the Nine.
The Servants might not get affected by that, but the Masters and possibly even Mash would be at risk.
The Servants might not get affected by that, but the Masters and possibly even Mash would be at risk.
Last edited:
Jim Starluck
CO, ICS Vanguard
- Location
- Cincinnati, OH
And the moment you've all been waiting for...
When she finds out Taylor was also a supervillain, all those simulator fights will suddenly make a whole new kind of sense.
When she finds out Taylor was also a supervillain, all those simulator fights will suddenly make a whole new kind of sense.
Last edited:
- Location
- Argentina
Axel
Tenno Wax
- Location
- Italy
- Pronouns
- He
This just means she'll have to correct Rika on that front, she was not just a superhero, she was a supervillain that completed her carrier after taking over her city in just three months, discovered a citywide conspiracy, a multi-earth based conspiracy, and decided to change carrier before culminating in deicide. Jeanne Alter is going to be starry-eyed by the end of it lol
Last edited:
I can see Waver reaching the conclusion that Scion was a Alien or something similar
Like it's clearly something that doesn't work on how he knows God's and the like work so
Like it's clearly something that doesn't work on how he knows God's and the like work so
- Location
- Southern California
Guess it clicked in waver's head. Hilarious in took him less then a minute to figure out that Scion was responsible for powers while most of Earth Bet was clueless
It's fucked up but I want her to meet Jackie so damn badly
Two absolutely messed up in the head girls who carry an assortment of blades.
Imagine Jackie asking Riley if she can put Jackie back in the womb with the latter smiling and saying it wouldn't be a problem….oh no now I'm thinking of Jackie in the S9. Damn it brain
Obligatory "fuck Jack slash"
Cause Jackie is messed up in the head because she's an amalgamation of all the spirits of the dead children (and babies) in White chapel during the Industrial revolution
Riley got messed up the head because Jack slash wanted to have fun torturing her for shits and giggles
Oh boy I wonder if Tay is gonna mention that all of Kyushu got sank in 1999
Which BTW was the same island and year Kiritsugu died
- Location
- New Zealand
But a lot of Gods are Aliens....
The Olympians are Transformers and the Aztec Gods are space bacteria
Like Scion is still a God for all intent and purpose in the Fate framework
Not necessarily, because Scion isn't a divine spirit. He's not quite what the Olympians were before losing their original bodies either. If anything he's closer to a TYPE, which is an alien entity but no one has called them gods before.
Of course, this is Fate, so James could just shrug and say close enough.
Cocaine and violence. Lots and lots of cocaine.